Michel Foucault - The Order of Things - Part 2

PART TWO

*A moment here on gendered language. Foucault talks all about “man” and the “history of man” and “man’s idea of himself” and blah blah blah. If this were an undergrad paper, I’d be all “Don’t do that!” but this is Foucault, so I’m gonna shut up and listen, like a woman is supposed to do anyway, I suppose.

Chapter 7: The Limits of Representation

And now we come to History. To what Foucault calls the “mutation of Order into History” that occurs at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries (Foucault, 220). This capitalized History Foucault says, “gives place to analogical organic structures, just as Order opened the way to successive identities and differences. … It is the fundamental mode of being of empiricities, upon the basis of which they are affirmed, posited, arranged, and distributed in the space of knowledge for the use of such disciplines or sciences as may arise (Foucault, 219).” It took “a fundamental event – certainly one of the most radical that ever occurred in Western culture – to bring about the dissolution of the positivity of Classical knowledge, and to constitute another positivity form which, even now, we have doubtless not entirely emerged (Foucault, 220-221).” Not only that, but this event, the event the precipitated the mutation of Order into History, “probably because we are still caught inside it, is largely beyond our comprehension (Foucault, 221).” This is the event whereby,

to classify… will no longer mean to refer the visible back to itself, while allotting one of its elements the task of representing others; it will mean, in a movement that makes analysis pivot on its axis, to relate the visible to the invisible, to its deeper cause, as it were, then to rise upwards once more from that hidden architecture towards the more obvious signs displayed on the surface of bodies (Foucault, 229).

In other words, “organic structure intervenes between the articulating structures and the designating characters – creating between them a profound, interior, and essential space (Foucault, 231)” and thus, “the very being of that which is represented is now going to fall outside representation itself (Foucault, 240).”

Okay, so how to put this? I remember that when I was reading this book this summer, I was trying to explain to my roommate, and I remember explaining this moment, and it making sense when I did it, and right now I would do anything to have tape of that moment. Basically, there was a direct connection between a thing and a word. That word went to that thing for a reason, because of something essential about that thing that was shared with that word, and that was why they were connected. At this point, though, things start to be considered distinct entities that can be related to each other in classes, plants, trees, species, etc. and the words that describe them, and those relationships of classification, but they do not emanate from them, or resemble them.

I’m honestly not sure that I’m not reducing this too much or that I’ve really read it correctly, but that’s about the most sense of it that I can make at the moment.

Chapter 8: Labour, Life, Language

The three terms that comprise the title of this chapter are what Foucault calls the “”quasi-transcendentals” that are constituted for us by “the thought that is contemporaneous with us, and with which, willy-nilly, we think, is still largely dominated by the impossibility, brought to light towards the end of the eighteenth century, of basing syntheses in the spaces of representation (Foucault, 250).” At the end of the eighteenth century, what was happening was that,

The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now a superficial glitter above an abyss.

The space of Western knowledge is now about to topple: the taxinomia, whose great, universal expanse extended in correlation with the possibility of a mathesis, and which constituted the down-beat of knowledge – at once its primary possibility and the end of its perfection – is now about to order itself in accordance with an obscure verticality: a verticality that is to define the law of resemblances, prescribe all adjacencies and discontinuities, provide the foundation for perceptible arrangements, and displace all the great horizontal deployments of the taxinomia towards the somewhat accessory region of consequences. Thus, European culture is inventing for itself a depth in which what matters is no longer identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables with all their possible paths and routes, but great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus, origin, causality, and history (Foucault, 251).

Thus, “what changed at the turn of the century, and underwent an irremediable modification, was knowledge itself as an anterior and indivisible mode of being between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge (Foucault, 252).” And those “quasi-transcendentals,” Foucault says, “are fundamental modes of knowledge which sustain in their flawless unity the secondary and derived correlation of new sciences and techniques with unprecedented objects (Foucault, 253).” From here, he goes on to explore how one can discern signs of these emergent modes “doubtless buried deep down in the dense archaeological layers” in Ricardo’s work in economics, Cuvier’s in biology, and Bopp’s in philology. A few quotes here for each of them. It’s pretty straightforward, so I’m not going to editorialize, best to just get onto the really rich stuff in Chapter Nine:

Ricardo:

The positivity of economics is situated in that anthropological hollow. Homo oeconomicus is not the human being who represents his own needs to himself, and the objects capable of satisfying them; he is the human being who spends, wears out, and wastes his life in evading the imminence of death. He is a finite being: and just as, since Kant, the question of finitude has become more fundamental than the analysis of representations (the latter now being necessarily a derivation of fashion, upon an anthropology that attempts to assign concrete forms to finitude. Foucault, 257

The tide of History will at last become slack. Man’s finitude will have been defined – once and for all, that is, for an indefinite time.

Paradoxically, it is the historicity introduced into economics by Ricardo that makes it possible to conceive of this immobilization of History. Foucault, 259

At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of disturbing and, above all, no power to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it. Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else. Foucault, 262

Cuvier:

From Cuvier onward, it is life in its non-perceptible, purely functional aspect that provides the basis for the exterior possibility of a classification. The classification now arises from the depths of life, from those elements most hidden from view. Before, the living being was a locality of natural classification; now, the fact of being classifiable is a property of the living being. So the project of a general taxinomia disappears; the possibility of deploying a great natural order which would extend continuously from the simplest and most inert of things to the most living and the most complex disappears; and the search for order as the ground and foundation of a general science of nature also disappears. ‘Nature’, too, disappears – being understood that nature, throughout the Classical age, did not exist in the first place as a ‘theme’, as an ‘idea’, as an endless source of knowledge, but as a homogenous space of orderable identities and differences. Foucault, 268

Life is no longer that which can be distinguished in a more or less certain fashion from the mechanical; it is that in which all the possible distinctions between living beings have their basis. It is this transition from the taxonomic to the synthetic notion of life which is indicated, in the chronology of ideas and sciences, by the recrudescence, in the early nineteenth century, of vitalist themes. From the archaeological point of view, what is being established at this particular moment is the conditions of possibility of a biology. Foucault, 269

From Cuvier onward, the living being wraps itself in its own existence, breaks off its taxonomic links of adjacency, tears itself free from the vast, tyrannical plan of continuities, and constitutes itself as a new space: a double space, in fact – since it is both the interior one of anatomical coherences and physiological compatibilities, and the exterior one of the elements in which it resides and of which it forms its own body. But both these spaces are subject to a common control: it is no longer that of the possibilities of being, it is that of the conditions of life. Foucault, 274

Here, on the contrary, a system of thought is being developed in which individuality, with its forms, limits, and needs, is no more than a precarious moment, doomed to destruction, forming first and last a simple obstacle that must be removed from the path of that annihilation; a system of thought in which the objectivity of things is mere appearance, a chimera of the perceptions, an illusion that must be dissipated and returned to the pure will, without phenomenon, that brought those things into being and maintained them there for an instant; lastly, a system of thought for which the recommencement of life, its incessant resumptions, and its stubbornness, preclude the possibility of imposing a limit of duration upon it, especially since time itself, with its chronological divisions and its quasi-spatial calendar, is doubtless nothing but an allusion to knowledge. Foucault, 279

Bopp:

If the word is able to figure in a discourse in which it means something, it will no longer be by virtue of some immediate discursivity that it is thought to possess in itself, and by right of birth, but because, in its very form, , in the sounds that compose it, in the changes it undergoes in accordance with the grammatical function it is performing, and finally in the modifications to which it finds itself subject in the course of time, it obeys a certain number of strict laws which regulate, in a similar way, all the other elements of the same language; so that the word is no longer attached to a representation except in so far as it is previously a part of the grammatical organization by means of which the language defines and guarantees its own coherence. Foucault, 280-81

Etymology will therefore cease to be an endless regress towards a primitive language entirely stocked with primal, natural cries; it becomes a definite, limited method of analysis, the aim of which is to discover within any given word the radical from which it has been formed: ‘The roots of words were brought to light only after the successful analysis of inflection and derivations’ [J. Grimm, L’Origine du langage (Fr. Trans. Paris, 1859, p.7.]. Foucault, 288

We speak because we act, and not because recognition is a means of cognition. Like action, language expresses a profound will to something. Foucault, 290

Empiricity – and this is equally true of natural individuals and of the words by which they can be named – is henceforth traversed by History, through the whole density of its being. The order of time is beginning. Foucault, 293

By being cut off from that which it represents, language was certainly made to emerge for the first time in its own particular legality, and at the same time it was doomed to be re-apprehensible only within history. Foucault, 294

Classical knowledge was profoundly nominalist. From the nineteenth century, language began to fold in upon itself, to acquire its own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of its own. It became one object of knowledge among others. on the same level as living beings, wealth and value, and the history of evens and men. It may possess its own concepts, but the analyses that bear upon it have their roots at the same level as those that deal with other empirical forms of knowledge. The preeminence that enabled general grammar to be logic while at the same time intersecting with it has now been lost. To know language is no longer to come as close as possible to knowledge itself; it is merely to apply the methods of understanding in general to a particular domain of objectivity. Foucault, 296

Finally, the last compensations for the demotions of language, the most important, and also the most unexpected, is the appearance of literature, of literature as such – for there has of course existed in the Western world, since Dante, since Homer, a form of language that we now call ‘literature.’ … Literature is the contestation of philology (of which it is nevertheless the twin figure): it leads language back from grammar to the naked power of speech, and there it encounters the untamed, imperious being of words. From the Romantic revolt against a discourse frozen in its own ritual pomp, to the Mallarméan discovery of the word in its impotent power, it becomes clear what the function of literature was, in the nineteenth century, in relation to the modern mode of being language. … it breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law that that of affirming – in opposition to all other forms of discourse – its own precipitous existence; and so there is nothing for it to do but to curve backing a perpetual return upon itself, as if its discourse could have no other content than the expression of its own form; it addresses itself to itself as a writing subjectivity, or seeks to re-apprehend the essence of all literature in the movement that brought it into being; and thus all its threads converge upon the finest points – singular, instantaneous, and yet absolutely universal – upon the simple act of writing. Foucault, 300

At the moment when language, as spoken an scattered words, becomes an object of knowledge, we see it reappearing in a strictly opposite modality: a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being. Foucault, 300

Chapter 9: Man and his Doubles

Here, Foucault tells us that “what Classical thought reveals is the power of discourse (Foucault, 310-11),” and that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the law of discourse was now detached from representation, “the being of language itself” became “fragmented,” resulting in the focus of thought becoming the question “What is language, how can we find a way round it in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plenitude” and he sees this line of questioning as paralleling those also arising at the time about life (biology) and labour (political economy) (Foucault, 306). “Classical language, as the common discourse of representation and things, as the place within which nature and human nature intersect” excluded the possibility of a ‘science of man’ because “as long as that language was spoken in Western culture, it was not possible for human existence to be called in question on its own account, since it contained the nexus of representation of being (Foucault, 311).” With the decline of Classical language as the common discourse, such a ‘science of man,’ becomes possible; biology emerges from the breakdown of natural history. This event is “the appearance of man (Foucault, 317).”

This is the event of the end of metaphysics (Foucault, 317) and a

fourfold displacement in relation to the Kantian position, for it is now a question not of truth, but of being; not of nature, but of man; not of the possibility of understanding, but of the possibility of a primary misunderstanding; not of the unaccountable nature of philosophical theories as opposed to science, but of the resumption in a clear philosophical awareness of that whole realm of unaccounted-for experiences in which man does not recognize himself (Foucault, 323).

Foucault gives a really beautiful description of what this concept of man is that emerges, which I’ll quote in full:

No doubt, on the level of appearances, modernity begins when the human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head, inside the armature of his limbs, and in the whole structure of his physiology; when he begins to exist at the centre of a labour by whose principles he is governed and whose product eludes him; when he lodges his thought in the folds of a language so much older than himself that he cannot master its significations, even though they have been called back to life by the insistence of his words. But more fundamentally, our culture crossed the threshold beyond which we recognize our modernity when finitude was conceived in an interminable cross-reference with itself. Though it is true, at the level of the various branches of knowledge, that finitude is always designated on the basis of man as concrete being and on the basis of the empirical forms that can be assigned to his existence, nevertheless, at the archaeological level, which reveals the general, historical a priori of each of those branches of knowledge, modern man – that man assignable to his corporeal, labouring, and speaking existence – is possible only as a figuration of finitude. Modern culture can conceive of man because it conceives of the finite on the basis of itself. Foucault, 318

Man, thinking of himself as such “inside the shell of his head” is the beginning of the modern. With the end of metaphysics Foucault turns to the beginning of phenomenology, which he says is “much less the resumption of an old rational goal of the West than the sensitive and precisely formulated acknowledgement of the great hiatus that occurred in the modern episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Foucault, 325).” Phenomenology, he says, has an “allegiance,” if it has any, to “the discovery of life, work, and language; and also to the new figure which, under the old name of man, first appeared less than two centuries ago… to interrogation concerning man’s mode of being and his relation to the unthought (Foucault, 325).” The “unthought (whatever name we give it),” Foucault quickly explains, “is not lodged in man like a shriveled-up nature or a stratified history; it is, in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality (Foucault, 326).” So, with the emergence of a man who conceives of himself as finite, of and in his mind and body, a twin Other is born at the same time.

Here Foucault turns to the question of morality as it existed in these periods. He says that “it is clear that the West has known only two ethical forms. The old one (in the form of stoicism or Epicureanism) was articulated upon the order of the world, and by discovering the law of that order it could deduce from it the principle of a code of wisdom or a conception of the city (Foucault, 328).” Modernity, on the other hand,

formulates no morality, since any imperative is lodged within thought and its movement towards the apprehension of unthought [the Other]; it is reflection, the act of consciousness, the elucidation of what is silent, language restored to what is mute, the illumination of the element of darkness that cuts man off from himself, the reanimation of the inert – it is all this and this alone that constituted the content and form of the ethical (Foucault, 328).

The rupture in language that sundered apart the thing and the word, produced a gap between “man and himself,” as he is now occupied by trying to think that gap, to think the unthought, his own otherness to himself and the otherness of the Other. thus, “Modern thought has never, in fact, been able to propose a morality. But the reason for this is not because it is pure speculation; on the contrary, modern thought, from its inception and in its very density, is a certain mode of action (Foucault, 328).” Modernity produced ethics, way of living in and with finitude, not morality, or a code for being. Foucault explains that, “superficially, one might say that knowledge of man, unlike the sciences of nature, is always linked, even in its vaguest form, to ethics or politics; more fundamentally, modern thought is advancing towards that region where man’s Other must become the same as himself (Foucault, 328).”

Thus, “man is cut off from the origin that would make him contemporaneous with his own existence: amid all the things that are born in time and no doubt die in time, he, cut off from all origin, is already there (Foucault, 332).” I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around this part of Foucault’s argument, but its relation to historicity is clearly important. He says that in modernity, “it is no longer origin that gives rise to historicity,” but rather,

it is historicity that, in its very fabric, makes possible the necessity of an origin which must be both internal and foreign to it: like the virtual tip of a cone in which all differences, all dispersions, all discontinuities would be knitted together so as to form no more than a single point of identity, the impalpable figure of the Same, yet possessing the power, nevertheless, to burst open upon itself and become the other (Foucault, 332).

The modern sense of history creates a position for man in which he is constantly seeking an original the concept of which would not exist without his idea of history. Thus, t

The incommensurability of he incommensurability of man and his origin is mirrored in the incommensurability of man and himself, his double, the Same or the Other. Constituted as outside of himself, he is thus constituted to conceive of an inside, and origin. Of this, Foucault says, “Western culture, the being of man and the being of language have never, at any time, been able to coexist and to articulate themselves one upon the other. their incompatibility has been one of the fundamental features of our thought (Foucault, 339).” And thus, there is a constant push and pull in modern thought as man tries to think his way through a concept of time that has, itself, constituted his thinking.

Foucault describes the philosophical consequences of modern thought thusly,

Calling to one another and answering throughout modern thought and throughout its history, we find a dialectical interplay and an ontology without metaphysics: for modern thought is one that moves no longer towards the ever-to-be-accomplished unveiling of the Same. Now, such an unveiling is not accomplished without the simultaneous appearance of the Double, and that hiatus, miniscule and yet invincible, which resides in the ‘and’ of retreat and return, of thought and the unthought, of the empirical and the transcendental, of what belongs to the order of positivity and what belongs to the order of foundations. Foucault, 340

And then he gets to the fun stuff: Nietzsche.

In this, Nietzsche, offering this future to us as both promise and task, marks the threshold beyond which contemporary philosophy can begin thinking again; and he will no doubt continue for a long while to dominate in advance. If the discovery of the Return is indeed the end of philosophy, then the end of man, for its part, is the return of the beginning of philosophy. It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which is once more possible to think. Foucault, 342

Before he goes out on a pretty darned amazing bang, if you ask me:

To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all their knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifiying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one. Foucault, 342-43

Whoa. Right? Whoa. **swoon**

Last Chapter. Ready… go.

Chapter 10: The Human Sciences

Yeah, so this is kind of what I mean about how I got to the end of the book and felt like I maybe sort of could have skipped all that tricky representation footwork at the beginning and just gone straight to this sexy stuff at the end. Because at the end, he says stuff like this:

The epistemological field traversed by the human sciences was not laid down in advance: no philosophy, not political or moral option, no empirical science of any kind, no observation of the human body, no analysis of sensation, no imagination, or the passions, had ever encountered, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, anything like man; for man did not exist (any more than life, or language, or labour); and the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success) among the objects of science – among which it has perhaps not been proved even yet that it is absolutely possible to class him; they appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known. Foucault, 344-45

And that’s the twist for man and his double: man is that which has to do the knowing and is the thing to be known. Why Foucault waits to say it so clearly until the next chapter, I don’t know. Thus, the human sciences are,

are not, then, an analysis of what man is by nature; but rather, an analysis that extends from what man is in his positivity (living, speaking, labouring, being) to what enables this same being to know (or seek to know) what life is, in what the essence of labour and its laws consist, and in what way he is able to speak. The human sciences thus occupy the distance that separates though not without connecting them) biology, economics, and philology form that which gives them possibility in the very being of man (Foucault, 353).

Thus, Foucault argues, it can be understood why the categories of “the norm, the rule, and the system” (this part is a little bit about Freud, which is important, but is not something on which I focused in my notes, sorry) “can structure the entire field of the human sciences” and can “span it from end to end.” It is, “because they both hold apart and link together the empirical positivites of life, labour and language (on the basis of which man first detached himself historically as a form of possible knowledge) and the forms of finitude that characterize man’s mode of being (as he constituted himself when representation ceased to define the general space of knowledge (Foucault, 362).” Not only that, but “they also permit the dissociation, which is characteristic of all contemporary knowledge about man, of consciousness and representation (Foucault, 362).” And here, we get back to representation, because “representation is not simply an object for the human sciences” it is “the very field upon which the human sciences occur, and to their fullest extent (Foucault, 363).” Representation “is the general pedestal of that form of knowledge (Foucault, 363).”

And here is where Freud is important, because with psychoanalysis comes the concept of the unconscious, as such. Thus, Foucault argues, that “we shall say, therefore, that a ‘human science’ exists, not wherever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis – within the dimension proper to the unconscious – of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness of its forms and contents (Foucault, 364).” So how are we supposed to continue thinking about this trap in our thinking about ourselves thinking? Archaeologically, of course. To think of the “historicity proper to man” not as one that is inscribed in the very depths of his being, that enables him to adapt himself like any living being, and to evolve like any living being (though with the help of tools, techniques, and organization belonging to no other living being) that enables him to invent forms of production, to stabilize, prolong, or abridge the validity of economic laws by means of the consciousness he attains of them and by means of the institutions he constructs upon or around them, and that enables him to exercise upon language, with every word he speaks, a sort of constant interior pressure which makes it shift imperceptibly upon itself at any given moment in time (Foucault, 370).

But instead, to think in such a way that considers “the history of the positivities” in which “there appears another, more radical history, that of man himself – a history that now concerns man’s very being, since he now realizes that he not only ‘has history’ all around him, but is himself, in his own historicity, that by means of which a history of human life, a history of economics, and a history of languages are given their form (Foucault, 370).” It comes back to history here, because, well, because it’s Foucault, but also because,

even when they avoid all reference to history, the human sciences (and history may be included among them) never do anything but relate one cultural episode to another (that to which they apply themselves as their objects, and that in which their existence, their mode of being, their methods, and their concepts have their roots); and though they apply themselves to their own synchronology, they relate the cultural episode from which they emerged to itself (Foucault, 371).

Thus, because of the human sciences’ relationship to history, “man never appears in his positivity and that positivity is not immediately limited by the limitlessness of History (Foucault, 371).” Which is to say that, “by unveiling the unconscious as their fundamental object, the human sciences showed that there was always something still to be though in what had already been through on a manifest level; by revealing the law of time as the external boundary of the human sciences, History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that does not yet exist (Foucault, 372),” which is possibly my favorite line in the whole book.

Then we get back to literature (yay?). Literature (first with Surrealism, “then more, and more and more purely, with Kafka, Bataille, and Blanchot”) reveals a space “of unthinkable thought (Foucault, 383-84) and is produced by and productive of a “return of language (Foucault, 384).” This “return of language”

is not a sudden interruption in our culture; it is not the irruptive discovery of some long-buried evidence; it does not indicate a folding back of thought upon itself, in the movement by which it emancipates itself form all content, or narcissism occurring within a literature freeing itself at last form what it has to say in order to speak henceforth only about the fact that it is language stripped naked. It is, in fact, the strict unfolding of Western culture in accordance with the necessity it imposed upon itself at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Foucault, 384).

Thus, Foucault concludes, “since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity (Foucault, 386)?” And with still more questions on the matter, he concludes the chapter:

Ought we not admit that, since language is here once more, man will return to that serene non-existence in which he was formerly maintained by the imperious unity of Discourse? Man had been a figure occurring between two modes of language; or, rather, he was constituted only when language, having been situated within representation and, as it were, dissolved in it, freed itself from that situation at the cost of its own fragmentation: man composed his own figure in the interstices of that fragmented language. Of course, these are not affirmations; they are at most questions to which it is not possible to reply; they must be left in suspense, where they pose themselves, only with the knowledge that the possibility of posing them may well open the way to a future thought (Foucault, 386).

Conclusion

After all that, Foucault doesn’t really have a whole lot more to say in conclusion. He tells us that, “one thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge (Foucault, 386)” and then sort of goes ahead and summarizes the whole thing and offers some thoughts on where he sees it all going. I’ll quote in full:

Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things an their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, and the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises –were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical though did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. Foucault, 386-87

So how about that? Man” is just an “effect” of a change in how we order things, how we relate mots with choses and it could all change again… Pretty neat, right? Exciting times in which to… study religion.

Michel Foucault - The Order of Things - Part 1

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault.

Original Title: Les Mots et les choses [words and things]. Published in French in 1966, and in English in 1970.

I feel a little stuck trying to summarize this book. On the one hand, there is a vast amount of very specific information about some very important things. On the other hand, one could basically sum up his point in a couple of sentences, do a few of those clapping/sliding of hands together things they do in the movies when there is something dramatically dusty that needed finishing being finished, and be done with it. While typing up my notes from the book I had the same feeling I’d had while reading it, that I could have just read the second half and through it understood the whole first without having had to suffer through reading the blasted thing. I was also reminded of the fact that Foucault is freakishly brilliant, a fantastic writer, uses more semicolons than anyone else in history, and can be a total bore when he’s not being thrilling. As you’ll see in my notes on Heterologies, l’autre Michel de le examination de Theory & Method, Monsieur de Certeau, totally agrees. Anyway, Foucault wrote a big ol’ book about how everything in the world changed and that book did a pretty goddamn good job of changing everything about how people talk about the world.

So, I’m going to try to do a combo chapter-by-chapter kind of a thing as well as a sort of a bullet-pointed highlights reel/ talking points list. Hope that works.

Main Keywords/ Themes:

Order:

“at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront once another, and also that which has no existence except in the gird created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression (Foucault, xx).

Archaeology:

The archaeological level of investigation is the level of thinking in a project which is concerned with what made something possible (Foucault, 31).

Resemblance:

Resemblance is the way in which, as mentioned previously, “the space where one speaks” and “the space where one looks… fold one over the other as though they were equivalents (Foucault, 9-10).”

Episteme:

“In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice (Foucault, 168).

Secondary Keywords/ Themes:

General Grammar/ Philology

Natural History/ Biology

Wealth/ Political Economy

Preface:

Order exists in every culture and is,

at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront once another, and also that which has no existence except in the gird created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression (Foucault, xx).

In other words, order, is the relationship between things and what they are called that is so deeply imbedded it gets taken as natural, something within to be brought out, rather than that which is decided or imposed. Foucault continues by explaining that,

The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home (Foucault, xx).

These are ordering codes. While, “at the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some other (Foucault, xx).” Or, what he calls, reflections upon order itself. So, Order is both the code that governs who we interact with the world and the ways we devise of thinking about those codes.

Foucault says that his intent in The Order of Things (from here-on-out, OT) is try to analyze the “pure experience of order and of its modes of being” that occurs between ordering codes and reflections on order itself which he says exists in all cultures. His purpose is to show how this experience has developed since the sixteenth-century. As he lays out in the preface, he is, then, particularly focused on “language as it has been spoken, natural creatures as they have been perceived and grouped together, and exchanges as they have been practiced” in other words, “in what way, then, our culture has made manifest the existence of order, and how, to the modalities of that order, the exchanges owed their laws, the living being their constants, the words their sequence and their representative value” and the ways in which these “modalities of order have been recognized, posited, linked with space and time, in order to create the positive basis of knowledge as we find it employed in grammar and philology, in natural history and biology [and] in the study of wealth and political economy (Foucault, xxi).” These, what we would now call “disciplines,” grammar, philology, natural history, biology, wealth, and political economy, are where Foucault focuses his inquiry.

As he says in his preface, this is project does not belong to any history of ideas or science, it is rather,

An inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards (Foucault, xxii).

The conditions that make knowledge possible, and how those conditions, and thus knowledge, change. That is, as ever, what is of interest to Foucault in this book. His methodology once again being archaeological (more on this to come shortly), he seeks to investigate the threshold between Classical knowledge (knowledge prior to the sixteenth century) and that served to “separate us from Classical though and constitute our modernity (Foucault, xxiv).” On this constitutive threshold, as he calls it, first appears “the strange figure of knowledge called man and revealed a space proper to the human sciences.”[1]

Okay, so, I could stop here and you’d already know why people think this book is important. Obviously, it matters how and why Foucault took on this project. He’s not really getting at something terribly different than he does in his histories of institutionalized power like mental hospitals (Madness and Civilization, 1961 and Birth of the Clinic, 1963), or prison (Discipline and Punish, 1975), or sexuality (History of Sexuality, parts 1-3, 1976 -1984) but the project’s comprehensive combination of detail and expansiveness does set it apart and you can see why it set his career off to run the way that it did. The archaeological method he uses is then articulated fully in the next book he publishes after OT, appropriately titled, The Archeology of Knowledge, released in France in 1969. So, it is worth taking a minute now to make sure it’s clear what Foucault means by “archaeological” in this book.

The archaeological level of investigation is the level of thinking in a project which is concerned with what made something possible (Foucault, 31). Archaeology “can give an account of the existence” in terms of “conditions and a prioris established in time,” it can be used to write “a history of knowledge… on the basis of what was contemporaneous with it” but “not in terms of reciprocal influence (Foucault, 208).” In other words, archeology is a way of studying what happened at a time to make something possible, not a way of saying why or how that thing came to be or how it might have come to influence other things. Or, in still other word, archaeology “must examine each event in terms of its own evident arrangement (Foucault, 218).” The emphasis here ought to be on the idea that the arrangements (conditions) around (of) an event that can be considered archaeologically are only those that are evident, as in discernibly present at the time of the event.

Part 1

Chapter 1: Las Meninas

The first chapter is about a painting by Diego Velázquez from 1656 called “Las Meninas” or “The Maids of Honour” (incidentally, housed in the same Museo del Prado in Madrid as Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” with which de Certeau’s Mystic Fable was so interested – who wants to go on a field trip with me?). I won’t say much about the chapter, other than that it is Foucault’s way in to talking about the relationship between things and what they are called, and the model on which this relationship operated in Classical knowledge, resemblance. You see both what interests him about the painting and what his agenda is in using it in this passage:

And the proper name, in this particular context, is merely an artifice: it gives us a finger to point with, in other words, to pass surreptitiously form the space where one speaks to the space where on looks; in other words, to fold one over the other as though they were equivalents. But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task. It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illuminations (Foucault, 9-10).

It is clear here, that for Foucault, at stake in this investigation of how words used to be matched to things, and how that relationship changed, is a declared interest in opening up space where the relationship could shift once more.

Chapter 2: The Prose of the World

This is where we start to get into what Foucault means by resemblance and what its significance is in Classical knowledge. Resemblance is the way in which, as mentioned previously, “the space where one speaks” and “the space where one looks… fold one over the other as though they were equivalents (Foucault, 9-10).” Here, he elaborates, “The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the starts, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man (Foucault, 17),” he goes on to state what is already becoming clear, that “The main point is man: he stands in proportion to the heavens, just as he does to animals and plants, and as he does also to the earth, to metals, to stalactites or storms (Foucault, 22).” This was the kind of resemblance, man finding in the world a reflection of his needs thus served, that “up to the end of the sixteenth century… played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them (Foucault, 22).”

Since the world of resemblances can “can only be a world of signs (Foucault, 26)” one must be sure to understand what signs are and how they are read in this Classical mode. In its raw, historical sixteenth-century being, language is not an arbitrary system; it has been set down in the world and forms a part of it (Foucault, 35).” At that time, “things themselves were seen to “hide and manifest their own enigma like language” and words were seen to “offer themselves to men as things to be deciphered.” Foucault describes this relationship in more theoretical language in the following way:

Let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their meaning, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the location of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to know how and by what laws they are linked, semiology: the sixteenth century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude. To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that are alike. The grammar of beings is an exegesis of these things. And what the language they speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is that binds them together. The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance (Foucault, 29).

Or, in other, more approachable language, one could understand it this way, as when he writes of the world as it was understood in the sixteenth century,

…it was all legenda –things to be read. But the reason for this was not that they preferred the authority of men to the precision of an unprejudiced eye, but that nature, in itself, is an unbroken tissue of words and signs, of accounts and characters, of discourse and forms (Foucault, 39-40).

Nature itself was thought of differently, as something to be read, that could be read. Foucault then argues that,

from the seventeenth century, one began to ask how a sign could be linked to what it signified. A question to which the classical period was to reply by the analysis of representation; and to which modern thought was to reply by the analysis of meaning and signification. But given the fact itself, language was never to be anything more than a particular case of representation (for the Classics) or of signification (for us). The profound kinship of language with the world was thus dissolved (Foucault, 43).

Okay, so that’s resemblance. Remember this later when we get to the 17^th century and how it all comes undid.

Chapter 3: Representing

The first part of this chapter is about how Don Quixote is the

first modern work of literature because in it we see the cruel reason of identities and differences make endless sport of signs and similitudes; because in it language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature; because it marks the point where resemblance enters an age which is, from the point of view of resemblance, one of madness and imagination. Once similitude and signs are sundered from each other, two experiences can be established and two characters appear face to face (Foucault, 49).

This part is a lot of fun, but I think much more relevant to our present purposes, is the following bit of the chapter’s second part, called “Order,” which so far as I’m concerned, basically spells out the main questions guiding the book:

Generally speaking, what does it mean, no longer being able to think a certain thought? or to introduce a new thought.

Discontinuity – the fact that within the space of a few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up till then and beings to think other things in a new way – probably begins with an erosion from outside, form that space which is, for thought, on the other side, but in which it has never ceased to think from the very beginning. Ultimately, the problem that presents itself is that of the relations between thought and culture; how is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases, in this place or that, to being anew? Foucault, 50

The place of thought in culture, how it gets there, what form it takes, and how and why its forms and positions changes when they do. That’s really what Foucault is after. He lays these questions before the reader just as he begins to talk about the first major shift in Western thought that is of concern here, the one from resemblance to representation which happens through processes of comparison.

Because comparison becomes the way by which people relate things to things, and words to words, and words about things to other words about things,

the activity of the mind… will no longer consist in drawing things together, in setting out on a quest for everything that might reveal some sort of kinship, attraction or secretly shared nature within them [resemblance], but, on the contrary, in discriminating, that is, in establishing their identities, then the inevitability of the connections with all the successive degrees of series (Foucault, 55).

Of this difference in thought (“the activity of the mind”), Foucault says,

All this was of the greatest consequence to Western thought. resemblance, which had for long been the fundamental category of knowledge – both the form and the content of what we know – became dissociated in an analysis based on terms of identity and difference; moreover, whether indirectly by the intermediary or measurement, or directly and, as it were, on the same footing, comparison became a function of order; and, lastly, comparison ceased to fulfill the function of revealing how the world is ordered, since it was now accomplished according to the order laid down by thought, progressing naturally from the simple to the complex. As a result, the entire episteme of Western culture found its fundamental arrangements modified (Foucault, 54).

In an epistemic system of representation, “to know is to discriminate, history and science will become separated from one another (Foucault, 55).” In other words, “the written word ceases to be included among the signs and forms of truth… it is the task of words to translate that truth if they can; but they no longer have the right to be considered a mark of it. Language has withdrawn from the midst of beings themselves and has entered a period of transparency and neutrality (Foucault, 56).” Or, in still more clear words, “It is no longer the task of knowledge to dig out the ancient Word from the unknown places where it may be hidden; its job now is to fabricate a language, and to fabricate it well – so that, as an instrument of analysis and combination, it will really be the language of calculation (Foucault, 62-63).”

Here, Foucault turns to imagination, an says that, “without imagination, there would be no resemblance between things. The double requisite is patent. There must be, in the things represented, the insistent murmur of resemblance; there must be, in the representation, the perpetual possibility of imaginative recall (Foucault, 69).”

The point here has been to draw a picture of the two ends of the spectrum of how people thought about the world in the sixteenth century. At one of the spectrum is resemblance, I which “simple natures” (based in resemblance) are ordered according to mathesis, and at the other end is the taxonomic ordering of “complex natures” (based in representation) (Foucault, 72). “Thus, at the two extremities of the Classical episteme, we have a mathesis as the science of calculable order and a genesis as the analysis of the constitution of orders on the basis of empirical series (Foucault, 73).” Furthermore, “it is patent that these three notions – mathesis, taxinomia, genesis – designate not so much separate domains as a solid grid of kinships that defines the general configuration of knowledge in the Classical age (Foucault, 74).”

Chapter 4: Speaking

Chapter four picks up where three left off, but clearer:

From an extreme point of view, one might say that language in the Classical era does not exist. But that it functions: its whole existence is located in its representative role, is limited precisely to that role and finally exhausts it. Language has no other locus, no other value, than in representation; in the hollow it has been able to form. …

Henceforth, the primary Text is effaced, and with it, the entire, inexhaustible foundation of the words whose mute being was inscribed in things; all that remains is representation, unfolding in the verbal signs that manifest it, and hence becoming discourse (Foucault, 79).

Importantly, here Foucault also clarifies why language, of all sign systems, is of such primary importance:

What distinguishes language from all other signs and enables it to play a decisive role in representation is, therefore, not so much that it is individual or collective, natural or arbitrary, but that it analyses representation according to a necessarily successive order; the sounds, in fact, can be articulated only one by one; language cannot represent thought, instantly, in its totality; it is bound to arrange it, part by part, in a linear order (Foucault, 82).

Language orders by way of general grammar, which you may remember, was one of the main modalities of knowledge listed in the preface. According to Foucault, “General grammar is the study of verbal order in its relation to the simultaneity that it is its task to represent. Its proper object is therefore neither thought nor any individual language, but discourse, understood as a sequence of verbal signs (Foucault, 83).”

This chapter’s overall intention was, “to determine in what conditions language could become the object of a period’s knowledge, and between what limits this epistemological domain developed. Not to calculate the common denominator of men’s opinions, but to define what made it possible for opinions about language – whatever the opinions may have been – to exist at all (Foucault, 119).” Again, the conditions that made possible this thinking. Thus, Foucault concludes that,

If language exists, it is because below the level of identities and differences there is the foundation provided by continuities, resemblances, repetitions, and natural criss-crossings. Resemblance, excluded from knowledge since the early seventeenth century, still constitutes the outer edge of language: the ring surrounding the domain of that which can be analysed, reduced to order, and known. Discourse dissipates the murmur, but without it, it could not speak (Foucault, 120).

In other words, Classical knowledge was thought in different ways, but it was fully rooted in the order of resemblances.

Chapter 5: Classifying

This chapter gives us one of the other really big points of the book which is that,

Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. Foucault, 127-28

Natural History, another of the modalities listed at the beginning, “is nothing more than the nomination of the visible (Foucault, 132)” which “finds its locus in the gap that is now opened up between things and words (Foucault, 130).” History had to become Natural (Foucault, 128) and thus, “What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre and that of the catalogue was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse. A new way of making history (Foucault, 131).” More specifically, classification, which Foucault says is the “constituent problem of natural history… took up its position historically, and in a necessary fashion, between a theory of the mark and a theory of the organism (Foucault, 145).

According to Foucault, natural history produces a “discourse of nature” which is not “ a question of a more general rationality imposing identical forms upon grammatical thinking and upon taxinomia. Rather, it concerns a fundamental arrangement of knowledge, which orders the knowledge of beings so as to make it possible to represent them in a system of name (Foucault, 157).” He explains that,

Things and words are very strictly interwoven: nature is posited only through the grid of denominations, and – though without such names it would remain mute and invisible – it glimmers far off beyond them, continuously present on the far side of this grid, which nevertheless presents it to our knowledge and renders it visible only when wholly spanned by language (Foucault, 160).

Thus, he concludes importantly, that,

We must therefore not connect natural history, as it was manifested during the Classical period, with a philosophy of life, albeit an obscure and still faltering one. In reality, it is interwoven with a theory of words. Natural history is situated both before and after language; it decomposes the language of everyday life, but in order to recompose it and discover what has made it possible through the blind resemblances of imagination; it criticizes language, but in order to reveal its foundation. If natural history reworks language and attempts to perfect it, this is because it also delves down into the origin of language. Foucault, 161

Okay, so, you see how he’s building this whole “relationship between mots and choses, yes? Good, okay, onward! Chapter 6 is going to tell us about the last Classical term in those pairs of modalities (grammar/ philology, natural history/ biology, wealth/ political economy) and then we’ll get on to the second part of the book which deals with how we get to those second terms in the pairings.

Chapter 6: Exchanging

Chapter six is about the Classical concept of wealth, which, like general grammar and natural history, is thought in resemblance and representation. Or, in Foucault’s words,

Whatever its economic determinations and consequences, mercantilism, when questioned at the level of the episteme, appears as the slow, long effort to bring reflection upon prices and money into alignment with the analysis of representations. It was responsible for the emergence of a domain of ‘wealth’ connected to that which, at about the same time, was opened up to natural history, and likewise to that which unfolded before general grammar (Foucault, 180).

Here the mode of representational resemblance is that of exchange, “In other words, in order that one thing can represent another in an exchange, they must both exist as bearers of value; and yet value exists only within the representation (actual or possible), that is, within the exchange or the exchangeability (Foucault, 190).”

We start to see how all of this connects when Foucault explains that,

With language, the system of signs is passively accepted in its imperfection, and only an art can rectify it: the theory of language is immediately prescriptive. Natural history establishes itself a system of signs for denoting beings, and that is why it is a theory. Wealth is a system of signs that are created, multiplied, and modified by men; the theory of wealth is linked throughout to politics (Foucault, 205).

Thus,

Philology, biology, and political economy were established, not in the places formerly occupied by general grammar, natural history and the analysis of wealth, but in an area where those forms of knowledge did not exist, in the space they left blank, in the deep gaps that separated their broad theoretical segments and that were filled with the murmur of the ontological continuum. The object of knowledge in the nineteenth century is formed in the very place where the Classical plenitude of being has fallen silent. Foucault, 207

And, “Structuralism is not a new method; it is the awakened and troubled consciousness of modern thought” which was produced by “the essential problem of Classical thought” which,

lay in the relation between name and order: how to discover a nomenclature that would be a taxonomy, or again, how to establish a system of signs that would be transparent to the continuity of being. What modern though is to throw fundamentally into question is the relation of meaning with the form of truth and the form of being: in the firmament of our reflection there reigns a discourse – a perhaps inaccessible discourse – which would at the same time be an ontology and a semantics.

Thus, Foucault concludes the first part of the book by bringing everything together in the following explanation:

The whole Classical system of order, the whole of that great taxinomia that makes it possible to know things by means of the system of their identities, is unfolded within the space that is opened up inside representation when representation represents itself, that area where being and the Same reside. Language is simply the representation of words; nature is simply the representation of beings; need is simply the representation of needs. The end of Classical though – and of the episteme that made general grammar, natural history, and the science of wealth possible – will coincide with the decline of representation, or rather with the emancipation of language, of the living being, and of need, with regard to representation. Foucault, 209

From here, we go back to literature. First Borges (did I mention that, that it all starts with Borges? Probably not. You just assume that, right? Important theory book, the first pages must be about Borges. Okay, good), then Cervantes, now the Marquis de Sade. Are things getting hotter in here, or is it just the Enlightenment finally arriving half way through the book? Right, sorry, anyway, “Sade’s characters correspond to him at the other end of the Classical age, at the moment of its decline. It is no longer the ironic triumph of representation over resemblance; it is the obscure and repeated violence of desire beating at the limits of representation (Foucault, 210). Hawt.

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[1] Gil Anidjar has done some thinking recently on “the strange figure of knowledge called man” that appears in OT, if not also, as it does according to Foucault, in the sixteenth century. Anidjar’s most recent (Summer 2011) Critical Inquiry piece is a good place to look if you want to know what he thinks of this idea, and of the book in general. If by some chance that is a perspective that interests you, the article, called The Meaning of Life, can be found here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660988.

Allan Megill - Prophets of Extremity

INTRODUCTION

All the writers examined here share an aestheticism, not a concern with aesthetics, but a desire to expand the aesthetic to embrace the whole of reality. Foucault's discourse, Heidegger's language, these stand as successors to the work of art (3). Like the Romantics, these authors saw themselves as living in a time of change. But unlike the Romantics, they saw no promise of return, only a circuitous journey, a crisis without resolution, a dialectic without reintegration. All followed in the footsteps of Kant's third critique, which sought to bring together science (the realm of unfree objects) and morality (the realm of free subjects). All desire to circumvent the subject/object distinction, using art as a mediator. They all follow Schiller in theorizing modern alienation, and Schelling in putting art above philosophy. They all also desire to break down the barriers between philosophy and literature. Megill would have liked to have included Gadamer in this bunch because he thinks of the work of art as the model for all experience, but Gadamer rejects the notion of a radical crisis.

PART I: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AS AESTHETICIST

1. Nietzsche and the Aesthetic

Against the "naturalist" interpretation of Nietzsche, Megill argues for an aestheticist view, which sees Nietzsche as questioning the very notion of "natural." Nietzsche gives art an ontogenetic, or world-making, significance (31). He thinks of the "natural" as a human creation, and that nothing is "behind" this web of illusion. As he says, "It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified."

Nietzsche condemns the present world as null but rejects the alternative of searching for another, saying that there is "no true world," only perspectival appearance. Nietzsche desires a return to myth, and he sees in art the method. While the Romantics thought that art could penetrate to the truth of things, Nietzsche believed art is a vehicle of illusion. He sees immediacy as unattainable but still desires it. He delights in the play of language for its own sake.

The early Nietzsche opposes Apollonian formalism and Dionysian formlessness. Men cannot bear the full burden of reality, so the Apollonian veil shields us from its harshness, while the Dionysian tears aside the veil, opening the way to the mysterious primordial unity.

In his later writings, Nietzsche comes to oppose Schopenhauer's will and to desire a justification of life, an affirmation of reality. In the Gay Science he distinguishes between two kinds of art, that done suffering from an impoverishment of life and that done suffering from the over-fullness of life. Only the latter is truly Dionysian. Kaufmann believes that the two figures of Apollo and Dionysus become congealed in Dionysus in the later Nieztsche, but Megill argues that the Dionysian itself undergoes a change. It becomes less an intoxicated reality and more a reality that can be turned into art. With this new conception of Dionysian realism, Apollonian illusionism goes by the wayside.

Nietzsche shares Kant's view that the aesthetic offers an alternative to the mediating and complexifying influence of concepts (48). But while Kant thinks these concepts constitute our world, Nietzsche thinks they dissimulate it. The human intellect claims to give us a true knowledge of the wold when in fact it does not. The world, in Nieztsche's view, is made up of absolutely individualized fragments: no thing, no occurrence, is exactly the same as any other thing or occurrence. We can nonetheless grant concepts an aesthetic, metaphoric status. Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which have become worn out and have lost their sensual power. A free play of intellect delights in play for its own sake, in bringing forward "forbidden metaphors" and "unheard-of combinations of concepts." In Kant, the process of constructing reality is the same for all humankind, but in Nietzsche, the process is highly individual and arbitrary. Concepts order reality for Kant, they dissimulate it for Nietzsche.

The later Nietzsche equates theoretical learning with Apollonianism, which is irremediably hostile to art, which means it is also hostile to culture. Creativity comes from the instincts, the passions, the unconscious - from the dark, hidden recesses of the human spirit, not from theory. The immediacy of unconscious creativity made the Greeks great, and Socrates ruined everything for them by making consciousness creative. After him follows a total inversion of Greek culture. He was the founder of an entirely new system of culture which believed in the profound illusion that thought can penetrate the deepest abysses of being (56). But at its limit, Socratic questioning turns back into and pronounces the need for art.

Logic is the attempt to comprehend the actual world by means of a schema of being posited by ourselves. It is one of man's many arts. But it becomes a problem when rigidified, when philosophers try to mummify our experience in concepts instead of accepting the evidence of the senses, that all is in constant flux. The eternal return is the myth that expresses this flux, but it remains an intuition, never fully developed in Nietzsche's work. He justifies his lack of definition by saying that it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things.'" N's remedy for all things is: become an artist. Art is the 'cult of the untrue' that makes bearable for us the general untruth and mendaciousness of the world (64).

2. Nietzsche and Myth

In the positivistic middle period, Nietzsche represents artists as intellectual lightweights. He here thinks of art in a kind of Hegelian way, as a stage on the way to something greater: science. But this is not to say he was a positivist, for he approached science in anticonceptualist terms. Thus, even in his positivistic period, he views science in terms of art, but remains uncertain about its mythical potential.

Myth begins by creating culture, but then it is hardened into religion, where the feeling for myth perishes. The resurgence of myth in Greek culture died with Socrates and the new Alexandrian culture of the theoretical man which sought to dissolve myth (73). We live today in a culture within which the binding force of myth has been loosed. We have made mythic consciousness all but impossible by examining the past in a critical and scientific spirit. The destruction of myth has robbed our culture of any fixed and sacred primordial site.

The problem, then, is to recover myth and to restore the lost vitality of culture. The process by which myth was lost is not to be followed by the reverse process, the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our modern world. One is reminded of Schelling’s Ages of the World, which looked forward to a golden age when truth becomes fable and fable truth. From logos to mythos we go from a debilitating skepticism and ironism to a renewed ground of certainty.

The myth of the future is the doctrine of eternal return, which is an attack on the ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness (82). Language is the prime expression of the will to power operative in the eternal return. Nietzsche intended eternal return as a denial of both the Christian myth of redemption and the 19th century bourgeois myth of progress. Like many of Foucault and Derrida’s concepts, it is easier to say what eternal return is not than what it is.

The process of interpretation is an infinite unfolding in which a ground is never reached because a ground does not exist. Foucault claimed that Nietzsche contributed a great deal to the liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos and the related concept of truth (85). Nietzsche claims that it is a mistake to the believe that if all perspectives on the world were deducted, a world would still remain over. Facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretation. Interpretation is a total imposition of meaning and reality upon the world.

Though Kant and Nietzsche share many of the same concerns, Kant saw himself as a critic, Nietzsche as an artist and mythmaker. Kant views the categories as world-constitutive, Nietzsche as Verstellung, dissimulation. Nietzsche delighted in interpretation, suggesting that there is a positive enjoyment and nobility in the attempt to throw a new interpretation over the world. What matters for Nietzsche is not the objective “correctness” of interpretation but rather the courage and daring of the interpreter and his ability to pursue his insights at length and in a single direction (91). Nietzsche avers that good interpretation does not stick too close to consciousness, which is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text. The true thinker is one who escapes an academic gravity and seriousness, who is able to remain airborne, spinning out interpretations of a reality that lies irremediably beyond human ken.

Nietzsche does not believe that language distorts reality but that it is reality – with nothing outside of language to be distorted. Thought is brought back towards language itself, toward its unique and difficult beginning. N’s conception of language as active, independent being, speaking what is allegedly its own truth, provides the framework within which we are able to grasp the role that eternal return plays in his thought.

N’s true predecessor as a mythmaker is Jesus, who is a symbolist par excellence. Nietzsche could not create a myth on his own, however, and only appealed to a hoped-for revival of myth.

PART II: MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND THE IDEALISM OF NOSTALGIA

3. Heidegger and Crisis

In his book about Nietzsche, Heidegger tells us that thinking only begins when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought. Heidegger opposes all manifestations of the scientization of man. He shared the prewar belief that all continuity had been lost and that in consequence new and unexpected possibilities had, for good or ill, been opened up. Like Simmel, he thought of modern man as essentially alienated, characterized by a contradiction between a need for personal spontaneity and an objective, oppressive culture. World War I gave to the crisis notion a much greater currency and breadth. Integrally connected with this sense of crisis was the notion of apocalypitc change and regeneration. While Foucault would embrace the imaginative side of the Nietzschean heritage, Heidegger embraced the nostalgic side. He perpetually wants to go back, to return, to go home again.

In Being and Time, Heidegger says that the banal and superficial life that we lead when, in the broadest sense, we are out meeting the public conceals from us the knowledge that we are alienated beings and makes us feel at home in the world. Fallenness and anxiety here are manifested at all times for Dasein. Through the Destruktion of the history of ontology, Heidegger wants us to return to the question of being. At present we are so concerned with knowing about things that we risk not knowing anything at all. Our conscience calls us back to a (mythologized) origin, but this calling back is also a calling forth. As Derrida notes, Heidegger’s discourse in B&T is dominated by a metaphorics of proximity, of simple immediate presence, neighboring, sheltering, guarding, listening, etc. Heidegger’s nostalgia for an immediate presence can be read as a longing for the immediate Dionysian presence of the origin, from which all division, all separation, all difference is excluded.

Though most of the analysis in B&T is abstract, Heidegger does occasionally get into the particulars of modern life, for instance, when he writes: “In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next.” Or when he is concerned with “the anonymous and depersonalized subject of the modern industrial city.” After B&T, Nietzsche became a bigger deal for him. He says in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” that ours is the age in which metaphysics is completed or the age in which nihilism comes to the fore (nihilism = the forgetting of being for beings). We are separated from being, from our beginnings, by both the Christian-theological world interpretation and the mathematical-technological thinking of the modern age (132). Heidegger lauds the thoughtfulness and sense of remembrance in peasant and thinks that philosophical work belongs in their midst. His idealization of the Volk is nostalgic in bearing.

In the political writings of the 30’s, Heidegger still thinks there is something to be done, but with his shift toward technology, his thinking becomes less a willing and more a waiting. In the Age of the World Picture, Heidegger accuses Descartes of unjustly equating the hypokeimenon/subiectum (foundation of beings) with man, which prevented beings from simply being. Henceforth being was violently seized upon by the Cartesian cogito, which grasped the world as a picture or model (Bild) standing apart from and against the human subject. This representation is not a self-unconcealment but a laying hold, an assault of man upon beings (139). So too is modern technology a seizing, a challenging-forth, as opposed to Greek techne, which still allowed beings to be. The nihilistic impulse of Western culture finds its culmination in technology, which turn everything into standing-reserve.

4. Heidegger’s Aestheticism

By the early 30’s, Heidegger had become a prophet of extremity. His later writings center around technology and art, the destroying and the saving powers. For the Greeks, techne was a poetic or revealing art, and Heidegger imagines a return to this openness. The later Heidegger is a radically ideal utopian because he feels an absolute revulsion against the present. The crisis of the modern age demands a turning, but the turning itself lies beyond our grasp, and we can only wait.

Heidegger and Hegel share many concerns, and Heidegger takes from him the idea of the end or fulfillment of history. But while Hegel sees what comes earlier as poorer in determination, Heidegger mythologizes the beginning, the Greeks.

The later Heidegger views language as a work of art and as an ontogenesis. He repudiates Sartre’s view that man alone creates, saying instead that what principally exists is being and that man stands out only in the truth of this being. Like Marx, Heidegger posited the estrangement of man but did not look to change the social order. The problem of freedom for Heidegger was rather a personal one, one of thinking. Such thinking is a recollection of being, and nothing else. It has no result. It is to think the world as a poem of its own making. This also means undermining the subject/object division, to question the being of the subject rather than simply assuming it as Kant did. Truth can no longer be conceived as a correspondence between knowing subject and known object but must rather be seen as an “uncoveredness” or “unhiddenness” of the things themselves.

In our “normal,” propositional-conceptual-representation thinking, we project a grid onto the world, onto “things.” But the thing resists this conceptualization, it “evades thought most stubbornly.” Art presents us the thing as thing. Heidegger’s ontological view (as opposed to the aesthetic view) of art holds that art is not mere play (as in Kant) but is rather a revelation of truth and hence of being (159). Hegel held the same view but nonetheless put philosophy above art. Heidegger attacks the “subjectivist” view of art, saying things like, it is not van Gogh who speaks through the painting but the painting itself that speaks. Art simply is, and questions of subjectivity and objectivity are irrelevant. Artwork speaks in a nonsubjective, being-attuned voice. Blanchot and Derrida follow Heidegger but reject truth in art.

In 1959, with On the Way to Language, Heidegger turns from the work of art to language. Language, like art, sets up a world; we must let this enigmatic center that resists clarification speak for itself. Language is the original essence of the truth as there. In language, we find a dwelling, the means for overcoming our crisis. There is no difference between language and being/reality.

Among the poets who Heidegger praises, Holderlin is at the top. With Holderlin, the Hegelian crisis acquires a more markedly nostalgic basis. Holderlin, like Heidegger, sought the rediscovery of the authentic Greek spirit (173).

For Heidegger, thinking is laying inconspicuous furrows in language. The philosopher is a creator who initiates profound transformations by devious paths (reminiscent of Nietzsche). Today we are dominated by a calculative, technological thinking. Heidegger recommends Gelassenheit, a releasement towards things, to combat the uprootedness that our excessive seizure of things has caused us. In the end, then, Heidegger recommends quietism, a reality left as it is.

PART III: MICHEL FOUCAULT AND THE ACTIVISM OF DISCOURSE

5. Foucault and Structuralism

Foucault assumes a crisis similar to Nietzsche and Heidegger. He persistently misuses and misinterprets texts, but this is because he wants them to go out into the world and, by the power of their rhetoric, change it. He wants his works to self-destruct after use, like fireworks. He recognizes his predecessor as Nietzsche, wherein he sees the promise of a postanthropological future. Foucault’s activism is in marked contrast to Heidegger’s quietism. Heidegger embraces the nostalgic side of Nietzsche, Foucault the imaginative side.

Foucault’s influences outside of philosophy include Artaud and Bataille, who intensified Kojeve’s notion of the violence of the dialectic to shake up the dialectic. Artaud and Bataille both expressed an “excessive” character similar to Foucault. He was also influenced by the structuralisms which attempt to move the center of intellectual concern away from the speaking subject and toward the structure of the language being spoken.

In his first works, the History of Madness and the Birth of the Clinic, Foucault is still concerned with uncovering an “experience,” though this notion of experience drops out of the picture in the Order of Things and the Archaeology of Knowledge, replaced by a concern with “language” or “discourse” (191). In these two later works, Foucault is under the “illusion of an autonomous discourse,” like the aestheticist Nietzsche and the later Heidegger.

Foucault sees the history of the west as a conflict between Same and Other; when an Other is absent, it must be invented, as demonstrated in the History of Madness, where a society deprived of lepers turn toward the insane to enclose. And in the Birth of the Clinic, which places bodily illness under the same gaze. And in Discipline and Punish, where criminals are put under observation in the same way as the insane. In all, Foucault is concerned with a mounting series of attacks on the existing order of things. The presence of crisis is indicated by his well-known penchant for seeing history as broken by a series of ruptures or discontinuities. Foucault identifies with no particular subjugated knowledge but with subjugated knowledge as such. All knowledge is connected to power, and since there is no such thing as objective knowledge, one must be active in shaping it.

Megill portrays Foucault as a utopian idealist in rejecting the present in all its forms. But utopia can never be reached, and thus all one can do is constantly contest the existing order, involve oneself in a permanent revolution.

In his early “phenomenological” works, Foucault contends that the concept of mental illness has wiped out our contact with this experience, and thus he wants to go back and let madness speak for itself, before it was captured by knowledge. This is not unlike the phenomenologist’s desire to get back to the “thing itself.” In his next “structuralist” stage, being the Order of Things and the Archaeology of Knowledge, experience disappears; he now proposes to substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse (203). The object, a something independent of the subject, is destroyed, and the destruction of the object is accompanied by the destruction of the subject as well.

Foucault might be characterized as a structuralist inasmuch as 1) he is concerned with language, 2) he attacks subjectivism and anthropologism, 3) he focuses on discontinuity rather than diachrony, 4) he speaks in binary oppositions (Same v. Other), 5) and he talks about the concept of the sign. Megill rejects these attributions one by one. First, Foucault’s concern with language has more to do with Mallarmé than Saussure, and his rejection of subjectivism more to do with Nietzsche and Heidegger. His focus on discontinuity has nothing to do with the synchronic/diachronic division, and his attraction to binary oppositions was rather temporary and unimportant. Finally, there is his concern with the sign. The Order of Things is no doubt concerned with language, but less language as a system of signs and more language as an ontogenetic work of art. He argues that representation is characteristic of the classical episteme in the way signification is of the modern episteme. Representation involves a doubling, a signifier and a signified. Signification involves only signifiers in a play of difference. Because for Foucault there is no transcendental signified today, there can be no sign, and thus the fifth connection to structuralism is refuted.

Megill continues with more debate on whether or not Foucault is a structuralist. He then talks about Derrida’s view of structuralism, which is of course that it is intimately tied up with logocentrism, the metaphoric of light and vision, the persistent Apollonianism of Western philosophy, etc. Foucault is part of this tradition too, portraying for us a lucent, Apollonian world, says Derrida.

6. Beyond Structuralism

In Foucault, as in in Nietzsche, art is a matter not of truth but of lie. Foucault radically denies the notion of return as involving the recovery of something that is simply there, waiting for us to pick it up again. The Archaeology of Knowledge displays this disappearance of any such nostalgic and lyrical suggestion. In it, both “work of art” and “language” are replaced by “discourse.” Foucault holds up Nietzsche, Marx and Freud as having discovered that there is no solid and objective truth that can serve as a point of termination. In this middle period, we see Foucault turning away from discourse conceived as a system of signs pointing outward and toward a discourse that would systematically form the objects of which it speaks. Yet his commitment to the principle of exteriority, which states the lack of any depth or ultimate referrent, remains inconsistent, for he continues to conceive of his project in terms of the visual and spatial metaphoric evoked in Chapter 5. See the Order of Things, where he talks about an “order that manifests itself in depth” and “this order, taken as a firm foundation.” But by the Archaeology of Knowledge, his rejection of images of depth is unequivocal. “We do not seek below what is manifest the half silent murmur of another discourse.”

The Archaeology of Knowledge is the most consistently misread of all Foucault’s works. One should know first that it is a parodic repetition of Descartes’ Discourse on Method. Its basic thesis, insofar as it can be said to have one, is that the uncovering of the archive - the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events - can be carried out only by an analysis that is concerned neither with the internal play of signifiers (literary critics) nor with the external reference of signifieds (historiography). But what the uncovering of the archive is is never made clear. The work is an attack on science, on the whole idea of an objective knowing. He writes that in “archaeological analysis,” “one is not seeking to pass from the text to thought, from talk to silence, from the exterior to the interior, form spatial dispersion to the pure recollection of the moment, from superficiality to profound unity. One remains within the dimension of discourse.”

The Archaeology of Knowledge is still, however, caught up within the spatial metaphoric. In the writings that come after it, Foucault abandons the lingering theoreticism of that work. This shift toward a notion of discourse as praxis can be linked to the events of 1968. After 1970, Foucault characterizes his work not as archaeology but as genealogy, at which point he also acknowledges the fictional character of his historical writings. He says in an interview that “I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. It seems to me that it is possible to make fiction work inside of truth, to induce truthful effects with a fictional discourse.” Foucault accepts, in his later writings, Nietzsche’s notion of history as something that propagates, or at any rate ought to propagate, myths that will be useful in the present. If Heidegger’s project may be titled Waiting for Godot, Foucault’s may be called Running after Godot - it being understood that Godot will not allow himself to be caught, if he exists at all.

Whereas in the Archaeology of Knowledge, discourse was a kind of plane surface that one seeks to order or disorder, it is now seen, in his later work, as that for which, that by which one struggles, the power that one seeks to seize. Pre-1969, he dealth almost exclusively with linguistic practices; after 1969, he deals with social practices that formed by institutions and discourse.

In the Will to Knowledge, Foucault denies the “repression hypothesis,” claiming that sexuality has not been repressed in the modern world but has rather proliferated. He portrays discourse here as something that goes out to battle. He is viewing the world as if it were discourse. In the reigning discourse, homosexuality is subjected to exclusion, and Foucault wants to show that absolutely arbitrary character of that exclusion. To be sure, when the present order is overturned and the subversive discourse becomes the reigning one, it, too, will be subject to discursive attack. Foucault articulates an instrument of systematic suspicion toward any order whatsoever.

Power in the later Foucault “tends to occupy the ‘anonymous’ place which classical treatises in metaphysics reserved for substance” (240). One can only understand Foucault’s conception of power when we understand his turn to Nietzsche. He conceives power not as a negative but a positive phenomenon: “Power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.” Discipline and Punish testifies to this new conception of power, for its central contention is that the social role of the prison was not to repress delinquency but to create it. By manufacturing a threat to social stability, the prison provided a rationale for the construction of the vast apparatus of control and discipline that now dominates bourgeois society. We all are caught within disciplinary systems - micro-pouvoirs. These systems exist throughout bourgeois society and control our behavior without our knowing it. This disciplinary power is exercised through its invisibility, yet at the same time, it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. Foucault engages in a reversal of Rousseau, viewing as insidious and threatening what he saw as desirable. Foucault said in an interview that “what I am trying to do is grasp the implicit systems which determine our most familiar behavior without our knowing it. Against the will to knowledge that has dominated our perception, he deploys a will to creative opinion. He engages in a legitimate rhetorical tactic, telling us lies about the past in order to open our eyes to the reality of the present. But the present reality is also a fiction. The question remains, however, whether the “dream of Apocalypse” that Foucault puts before us is really one we want to make our own.

Marx and Foucault both see the connection between knowledge and power, but Marx is committed to a notion of objective science, which grounds his revolution. Without a similar ground, Foucault’s revolution is against everything. Again, why should we opt for Foucault?

Foucault believed that thought is not theoretically, that it acts. This notion of the ontogenetic function of discourse has a strategic potential: it opens up a space within which the bearer of discourse can act to change the world. In the Will to Knowledge and elsewhere, Foucault articulates an antinaturalism, claiming that there is nothing natural about the current order and that it can and ought to be changed. There is no “natural,” just successive regimes of power. The same goes for Foucault’s own writings: there is no one Foucault, just a succession of positions.

PART IV: ON THE MEANING OF JACQUES DERRIDA

7. The Deconstruction of Crisis

To interpret Derrida is already an act of violence because his writings are literally non-sensical. As opposed to Foucault, with Derrida one finds an anti-ocular, antispatial stance so radical that all positions seem to be wiped away as soon as they become visible. Derrida’s irony is so radical that he rejects the ideal, utopian worlds of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant founded the philosophy of art; Derrida seeks to undermine this philosophy by calling into question the distinction between art and reality. This attack on aestheticism is coupled with one on the root of nihilism: historicism (being any attribution of directionality to history). This also undermines crisis thought. Megill chooses to see Derrida’s project as twofold: deconstruction of crisis (historicism) and deconstruction of art. Derrida’s comical catharsis is postethical, aesthetic laughter.

Derrida shares much with the other prophets of extremity, but undermines their projects in important ways. Against Foucault’s apocalyptic vision of history, Derrida makes no ringing claims to have detected earthquakes in the offing or the imminent wiping out of man. Derrida’s real interest seems to be in opening us up to the hermeneutical possibilities of the written word (271). His project is explicitly anti-Hegelian. He refers ‘to Hegel, who is always right as soon as one opens one’s mouth in order to articulate meaning.’ All Derrida’s texts are prefatory, meaning they do not point toward a rational end but are rather dogged and aimless crisscrossing of territory.

One of Derrida’s favorite tools is the “rule of four,” also known as dissemination. If the threefold dialectic is a process of reproduction, the fourfold dissemination is a falling of seed on barren ground. The possibility of a fourth moment of the dialectic destroys the whole dialectical machine. Position, negation, negation of the negation, deconstruction (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida).

As opposed to Foucault, who gave up the formal study of philosophy, Derrida remained within philosophy. Whereas Foucault’s concern with alterity was with different oppressed groups (the sick, the insane, criminals, sexual deviants), Derrida’s was with alterity as such.

Derrida devotes a great deal of time to literature, specifically Artaud, Bataille, Sollers and above all Mallarme. Like Blanchot, he rejects Heidegger’s idea of truth in art; art, in Blanchot’s view, hides itself from signification, designating that region where nothing lives. Blanchot makes a distinction, following Mallarme, between parole brute - language as it is concerned with the reality of things - and parole essentielle - language which distances us from things, making them disappear. Parole essentielle is the language of poetry.

Derrida’s primary “thesis” is that over the course of Western history writing has been abased in favor of speech. Speech stands for immediacy, writing for secondariness. Writing, the sensible inscription, has always been considered by Western tradition as the body and matter external to the spirit, to breath, to speech, and to the logos. Writing is presented as the dissimulation of the natural, primary and immediate presence of sense to the soul within the logos. From this follow Derrida’ attack on Hegel’s “here and now” and Husserl’s “living present.”

Adopting Rorty’s “hermeneutical stance,” Derrida tells us that there is nothing outside of the text, that interpretation is an endless play that connects with no extra-interpretive referent. Literature is at once reassured and threatened by the fact of depending only on itself, standing in the air, all alone, separated from being. “Traditional” criticism always seeks a theme that is outside the text. Derrida hopes that “language is beginning to let itself be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of writing. Yet Derrida’s apocalypticism is tempered by humor, not at all like Foucault’s.

Derrida undermines crisis philosophy by revealing that it is based on a certain view of history that is linear or directional. 19th c. historicism gave way to 20th c. crisis commitment. The convincing power of the crisis notion depends on one’s prior belief in the linear or directional character of history, yet the whole point of the crisis notion is to undermine any such belief.

8. The Deconstruction of Art

The other prophets of extremity flirt with their aesthetic strands, but Derrida’s is so prominent that we might be inclined to confine ourselves to a reflection on art and aesthetics alone. Derrida can be seen as providing the intellectual or philosophical complement to such aesthetic developments as Duchamp’s urinal/foundation and Christo’s monumental sculptures.

The two traditions Derrida deals with are philosophy and Judaism, which he conceives as both an historical reality and a symbol of marginality. Megill links Derrida’s deconstruction of art to four names: 1) Levinas and the question of the other, 2) Jabes and the question of writing, 3) Freud and the question of interpretation, and 4) Kant and the question of art.

With Levinas, Derrida calls into question Husserl’s unswerving allegiance to the visual metaphors of theory and intuition. He also argues against Heidegger that his distinction between Being and beings, and the alleged priority of the former to the latter, is a manifestation of the most vicious of all tyrannies, that of the same over the other. This compromises the alterity of the other, enclosing it within an other-denying totality. The distinguishing feature of Western civilization has been the advance of reason; this project is utterly dependent for its persistence on the preservation of precisely that interiority which the advance of reason aims to destroy. To Western philosophy Levinas opposed eschatology, which institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history. Derrida focuses on Levinas’ conflict between an eschatological Judaism and a totalizing Greek philosophy. Against Levinas he sees in the Greek tradition an alterity that is explcitly denied. He also maintains that the “themes of nonpresence” work over phenomenology unceasingly. In brief, he argues that Western philosophy is always already fissured by alterity, and also that Hebraism is corrupted by the totalitarian violence that it seeks to evade. Whereas Levinas presents himself as an apologist for a pristine Judaism, Derrida can do nothing more than point out the impossibility of such a Judaism. Derrida thus attempts to erase the distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism.

The name of the secondariness that follows from the death of God is writing. Derrida stands as a successor to the Kabbalah, for where the Kabbalists sought, through the manipulation of words and letters, to find a path back through the ten Sefirot to God, Derrida takes the manipulation of words and letters as something close to an end in itself. While Nietzsche deals with nihilism, Heidegger with technology and Foucault with humanism, Derrida confronts the holocaust. Derrida is attracted to Jabes because he connects Judaism and writing. Viewed in a longer historical perspective, the labyrinthine text that is Derrida’s can be seen as having its precursor in the labyrinthine wanderings of the Jew. The encyclopedic, that is, circular Book gives way to the post-Nietzschean figure of the ellipse - the ellipse of writing that lacks the center of a meaning. Two figures are important for Derrida: the poet and the rabbi.

Since Freud saw himself as a man of science, he is distant from the prophets of extremity and their antiscientism. Lorin Anderson argues that Freud was a secret disciple of Nietzsche. But Freud is better seen is one of the prime mythopoeic thinkers of our age. The modernist Freud offers a way of living. The Freudian analytic attidue gives us the detachment needed to survive the modern, crisis-ridden civilization. Post-moderns reject this, praising him rather for his skills as an interpreter. Freud the modernist as epistemologist, Freud the post-modernist as hermeneut, playing with text. An investment in “reality” supposedly separates Freud from the prophets of extremity, but his reality is highly elusive. It is not what happened that is important but what the fantasies about what happened were. Freud had the courage and imagination to build, on a foundation terrifying in its exiguousness, an immense interpretive edifice. Freud’s hostily to art marks him off from other aestheticist thinkers? Derrida stresses the fictive aspect of psychoanalysis. And Freud’s dream interpretation bears a striking resemblance to Derrida’s wordplay. Glas is an intellectual fantasy constructed from the detritus of 2500 years of western culture just as the dream work is constructed from the detritus of the day.

All the prophets of extremity desire a “mythic moment” except for Derrida, who is too ironic to articulate myth. He argues that art is as much under the sway of the Greek logos as philosophy is. That central to Derrida’s project is an importing into the realm of ideas what was already present in practice in the realm of art. Like postmodernists he substitutes for the modernist faith in depth and penetration an adherence to surfaces. One has in Derrida the sense of an ending, of both Hegelianism and Nietzscheanism.

CONCLUSION

Modern Western intellectual history has up to now been mainly defined by the thought of the Enlightenment. The prophets of extremity try to deal with the crisis of the Enlightenment with aestheticism, which Megill defines as “an attempt to bring back into thought and into our lives that form of edification, that reawakening of ekstasis, which in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment view has been largely confined to the realm of art.” Aestheticism can lead to both activity (Foucault) and passivity (Heidegger). Megill expresses worry about Foucault’s confusion of discourse and world. He concludes by saying we ought to approach this kind of aestheticism with a sympathetic skepticism. The intent of the prophets of extremity was to break us out of our routine, but once they accomplish this, one must ask, “Now what?” They are therapeutic thinkers, attacking received ideas, demolishing previous platitudes. Megill worries about the crisis notion as itself a danger.

The thinkers in this book remind us that there are compelling reasons for disbelieving in the One True Way. This is all the more important today when total destruction is a real possibility.