If You Don't Know, Why are You Asking? A Map of Similitudes and Coincidences in Five Locales, Two Gardens and Along Seven Rivers
If You Don't Know, Why are You Asking? A Map of Similitudes and Coincidences in Five Locales, Two Gardens and Along Seven Rivers

Summary/Abstract: The essay overlays Michael Joyce’s 2015 novel, Foucault in Winter in the Linnaeus Garden – a polylingual, operatic fantasy comprised of invented letters – upon Foucault’s work, especially Madness and Civilization, as an existing topography that overlaps with the physical and emotional territories of the authors’ own lives. They meet at several locations, from New Hamburg and Nyack, to Marcel Broodthaers’ exhibition at MoMA, New York; while Daniel Bozhkov separately travels to Sweden, Spain, Germany, Bulgaria and Texas, in order to visit various locations mentioned in the novel, as well as ones not mentioned, but relevant to Foucault. The seemingly fragmented text, perforated by the authors’ letters to each other, exists in a non-stop costume ball of famous shadows – Goya, Dürer and Bosch meet Magritte, Deleuze and William Kentridge. A hand drawn map accompanies the essay as a parallel, Deleuzian fold that aims to further unravel the authors’ developing connection to each other (who first met through this project), and their relationship to Michel Foucault’s unsettling and forever-provocative endeavor.

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