Between a Scalpel and a Touch, or, Foucault's Ways of Writing the Dead

This essay draws on Michel Foucault's reflections on his writing practice to develop a reading of his historical inquiries as exercises of what I call "death-writing." Death-writing is a type of writing that is predicated on death, both the death of the past and the death of others, comprising a way of orienting oneself toward the dead. I argue that Foucault mobilizes the theme of death and writing already since his earlier work in the 1970s. As a practice of death-writing, genealogy aims to diagnose the death of others by tracing their conditions of possibility in death's entwinement with power. Finally, I suggest that Foucault began experimenting with another practice of death-writing in his Parallel Lives series, a writing that assumes a different affective bearing toward obscure and brief lives.