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Speech Begins after Death
An interview with Michel Foucault on the problems and pleasures of writing
Speech Begins after Death is a transcript of critic Claude Bonnefoy’s interview with Michel Foucault in which the renown theorist reflects on his approach to the written word throughout his life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing. This is one of Foucault’s most personal statements about his life and writing.
In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is now being published for the first time in English. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing.
Wide ranging, characteristically insightful, and unexpectedly autobiographical, the discussion is revelatory of Foucault’s intellectual development, his aims as a writer, his clinical methodology (“let’s say I’m a diagnostician”), and his interest in other authors, including Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. Foucault discloses, in ways he never had previously, details about his home life, his family history, and the profound sense of obligation he feels to the act of writing. In his Introduction, Philippe Artières investigates Foucault’s engagement in various forms of oral discourse—lectures, speeches, debates, press conferences, and interviews—and their place in his work.
Speech Begins after Death shows Foucault adopting a new language, an innovative autobiographical communication that is neither conversation nor monologue, and is one of his most personal statements about his life and work.
Speech Begins after Death is a transcript of critic Claude Bonnefoy’s interview with Michel Foucault in which the renown theorist reflects on his approach to the written word throughout his life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing. This is one of Foucault’s most personal statements about his life and writing.
In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is now being published for the first time in English. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing.
Wide ranging, characteristically insightful, and unexpectedly autobiographical, the discussion is revelatory of Foucault’s intellectual development, his aims as a writer, his clinical methodology (“let’s say I’m a diagnostician”), and his interest in other authors, including Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. Foucault discloses, in ways he never had previously, details about his home life, his family history, and the profound sense of obligation he feels to the act of writing. In his Introduction, Philippe Artières investigates Foucault’s engagement in various forms of oral discourse—lectures, speeches, debates, press conferences, and interviews—and their place in his work.
Speech Begins after Death shows Foucault adopting a new language, an innovative autobiographical communication that is neither conversation nor monologue, and is one of his most personal statements about his life and work.
96 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
4 people are currently reading
131 people want to read
About the author
Michel Foucault
768 books6,550 followersPaul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 31, 2024
In one fucking sitting...
March 19, 2015
A slim little pamphlet that tantalizes more than satisfies. Michel Foucault and Claude Bonnefoy undertook a series of conversations; most of these conversations are lost to history but this one has survived. Here is the most vulnerable, personal, and intimate Foucault I have ever seen, almost frightened of questions, hesitant (but ultimately willing) to talk about his own ambivalent sense of himself as a writer.
What were these conversations? Speech for speech's sake? This is a snippet, papers torn from a larger book, a peek, a moment of eavesdropping. The book performs its own incompleteness.
What were these conversations? Speech for speech's sake? This is a snippet, papers torn from a larger book, a peek, a moment of eavesdropping. The book performs its own incompleteness.
April 3, 2019
"I think that’s what made me want to write. Because the possibility of speaking had been denied me, I discovered the pleasure of writing. Between the pleasure of writing and the possibility of speaking, there exists a certain relationship of incompatibility. When it is no longer possible to speak, we discover the secret, difficult, somewhat dangerous charm of writing."
"… does the pleasure of writing exist ?
I don’t know. One thing I feel certain of is that there’s a tremendous obligation to write. This obligation to write, I don’t really know where it comes from.
As long as we haven’t started writing, it seems to be the most gratuitous, the most improbable thing, almost the most impossible, and one to which, in any case, we’ll
never feel bound. Then, at some point—is it the first page, the thousandth, the middle of the first book, or later ? I have no idea — we realize that we’re absolutely obligated to write. This obligation is revealed to you, indicated in various ways. For example, by the fact that
we experience so much anxiety, so much tension if we haven’t finished that little page of writing, as we do each day. By writing that page, you give yourself, you
give to your existence, a form of absolution. That absolution is essential for the day’s happiness. It’s not the writing that’s happy, it’s the joy of existing that’s attached to writing, which is slightly different."
"I’d say that writing, for me, is associated with death, maybe essentially the death of others, but this doesn’t mean that writing would be like killing others and carrying out against them, against their existence, a definitively lethal gesture that would hunt them from presence, that would open a sovereign and free space before me.
Not at all. For me, writing means having to deal with the death of others, but it basically means having to deal with others to the extent that they’re already dead. In one sense, I’m speaking over the corpse of the others. I have to admit that I’m postulating their death to some extent. In speaking about them, I’m in the situation of the anatomist who performs an autopsy. With my writing I survey the body of others, I incise it, I lift the integuments and skin, I try to find the organs and, in exposing the organs, reveal the site of the lesion, the seat of pain, that something that has characterized their life, their thought, and which, in its negativity, has finally organized everything they’ve been. The venomous heart of things and men is, at bottom, what I’ve always tried to expose."
"… we write to hide our face, to bury ourselves in our own writing. We write so that the life
around us, alongside us, outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life that’s not very funny but tiresome and filled with worry, exposed to others, is absorbed in that small rectangle of paper before our eyes and which we control. Writing is a way of trying to evacuate,
through the mysterious channels of pen and ink, the substance, not just of existence, but of the body, in those minuscule marks we make on paper. To be nothing more, in terms of life, than this dead and jabbering scribbling that we’ve put on the white sheet of paper is
what we dream about when we write. But we never succeed in absorbing all that teeming life in the motionless swarm of letters. Life always goes on outside the sheet of paper, continues to proliferate, keeps going, and is never pinned down to that small rectangle; the heavy volume of the body never succeeds in spreading itself across the surface of the paper, we can never pass into
that two-dimensional universe, that pure line of speech; we never succeed in becoming thin enough or adroit enough to be nothing more than the linearity of a text, and yet that’s what we hope to achieve. So we keep trying, we continue to restrain ourselves, to take control of ourselves, to slip into the funnel of pen and ink, an infinite task, but the task to which we’ve dedicated ourselves."
"… does the pleasure of writing exist ?
I don’t know. One thing I feel certain of is that there’s a tremendous obligation to write. This obligation to write, I don’t really know where it comes from.
As long as we haven’t started writing, it seems to be the most gratuitous, the most improbable thing, almost the most impossible, and one to which, in any case, we’ll
never feel bound. Then, at some point—is it the first page, the thousandth, the middle of the first book, or later ? I have no idea — we realize that we’re absolutely obligated to write. This obligation is revealed to you, indicated in various ways. For example, by the fact that
we experience so much anxiety, so much tension if we haven’t finished that little page of writing, as we do each day. By writing that page, you give yourself, you
give to your existence, a form of absolution. That absolution is essential for the day’s happiness. It’s not the writing that’s happy, it’s the joy of existing that’s attached to writing, which is slightly different."
"I’d say that writing, for me, is associated with death, maybe essentially the death of others, but this doesn’t mean that writing would be like killing others and carrying out against them, against their existence, a definitively lethal gesture that would hunt them from presence, that would open a sovereign and free space before me.
Not at all. For me, writing means having to deal with the death of others, but it basically means having to deal with others to the extent that they’re already dead. In one sense, I’m speaking over the corpse of the others. I have to admit that I’m postulating their death to some extent. In speaking about them, I’m in the situation of the anatomist who performs an autopsy. With my writing I survey the body of others, I incise it, I lift the integuments and skin, I try to find the organs and, in exposing the organs, reveal the site of the lesion, the seat of pain, that something that has characterized their life, their thought, and which, in its negativity, has finally organized everything they’ve been. The venomous heart of things and men is, at bottom, what I’ve always tried to expose."
"… we write to hide our face, to bury ourselves in our own writing. We write so that the life
around us, alongside us, outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life that’s not very funny but tiresome and filled with worry, exposed to others, is absorbed in that small rectangle of paper before our eyes and which we control. Writing is a way of trying to evacuate,
through the mysterious channels of pen and ink, the substance, not just of existence, but of the body, in those minuscule marks we make on paper. To be nothing more, in terms of life, than this dead and jabbering scribbling that we’ve put on the white sheet of paper is
what we dream about when we write. But we never succeed in absorbing all that teeming life in the motionless swarm of letters. Life always goes on outside the sheet of paper, continues to proliferate, keeps going, and is never pinned down to that small rectangle; the heavy volume of the body never succeeds in spreading itself across the surface of the paper, we can never pass into
that two-dimensional universe, that pure line of speech; we never succeed in becoming thin enough or adroit enough to be nothing more than the linearity of a text, and yet that’s what we hope to achieve. So we keep trying, we continue to restrain ourselves, to take control of ourselves, to slip into the funnel of pen and ink, an infinite task, but the task to which we’ve dedicated ourselves."
October 4, 2025
An absolutely captivating little book in which Foucault (transcribed from an interview) attempts to describe his writing process. I think what's most interesting about this is how Foucault deliberately tries to invert his typical method of analysis; in his own words, he wants to show us "the back of the tapestry." He acknowledges that this risks casting a shadow over all of his more 'academic' work, tainting it with subjectivity and allowing biographers and amateur psychologists to analyze the 'secret meaning' behind everything he ever wrote, but it's something I really appreciated reading as a general fan of his work. Overall, this feels more like a love letter to those who feel called to writing in the realm of non-fiction more than anything. There are so many passages here that feel incredibly quotable and strangely profound, it's wild that he said some of this stuff off the top of his head.
December 31, 2020
I bought this book from Shakespeare & Company a few years ago. While it's quite short this perhaps my favorite piece of work from Foucault thus far. It's a very simple yet surprising mediation on Foucault's writing process (or perhaps lack thereof) and how that shapes his relationship to language, history, and purpose.
September 2, 2025
Foucalt is an interesting anti-Christian philosopher. I like some of his writing, and this interview was a great lens through which to understand his work.
August 3, 2014
Why do I find writers talking about writing so endlessly facinating?
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews