Freedom under Coercion, Unconditional Creation: The Political Lesson of Literature

Abstract

In what way can we consider literary texts as the basis for a certain number of analyses that constitute the core of the "political" Foucault? Did Foucault seek in literature, or in a certain practice of literary writing, a certain number of elements to confront questions that arose for him in spheres other than literature itself? This paper goes on to hypothesize that we find in Foucault's work on literature a source for understanding how a certain work on the materiality of language prefigured other work, which would come later, on the materiality of power relations and modes of subjectification. In the same way that we would find a "literary birth" of biopolitics. This paper intends to develop in particular another hypothesis that completes the previous ones, namely: that which Foucault's thought develops around the double question of freedom and history owes much, in reality, to a proposition that Oulipo makes. Namely, both would think together, in an inseparable way, coercion and the power of invention.