Michel de Certeau – Heterologies: Discourses on the Other

Michel de Certeau – Heterologies: Discourses on the Other

Translated by Brain Massumi. Forward by Wlad Godzich.

University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Theory and History of Literature, Vol 17.

Key Terms: Practice, Psychoanalysis, Literature, the Other, postcolonialism, History, Historiography, Foucault, tactics, discourse, Politics

Michel de Certeau’s collection of sixteen essays published in 1986, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, was very interesting to read shortly after reading Foucault’s The Order of Things (OT). As the publisher (University of Minnesota) website says about the books, it is “a collection of numerous essays drawn from de Certeau’s writings” which “illustrates the diverse concerns that inform his work” and in which “each essay examines and questions the bases surrounding contemporary reorganization (http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/heterologies).” De Certeau’s essays are divided up into four broadly named parts, each of which contains three or four essays. The parts are, first, “The Return of the Repressed in Psychoanalysis,” the second is “Representation Altered by the Subject (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries),” the third, “Nineteenth-Century Exoticisms,” and the fourth is, “Others’ Histories,” which is followed by a single essay conclusion on “The Politics of Silence: The Long March of the Indians.” One can see in the chapter titles alone how much OT provides an armature for de Certeau’s inquiries, though only the fourth Part’s four essays are explicitly about Foucault’s work. For this précis I’ll go through the parts that seemed to me to be the most relevant to our purposes for the exam. Beyond that, I’d say that de Certeau always makes for a good read, and these essays are written with particular force and wit.

Forward: The Further Possibility of Knowledge by Wlad Godzich

Reading Wlad Godzich’s forward to Heterologies was very helpful for setting up a context in which to think about why and what de Certeau writes in the book. Godzich helpfully sets up the context of its publication and subject accordingly:

Heterology is a term that has come to designate a philosophical countertradition that, in short-hand, could be described as being deeply suspicious of the Parmenidean principle of the identity of thought and being. Although de Certeau does not make over reference to the themes and motifs of this tradition, his choice of title, significantly pluralized, places him among those who have reacted against the modern forms of this prejudice, that is, against the mainstream of speculative philosophy which finds the Parmenidean principle embodied in the inexorable workings of the Hegelian dialectic as it paves the way for the Spirit’s conquer of the world (Godzich, vii-viii)

In many ways he could be seen as picking up where Foucault leaves off in OT, or, yes, of riding this heterological wave, as Godzich would have it. Godzich further describes how,

De Certeau relegates to the background the epistemological questions that have recently figured so prominently in our discussions as he conducts his reflection on the present organization of knowledge. This reflection leads him to pay special attention to the question of the Other, a question that figures as a leitmotif in many of the current discussions of knowledge, whether they originate in epistemological concerns or not (Godzich, viii).

What is clear to Godzich, and anyone who reads any of these essays, is that de Certeau, as always, sees a great deal at stake in practice as it relates, here, to theory. Godzich says of this that,

In contrast, then, to the tradition of which he is a part, de Certeau has clear practical aims. There is thus something very atheoretical about his endeavor, not because of any opposition to theory as such, but because the old construction of the opposition of theory and practice is part of the speculative edifice that de Certeau no longer finds hospitable or, perhaps more accurately, affordable (Godzich, viii).

Importantly, de Certeau’s practical aims are in many ways produced by and focused on contemporary political history and happenings, in particular, anti-colonial revolutions and national and indigenous independence movements. Godzich writes that much of de Certeau’s Heterologies thinking comes out of,

…the conception of the subject as the organizer and sense-maker of lived experience, and the challenge posed to forms of Western thought by the liberation movements of the past forty years. Both of these have contributed to a sense of fragmentation that is widespread in our culture and that has been diversely theorized in recent years (Godzich, viii).

So yeah, some sort of real Politics politics up in the mix for once, how about that? Neat, right?

PART ONE: The Return of the Repressed in Psychoanalysis

Chapter 1: Psychoanalysis and Its History

This chapter might be interesting to think about for those of you also interested in doing the memory question on the transmission exam. It is about how “Psychoanalysis and historiography thus have two different ways of distributing the space of memory (de Certeau).” By which he means that, “they conceive of the relation between the past and present differently. Psychoanalysis recognizes the past in the present; historiography places them one beside the other (de Certeau, 4).” Both psychoanalysis and historiography engage and produce relationships between the past and the present. Psychoanalysis gives us a model for understanding how,

any autonomous order is founded upon what it eliminates; It produces a ‘residue’ condemned to be forgotten. But what was excluded re-infiltrates the place of its origin – now the present’s ‘clean’ [propre] place. It resurfaces, it troubles, it turns the present’s feeling of beings ‘ at home’ into an illusion, it lurks – this ‘wild,’ this ob-scene,’ this ‘filth,’ this ‘resistance’ of ‘superstition’ – within the walls of the residence, and, behind the back of the owner (the ego), or over its objections, it inscribes there the law of the other (de Certeau, 4).

While, according to de Certeau’s argument,

Historiography, on the other hand, is based on a clean break between the past and the present. It is the product of relations of knowledge and power linking two supposedly distinct domains: on one hand, there is the present (scientific, professional, social) place of work, the technical and conceptual apparatus of inquiry and interpretation, and the operation of describing and/or explaining; on the other hand, there are places (museums, archives, libraries) where the materials forming the object of this research are kept and, secondarily, set off in time, there are the past systems or events to which these materials give analysis access. There is a boundary line separating the present institution (which fabricates representations) from past or distant regions (which historiographical representations bring into play). de Certeau, 4

Okay, so we have some memory space, some repression, some return and some disciplines. And a whole lot of power circulating through all of it. Next up? What else? Literature and History, of course!

Chapter 2: The Freudian Novel: History and Literature

Charmingly, de Certeau really gets right to the point in this one. He writes,

I will state my argument without delay: literature is the theoretic discourse of the historical process. It creates the non-topos where the effective operations of a society attain a formalization. Far from envisioning literature as the expression of a referential, it would be necessary to recognize here the analogue of that which for a long time mathematics has been for the exact sciences: a ‘logical’ discourse of history, the ‘fiction’ which allows it to be thought (de Certeau, 18).

Literature is the “fiction” which allows us to think history. Literature is the discursive mode of History. Thus, literature itself is historical. De Certeau relates this argument to Freud, whose work often takes a, self-proclaimed, novel-like form. De Certeau explains that,

Although Freudian interpretation takes the form of a novel, it remains nonetheless historical. Let us give to the term ‘historical’ the definition that will serve as a point of departure: by ‘historical’ we intend the analysis which considers its materials as effects of symptoms (economic, social, political, ideological, etc.) and which aims at elucidating the temporal operations (causality, intersection, inversion, calescence, etc.) which were able to produce such effects (de Certeau, 21).

Thus, History is, itself, “a ‘literature’ overlooked by the subject matter it deals with (de Certeau, 21).” That is History. “The project of historiography,” on the other hand, is “the inverse of the poetic (literary) one,

it consists of furnishing discourse with referentiality, to make it function as ‘expressive,’ to legitimize it by means of the ‘real,’ in short, to initiate discourse as that which is supposed to have knowledge. The law of historiography functions to obscure nothingness, to suppress the void, to fill the gap. The discourse must not appear separate from its referents. The absence of loss at the origin of this construct must not be unveiled. Literary history, for example, meticulously links the literary text to ‘realistic’ (economic, social, psychological, ideological, etc.) structures (de Certeau, 31).

Thus, he goes so far as to say, that in its efforts to “initiate discourse as that which is supposed to have knowledge” historiography is, “in effect, pedagogical.”

It says to use, “I will teach you, readers, something you do not know” and thus, “it is a law, written by reality itself (de Certeau, 32).” Thus, the historian, “teaches laws which supposedly have a real referent. But this capacity to institutionalize the texts he studies (chosen for their non-literary value or selected in such a way as to avoid their development toward ‘literary’ autonomy in relation to the facts they are considered to signify) is the product of an accreditation to a profession or of a membership in a learned community (de Certeau, 32).” Historiography, unlike history or its discursive mode, literature, is about producing expertise and the formalization, centralization and implementation of power.

Okay, so now we have psychoanalysis, historiography, History and literature all in the mix. From here de Certeau goes on some crazy case-study escapades. Lacan, Surin, Melancholy, Mysticism and all of that fantastic and wild stuff that I am going to save for/ spare you until another time. Which means that I am hereby skipping from his second essay straight through to his twelfth. I hope that’s okay. Instead of a précis, I present you, a table of contents.

PART ONE: The Return of the Repressed in Psychoanalysis (continued)

Chapter 3: The Institution of Rot

Chapter 4: Lacan: An Ethics of Speech

PART II: Representation Altered by the Subject (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)

Chapter 5: Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage ‘I’

Chapter 6: Mystic Speech

Chapter 7: Surin’s Melancholy

PART III: Nineteenth-Century Exoticisms

Chapter 8: The Beauty of the Dead: Nisard, Written in collaboration with Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel

Chapter 9: Writing the Sea: Jules Verne

Chapter 10: The Theater of the Quiproquo: Alexander Dumas

Chapter 11: The Arts of Dying: Celibatory Machines

And now…

PART IV: Others’ Histories

Chapter 12: The Black Sun of Language: Foucault

Right, so this is the section that is really totally about Foucault. De Certeau opens the chapter by telling his reader that, “Michel Foucault’s book, The Order of Things, sold out within a month after it first appeared – or so goes the advertising legend” and that “the work, though long and difficult, numbers among those outward signs of culture the trained eye should find on prominent display in every private library, alongside the art books (de Certeau, 171).” I’m giving you five minutes to go find your copy, make some space on your shelf next to your art books, and put it there….

Back? Okay, good. Because de Certeau has more to say about why you should be showing off like that:

First of all, Foucault is far from ‘boring.’ In fact, he is brilliant (a little too brilliant). His writing sparkles with incisive formulations. He is amusing. Stimulating. Dazzling. His erudition confounds his; his skills compels assent; his art seduces. Yet something in us resists. Or rather, the initial charm gives way to a kind of second-degree assent, a complicity that remains after we have taken a step back from the first flush of bewitchment, but whose basis we would be hard-pressed to explain. de Certeau, 171

Sparkly, stimulating and seductive. Apparently Foucault also designed for the Angels® collection at Victoria’s Secret. Maybe a “Discipline and Punish” line of leather goods? No? Enough? Okay, fine. Anyway…

De Certeau provides a summary of Foucault’s project in OT which is excellent, and not only because it runs 1/40^th the length of my own. It is as follows:

Over time, and in the density of its own time, each episteme is made up of the heterogeneous: what it does not know about itself (its own grounding); what it can no longer know about other epistemei (after the disappearance of the ‘foundations’ they imply); what will be lost forever of its own objects of knowledge (which are constituted by a ‘structure of perception’) things are defined by a network of words, and they give way when it does. Order emerges from disorder only in the form of the equivocal. Reason, rediscovered in its underlying coherence, is always being lost because it is forever inseparable from an illusion. In Foucault’s books, reason dies and is simultaneously reborn (Certeau, 173).

Pithy, right? And totally right on. Plus, he adds this completely correct assessment, if you ask me, which is that what Foucault presents in OT is “a philosophy as well as a method” and “although it is useful to distinguish them for purpose of exposition, the two are inseparable (de Certeau, 173).” He really gets to the heart of how this is accomplished in OT just a moment later when he writes that,

for Foucault, unreason is no longer the outer limit of reason: it is its truth. It is the black sun imprisoned in language, burning unbeknown to it – it is what revealed to him, as it did to Roussel, ‘ the untiring journey through the domain common to both language and being, the observation of the play in which things and words mark their presence yet are absent from themselves, expose and mask themselves (de Certeau, 173-74).

This dialectic of exposure and masking is part of a “Pascalian twist” in which “Foucault brings continuity to light precisely where rupture had appeared (de Certeau, 179).” Yup, sounds right to me.

Thus, before moving on to the next chapter, de Certeau concludes that “We may thus ask ourselves two questions regarding Foucault (de Certeau, 184).” The first question is, “what history does he recount? On this, the historians have the floor; they can confirm that his is a reading of history that sifts through the real, decides itself what is significant, and takes refuge in the ‘density’ of history when the surface resists his treatment (de Certeau, 184).” And, the second is about “the philosophic determination of the status of his discourse, the clarification of the relation between his particularity and his project (who is speaking? from where?), and the elaboration for the concepts he uses (foundation, ground, positivity, etc.) mark the spot where that magnificent ‘account’ should transform into philosophy (de Certeau, 184).” Good thing there are three more essays coming up to deal with those questions, they’re big ones.

Chapter 13: Micro-techniques and Panoptic Discourse: A Quid pro Quo

Seriously though, I want to be this good at the hitting of nails on their heads. Here’s how de Certeau gets it done this time: “As always, for Foucault, the drama is played out between two forces whose relationship to one another is inverted by the ruse of history (de Certeau, 185).” Yeah, I mean, it’s not really quite that easy, but… I guess it sort of is. It certainly isn’t not about that. Anyway, de Certeau argues that this method of “showing, in a single case, the heterogeneous and equivocal relations between apparatuses” Foucault constitutes “a new object of historical study: that zone in which technological procedures have specific effects of power, obey logical dynamisms which are specific to them, and produce fundamental turnings aside in the juridical and scientific institutions (de Certeau, 189).” De Certeau’s point here, though, is not just to unpack how things work in Foucault, it is to point out that given all that his method does do, what it does not do is help us “know what to make of other, equally infinitesimal procedures that have remained unprivileged by history yet which continue to flourish in the interstices of the institutional technologies” and that “this is most particularly the case of procedures that lack the essential precondition indicated by Foucault, namely the possession of a locus or specific space of their own on which the panoptical machinery can function (de Certeau, 189).”

In other words, Foucault’s method is very useful for looking at the big obvious places within a system of governmental power, clinics, prisons, etc., but power is just as important in less obvious places, places “without locus” that, rather, could be called “rhetorical ‘tactics (de Certeau, 189.’” Not only does Foucault’s method fail to account for these tactics and places without place, de Certeau suggests that these tactics “secretly reorganize Foucault’s discourse, colonize his ‘panopitcal’ text and transform it into a ‘trompe-l’oeil (de Certeau, 189).’” So basically, good job with the easy stuff there, big fella, now how about some of the sneaky craziness that upends all your neat little arguments and that is where it all really happens?

De Certeau says that “Foucault works on this cliff… beyond [which there is] nothing but the sea] when he attempts to invent a discourse that can speak of non-discursive practices” but that what we need to consider is that “micro-techniques,” instead of being its object, actually build his theory (de Certeau, 189-90). Thus, he concludes, “the question no longer concerns the procedures organizing social surveillance and discipline, but the procedures producing Foucault’s text itself. In fact, the micro-techniques provide not only the content of the discourse but also the process of its construction (de Certeau, 189-90).” I read this as connecting very much to the de Certeau’s thinking on tactics and practice in The Practice of Everyday Life which had been published six years earlier in France. The connection becomes even more explicit in the next chapter which uses the language of “poaching” which is so significant in that book. The “art” of “micro-techniques” techniques that comprise Foucault’s theory make it easy to see that the theory is not about such tactics, but is, instead, “an effect and a network of these procedures themselves. It is a narrative, a theoretical narrative, which obeys rules analogous to those panoptic procedures. There is no epistemological and hierarchical break between the theoretical text and the micro-techniques. Such a continuity constitutes the philosophical novelty of Foucault’s work (de Certeau, 191).” Once again, de Certeau’s essay/ chapter ends on a cliff(hanger). He writes:

Two short propositions may be an introduction to a debate, and may take the place of a conclusion.

1) Procedures are not merely the objects of a theory. They organize the very construction of theory itself. far from being external to theory, or from staying on its doorstep. Foucault’s procedures provide a field of operations within which theory is itself produced. With Foucault we get another way of building a theory, a theory which is the literary gesture of those procedures themselves.

2) In order to clarify the relationship of theory with those procedures that produce it as well with those that are its objects of study, the most relevant way would be a storytelling discourse. Foucault writes that he does nothing but tell stories (‘récits’). Stories slowly appear as a work of displacements, relating to a logic of metonymy. Is it not then time to recognize the theoretical legitimacy of narrative, which is then to be looked upon not as some ineradicable remnant (or remnant still to be eradicated) but rather as a necessary form for a theory of practices? In this hypothesis, a narrative theory would be indissociable from any theory of practices, for it would be its precondition as well as its production. de Certeau, 192

Foucault’s historical practice does not just study practices, it is produced by them and it produces them, it operates as much in a literary discursive mode as any other historical project. And thus, he, and we, laugh a big ol’ Nietzschean chuckle into the fourteenth chapter.

Chapter 14: The Laugh of Michel Foucault

This chapter starts with what I think is one of the best things Foucault ever said/ wrote. At the beginning of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault responds to his critics this way:

No, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you.

What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write. (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 17.) de Certeau, 193

De Certeau sees this attitude of Foucault as a fundamentally important part of his practice, he writes “This surprising inventiveness of words and things, this intellectual experience of a disappropriation that opens possibilities, is what Foucault marks with a laugh. It is his philosophical signature on the irony of history (de Certeau, 194).” But it isn’t that Foucault laughs at history, it is the gets history’s joke.

It is not Mr. Foucault who is making fun of domains of knowledge and predictions, or pre-visions; it is history that is laughing at them. It plays tricks on the teleologists who take themselves to the be the lieutenants of meaning. A meaninglessness of history, a mocking and nocturnal god, ridicules the schoolmasters’’ authority and withdraws from Foucault himself the moralistic or pedagogical role of being an ‘intellectual’ who is always on top of things. The lucidity comes from an attentiveness, always mobile, always surprised, to what events show us without our knowing it. de Certeau, 196

And this opening to surprise, to the constant twists and astonishments, is political. The politics of the visible is the terrain of philosophy in this domain. De Certeau writes about this, that

Already a major locus for Merleau-Ponty, the visible constitutes for Foucault the contemporary theater of our fundamental options. It is here that a use of space for policing purposes is confronted by a vigilance attuned to what else happens there. Mustered on this terrain of our epistemological wars, the work of philosophy oppose the systems that subject space to surveillance with paradoxes that chance encounters produce in it; it opposes the panoptic leveling with discontinuities revealed in thought by chance. Two practices of space clash in the field of visibility, the one ordered by discipline, the other based on astonishment. With this combat, reminiscent of those of the Greed gods in their heaven, is effect the ‘reversal’ of the technologies of ‘seeing without being seen’ into aesthetics of ethical existence (de Certeau, 197).

The chance, the contingent, the possibility of the impossible to predict, of being open and responding to tactics and “’discontinuous practices’ born of inventions that arise from chance encounters” and the “event that is elicited by the ‘wild profusion of beings’ adds to each carefully constructed map another possibility (de Certeau, 197).” De Certeau seems to be after a politics of history that, in asking questions about what makes thinking thoughts a certain way possible, remains open to other possible possibles. Not even a single subversive writing against the dominant, not a single heterology, not one Other, but Others, heterologies. He writes further,

None of these maps defines a destiny or truth of thought. these successive places are not linked by the progress of an Idea that would gradually formulate itself, but by a common way of thinking. They answer to the laughs of history. They attest to the necessity of inscribing these chance happenings one after another in our domains of knowledge; they do not undertake, by homogenizing all the discourses, to return their dazzling discontinuities to the shadows. Rarely has philosophical astonishment been treated in a manner so mindful of its possible developments and respectful of its surprises. de Certeau, 197

And as may already be obvious, this pertains not only to philosophy, but to “political activity” which “has the same style (de Certeau, 197).” Political activity,

does not appropriate for itself a meaning of history. It does not constitute a strategy, much less a doctrine. It responds to events with the same kind of faithfulness described above in relation to the fortuities of the text. It keeps to the events with the same rigorous constancy and precision, with a view to bringing out the implications of the unthought that breaks through the grid of the established order and accepted disciplines. The chance occurrences of political and social current events, the condition of inmates in French prisons, the Iranian revolution, the repression in Poland, and so many other singular encounters elicited in Foucault the kind of astonishment that generates action. de Certeau, 197

In the last two chapters of the book we see how de Certeau envisions a reorganization of the relationship between history and politics.

Chapter 15: History: Science and Fiction

De Certeau starts the chapter by explaining that:

My analysis of historiography must be situated in the context of a question too broad to be treated fully here, namely the antinomy between ethics and what, for lack of a better word, I will call dogmatism. Ethics is articulated through effective operations, and it defines a distance between what is and what ought to be. The distance designates a space where we have something to do. On the other hand, dogmatism is authorized by a reality that it claims to represent and in the name of this reality, it imposes laws. Historiography functions midway between these two poles: but whenever it attempts to break away from ethics, it returns toward dogmatism (de Certeau, 199).

And so, we are back to Historiography, which de Certeau tells us, is one of the sciences that was “born with that ‘modern’ historical act that depoliticized research by establishing ‘disinterested’ and ‘neutral’ fields of study supported by scientific institutions. This act of neutralization continues in many instance to be organizing the ideology proclaimed in certain scientific communities (de Certeau, 215). And so,

is therefore necessary today to ‘repoliticize’ the sciences, that is to focus their technical apparatus on the fields of force within which they operate and produce their discourse. This takes is preeminently that of the historian. Historiography has always been lodged at the frontier between discourse and power. It is a battlefield for a war between sense and violence. But after having believed for three or four centuries it was possible to dominate and to observe this relation – to situate it outside of knowledge in order to make it an ‘object’ for knowledge and to analyze it under the category of a ‘past’ – we must recognize today that the conflict between discourse and power hangs over historiography itself and at the same time remains an integral part of it. de Certeau, 215

And guess, what, “this ‘repoliticization’ will consist in ‘historicizing’ historiography itself (de Certeau, 216).” Makes sense, right? That’s basically what he’s been doing all along, I think, trying to historicize, and thus repoliticize historiography. And he makes a good argument for it, if you ask me. Particularly here, at the end of the essay when he says,

The very place established by procedures of control is itself historicized by time, past or future; time is inscribed there as the return of the ‘other’ (a relationship of power, to precedents, or to ambitions), and while ‘metaphorizing’ the discourse of science, it turns it into the discourse of a social reciprocity and of an ethical project. While place is dogmatic, the coming back of time restores an ethics. de Certeau, 221

If nothing else, de Certeau serves to remind us that when we read Foucault, we need to think about his history in the same way he read other peoples’ history, as produced by and productive of a particular discourse.

So, the politics. Let’s get to that there at the end and then we’ll be on to the next thing. Shall we?

PART V: Conclusion

Chapter 16: The Politic of Silence: The Long March of the Indians

Here, as Godzich told us he was, de Certeau gets into his interest in contemporary revolutionary political movements. He chooses to focus on the indigenous Indian Manifesto movement in South America about which I knew pretty much nothing and about which I now know only a little bit more because, frankly, I was really just reading this chapter to see how he went about applying any of what he’d said in the first fifteen pieces to an actual people/ place/ moment. I’ll be brief about what I found.

De Certeau summarizes “the features observable in the Indian Manifestoes” and says that in them,

the following model emerges: an associative interweaving of sociopolitical micro-units, each of which is characterized by community self-management of resources (essentially land), in other words, by a range of complementary rights and obligations which have as their object the same commodity, and which are assigned to various holders, none of which is inherently entitled (as either an individual or legal entity) to what we call the right of ownership (de Certeau, 230).

His interest in telling us about this movement is that the “attitude” evident in it

opens horizons and raises questions. A quick enumeration of them also serves as a summary of the reasons in favor of solidarity with the movement to which the Declarations bear witness:

1. The passage from a micro-politics (of self-managing communities) to a macro-politics (the federation). In our societies, this passage corresponds to an until now unbridgeable gap marked by the integrating structures of the State.

2. The collective contracts with the earth, in their dual aspect as economic (rural cooperatives) and ecological (harmony with nature. …

3. Lastly, cultural pluralism is also essential to the self-management perspective.

…

A space of exchange and sharing is thus established. Silently. It is accompanied- is it any surprise? – by references to the Great Spirit, but discreet ones, because the ‘daily recognition of the Unseen and Eternal’ is ‘unspoken’… (de Certeau, 233)

He then tells us that, “Readers, you and I stand invited to assist in this work, which is inspired by concern for the other, and is meant to rise to the same beat as the Indian awakening (de Certeau, 233).”

Whether or not that’s something you feel like doing is obviously up to you. But I hope you can see how de Certeau does help us to continue thinking with and about Foucault in some ways that I think could potentially be very productive.