Whitney Arnold, The Secret Subject: Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, and the Interview as Genre, Criticism, Volume 54, Number 4, Fall 2012
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/crt.2012.0029
Extract
My relationship to my book on Roussel, and to Roussel’s work, is something very personal. . . . I would go so far as to say that it doesn’t have a place in the sequence of my books.
—Michel Foucault, “An Interview with Michel Foucault”
In this 1983 interview with Charles Ruas, Michel Foucault reflects on his 1963 work Raymond Roussel (translated into English as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel). While Foucault often uses his interviews to paint trajectories of his thought—even characterizing his interviews as “scaffolding” holding together and plotting a course between his works—in this particular interview he insists on the differences between Death and the Labyrinth and the rest of his oeuvre. In Death and the Labyrinth—a text that has received a marked lack of critical attention—Foucault examines Roussel’s Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of My Books), in which Roussel describes the methods he employed for structuring certain of his works. Foucault’s efforts to clarify Death and the Labyrinth through his interview about the text parallel Roussel’s problematic efforts to explain his texts with How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Much as Roussel veils while unveiling in his explanatory text, revealing the presence of an undisclosed “secret,” Foucault clarifies Death and the Labyrinth in the interview by pointing to what he does not reveal. He presents Death and the Labyrinth as a personal text intricately connected to his private thoughts, desires, and experiences, yet he declines to elaborate on these connections.
Foucault News 