I am not the kind of person who reads social theory for fun. There are moments, however, when I feel like I'm stuck in such a deep rut, that life is so deeply mired in the mundanity that I need something to make me think -- really think -- about something outside myself, outside the daily routine, outside politics and the urgent fear and despair of humanity. And so I find myself reading Foucault, not because I like him, but because me forces me radically out of my own interior space and into his, and in doing so he makes me think about art and its power to subvert and transform, to shatter the discourses that shackle it. Art, he leads me to believe, is the one redeeming thing we have, the only way to escape reality, and in escaping reality, to bend it into something else, to create something that is both lens and mirror all at once, to reveal truth in the midst of distorting resemblance.
My only disappointment is that my French is not strong enough to read this in the original, where I suspect (based on the translator's note) that it is a funny, playful piece. I can't fault the translator too much -- the thing about humor is that it's the true barometer of whether you understand a language, and in so many respects it simply doesn't translate without so much explication as to render it deadpan, or worse, frustrating. And I wonder also whether in the original, to someone fluent, Foucault is a slightly less dense read -- if some of the complexities of reading Foucault (sometimes a herculean task) arise in part from a use of language on his part so precise that even the best translation will lose some of its saturation, will labor to reproduce the ideas, turning the smooth functioning of his thought into a limping, juddering machine.
Or maybe it's just me.
In any case, I am not widely read enough to comment extensively on the relative importance of the ideas here. I am familiar with a small range of Foucault's work (Discipline and Punish; The History of Sexuality; Madness and Civilization; governmentality), and so I can see how the threads of discourse bound this work and frame it from a distance, but it reads in a very different vein than those works more familiar to me. His discussion of calligrams, of representation and similitude: these, vis-à-vis his work, are new to me, and I found them interesting. There are echoes of Baudrillard here, though from a slightly different perspective -- less biting perhaps; rather than a media trap, simulation is presented as empowering. And this is crucial: so rarely do I feel that anything Foucault proposes is empowering, so concerned is he with the chains that dominate and discipline us.
And that, for now, must be enough.