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Review: An Ethics of Language

Author(s): Edward Said
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1974), pp. 28-37
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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too has happened to Foucault. which is the very ology envisages no particular individual. . is translated by M. translations. making every item of knowledge re. Unless otherwise noted. the disappearance in contemporary knowledge of man's role as central subject. standpoint of anonymous rules has been worth main- cess of knowledge. neurotic patient. yet I intend it also as a way of ond. Thus it Edward Said appeared in 1969 that The Order of Things and Madness and Civilization had tried "to measure the mutations that operate in general in the field of his- tory. New York: Pantheon Books. This is an unhesitating compliment to him as 1969. Since the publication of Les Mots et les choses (the title of its 1971 English translation is The Or- der of Things) in 1966. reordering. . trans. the en- tire system of coherence by which his thoughts can quently an itemized list of what they are not. "on the other side of change opinions about which authors are more sig- nificant than others. and L'Ordre du discours. but also Foucault now turned his thought back towards his own previous work. But why not also practically consistent? Because Foucault is. things. author and actor. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language and to speech. Usu- be understood. 49). phy. is teaching at Harvard this year. To revise for him has Nevertheless the ambition to write as if from the meant primarily to understand more closely the pro. reinterpreting what had been written. but To understand this we need only recall that Freud's also from the conventional biography of great men account of the Unconscious and its behavior is not and the narration of important events. its formation. Also part of this revisionist phase has been Foucault's disenchantment with the idea of an author. Sheridan Smith. limits. For not only have his three essays on Nietzsche and Deleuze." Among these conditions an the course of this understanding he has been released author is not necessarily one of the most important. Similarly. . but what ducible to an original human act without which the they do is more than use these signs to designate item would otherwise have no cognitive status. whose French original appeared in work. The questions tent with one of the principal themes of his histor- Foucault has been asking himself therefore are as ical research. ordered and interpreted differently from them. Foucault's work has been revisionist in character and concern. in terms of "anonymous that discourse "is made up of a limited number of rules" that are extremely precise and specialized. his two later books L'Archdologie du savoir. dispersion. page references appended parenthetically to quotations Edward Said. 15). far i These last two works now appear together in English as The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on too clearly the unusually impressive author of his Language. revising. and the sec- a stylist of thought. from Foucault are taken from this one volume of two erature at Columbia. To revise has not meant to making very doubtful his theoretical ambition to find himself. as I have elsewhere said. which originally appeared in 1971. The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Lan- guage. according to Foucault. a concept he has found grossly incapable of dealing with the trans-personal authority of texts and documents. All told then completely dependent for its intelligibility upon the a good deal of Foucault's revision has been negative. taining since. he now knows mission and permanence. as he would like.28 Michel Foucault. although one can assume that that discourse. 1972. the negatives are pronounced against what he refers to as anthropology. worse. These tasks were outlined [in those two earlier books] in a rather dis- ordered way. The first. as a philo- thing that Nietzsche had called anthropomorphism: sophic idea it has a force (in Marxist discourse) that the habit of making all knowledge in the image of need not always be referred back to Marx's biogra- man or. Professor of English and ComparativeLit.' all been about thinkers and thought. "Discourses are composed of signs. does not authorize. and themes proper to the history of ideas are questioned. an enterprise in which the methods." An anonymous writer he clearly is not. is translated-- less carefully-by Rupert Swyer. not only from obligations to the history of ideas. however. and their general articulation was never clearly defined" (p. It is this 'more' that Foucault's self-revision is theoretically consis- we must reveal and describe" (p. Marx's description of ide- ally.]. except in a limited way. The author of neurotic thoughts and his description of those anonymous rules is fre. statements for which a group of conditions of exis- Moreover he has been at pains to show that during tence can be defined. an enterprise by which one tries to throw off the last JirT( It0 OF IL'GQJ(J anthropological constraints [.

Foucault began to draw forth the political meaning ing lines of his language: namely that knowledge is of "archeology. how is it that one particular statement appeared What has become more clear than ever in rather than another?" (p. Probably 83). lary of working terms-monument. and motives). Yet in order to plexity and density. he frees "a coherent domain of the actualities and the desires of will to knowledge description" for and with his students. tion. lic quality of his historical investigation in Madness and are defined." documents with "monuments. he has only lately apprehended the latent pub- ordination of statements in which concepts appear. One is dispersion. a context. To asnwer the question why did X (not A) ture. think. whereas the author's locale. to show that a to an historically and particularly apprehensible or- change in the order of discourse does not presuppose der." p. applied and transformed" (pp. Foucault must make the nature of the statement ward. say Y (not B) on occasion Z (not W)." Esprit. a t6mologie. on the What gives written language a recognizable imprimt other hand. none had been possible previously. I believe that Foucault's inter- motif running through Foucault's Archeology as he ests are dominated by a symptomatic group of pres- turns the teacher's openness upon the author's ac. All this is a political From then on. formation. the thought from period to period. the uncompleted. and Civilization and The Order of Things. but is rather a design to meet before his students. the trajectory of his own intellectual 6ver and above the signature of its author? What in project has re-formed itself to accommodate certain short is the regularity of language in use in relation actualities in research elucidated by his practice. tions nor to simple causal arguments. sures on him (one can just as well call them desires cumulated reserves of power. Hence: 'new ideas. Z. More. Y. and pp. because a teacher exposes knowledge directly claring his originality.' a little invention and creativity. and responsive ogy of the sciences. to draws the terrain in which. Class struggle within or condititons or obsessions). No. 5 (May 1968). discontinuity. and in their common articula. much more his private property. the return to an ever. the injustices of contempo- the progress of consciousness. see. texts. the May 1968 events in Paris played a major role in plicit distinction between author and teacher. a pp. the other is "R6ponse au Cercle d'6pis- site of exteriority. etc. which involves conditions (and not only a situa. as a historian. by certain condititons. the more also he has become a teacher that brought him great fame. would prefer to be called a teacher rather than an statement. to show that to speak is to do some. and his own popularity. Foucault re- to translate what one knows. but transformationsin a practice. B and W must be re-defined as belonging wholly and linguistic rules of construction). is far less visible as activity (which it is). This order Foucault calls discourse. and something other than to play with the structures of a language (langue). I suspect. but it bringing him out from behind his work: two espe- is a very useful one nonetheless. and rules (not the logical A." language with "statements" tionale usually employed in determining the setting (enonces). statements is to perform a complicated and costly ges. but uninterrupted these pressures is the simplest to state and the hardest movement of totalizations. 27). 182. this pressure enables Foucault to search for rigor in explanation where is an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their com. and his own search for knowledge in par- Foucault's work increases in volume and authority ticular. its perpetual resump- rary society. 850-74. archeology. Obviously statement Foucault's revisionist assault upon scholarship is the is the key word here. It is the historian's need to see history open source. Taken all together knowledge pits man-the-author as historian (whose these pressures have kept him responsible for the security is "the destiny of rationality and the teleo!. Primarily a teacher cially important and extended interviews. the awakening and community of radicals. as we shall particular will to knowledge pushing his work for. in which makes explicit what an author hides inside the flow. Zeitgeist. 209) rules has a particular statement been made. 29 follows: can one describe intellectual production lectures at the College de France he has been study- without stopping the description at terminals like ing the regular transformations which a "polymor- author. The first of tion of itself. discursive fact or other is always: according to what tion." date from that period." texts or time. and consequently. over the teacher's place of business is the class. 9 (Summer 1968). in his most recent series of coherent both from the standpoint of its retrospec- diacritics/Summer1974 . he can show that to add a statement to a pre-existing series of function systematically. 39) against a revolutionary teacher tated. necessi- thematic. discourse. strategy. I to which an author is a kind of eruptive irregularity? think it is imperative to understand that his vocabu- In raising these questions Foucault. then that is because. "R6ponse 'aune question. Nowhere does Foucault himself make the ex. X. resort neither to mechanically determinist explana- thing-something other than to express what one thinks. The more in general. and con- sequently according to what rules could other sim- Thus the teacher deprives the sovereign subject (or ilar statements be made? The description of the cogito) "of the exclusive and instantaneous right" to events of discourse poses a quite different question: change discourse. to deal with. On the one hand. 9-40. (p. The teacher's aim of a text in time and place. ideas or language? phous" appetite for knowledge can undergo. I who stands in "the field of coordination and sub. a different mentality. goals and the results of his research." Cahiers pour l'analyse. and finally the historico-transcendental as a mass of historical documents intended. An intellectual rejection of the watery ra- with "discourses.-is not a fussy way of de- author. period. the long. If his most recent work appears to be more the more he has agitated to diminish the author's explicitly political and revolutionary than the work prerogatives. perhaps also "The question posed by language analysis of some in neighboring practices. not as chance produc- whose vocabulary replaces history of ideas with tions willed into existence by the flukes of genius "archeology. continuous labor of to the encroachments on him of the academy. page.

Instead writing the "apparently unmoving histories" of "sea routes sought to constitute its own realm. bound neither by an individual 3). words. non-sequential thought. by which a sequential calendar roughly the same period. but these adoxically history no longer can be conceived of as documents are formed and persist monumentally. in which statements occur. with only the most tarity.. To- description draws all phenomena around a single gether with these writers. to those who persist in making of a contingent print- of history. a "period. and complemen- past and its description is what. human image. 3)? No longer is the historian simply and enunciative functions. Hence the pertinence of Foucault's choice of ness to the future and its retention of the past" (p. on the con. acquire diminished and cess of defining the realms of language and "reality" qualified significance. Thus writing could not have a predic- trary. "epistemological mutation" has overtaken the study. Its essential point is what Foucault and ing device an ontological unit having final value. The effects of ethnology. avoiding descriptions equivalent to. no immobile structures necessarily to be such writers as Sade. savoir over connaissance (English regrettably trans- 169). able in terms of.. The retrieval units like demographic expansion. which is fundamen. to it. with their the former is unthinkable without reference to condi- own forms of sequence and succession. A text.. Rather it distributes various extent to which recent historical research is about textual impulses." nor an idea. To uncover those bases is to admit that an author. Dates. convey neither their desires nor their psychological choanalysis. a general history. the linear succes. is man's life is an adequate measure neither of large specified by Foucault as the archive. image: the linear model of speech (and partly at felt. coincidence. no smug con. tive form based either upon biological growth or up- 10). closer to formalization. what Foucault calls an element of rarity very special ness whose presence always eludes itself in its open. on the new method.. would deploy the space of a dispersion" (p. linguistics. displacements and transforma. discoveries.] of the balance relations between this realm and empirical reality achieved by the human species between hunger and were made possible according to particular strategies abundance" (p. psy.. a meaning. based on the se. regularly and on several axes. without any effect of coincidence and super." a "work. (disguised or not) or direct unmediated representa- The next pressure has already been implied in tions of human life. Foucault begins The not the pure graphological consequence of-an im- Archeology of Knowledge with a stocktaking of the mediate desire to write. relativist thought was first sketched in detail by Fou- For the new kind of history there is no quasi-divine cault in the final pages of The Order of Things. and generally of Nietzschean interpre. temporal according to their own laws. It is to break the hold of these models that lates both as knowledge) for the object of his study: Foucault describes discourse and archive. The will to knowledge expresses itself in position. Recurrent distributions and commonly known by all three such "texts" a step architectonic unities. The Archeology of Knowledge takes the pro- structed and given priority. all dating from between series. generally. a novel by Virginia Woolf. and not according to a (if by time one means..] crop rotation [. miming the line of a man's life was formerly con. For just as history is not tem- ligible method of production. was adequate. an overall shape. Rather work is assaulted (and found wanting) by a wish to the historian must now write general history: "a total express non-syntactic. Here we tions and appropriations that make it knowledge. or tasted-it can neither be produced nor sought least of writing) in which all events succeed one an. However the place of poral sequence. differently articulated systems of relation chemistry.] of corn or of gold-mining [. Concurrently the logic of syntax as well tation have been to dissolve the priority of these as the linear sequence of printed language in their given calendars which supposedly typify time. inhabited entirely [. or even mainly. or telos. smelled. discontinuity. and the model of the stream of conscious. is based on historical documents. what "the great silent. new criteria of period. or a textbook of organic ization.. is a others have called decentering. no Weltanschauung. Marx. after (desired) in the simple experiential terms of other. Mallarm6 and Nietzsche could found in it. Par. he must now ask a text therefore change definitively as one examines about different sorts of series. motionless bases that traditional gives these impulses unity is what Foucault calls a history has covered with a thick layer of events" (p. or a political pamphlet. is itself abetted by is capable of containing knowledge-formal knowl- "two models that have for so long imposed their edge cannot be immediately seen. put forward systems of thought for which no image view. he calls tory cannot be filled with objects that are analogies archeology. daily life. remarked there how mimetic representation after tinuity. tally opposed to anthropological and humanistic at. What ideas one has about to link events in a causal series. and it is Foucault's goal to formulate lated by Foucault with the principle negative aim of a method sensitive to these indicators. fundamentally inconstant epistemological judgment. because the birth-to-death span of discourse. The background for this more than simply tempts to write total history radiating out from man. or understand- But the linear image of time.. heard. its setting. a spirit. latter-as Foucault says in a summary of his 1970- . sense impressions. of phenomena of of the archive from its own time and place in the rupture. In turn the of irrigation [.3D tive historical analysis and of its rationally intel. Since no image quential calendar of a man's life. so too the spatial dispersion enacted by his- unavoidable geological analogy intended. a world. Saussure and Freud centre-a principle.] of drought and by words and the spaces between them. the come to the third and the most complex pressure up. Textual evidence. How else is one to deal with such questions as on a representative governing image. The vocabulary and the tions-these are the spatial indicators of historical problematics of that kind of knowledge are articu- activity today. in other my initial definition of discourse and archive. A text does not simply record-is sion of dates and events). a domain which is entirely. He archi. discursive formation.

produced as an event of desire (produite tion. Mainly. is not the thesis of the different theses sus. It is a useful exercise to describe a few of ally humanist vision of knowledge. which are absent-that entitles them to act stress the regularity of that knowledge. the as thought-producers. if my irony is not others. an archive (as understood conventionally) they are pendent of the sciences (which are neither their histor. and are defined. 207) of coordination and subordinationof statementsin which concepts appear. Secondly it is antidemocratic. in order to functions of observations. (p. Nevertheless one must note that Foucault's own naissance). knowledge is also the space in which the statement defined as a function of realization of the subject may take up a position and speak of the objects verbal performance. the almost oppressively novel vocab- too long unnoticed. Yet like cursive). nor their practical by-products). according to Kuhn. or in- said. in which the freedom bilities of use and appropriation offered by discourse of the subject. "Men whose research is based on shared Archeology is plain. The con. that is. Georges Canguilhem and Michael Polanyi in the sense that permits its votaries to wave the ban. the labour of the human being. number 49. some of whom he names tion of genius and/or individual hard work. positive and specifi- practice. While nineteenth century is not the sum of what was thought both theories appear to have a strong libertarian to be true. but the whole set of modes and sites in accordance with which one can integrate new statement with the terpretative analyses of language. and always. singularities. archeology. The importance of the attack has gone far mis-interpreted. the knowledge of political economy. tough. romantic standards for scientific practice. in the Clas. for they inhabit a spe- ical prototypes. thrust. shall return to that critical problem a little later. and vice visible. lastly. opening up of a transcendental destiny could be ful- sical period. That commitment knowledge is anti-intellectual and anti-rational. Nevertheless I have ventured ner of science and knowledge and. I property of the big brain whose inspiration knowl. especially in the United ulary of his methodology itself seems more regular." This consensus enables further power and interest as being the radical intellectual research. and more rigid definition of the field" of scientific tack upon anti-democratic epistemology in The research. but the whole set of practices. filled" (p. 9). Fou- cause what it thereby banished is a conception of cault has assembled together various characteriza- knowledge as the free-floating. (pp. although I think these correlative discoveries made by others. the thought about originality is highly ambivalent. out of the mass of things said. and acknowledges. Yet and the apparent consensus it produces are prereq- diacritics/Summer1974 . applied and trans. performs of social power (L'Arc. define the acceptability of statements. if only be. In March 1972 Foucault be. signifies property quite narrowly. interrogation. and any discursive practice may be defined by able knowledge is regular. 31 71 course of lectures at the Collkge-is best studied nowhere does Foucault say as a result that knowl- as something fundamentally subjective and selfish edge (savoir) is immediately accessible to introspec- (interessde). but there is no knowledge without a particular discursive cial medium of rarity. p. knowledge is defined by the possi. In the first place romantic knowledge (con. to specify knowledge that is. than most tively familiar background where. distinguishes itself from a search with which he deals in his discourse (in this sense. shared paradigms discussed by Kuhn that comprise a gan explicitly to speak of an interplay of desire. read with the following. it conceals its structure. In one or two places Foucault carefully distinguishes is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice. others he probably did not have in cault is not the first modern to attack this romantic. There are bodies of knowledge that are inde. the whose privilegedfield is linguistic competence:while such knowledge of clinical medicine is the whole group of a description constitutes a generative model. it is eminently capable of being there. decipherment. between his archeological method and Chomsky's and which is specified by that fact: the domain consti. This is not as unimag- versa. beyond structural. spontaneous emana. passage in mind: in the eighteenth century. tained. to establish rules of formation. albeit with difficulty. only with trepidation. One brings Foucault together with Thomas S. earlier. it absorbs discontinuity the knowledge that it forms. Therefore knowledge (savoir) bly specified and characterized. mind. The tautology does not matter. knowledge is also the field dition of their realization. or even to consciousness. dis- truth by falsification (determinant par falsification seminated and reformed in ways that can be intelligi- l'eflet de vdritd). They he does more to regularize the irregularities of have the virtue of placing Foucault against a rela- knowledge. to direct questioning. almost material. upon the discourse). Fou. or the (thus. All of to conceal the privilege-but not the rigor or real these writers on the structure of scientific knowledge science. even if it is not Knowledge is specified by discourse. a domain that is at already said). formal. and determining What he does say is that knowledge is produced. States. the knowledge of Natural History. not in any vague counter-culture sense. 182-83) and individual effort. The opacity of this disclaimer thins out a bit if it is formed (at this level. in order to define the con- ject of medical discourse). and it is repeatable. and deviations of which one could speak in psychiatric by seizing. not wholly corporeal either. is not the sum of what was "it is vain to seek. the function of providing in ongoing time "a new tinuity between such a statement and Foucault's at. at the same time to do so and find the attempt instructive. accommodates or is radically altered by target in the struggle to uncover the hidden strategies anomaly. methods (never mentioned by name) of linguistic tuted by the different objects that will or will not acquire a scientific status (the knowledge of psychiatry in the analysis based upon the generative model. however. "research consensus. edge therefore seems. inable a constellation of features as its seems. Thirdly. last freed from all positivity. rind of knowledge. tions made by other writers. comme evenement du vouloir). but rather Kuhn. but the totality of its point of articulation on Positivity and specification: these make up the other discourses or on other practices that are not dis. 112). archeology tries recording and decision that may be exercised by the sub. and this realization I paradigms are committed to the same rules and believe is necessitated by the first two.

that the object of objective path." the paradigm" (p. Within the paradigm. deal with the problem of showing discourse in its ymous. Polanyi demonstrates that what he calls tacit that it is itself a human construction. whose philosophical investigations of "health is a genetic and enzymatic correction of an contemporary reality play an important role in Fred- error [in the substitution of one molecular arrange. economic. 1970. or lin. sociology. but rather that of a fers-and in his Lindsay Memorial Lectures. surmounted the opposition between the two. can be studied as a quasi-transcendental form of dis- of Chicago Press. 157). wrong not with the class-derived concealment of work: in the sense of a counterfeit note in the sense of a Works of art owe their existence to the social division false brother. they appear under the hem. of Chicago Press. eral or in the more specialized types of production tific research conducts itself. directly relevant analogies. sionment. are discursive He concludes that "every empirical concept of illness practices. If new course (I adapt this notion from Angus Fletcher's problems emerge as anomalies it is because they are theory of a transcendental art-form in his The Tran- in disharmony with "the background provided by scendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's "Comus. What interests Val6ry in Leonardo is not his guistic area. Paris: P. How. criteria are formed in medicine. knowledge which can be rationally ascertained and cept of illness. 117). 11). the more one notices the extent to which he is sus- server and individual patient. the structure of the political bureaucracy. 65). in- that determine "the normal" and "the pathological. social exclusions and incorporations that comprise dates Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions by nineteen the penal system. the organization of university cur- years. knowledge whose prac- which justifies the label pathological" (Le Normal et tice conceals the fact of its fabrication. Consequently it is not an objective articulated. The more one reads in Foucault as pathological. social science and hu. Lukics saying that there is such a thing as objective path. He has this le pathologique. 408) knowledge can be incorporated. no matter how implicit or hidden it may method that characterizes a biological phenomenon first appear to be. To be sick is to have been wrong. the neo-Marxists. U. to the separation of mental and physical work. as well as the discontinuity be. proletarian class-consciousness also demonstrates In 1966 Canguilhem refined this view by say. ton: Princeton Univ. can one depict rational work as a process hav- adigm stands in a fairly close relation to Foucault's ing significant material consequences? How does one account of discursive practice "as a body of anon." sofar as these are coherent positivities. In Personal Knowledge (Chicago: guise of independent existence. in a construction is a decision to move away from manities. 1972). rev. then the intra- Canguilhem showed in a very early study that pre. Press. of Chicago Press. "There is thus given within the very concept of work ately formulable in a set of rules. phors. always determined in the persistence to be what Foucault has called a material- time and space that have defined a given period. for instance. (p. ed. It is always the relation between ob. too. Thus And Adorno. whole body of scientific knowledge at any given a certain order must be assumed for it. the page. and istic incorporeal? Val6ry's Leonardo comes to mind for a given social. Such con- tradiction obliges the work of art to conceal the fact 1959). does not inhibit the regularity of the Yet if the work process is not to remain occult. sequence. ed. and Adorno. geographical. Jameson continues Adorno's argument as follows: tific research. of whom Barthes the structuralist. norms that regulate even the concept of error. 1972). p. by which what is present is falsely given ological practice "is not so much a fact as a value" as not-made and always-there. called autonomy of a work of art in class society theory]. however. If from continuation of a particular research tradition" (The the "archeological" historian's viewpoint. Tacit knowledge need not be immedi. The point is that even characteristic of capitalism-the principle of a cen- the apparently contradictory status of explicit and sorship of the work process itself. biography but his constructive power as a mind. picious of. how the bourgeois status-quo masks a discourse or a ing that within a science like pathology there are theory that denies its own self-preserving activity. Barthes' anatomy of tivity is absolutely tied to a specific biological history myth (in Mythologies) construes the bourgeois habit (with its own time. the conditions of operation of the enun. All of these divisions are subject to the nature and into the constructive element. mediated by the clinic. F. Canguilhem dispels the subjectivist fallacy by thinkers. as Ithaca: Cornell Univ. for the genesis and them are equally a function of these laws. Chicago: Univ." tween them. Lukics' definition of (p. and the relations between an interesting study of Leonardo's use of sketches .32 uisites for normal science. but in the sense of a mistaken fold of of labor. rev. 1958)-to which Kuhn re. events. equates the so- chemistry here is borrowed from information. ciative function" (p. and is indeed an important part of what passes for "objective" scien. the traces of labor on the product. here. 1962. of appeals to immutable "reality" as a form of illu- der) and second. historical rules. Kuhn's brilliant analysis of the role played does not wish to employ crude sensationalist meta- by textbooks in contributing to the scientific par. p. eric Jameson's excellent Marxism and Form (Prince- ment for another: the conceptual structure of bio. i. Construction itself has its own logic whose basis is Foucault's archeology of knowledge scants the an "intervention in natural things. if one time. of a repression of implicit knowledge. The spirit which having become object now claims to have Study of Man (Chicago: Univ. or of a wrong line of verse" (Canguil. and attracted to. for their medium is not Univ. (There is laws of discursive practice. 208). a society Structure of Scientific Revolutions.." The initial step difference between science.e. p. furnish the most ology so long as it is understood first that that objec. In such a situation. in common obviously with a number of modern 156). ricula. nonetheless it is -either in the form of the division of labor in gen- consentual and works as a basis upon which scien. Thus a positvity is that acted-upon retains a disciplined relation with an axiological con. or. Press. that of pure and autonomous spirit.

in Kuhn's discussion of the research paradigm every mental presence does not exclusively mean empirical research worker re-articulates a special aspect of the visibility. answering these questions in The Archeology of Moreover in the conception of books and Knowledge Foucault admits that what he supplies is language as a universe that Borges has made cur. is one particular paradigm and extends and refines it further. I think. Therefore. the possibility provides enough of an there is no determinable origin and no final goal. this argument reveals the extent to which repetition. discoveries. Foucault with Kenneth Burke's dramatistic analysis ment") which also passes through several successive of literature. 1966). 121). pp. inspiration. mem. (Valkry. with certain animal characteristics-organs. 49-50) "the time of discourse is not the translation. a "raptus") it also rarity Leonardo puts his monuments: contained an anxiety about the value of what one was saying. Deleuze con- Compositions" in his Norm and Form: Studies in structs before his reader the drama of repetition that the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon. constantly by each statement made within it. U. infinitely form of writing relied upon to a great extent by varied by perspective. a sort of general will. The monument (which composes the City. One of them might be where is a condition of action before it becomes a concept one stands in order to speak. whose recognition to an ongoing system of the values. although in the special sense of the word in. p. In books to each other and keep the word on the pages. Since knowledge is neither a mysterious jumble of What makes such comparative abstractions like dif. however. intercrossing. "history is that which visible chronology. which all utterance is a form of re-inscription: hence orig- in turn is almost the whole of civilization) is such a com- plex entity that our understandingof it passes through inality is a far more unstable quality. 114-15). Mann and tant. In such a universe if. the time of monumen. and interweaving without ity concealed an appeal to some extra-positive "priv- ever coinciding one with another. then a rich tex. just as tended by Foucault (like Valery before him) monu. calls misprision. the ture of motifs in height. One ought to be willing to accept this qualification ence to every other discourse. then something solid. in a "In our time. Collected Works. Prince- domain that is autonomous" (p. (p. indication that a possibility now is not just an excuse since repetition underlies cross-reference. one that carries us in thought from geometry to dynamics and thence to the most tenuous speculations "interiority" like inspiration. As Vico was one of the first to argue. effectiveness is its main criterion of success. sponds to Foucault's concept of the duration in his. ideas nor a fact of nature. ic's. how is its effectiveness measured than the infinitely interwined lines that connect the or realized.. Val. 21). 1972. F. III. discourse for Foucault is only misprision and exteriority: "it is a practical of molecular physics. This deliberate mis-taking characterizes in- bers-then finally a machine having gravity for its mo. of reflection" (Deleuze. For Foucault is proposing a method for under- ference et repetition (Paris: P. is capable of producing the absolutely different. We mode of presence for discourse as monument: as vis. it is very complex argument is his way of describing best conceived of initially as occupying a group of those things as forms of action. ton: Princeton Univ. bold. another might be from dkccri IS/Summer1974 . in repetition and discourse. and since it is not some- ference and repetition clear in Deleuze's otherwise thing that one has but something that one does. tiveness can be judged in several ways but Foucault tal duration. is a possi- philosophical affinity with Gilles Deleuze derives bility described at length forceful enough to prepare from this interest in repetition. Instead. affinity has become political as well. not yet a theory but only a possibility (pp. each discourse becomes a sort of cross-refer. 121). in this case. First we grasp a changeable creativity belong inherently to what Harold Bloom background that merges with the sky. in exchange. H61derlin. Discursive practice is modified course. A library. Using examples from 3 Gombrich's "Leonardo's Method of Working out Marx. although recently the the ground for a theory? I think it is. Joyce. resis. breadth. although Foucault holds that discursive phases. and depth. rent. of the obscure time of thought" transforms documents into monuments" (p. and what sort of activity it is really. A document's monumentality can only practice is neither benign nor necessarily artistic: emerge when discourse is not elided with reality. ventiveness. is not less have a special empirical validity. Foucault's for the absence of theory. as a device or a mode or a philosophic habit. Far from being the -realization of an tive force." In this element of ilege" (the Muse. er- that there is no Origin is pre-supposed by his interest rors. must still ask. H. repetition produces difference. Vico. If as a concept or a description. for instance. neverthe. "Repetition [in time] hypothetical spaces. In other words. Leonardo saw the opposite of originality in the romantic sense of "the air [as being] full of infinite lines. original- radiating. architectural projections for monuments which. has publicly agreed. Monu. 7). Deleuze's Dif. Discursive language is like a repertory theatre tory of texts as monument: the historian's discipline that stages numerous spectacles. one of whose signs is parody. This figure connects is archeology ("the intrinsic description of the monu. 1968) goes a standing social behaviour as what it is that people very long way towards laying forth a philosophy of must do in order to speak and write as contributors repetition with which Foucault. al. where discursive practice ible objects the books in the stacks are less important actually takes place. and institutions that we call knowledge (savoir). though they have no empirical equivalent. many of the modern masters like Eliot. Thereafter Val6ry meditates upon Leonardo's Aside from being an appealingly surprising volte-face. the time of its analysis: these three are is right. not to make effectiveness dependent correlates that tend differently to repeat each other upon so fickle a perception as the retrospective crit- without being copies of nature or of an ideal.that develops this theme further than Valry: E." says Foucault. it and several successive phases. Effec- The time of its construction. straight and that word. Press. and Nietzsche. vol. Here we can begin to understand how 6ry's account of the constructed monument corre. Yet neither is effectiveness passive conformity to mentality is the general mode of presence of dis.

The historical economy of discourse is the a Chinese encyclopedia referred to in "The Analyt- archive: ical Language of John Wilkins" by Borges. a statement. 111) ments of the dpistem'-governing their appearance as events.but they are grouped sions. or a sentence. that is. 234) Discourses exist within the archive. and a fourth might be where his state.. Another important mines that all these things said do not accumulate end. all these are analytic instruments ment is either preserved. resort of affirmation[Swyer's translation here is impos- entiates discourses in their multiple existence and speci. to be consciously ex- tive function" (p. dpistime. without contradic. which "bear an enuncia. to be re-appropriated (as in his essay "Kafka . of statements that have become inert once more. nor are they inscribed in a lack: "There may in fact be-and always are-in an unbroken linearity. A discourse is syste. it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of sized here: that the analysis of discourse [and of state- the statement-thing." which is effaced in the very thing of The rules collectively governing these move. which is after all the very mode and presence of when it is specified as an actively populated expanse effectiveness. "the rarity of affirmation"] fies them in their own duration. though the statement cannot be hidden it is not vis- the system that governs the appearance of statements as ible either [. For Foucault the statement is not a of knowledge-acts at a given moment in history. is sentence necessarily. ments in and by discourse] thus understood. . the dis. maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities. modified. nor do they disappear at the the conditions of emergence of statements. or a passing remark. for future other utterance from emerging. it is that which differ. 129) -certainly not any continuous out-pouring of meaning. which. political. 110-11). or gaps that divide up their referential. defines at the outset the system of its enunci. The archive is of coexistence. together in distinct figures. (p. The peculiar.. by individuals or institutions. accumulated. Moreover since it is in and of Thus in the eighteenth century. his statement. What The statement is not just another unity-above or be- distinguishes dpisteme from them is not that all are low-sentences and propositions. social. This is very different from describing a Zeitgeist. emerges to be something else. or a Weltanschauung. does not re- Far from being that which unifies everything that has veal the universality of a meaning. Rather the dpistmrne"is chance series. safeguards (p. exclu- mercy of chance external accidents. despite its immediate escape. its status as an escape. but the very fact that they are given. of the "there is. which one can say: "thereis this or that thing. aspect of the statement is that it is correlative with lessly in an amorphous mass. Most important. and it now be. main part of it.. even discourse. nor any unit describable by not an open space but rather a system of distances. composed together in accor. stantly eludes one" (pp. as he himself says in the opening pages of lish an outer limit of knowledge-make The Order of Things. ity). namely. to regard matic. is also to modify other effective statements. the action of imposed rarity. The more Foucault enumerates closer than it is a hundred years later. or more or less invented by the archeologist in order passed on. enclose groups dance with multiple relations. it is that which em. and certainly not any monarchy of the signifier. cluded (as when The Wasteland excludes Christian- We are back to effectiveness. but that only the episteme in unities of this kind. But the archive is also that which deter. tables). 115). It has the quasi-invisibility others" (p. it is always invested unconscious or communal. in order to provide a general boundaries. and it has epistemological. one thing at least must be empha- tion. Surrounding all these places is a set of to approach the statement. to be re-activated (as when a later age is made up of statements. for is the system of its functioning. the more it is evident that map of such relations is what Foucault means by a statement is difficult both to make and to describe: it is rare. sibly garbled: Foucault says. limits. (p. conversely. problem stance. in the last the midst of preserved discourse. and it is tion. for example. 114)-and also to last. for the dpistime is usually described by Perhaps a prefiguration of what Foucault means by a statement is to be found in the smile of the Chesh- Foucault as a set of moving constraints that estab- discourse ire cat or. but brings to light been said in the great confused murmur of a discourse. and prevent certain forms of use" not that which. ability. and I think the crucial.Rarity and affirmation:rarity." (p. and in them. or even in sequences of signs is not an implicit belief-system sometimes projected that do not obey their laws (and which may be lists. another might be where he puts in defining the statement: the dpisteme'. or limits. gard to a whole series of possibilities. without internal arbitrariness" (p. and preserves. Effectiveness is not dialectical-"without flaw. spaces in. and the coincidences that are established only to give rise to way in which they are given.3J where he draws forth the elements he combines to comes possible to see that Foucault is most interested make a statement. returns to Marx or to Freud).] it is like the over-familiar that con- unique events. that holds all the other suitable terminology for apprehending the statement. At all events. a statement bodies it. validate only one series of modalities. To affirm with force even as one ex- courses in the archive. shifts. 192). discourse it cannot be something latent that is real- tance between religion and psychology as discipline is ized by discourse. with a fundamental power far from being only that which insures that we exist in of affirmation. or an ideology. Nor is the archive that which collects the dust but not an idea. practice not as a cause of effectiveness but as the economic and historical relations with other dis. They are special- ized modes of utterance (clinical discourse. it characterizesnot what is given a constantly moving set of articulations. "Al- The archive is first the law of what can be said. or sociological discourse) that must not be of The Archeology of Knowledge is its attempt to confused with simple jargon. with re- memories. This constraint is the dpistm&e. the discourse cludes much else-this is effectiveness. grammar or logic. The whole what a statement is not. define effectiveness without theory. and which may make possible the miracle of their resurrec.. Thus a statement emerging prevents an- the event of the statement. in the list of animals given in possible. the archive. 110).

is systematically organized and in turn refers to what sive line of development. affirmation. Since all knowledge is rarity. Two of his most com. have produced it as it was produced. modified and patrimony). never going straight. is one of the things any form of understanding that sends one away to that distinguishes him from structuralism and its given or assumed ontologically prior forms such as more simply appropriated linguistic models. ascertainable transformations. an idea. is essentially a set of "intrinsic tions in favor of "diagonal mobility. freedom and are relatively free. e. Let us take dissatisfac. and the or as evidence. . In or. thing that Foucault would agree with readily. which is tion and radical affirmation. chanical somehow. force. a source. and was written (and this involves an archeological de. then knowledge ("le savoir du Western historical understanding as being based very savoir") must also be affirmative.. his archeology as aspect of Foucault's work that exemplifies radical simultaneously the expression of radical dissatisfac. fore describes language ethically. always really moving and in accordance with a constant scale. When of signs is a judgment already made that those par- Nietzsche said that discussions of poets like Homer ticular signs shall be. I think he is correct to judge B is not to know A). Linnaeus to produce his system of classification and ity. and one horizontal. a world-view said in another essay that structuralism begins with -in short. a genealogy of order-discounts the pres. two. the affirmation of a process of exclusion (to know tion and doubt first. and the scales of mapping may discipline with which he negotiates the discontinuous oscillate" (p. there are no order of knowledge. To the archeologist discourse is a Deleuze has said quite ingeniously that Fou- space of dissension. pres- ilege in the understanding without account being ence. negatives. Foucault is like a man plants [in eighteenth-century Natural History]. scription of literary discourse today). The will to knowledge therefore a trace. These opposi. When. one. discourse he can show that there is a beginning made der to do that one would have to grasp first of all up of organized exclusions and inclusions. (I shall permit myself a solecism) not not to articulated correlations. if one wishes to show. 154). interior. This perhaps silly picture begins ical description [during the same period]. An image I prefer is that in his tions articulate divergence. for instance." which is tangled but is also a set of fairly well. discourse is not made up gether since both mix the temporal and the spatial of ideas-all these affirm the positive exclusions that modes. then to grasp Discourse is therefore the organized social 1974 diacritics/Summer .g. for every statement in describe the fact that "Adonais" was written. pertinent task for the analyst is attention to a sys- tizations. and ex. produce it. This is the terprets. almost exclusive attention to exteriority and surface clusion. the codes to get at the combination of realism. In this insistence upon a judgment judgments made by later generations and not at all made both to exclude and include. preserved in poetico-elegiac discourse in the early Lest it be assumed that statements in discourse nineteenth century. To Foucault it has excluded and organized. a period. in the literal sense. to produce it when he did. Foucault is under no illusion that it is anything but ity Foucault goes out of his way to show that this interminable-its stated requirements are at least a is not what he has in mind. as the fact that knowledge is both produced and there. This has been one of Foucault's constant image. Foucault did in The Order of Things. Foucault's lists of generally upon two forms of explanation. or idea. Eighteenth-century Natural His. houses. an Origin. 154). he was saying some. Moreover these determinisms assume a priv. 35 and his Precursors" Borges gives Kafka his forgotten how as writing the poem was received. So too with Weltanschauungen strongly on the discontinuous nature of statements and similar ideas of order. to Everything I have so far said of Foucault in. is an effort made to exclude that which is not suit- ceived of as the exterior residual expression of an able as knowledge. a tical. what concatenation of century General Grammar and Natural History are events (not mere happenings) made it possible for related after all-there is "a region of interpositiv. from side to side. rather than summarizes. statement is not a sentence." This is an oppositions [. for method. rationale. I have an author. a setting why to the critic in 1973 it matters that the poem amidst other permitted statements. one who runs across rooftops. or underlying. distributed over different levels of interesting suggestion but it strikes me as too me- the discursive formation" (p. an affirmation exclusion means that what is excluded thing that gives it meaning: other events. which when it is explained vertically is con. cault has rejected horizontal and vertical explana- tory. for example. and the extent to which he has shown how is conveived of as having been preceded by some. a continuity. incompatibility. however. a succes. never descending into the applies a rigorous perceptual and linguistic code. He is interested in describing contradictions-that is. linguicity: structuralism assumes that things can be ence of the evidence. To say The source or pure origin of language is something that Shelley wrote "Adonais" is not sufficiently to he cannot discuss. Foucault there- accurate descriptions of reality. While one may never to able to during a given epistime make up a unity resembling complete such an archeological description-and either the Great Chain of Being or a Hegelian total. "In the case of the systematic analysis of while discussing statements.. however. Foucault's position is that an existing system taken of their very circumstantial nature. three. even if theoretic. in the archive. its sheer persistence as event apprehended by and as signs in a language. He investigates the process of (about whom as authors nothing was known) were signs being made. Both generally work to. tem of signs with perpetual. meaning. in favor of deterministic hyposta. Written historical evidence is judged to be add to knowledge. archeology is not history of ideas. that eighteenth in knowing. When it is explained horizontally it themes. one ver. didactic way of showing that the concept of author plex chapters in The Archeology-"Contradictions" as origin is an unsatisfactory terminal from which and "The Comparative Facts"-insist yet more to begin or conclude.

Nietzsche schaffende Gotteswort). selected. vol. sible disappearance. maybe they've already borne guage in particular. I stood in its path-a slender gap-the point of its pos- idation. communication of something. portant work. Beckett) so important where in modern rationalism. choses dites)-profoundly. they've already said me. Benja. I'd be surprised if it opened" the knowledge of good and evil. long preceding me. in the profound course as it takes its course. maybe it's been done already. archive and statement. until they say me-heavy burden. He himself seems very a place in his historical and theoretical studies is aware of the difficulty of his position. although presumably it is modifying the dis- but perception of good and evil is. in the exclusion). that in which the name no longer group of men. There would have been no be- main is the result of this exteriority. It is within the discourse of serpent's promise. 414-15) structs. I would like to have slipped imperceptiblyinto this lec- rifying freedom that comes from hyper-individuality. 1970 opens as alienation the exteriority of discursive practice by follows: outdoing discourse. (on what is being excluded and on whomever does Who then is Foucault? To me he typifies. Sade. The cogni. I would like to which all is made deliberately to depend is no longer have perceived a nameless voice. to evade its ponderous. namely Judgment. pp. (Schriften. organized and redistributed accord. chatter-whose rarity the skeleton of discourse. with a terminology that often threatens to Discourse. leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it. is that or chatter. is in his quasi-madness to thereafter stimulate discourse to change. whose role is Beckett's work. There is indeed a basic sameness between the word which. regards Nietzsche and Freud as the most severe and This is really the original sin of the spirit of language. a more complex and interesting form than any con- One reason therefore that Foucault seems to temporary writer I know. the problem of modern give artists. I suspect that Foucault side. and to lodge myself. i. of God's creative word (das of interpretation-together with Marx. the most recent of challengers to discourse: as au- As it communicates outside of itself the word is some. and deviants beginnings. who stands in the middle. (purification and elevation) is the form of judgment whose ethic is hidden in the exteriority of practice. Good and Evil. Frankfurt: Suhr. perhaps To make "I speak" into what Foucault calls a soli. Nietzsche. capable only of the purificationand elevation he has always returned to the past in order to re- to which the babbling man. All things have a (cited by Foucault. mainly in man with new knowledge. I must say them until they materiality" (p. but the stretching. despite its visions and revisions. out- side itself. awesome long as there are words. Before the Fall in Eden. is things that are said (les overcome the matter with which it purports to deal. 215). I think the answer one finds the Fall is the moment of birth of man's language (des is largely symbolic: it is that any alienated man or menschlichen Wortes). These bursts its own immanent magic. veloped in words. and knowledge. all this in order for language across the fabric of discourse create rents that dis- now to make itself deliberately magical from the out. The word must communicate something now. 216). I can't go on. also had to lease from their silence those utterances blanketted submit. p. 215) . as in its interstices as if it had paused an instant. course is forced to repair. What is heroic about such men is. by the time of ing to a certain number of procedures. perceives good and evil and the word which on the surface conveys information. which the nineteenth century. found. visionaries. by an explicitly mediate word. the sinner.e. forth (dtalement) of language in its raw state. erature escapes the mode of being of discourse. as into all the others I shall be delivering.36 ethic of language: "I am supposing that in every so. when no one was looking. and Freud make interpretation a literally unending sence of language (der Verfall des seligen Sprachgeistes) task since they begin by saying that there is no be- in Adam. At the moment of speaking. the only knowledge without a name was opening onto my story. idle talk cault's work. Many readers of Fou- abandons the name. (Das Wort soll "etwas" ausser sich selbst). The Archeology of Knowledge con- kamp. that which has left behind a language the insane are hidden in asylums. become a victim of language. ture. who are hidden beneath discourse as remains intact. their willingness to accept the ter. says Foucault. thors he says that they are founders of discourse. The serpent tempts But the role of the modern artist. paradoxically. which is not the ginnings: instead. maybe of an essay on language in general and human lan. borne away beyond all possible be- logical limitations: the individual act of speech upon ginnings. me to the threshold of my story. interpretation that Foucault's archeology is to be tion/perception of things/objects is based on the name. The name steps away from itself in this knowledge: changes into another. In 1916 Walter Benjamin put find me. of the Their work requires so great an adjustment in modes explicitly immediate word. it is the Fall of a fortunate es. taking up its cadence. and not mimetic representation. nevertheless speak that names and the language-one can say-that knew from their own exteriority to society. but ciety the production of discourse is at once con. in sus- pure. I must say words as chance events. more than the average user of discourse. madmen. Molloy: to avert its powers and its dangers. exteriority. The coherence of Fou- sense in which Kierkegaardconceives this word. His most im- that they. while result of signs returning to a point of origin for val. heavy sin. Modern literature in the pense. the uncreative imitation of [God's] creative his work of any way of explaining how one epistime verb. speech would proceed from me. rates the freedom of exteriority has. I would have preferred to be en- tary sovereignty is to be free of all social and psycho. by discourse. to beckon to me. right to the door min says. all knowledge is nouns. deployed exteriority. [This new knowledge] is exterior cault have been troubled by the seeming absence in knowledge. a predicament to be found lurking every- (Hblderlin. thing of a parody. one result is that the speaking subject who inaugu- trolled. 1955. name. to cope with "I must go on. according to the ginning-that interpretation itself becomes a special discursive formation. II.(p. Modern lit. his inaugural Legon at the College de exaggerate and make plain in their solitude and France delivered on December 2. over the years ahead. a similar ethical insight into language at the centre I must go on.

Foucault is saying also that such a possibility calls cluded by discourse? Foucault has recently begun for judgment. then in response one can begin again to spoken things. For it emphasizes the extent to which writing course to romantic originality is no response. His oeuvre oriented affirmation. consideration on the part of to devote himself to a study of the penal system. as the author alternates between them. formalized recapitulation of Western historical un- tween writing as discourse (the author is a function derstanding. Yet still more ex. we places drastic limitations upon the idea of man as can be expected to examine first the need for repeti- author of his work. analysis. for citizens in the name of an original spirit of laws. he acknowledges that their work which gave rise to it. social and political organiza. When a society oppresses its illusions. the accumulation of power that it represents. with market- any literary standard. as long-gone past. take the step of sub- his has not further intensified the ethnocentricity of stituting agitation dominated by undigested philos- Western discourse in its appropriation of the op. conversely. relatively unforced view of them. If what they have is "doxolog- necting the most minute particulars of human ex. is an expression of anxiety. and historically as well. we disparate movements has been unstinting. and hopefully will never. Fou- These problems have everywhere appeared cault has been concerned with what men have made whenever a method has taken on the task of con. But what Foucault discovers is that mon original "tradition. How rules" binding knowledge together. Notwithstanding Sartre's the instruments with which to withstand further profoundly ill-considered attack on Foucault (in domination? 1966) for his alleged anti-historical attitude. along with his re- much in his writing is originality. As author then he dramatizes a vacillation be. ical" there is no reason whatever for saying conse- perience with the most common and universal of quently that because a doxology is maintained on a human concerns. in its operative forcefulness. draws upon his ego. For such a presence a re- terest. other workers in knowledge. If system here is repetition. Vico. Marx. Freud are level of its own (the archive). His "real" beginning then is his awareness emplify the cycle of repetition and beginning. and writing against discourse. however. how much repeti. his own invention. consequently. or 31 to be an author is to take on the responsibility for when a writer masks his opportunism behind a com- what one says. with what they have. Much of Foucault's latest work is a kind of guage. or analysis conceived of as making differences within whether archeology can supply other cultures with the order of repetition. To begin therefore is whether what has been excluded has impoverished to repeat. and then we can go on to investigate order of. originality or creativity) that has a unity all its own. done with such complex instruments of of the discourse. That the validation of which is an economic. are. when rev- the order of discourse. between knowledge and the historical conditions plicitly than they. and made to study. One can Knowledge correctly. controlled. on the other hand. and discourse itself. If I have understood The Archeology of a large part of society justly or unjustly. is for to be concerned with knowledge is to be of his- a way of beginning to stand openly in the path of tory without being uniformly subject to its repeated mistaken originality." or. uses other writing. and indeed a beginning all its they lead to knowledge and freedom. Foucault's support of these two always explicitly addressed Western discourse. By being the order of pianism. ex- authority. Nietzsche. diocritics/Summer 1974 . in this case. function by society. So much so that discourse-the tion (in laws of exclusion that society has always monumentality of man's organized utterance-is an employed). own in the perceptions he has of history and lan. but he has must ask whether such an archeological project as never. of history. in a large. and is necessarily caught between conflicting pressures neither are dropping out. write-again. the possibility cannot restore what Benjamin calls tion put together. discourse reduces the author's writing. alas there is no disinterested that his decision to study penal laws is a beginning language. on the one hand.This. When he exploitation by the discourse. be a re-assertion of a Those observations comprise the rational ele- discourse concerning crime in contemporary France. by almost into a fetish or a commodity (called. Every writer. act. What he has already said about discourse evident: so long as one recognizes that there is such leaves this particular undertaking prey to the doubt a thing as knowledge. but it of being already inserted in the order of discourse. that may. As with most contemporary writ. how much exploitation says that he presents not a theory but a possibility of whatever silent voices may be hidden and ex. begin a new system of radicalism and also to the radical nationalism of the thought about crime. it is therefore outside notable examples." an invitation to the intellectual to see knowledge how much exploitation of the discourse. Archeology has sought ers Foucault is saturated with their discoveries and to describe systematically the systematic exchanges emboldened by their examples. of interpretation) and rational exposition as to give that understanding. Quite the contrary. is when the distance between them is not made either And yet Foucault himself in his work says. consciousness of work rationally on this basis. the recitation of revolu- which. original things. an al- This vacillation I take to be of the greatest in. ophies of unrepeatable revolution for study and pressed races everywhere under its domination. Similarly. Although they are very much he writes. I think. Foucault's array of "anonymous addresses others and his own sense of himself. indeed is. tionary-sounding slogans. as a the fortunate essence of language should be quite discourse. repetition. or empty appeals to a are ultimately cultural and political. he says later. as a rational method of understanding. organized. since Foucault has non-Western world. tion and re-combining of "the order of discourse. peated insistence upon their anonymity. ment of Foucault's relevance to Western cultural but may. repetition. most physical presence. allay olution is derided as the repetition of hopeless uto- this fear of responsibility. how much practically as a collective responsibility. Learning and.