Foucault enters the den

Over ten years of "teaching" creative writing, my primary goal has been to seek opportunities in the students' works. But here Foucault says the same thing with the passion and dimension that it deserves. In my dream world, every writing teacher would accept this as the method by which wonderful writing is cultivated.


"I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring
an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch
the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze
and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it
would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent
them sometimes -- all the better.

"Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I'd like a
criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or
dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms."

-Michel Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher," interview in *Le Monde,*
1980