No More Learning

MF: It revealed one thing that came to me as a complete surprise: that man didn't exist within classical knowledge {savoir). What existed in the place where we now discover man was the power special to discourse, to the verbal order, to represent the order of things. In order to study the grammar or the system of wealth, there was no need to pass through a science of man, but through discourse.
? Q: Yet, apparently, if ever a literature seemed to speak of man, it was our literature of the 17th century.
MF: Insofar as what existed in classical knowledge were representations ordered in a discourse, all the notions
? ? 6 The Order of Things
? that are fundamental for our conception of man, like those of life, work, and language, had no basis in that period, and no place.
At the end of the 17th century, discourse ceased to play the organizing role that it had in classical knowledge. There was no longer any transparence between the order of things and the representations that one could have of them; things were folded somehow onto their own thickness and onto a demand exterior to representation, and it's for this rea- son that languages with their history, hfe with its organization and its autonomy, and work with its own capacity for produc- tion appeared. In the face of that, in the lacuna left by dis- course, man constituted himself, a man who is as much one who hves, who speaks and who works, as one who experi- ences life, language and work, as one finally who can be known to the extent that he lives, speaks and works.
Q: Against this background how does our situation today present itself?
? MF: At the moment we find ourselves in a very ambiguous situation. Man has existed since the beginning of the 19th century only because discourse ceased to have the force of law over the empirical world. Man has existed there where discourse was silenced. Yet with Saussure, Freud and Hegel, at the heart of what is most fundamental in the knowl- edge of man, the problem of meaning and the sign reappeared. Now one can wonder if this return of the great problem of the sign and meaning, of the order of signs, constitutes a kind of superimposition in our culture over what had constituted the classical age and modernity, or rather if it's a question of omens announcing that man is disappearing, since until the present the order of man and that of signs have in our culture been incompatible with each other. Man would die from the
? The Order of Things 7
? signs that were bom in him--that's what Nietzsche, the first one to see this, meant.
Q: It seems to me that this idea of an incompatability between the OTder of signs and the order of man must have a certain number of consequences.
MF; Yes. For example;
1. It makes an idle fancy of the idea of a science of
man that would be at the same time an analysis of signs.
2. It announces the first deterioration in European history of the anthropological and humanist episode that we experienced in the 19th century, when one thought that the sciences of man would be at the same time the liberation of man, of the human being in his plenitude. Experience has shown that in their development the sciences of man lead to
the disappearance of man rather than to his apotheosis.
? 3. Literature, whose status changed in the 19th cen- tury when it ceased to belong to the order of discourse and became the manifestation of language in its thickness, must no doubt now assume another status, is assuming another status, and the hesitation that it manifests between the vague human- isms and the pure formalism of language is no doubt only one of the manifestations of this phenomenon that is fundamental for us and which makes us oscillate between interpretation and formalization, man and signs.
Q; Thus one sees clearly the great determinations of French literature since the classical age take form; in particu- lar, the scheme that leads from a first humanism, that of Ro- manticism, to Flaubert, then to this literature of the subject incarnated in the generation of the Nouvelle Revue Franc? aise, to the new humanism of before and after the war, and today to the formation of the nouveau roman. Yet German literature
? ? 8 The Order of Things
? holds this kind of evolutionary scheme in check, however one envisages it.
MF; Perhaps insofar as German classicism was con- temporary with this age of history and interpretation, German literature found itself from its origins in this confrontation that we are experiencing today. That would explain why Nietzsche didn't do anything but become aware of this situation, and now he's the one who serves as a Hght for us.
Q; That would explain why he can appear through- out your book as the exemplary figure, the non-archeologiz- able subject (or not yet), since it is starting from what he opened that the question is posed in all its violence.
? MF; Yes, he is the one who through German culture understood that the rediscovery of the dimension proper to language is incompatible with man. From that point Nietzsche has taken a prophetic value for us. And then on the other hand it is necessary to condemn with the most complete severity all the attempts to dull the problem. For example, the use of the most familiar notions of the 18th century, the schemes of re- semblance and contiguity, all of that which is used to build the human sciences, to found them, all that appears to me to be a form of intellectual cowardice that serves to confirm what Nietzsche signified to us for almost a century, that where there is a sign, there man cannot be, and that where one makes signs speak, there man must fall silent.
What appears to me to be deceiving and naive in reflections on and analyses of signs is that one supposes them to be always already there, deposited on the figure of the world, or consituted by men, and that one never investigates their being. What does it mean, the fact that there are signs and marks of language? One must pose the problem of the
? ? The Order of Things 9
? being of language as a task, in order not to fall back to a level of reflection which would be that of the 18th century, to the level of empiricism.
Q: One thing in your book struck me very sharply, the perfect singularity of its position towards philosophy, the philosophical tradition and history on the one hand, and on the other towards the history of ideas, methods and concepts.
MF: I was shocked by the fact that there existed on one side a history of philosophy which gave itself as a privileged object the philosophical edifices that the tradition signaled as important (at the very most one accepted, when one was a little trendy, to relate them to the birth of industrial capitalism), and on the other side a history of ideas, that is to say sub-philosophies, which took for their privileged object the texts of Montesquieu, Diderot or FonteneUe.
? If one adds to that the histories of the sciences, one cannot fail to be struck by the impossibility for our culture to pose the problem of the history of its own thought. It's why I have tried to make, obviously in a rather particular style, the history not of thought in general but of all that "contains thought" in a culture, of all in which there is thought. For there is thought in philosophy, but also in a novel, in jurisprudence, in law, in an administrative system, in a prison. A
? Translated by John Johnston
? 10 The Order of Things
? Notes
? 'In the case of Foucault's use of the terms savoir and connais- sance, I have retained the French in parantheses in order to preserve a distinction not available in English. (Translator)
? ^The "practico-inert" is a historical category developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). The practico-inert field is a structure that unifies individuals from without (e. g. , common interest).
? 'Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), first published in 1916, is at the origin of the modem science of signs, or semiotics.
? 2
The Discourse of History
? Q: The double reception given to your book--criti- cal and public, enthusiastic and reticent--prompts a follow-up interview to the one you gave more than a year ago, where you laid out the nature and the field of your research. Which ap- pears to you to be the most striking reaction raised by The Order of Things?
? MF: I was struck by the following fact: professional historians recognized it as a work of history, and many others, who think of history as an old idea and no doubt feel it to be very outmoded today, cried out at the murder of history.
? Q: Does it not seem to you that the form of the book--mean by that as much the absence of detailed notes and bibliographies, accumulated and acknowledged refer- ences, customary for this kind of work, as the mirror play con- stituted by Las Meninas and your style itself--has not this form helped to mask its nature?
? MF; No doubt the presentation of the book is not indifferent to these things, but above all I believe that certain people are ignorant of the very important mutation in
? 12 The Discourse of History
? historical knowledge (savoir) already more than twenty years old. One knows that the books of Dume? zil,' Le? vi-Strauss and Lacan count among the major books of our time, but is it simi- larly known that, among the works that assure a new adven- ture in knowledge today, one must put the books of Braudel, Furet and Denis Richet, Leroy-Ladurie, the research of the Cambridge historical school and of the Soviet school? ^
? Q; You thus situate yourself deliberately as an histo- rian. To what do you attribute this ignorance?
? MF: History, I believe, has become the object of a curious sacralization. For many intellectuals, a distant respect for history, uninformed and traditionalist, was the simplest way of reconciling their political conscience and their activity as researchers or writers. Under the sign of the cross of his- tory, every discourse became a prayer to the God of just causes. There is next a more technicd reason. One must rec- ognize that in domains like linguistics, anthropology, history of religion and sociology, the concepts, formed in the 19th century and of a dialectical order, one can say, have been for the most part abandoned. Yet, in the eyes of certain people, history as a discipline constituted the last refuge of the dialec- tical order: in it one could save the reign of rational contradic- tion. Thus, for these two reasons and against all likelihood, a conception of history organized on the narrative model as a great sequence of events caught up in a hierarchy of determi- nations: individuals are grasped at the interior of this totality which transcends them and plays with them but of which they are perhaps at the same time the badly conscious authors. To the point that this history, simultaneously an individual project and a totality, has for some become untouchable: to refuse such a form of historical statement would be to attack the great cause of the revolution.
? The Discourse of History 13
? Q: The novelty of the historical works you allude to consists in what exactly?
MF: One can characterize them a little schematically as follows:
? 1. These historians are posing the very difficult prob- lem of periodization. They have perceived that the manifest periodization highlighted by political revolutions was not al- ways methodologically the best way possible to mark things out.
? 2. Each periodization marks out in history a certain level of events, and, inversely, each layer of events calls for its own periodization. There lies a delicate set of problems, since, according to the level one chooses, one will have to delimit different periodizations, and according to the periodization that one is given, one will attain different levels. Thus one accedes to a complex methodology of discontinuity.
? 3. The old traditional opposition between the human sciences and history (the first studying the synchronic and the non-evolutionary, the second analyzing the dimension of ceaseless great changes) disappears; change can be the object of analysis in terms of structure, and historical discourse is populated with analyses borrowed from ethnology, sociology, and the human sciences.
4. One introduces into historical analysis many more types of relationship and modes of linkage than the universal relation of causality through which one had formerly wanted to define historical method.
Thus, for the first time perhaps, one has the possibil- ity of analyzing as an object a set of materials which have been deposited in the course of time in the form of signs, traces, institutions, practices and works, etc. In all these changes there are two essential manifestations:
? 14 The Discourse of History
(a) On the historians' side, the works of Braudel, the Cambridge school, the Russian school, etc.
(b) The very remarkable critique and analysis of the notion of history developed by Althusser at the beginning of Reading Capital. '^
Q: Thus you mark a direct kinship between your works and those of Althusser?
MF: Having been his student and owing him much, perhaps I tend to place under his sign an effort that he might challenge, so much that I can't respond to what concerns him. But all the same, I would say: open Althusser's books.
There remains, however, between Althusser and my- self, an obvious difference: he employs the word epistemo- logical break in relation to Marx, while I affirm that Marx does not represent such a break. "
Q: Is not this difference over Marx precisely the most manifest sign of what has appeared to be arguable in your analysis of the structural mutations of knowledge {sa- voir) in the course of the 19th century?
MF: What I said a propos of Marx concerns the precise epistemological domain of political economy. What- ever the importance of the modifications Marx brings to Ricardo's analysis, I do not believe that his economic analyses escape the epistemological space inaugurated by Ricardo. On the other hand, one can suppose that Marx introduced into the historical and political consciousness of men a radical break and that the Marxist theory of society inaugurated an entirely new epistemological field.
? My book bears the sub-title "An archeology of the human sciences": that itself supposes another, which would be
? The Discourse of History 15
? precisely the analysis of knowledge (savoir) and of historical consciousness in the West since the 16th century. And even before having advanced very far in this work, it seemed to me that the great break has to be situated at the level of Marx. Here we are led back to what I was saying earlier: the periodi- zation of domains of knowledge (connaissance) cannot be made in the same way according to the levels where one is positioned. One finds oneself before a kind of superimposition of bricks and the interesting thing, the strange and curious thing, will be to know precisely how and why the epistemo- logical break for the life sciences, economy and language is situated at the beginning of the 19th century, and at the middle of the 19th century for the theory of history and pohtics.
Q: But that's to break deliberately with the tendency to privilege history as the harmonic science of the totality as the Marxist tradition transmits it to us.
? MF: In my opinion this widespread idea is not really to be found in Marx. But I will respond, since in this domain where one is still only broaching possible principles, it is still way too early to pose the problem of the reciprocal determina- tions of these layers. It is not at all impossible that one can discover forms of determination such that all the levels line up and move together in a great regimented step on the bridge of historical progress. But that's only an hypothesis.
? Q: In the articles that attack your book one notices the words "to freeze history," which return like a leitmotif and seem to formulate the more fundamental accusation, which puts into question as much your conceptual scheme as the narrative technique it implies, in fact the very possibility, as you intend to do it, of formulating a logic of mutation. What do you think of this objection?
? 7
? ? 16 The Discourse of History
? MF: In what is called the history of ideas one de- scribes change in general by making things easy in two ways:
? (1) One uses concepts which appear to me to be a little magical, like influence, crisis, the coming to conscious- ness {la prise de conscience), the interest taken in a problem, etc. All utilitarian, they do not appear to me to be operating.
? (2) When one encounters a difficulty, one passes from the level of analysis which is that of the statements them- selves to another which is exterior to it. Thus, when con- fronted with a change, a contradiction or an incoherence, one resorts to an explanation in terms of social conditions, mental- ity, vision of the world, etc.
? I wanted, through a methodological move, to do without all that; consequently, I have striven to describe state- ments, entire groups of statements, by making the relations of implication, of opposition and exclusion which could link them appear.
? I am told for example that I have admitted or in- vented an absolute break between the end of the 18th centmry and the beginning of the 19th. In fact, when one carefully examines the scientific discourse of the end of the 18th cen- tury, one notices a very rapid and in truth a very enigmatic change. I wanted to describe this change very precisely, in other words to establish the transformations necessary and suf- ficient for passing from the initial form of scientific disourse, that of the 18th century, to its final form, that of the 19th. The set for transformations that I have defined maintains a certain number of theoretical elements, displaces certain others, sees old ones, disappear and new ones arise; all that allows me to define the rule of passage in the domains 1 have focused upon. What I have wanted to establish is the very contrary of a discontinuity, since I have made manifest the very form of passage from one state to another.
? The Discourse of History 17
? ? ? (2) One can very well reconsider these texts, and the material itself that I have treated, in a description that would
have another periodization and would be situated at another
level. When one makes an archeology of historical knowledge (savoir) for example, it will be necessary to utihze again the
texts on language and to relate them to exegetical techniques,
the criticism of sources, and to all knowledge (savoir) con-
cerning the holy scriptures and the historic tradition; their de- scription will then be different. But these descriptions, if they
are exact, must be such that one can define the transformations
that permit one to pass from one to the other.
In one sense description is therefore infinite, in an- other it is closed, to the extent that it tends to establish a
? Q: I wonder if the equivocation doesn't derive from the difficulty of thinking side by side the terms of the change and passage on the one hand, and the picture and the descrip- tion on the other.
MF: All the same, it's been more than fifty years since we perceived that the task of description was essential in domains like those of history, ethnology and language. After all, mathematical language since Galileo and Newton doesn't function as an explanation of nature but as a description of a process. I don't see why one should contest the attempt of non-formalized disciplines like history to undertake for them- selves the first task of description.
Q: How do you conceive the methodological orienta- tion of this first task?
MF: (1) One must be able, if what I have said is true, to account for and analyze exactly the texts I've discussed according to the same schemes by bringing to them several supplementary transformations.
? ? 18 The Discourse of History
? theoretical model capable of accounting for relations that exist between the discourse studied.
? Q: It would seem that it is precisely this double character of description that by its very nature creates the reti- cence or the bewilderment, since histoiy thus finds itself at once directly grafted onto the infinity of its archives, therefore onto the non-sense proper to every infinity, and mastered in the models whose formal character challenges in its very logic the non-sense belonging to every closure of an internal charac- ter. And the effect is all the more powerful as your book observes an absolute distance towards what one could call "living history," where the practice, whatever the theoretical level at which one sohcits it and the models in which its inde- fatigable diversity can be enclosed, turns the non-sense into a sort of familiarity in a "natural" world of actions and institu- tions. How do you understand this break on which The Order of Things is established?
? MF: In wanting to engage in a rigorous description of the statements themselves, it appeared to me that the do- main of statements very much obeyed certain formal laws, that one could for example discover a single theoretical model for different epistemological domains and that one could, in this sense, infer an autonomy of discouse. But there is no reason for describing this autonomous layer of discourse except to the extent that one can relate it to other layers, practices, institu- tions, social and political relations, etc. It is this relationship that has always haunted me, and in Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic I wanted precisely to define the different relationships between these different domains. I took for example the epistemological domain of medicine and that of the institutions of repression, of hospitalization, of aid to the unemployed, of administrative control over public health.
? The Discourse of History 19
? etc. But I perceived that things were more complicated than I had believed in the first two works, that the discursive do- mains didn't always obey the structures that had common practical domains and associated institutions, that they obeyed on the other hand structures common to other epistemological domains, that there was something like an isomorphism of discourses for a given period. In such a way that one finds oneself before two axes of perpendicular description: that of theoretical models common to several discourses, and that of relationships between a discursive domain and a non-discur- sive domain. In The Order of Things I traversed the hori- zontal axis, in Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic the vertical dimension of the figure.
? For the first, let someone undertake to show me, us- ing texts as a basis, that such a theoretical coherence among discourses doesn't exist and a real discussion could begin. As for minimizing the domain of practice, my preceding books are there to show that I am far fi'om doing that; for their relationship I'll refer to an illustrative example. When Du- me? zil demonstrates that the Roman reUgion has an isomorphic relationship with Scandinavian or Celtic legends or some Ira- nian rite, he doesn't mean that Roman religion doesn't have its place within Roman history, that the history of Rome doesn't exist, but that one cannot describe the history of Roman reli- gion, its relationships with institutions, social classes and eco- nomic conditions except by taking into account its internal morphology. In the same way, to demonstrate that the scien- tific discourses of a period stem from a common theoretical model does not mean that they escape history and float in the air as if disembodied and isolated, but that one cannot write the history and the analysis of the functioning of the role of this knowledge (savoir), the conditions that give rise to it, and the manner in which it is rooted in the society without taking into account the force and consistency of these isomorphisms.
?
20 The Discourse of History
? Q: This objectivity that you accord to theoretical models in view of an extensive analysis of history as a science and, for the constitution of these models, to the descriptive logic as such, obliges us to investigate the point of departure of this description, its source in some sense, which amounts in the case of a book as personal as yours to trying to understand the relationship of the author and his text, what place exactly it can, wants to, and must occupy.
? MF: I can't respond to that without plunging into the book itself. If the style of analysis that I tried to formulate in it is admissible, one should be able to define the theoretical model to which not only my book, but those which belong to the same configuration of knowledge (savoir) also belong. No doubt it is one that permits us today to treat history as a set of statements actually articulated, to treat language as an object of description and as a set of relationships in reference to discourse and to statements which make up the object of inter- pretation. It is our period and it alone that makes possible the appearance of this set of texts that treat grammar, natural his- tory and political economy as so many objects.
? So much in fact that the author, in that and only in that, constitutes that of which he speaks. My book is a pure and simple "fiction": it's a novel, but it's not I who invented it; it is the relationship between our period and its epistemo- logical configuration and this mass of statements. So much that the subject is indeed present in the totality of the book, but he is the anonymous "one" who speaks today in all that is said.
? Q: How do you understand the status of this anon- ymous "one"?
MF: Perhaps we are undoing little by little, and not without great difficulty, the great distrust in allegory. I mean
? ? The Discourse of History 21
? by that the simple idea that consists in demanding from a text nothing but what the text says truly beneath what it really says. No doubt that's the heritage of an ancient exegetical tra- dition: underneath everything said, we suspect that another thing is being said. The laic version of this allegorical mistrust has had the effect of assigning to every commentator the task of discovering everywhere the true thought of the author, what he said without saying it, meant without succeeding to say it, wanted to hide and yet allowed to appear. One perceives that today there are many other possibilities for dealing with lan- guage. Thus the contemporary critic--and this is what distin- guishes him from what was done still very recently--^is formu- lating, according to the diverse texts that he smdies, his object- texts, a sort of new combinatory. Instead of reconstituting its immanent secret, he grasps the text as a set of elements (words, metaphors, literary forms, a set of narratives) among which one can make absolutely new relations appear insofar as they have not been mastered by the writer's project and are made possible only through the work as such. The formal relations that one thus discovers were not present in the mind of anyone, they do not constitute the latent content of state- ments, their indiscreet secret; they are a construction, but an exact construction as long as the relations thus described can actually be assigned to the materials treated. We have learned to put the words of men into yet unformulated relationships
stated by us for the first time, and yet objectively exact.
? Thus the contemporary critic is abandoning the great yth of interiority: intimior intimio ejus. He finds himself tally displaced from the old themes of locked enclosures, of e treasure in the box that he habitually sought in the depth of e work's container. Placing himself at the exterior of the xt, he constitutes a new exterior for it, writing texts out of xts.
m to th th te te
? 22 The Discourse of History
? Q: In terms of that description it seems to me that modem literary criticism, in its very richness and multiple contributions, is guilty of marking in one sense a curious regression in relation to one in whom it found the essential of its demands: I mean Maurice Blanchot. For if Blanchot, under the name of "Literature," actually won for the space of modem thought the imperious exteriority of the text, he in no way attributed to himself this facility that tends to avoid the violence of the work as place of the name and of a biography whose secret, precisely, is to be diversely traversed by the irreducible and abstract force of the literamre whose vigorous itinerary Blanchot retraces, in each case, without caring to describe it as such in the logic of its forms, as a more learned critic would want to.
? MF: It's true that it is Blanchot who has made all discourse on hterature possible. First of all because he's the one who has shown above all that works are linked to one another through this exterior face of their language where "lit- erature" appears. Literature is thus what constitutes the outside of every work, what ploughs up every written language and leaves on every text an empty claw mark. It is not a mode of language, but a hollow that traverses like a great movement all literary languages. By making this instance of literature appear as a "common place," an empty space where works come to lodge themselves, I believe that he has assigned to the contem- porary critic what must be his object, what makes his work both of exactitude and invention possible.
? One can affirm on the other hand that Blanchot has made it possible by instituting between the author and the work a mode of relationship that had remained unsuspected. We now know that the work does not belong to the author's project, nor even to the one of his existence, that it maintains with him relationships of negation and destruction, that it is
? The Discourse of History 23
? for him the flowing of an eternal outside, and that yet there exists beween them this primordial function of the name. It is through the name that in a work a modality irreducible to the anonymous murmur of all other languages is marked. It is certain that the contemporary literary critic has not yet really investigated this existence of the name that Blanchot has pro- posed for him. He really ought to deal with it, since the name marks for the work its relations of opposition, of difference with other works, and since it characterizes absolutely the mode of being of the literary work in a culture and in institu- tions like ours. After all, it's now been five or six centuries since the anonymous, apart from exceptional cases, has disap- peared completely from literary language and its functioning.
? Q: It's for that reason, I think, that the lesson of Blan- chot, compared with the technical critiques towards which he maintains an equal distance, finds a more accurate echo in an interpretation of the psychoanalytic type, which maintains it- self by definition in the space of the subject, than in the lin- guistic type of interpretation, where often the risk of mechani- cal abstraction arises.
? What is precisely important and problematic in cer- tain research of the "scientific" type like yours is a somewhat new relationship of familiarity that they appear to maintain with the more explicitly "subjective" works of hterature.
? MF: It would be very interesting to know of what the designatable, "nameable" individuality of a scientific work consists; those of Abel or Lagrange for example are marked by characteristics of writing that individualize them, as surely as a painting by Titian or page of Chateaubriand. And simi- larly for the philosophic or descriptive writings of Linnaeus or Buffon. They are caught up however in the network of all those who speak of "the same thing," who are contemporary to
? 24 The Discourse of History
? them or follow them: this network that envelopes them out- lines these great figures without a social identity that one calls "mathematics," "history," or "biology. "
? The problem of the singularity or the relation be- tween the name and the network is an old problem, but in former times there existed certain kinds of channels and marked paths that separated literary works, works on physics or mathematics and historical works from one another; each one evolved on its own level and in some way in the territory where it was assigned, in spite of a whole set of overlappings, borrowings and resemblances. One can note today that all this dividing up, this separation, is being effaced or being reconsti- tuted in another mode altogether. Thus the relations between linguistics and literary works, between music and mathemat- ics, the discourse of historians and economists are no longer simply of an order of borrowing, imitation or involuntary anal- ogy, nor even of structural isomorphism; these works and pro- gressions are formed in relation to one another and exist for one another. There is a literature of linguistics and not an influence of grammarians on the grammar and the vocabulary of novelists. In the same way, mathematics is not applicable to the construction of musical language, as at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 19th; it actually constitutes the formal universe of the musical work itself. In such a way that one is witness to a general and vertiginous effacement of the old distribution of languages.
? One says gladly that nothing else today interests us but language and that it has become the universal object. We must not make a mistake there: this sovereignty is the provi- sional, equivocal, precarious sovereignty of a tribe in migra- tion. Of course we are interested in language; yet it's not that we have finally entered into its possession, but rather that it escapes us more than ever before. Its boundaries have col- lapsed and its calm universe has entered into fusion; and if we
? The Discourse of History 25
? are submerged, it is not so much through its intemporal vigor as through the movement today of its wave.
Q: How do you situate yourself personally in this mutation that pulls the most demanding works of knowledge (savoir) into a sort of novehstic adventure?
MF: In conttast to those whom one calls structural- ists, I am not so interested in the formal possibilities offered by a system like language. Personally I am rather haunted by the existence of discourse, by the fact that particular words have been spoken; these events have functioned in relation to their original situation, they have left traces behind them; they subsist and exercise, in this subsistence even within history, a certain number of manifest or secret functions.
Q: Thus you yield to the passion proper to the histo- rian who wants to respond to the infinite rumor of the ar- chives.
MF: Yes, for my object is not language but the ar- chive, that is to say the accumulated existence of discourse. Archeology, such as I intend it, is kin neither to geology (as analysis of the sub-soil), nor to genealogy (as descriptions of beginnings and sequences); it's the analysis of discourse in its modality of archive.
A nightmare has pursued me since childhood: I have under my eyes a text that I can't read, or of which only a tiny part can be deciphered; I pretend to read it, but I know that I'm inventing; then the text suddenly blurs completely, I can no longer read anything or even invent, my throat constricts and I wake up.
? I don't know what tiiere can be of the personal in this obsession with language, which exists everywhere and escapes
? 26 The Discourse of History
? us in its very survival. It survives by turning its look away from us, its face inclined toward a night of which we know nothing.
? How justify these discourses on discourse that I un- dertake? What status do we give them? One begins to per- ceive, above all on the side of logicians and the students of Russell and Wittgenstein, that language can be analyzed in terms of its formal properties only on the condition of taking account of its concrete functioning. Language is very much a set of structures, but discourses are unities of function, and the analysis of language in its totality cannot fail to confront this essential demand. To this extent what I do is located in the general anonymity of all the research which today turns around language, that is to say not only the language that permits us to speak, but the discourses that have been spoken.
? Q: More precisely, what do you mean by this idea of the anonymous?
? MF: I wonder if we're not discovering again today, in the relationship of the name to the anonymous, a certain transposition of the old classic problem of the individual and the truth, or of the individual and beauty. How is it that an individual bom at a given moment, having such a history and such a face, can discover, by himself and for the first time, some truth, perhaps even the truth? That's the question to which Descartes responds in the Meditations: how could I discover the tmth? And many years later we find it again in the romantic theme of the genius; How can an individual lodged in a fold of history discover the forms of beauty in which the whole trath of a period or of a civilization is ex- pressed? The problem today is no longer posed in these terms: we are no longer in the truth but in the coherence of discourse, no longer in beauty, but in the complex relations of forms. It's
? The Discourse of History 27
? a question now of knowing how an individual, a name, can be the support of an element or group of elements that, in being integrated into the coherence of discourses or the indefinite network of forms, comes to efface or at least to render empty and useless this name, this individuality of which he bears however to a certain point, for a certain time and in certain respects, the mark. We have to conquer the anonymous, to justify for ourselves the enormous presumption of one day finally becoming anonymous, a littie like the classics had to justify for themselves the enormous presumption of having found the truth, and of attaching their names to it. The prob- lem in the past for the one who wrote was to tear himself out of the anonymity of everything; nowadays, it's to succeed in effacing one's own name and of coming to lodge one's voice in this great anonymous murmur of discourses held today.
Q: Does it not seem to you however that it's there, as soon as the movement is pushed to the extreme, that we enter into the double game of affirmation and effacement of the word and silence, of which Blanchot makes the essence of the literary act, when he assigns to the work the chosen function of a rich abode of silence facing the insupportable immensity of speech without which, however, it would not exist? When Le? vi-Strauss says of The Raw and the Cooked:^ "Thus this book on myths, is, in its way, a myth" he has seen the sover- eign impersonality of myth, and yet few books, from this very fact, are as personal as his Mythologies. You are, in a very different way, in a similar situation in relation to history.
MF: What gives books like those which have no other pretension than to be anonymous so many marks of sin- gularity and individuality are not the privileged signs of a style, nor the mark of a singular or individual interpretation, but the rage to apply the eraser by which one meticulously
? 28 The Discourse of History
? effaces all that could refer to a written individuality. Between writers and people who write (e? crivants) there are the effac- ers. (R)
? Bourbaki is at bottom the model. The dream for all of us would be, each in his own domain, to make something like this Bourbaki, where mathematics is elaborated under the ano- nymity of a fantastic name. Perhaps the irreducible difference between research in mathematics and our activities is that the eraser marks intended to attain the anonymous indicate more surely the signature of a name than the ostentatious penholder. And yet one could say that Bourbaki has his style and very much his own way of being anonymous.
? Q: Like your reference to the classic relation of the individual, this leads me to think that the author's position in this kind of research seems like a doubling of that of the philosopher, always ambiguous, between science and litera- ture. In this sense, what do you think is the modem status of philosophy?
MF: It seems to me that philosophy no longer exists; not that it has disappeared, but it has been disseminated into a great number of diverse activities. Thus the activities of the axiomatician, the linguist, the anthropologist, the historian, the revolutionary, the man of politics can be forms of philosophi- cal activity. In the 19th century the reflection that investigated the condition of possibility of objects was philosophical; today philosophy is every activity that makes a new object appear for knowledge or practice--rwhether this activity stems from mathematics, linguistics, anthropology or history.
? Q; Nevertheless, in the last chapter of The Order of Things, where you deal with the human sciences today, you accord to history a privilege over all other disciplines. Would
? The Discourse of History 29
? it therefore be a new way of rediscovering this power of syn- thetic legislation that used to be the proper privilege of philo- sophic thought, and that Heidegger already recognized not as that of traditional philosophy, but as "history of philosophy"?
? MF; Indeed, history does retain, in relation to my investigation, a privileged position. It's because in our culture, at least for several centuries, discourse has been linked to- gether through history as a mode: we receive things which have been spoken as if they come from a past where they succeeded one another, were opposed, influenced, replaced, engendered and accumulated. The cultures "without history" are obviously not those where there was neither event, nor evolution, nor revolution, but where discourses were not added together according history as a mode; they are juxta- posed; they replace one another; they are forgotten; they are transformed. On the other hand, in a culture like ours, every discourse appears against the background of the disappearance of every event.
That's why in studying a set of theoretical discourses concerning language, economy and living beings I did not want to establish a priori the possibilities or impossibilities of such knowledges--this is an element of birth, that of survival, etc. I wanted to do an historian's work by showing the simul- taneous functioning of these discourses and the transforma- tions which accounted for their visible changes.
? But history for all that does not have to play the role of a philosophy of philosophy, to pride itself in being the language of languages, as the historicism which tended to pass to the account of history the legislative and critical power of philosophy wanted it in the 19th century. If history possesses a privilege, it would be rather to the extent to which it would play the role of an internal ethnology of our culture and of our rationality, and would consequently incarnate the very possi- bility of every ethnology.
? 30 The Discourse of History
? Q: I would like, after this long detour, to return to the book, and to ask you the reason for this gap that one senses in your position when one passes from the analysis of the 17th and 18th centuries to that of the 19th and 20th centuries, a gap which has been the object of some of the most lively reserva- tions formulated towards your work.
? MF; Yes, something seems to change with the 19th century in the arrangement of the book. The same thing oc- curred in Madness and Civilization: people assumed that I wanted to attack modem psychiatry and in The Order of Things that I was being polemical towards the thought of the 19th century. In fact there is a very big difference in the two analyses. I can indeed define the classical age in its own con- figuration through the double difference that opposes it to the 16th century on one hand and to the 19th on the other. On the other hand, I can define the modem age in its singularity only by opposing it to the 17th century on one hand and to us on the other; it is necessary, therefore, in order to be able to continuously establish the division, to make the difference that separates us from them surge up under each one of our sen- tences. From this modem age which begins around 1790-1810 and goes to around 1950, it's a matter of detaching onself, whereas for the classical age it's only a matter of describing it.
? The apparently polemical character stems from the fact that it's a question of hollowing out the whole mass of discourse that's accumulated under our feet. One can discover from a gradual movement the old latent configurations; but as soon as it's a matter of determining the system of discourse within which we are still living, at the moment we are obliged to put into question the words that still resonate in our ears and which are indistinguishable from those we are trying to speak, then the archeologist, like the Nietzschean philosopher, is forced to resort to the blows of the hammer.
? The Discourse of History 31
? Q: The unique and enthusiastic status that you ac- cord to Nietzsche--^is it not the most manifest sign of this irre- mediable gap?
? MF: If I had to begin again this book that I finished two years ago, I would try not to give Nietzsche this ambig- uous status, absolutely privileged and meta-historical, that I gave him out of weakness. It is due to the fact that no doubt my archeology owes more to the Nietzschean genealogy than to structuralism properly called.
? Q: But how, in this case, can you render Nietzsche to the archeologist without the risk of being as false towards the one as towards the other? It seems that there is in the very fact an insurmountable contradiction. I see it, in your book, in the figured form of a conflict in principle between Nietzsche and Las Meninas. For, without resorting to a facile play on your predilection for spatial metaphors, it is clear that the painting proves to be the privileged place, as it is, in one sense, for all structuralism: it is there, I think, that you compare the ano- nymity of the present with that of the 17th century, in the name of an idea of reading that can arrange history in a paint- ing as well as in the Borges text on the Chinese encyclopedia where your book has its "place of birth," in the very move- ment of historical evolution. That's why the 19th century, where history is invented in the form of a gap between signs and men, is the object of debate, and our period the hope of a new resolution through an attempt to re-integrate the historical subject into,the space of the painting in a new anonymity.
? Is not Nietzsche precisely the place where all the signs converge in the irreducible dimension of a subject, an- onymous by dint of being himself, anonymous by dint of in- corporating the totality of voices in the form of a fragmentary
? 32 The Discourse of History
? discourse; and is it not in that the extreme and exemplary form of thought and of all expression as autobiography without re- mainder, which is always lacking in the space of the painting just as in the time of history, where it is and is not, for one cannot say it but in the sense of its own madness and not through recourse to an exterior law? Thus the fact that Nietzsche, and with him a certain truth of literature, escapes your book, which owes him so much and brings so much to him, doesn't this fact bear witness of the impossibility of all discourse at the same level? And even that, in the form of your presence in the book, is it not to the exact measure of the impossible anonymity you don, which to be total, can only signify today a world without the written word or, to the point of madness, the circular literalness of Nietzsche?
? MF: It is difficult to respond to this question; for it is from it, at bottom, that all your questions come, and as a consequence our whole dialogue; it is what supports the pas- sionate interest, a little aloof, that you bring to all that is hap- pening around you, and to the generations that precede you; from this question comes your desire to write and to ask ques- tions. Here then begins the interview with Raymond Bellour conducted by Michel Foucault, an interview that has gone on for several years and from which perhaps one day Les Lettres
franc? aises will publish a fragment. A
? Translated by John Johnston
? The Discourse of History 33
? Notes
Georges Dume? zil inaugurated a new era in the study of Indo- European mythologies and religions.
? Fernand Braudel, Franc? ois Furet, Denis Richet and Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie belong to the Annales school of French histo- rians, founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, which champions the study of "total history". See Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranen World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), and Leroy- Ladurie's The Mind and Method of the Historian (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981),
? Louis Althusser, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1979).
? The epistemological break is a concept introduced into the philosophy of science by Gaston Bachelard, and employed by Althusser in his reading of Marx.
? Claude Le? vi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Octagon, 1979).
? The distinction between writers and e? crivants (people who use writing for other purposes) was introduced by Roland Barthes in Critical Essays (Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972).
? 3
? Foucault Responds to Sartre
? Q; Michel Foucault, it is said, perhaps against your will, that you are a philosopher. What is philosophy for you?
? MF: There was the great period of contemporary philosophy, that of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, in which a philosophical text, a theoretical text, finally had to tell you what life, death, and sexuality were, if God existed or not, what liberty consisted of, what one had to do in political life, how to behave in regard to others, and so forth. One has the impression that this kind of philosophy is now obsolete, that philosophy if you like has if not vanished has at least been dis- persed, and that there is a theoretical work that somehow joins together in the plural.