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What Is Neuro-literature?

Neuroliterature: this word is not a name for a new discipline, which—like neurolinguistics, neuropsychoanalysis, or neurophilosophy—would tend to explain the way in which our mental acts are rooted in biological neural processes. Even if we have to pay these new sciences the most acute attention to the extent that they are currently re-sketching the inner and outer boundaries of the Humanities, my purpose here is different and wishes to escape all forms of reductionism. Current neurobiology will be present in my discourse, but not as a possible new foundation for literature. Speaking from the continental philosophical point of view, I am interested in the way neurological research helps both radicalizing and challenging certain major motives of what took place in the second half of the twentieth century under the names of “deconstruction of subjectivity” in Derrida on the one hand, of “archeology of knowledge” in Foucault on the other. These two movements—let us call them movements for want of a better name—as different and sometimes opposed as they might have been, have shared what I will call a common faith in literature. I will limit myself here to exploring the Foucaultian structure or economy of this faith, which might be formulated as a faith in the outside. According to Foucault, literature promises the opening of an outside: outside of philosophy, outside of representation, outside of “discourse,” and, of course and above all, outside science, which has always been identified with power, regulation, normalization, and discipline. This “outside” will actually be my topic, and I will focus on Foucault’s reading of Blanchot in his short but fundamental book entitled The Thought From Outside. In this book, Foucault declares: