Foucault

Retour au pays natal après une longue durée est un phénomène récurrent qui a nourri beaucoup de romans à l’époque contemporaine tellement marquée par l’immigration et l’exil. Kossi Efoui, écrivain togolais, dans Solo d’un revenant et Dany Laferrière, écrivain haïtien, dans L’Énigme du retour racontent, chacun à sa manière, les complexités chez les revenants qui vivent l’expérience de l’altérité au sein de leur propre patrie. Le rapport problématique liant, dans ces récits, l’instance de la fiction à l’instance de la réalité, et le sens qui en résulte dans le processus du retour, nous préoccupent dans cette étude basée sur la géocritique de Bertrand Westphal. En plus, l’idée de l’hétérotopie évoquée par Michel Foucault et développée par Bertrand Westphal, nous prépare une théorie féconde pour analyser la fonction de l’espace du cimetière comme un espace autre, que les revenants mettent en valeur par rapport à la norme établie de la patrie.

This paper aims to investigate the role of language as a form of political and social control, and a vehicle for power and domination in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Edward Bond’s Lear on parallel bases. Foucault’s famous statement which refers to power as present “everywhere, not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere” clearly points to the always already presence of power. The issue of power has occupied a central position within his works. In fact, language can reflect truth as false and vice versa to sustain dominant group’s desires. Language can both reflect and affect our perception of the world indeed. In fact, King Lear and Lear are both stages for language game. The paper thus aims to focus on the way language plays a key role in King Lear and Lear as a vehicle for power and how language makes you powerful or how it throws you away to be a margin. The result shows that there is a dual relation between language and power, so that the voice of king is doomed to silence through the function of characters’ powerful language usage. In both plays, King is in the margin and language rules powerfully on socio-political relations. This paper has benefited from library documents and sources by use of a descriptive-analytical method.

Understanding how discourse is spatialized needs a conceptual ground for the discussion, and this study believes that the Foucauldian view is the right one. With a non-cartesian attitude, Michel Foucault considered the body as space and used archaeological and genealogical analysis to study its productive conditions. In his archaeological study, Foucault sought to analyze changes in knowledge or discourse through historical periods. In the genealogical one, he revealed discourse emergence conditions via mechanisms of power. Taking Foucault's epistemic framework, power and knowledge have a mutual relationship, and spaces represent power/knowledge. This paper explores spatial discourses in Naghsh-e-Jahan Square of Isfahan (1591-1941 A.D.) as the last public-government square from the Safavid era. Ultimately, the spatial discourses of the Naghsh-e-Jahan square can be traced by techniques of domination in different periods of history; the discourse of Islamization through sovereign power in the Safavid era, the discourse of modernization through disciplinary power in the Ghajar era, and the modernization, civilization, and nationalism through disciplinary power and biopower in the late Ghajar era and during the first Pahlavi era.

 Although Michel  Foucault (1926 - 1984) emphasizes that the dominant paradigm of the renaissance era is based on resemblance and analogy, contrary to Foucault's view, metaphorical thinking and analogy is not merely dominant in the pre-modern society, but is also active in the modern and contemporary era, and according to the cognitive theory, it exists in the human being's whole life. The present research aims to investigate the relationship between socio-space metaphors in Foucault's thought. By studying Foucault's works and applying the metaphor identification procedure model, his main metaphors were extracted and analyzed using the qualitative content analysis method. Based on Foucault and Derrida’s theories power is the determining metaphor and has a linguistic character, other metaphors are a function of the metaphor of power. They believe in metaphorical form Power and knowledge are the same. Further, power creates knowledge and controls it spatially and has a great share in its reproduction and chain circulation. Most of Foucault's metaphors of space, such as situation, displacement, place, context, realm, sphere, the horizon, archipelago, land, and landscape, have a military background and are intertwined with power. Foucault likened the modern world to Jeremy Bentham's panopticon power. Foucault's panopticon architecture metaphor is location-based and social one. In other words, he has embodied or objectified the modern world as a disciplinary field or society. The results show that based on Lakoff and Johnson's theory, Foucault has used the metaphors of architecture as well as the panopticon as a source domain to explain the target domain (modern society).