No More Learning

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. Theory, the philosophic activity, is being produced in different domains that are separate from one other. There is a theoretical activity produced in the field of mathematics, a theoretical activity that manifests itself in the domain of linguistics or mythology or the history of religion, or simply in the domain of history itself. Finally, it is in this kind of plurality of theoretical work that a philosophy is being carried out which has not yet found its unique thinker and its unity of discourse.
? 36 Foucault Responds to Sartre
? Q: When did this rupture between the two moments occur?
MF; It was around 1950-55, at a time moreover exactly when Sartre himself renounced, I believe, what one could call philosophical speculation properly speaking, and when finally he invested his own philosophical activity in be- havior that was pohtical.
Q; You wrote in the conclusion of your work The Order of Things that man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed to human knowledge (savoir). Man, you say, is an invention of which the archeol- ogy of our thought shows the recent date and perhaps the coining end. It's one of the sentences that has stirred up read- ers the most. In your opinion what is man's date of birth in the space of knowledge?
MF: The 19th century was the century when a cer- tain number of very important things were invented, microbi- ology and electromagnetism for example; it's also the century when the human sciences were invented. To invent the human sciences apparently me^t to make of man the object of a possible knowledge (savoir). It was to constitute man as an object of knowledge (connaissance). Yet, in this same 19th century one hoped, one dreamed the great eschatological myth of the 19th century, which was somehow to make this knowl- edge (connaissance) of man exist so that man could be liber- ated by it from his alienations, liberated from all the determi- nations of which he was not the master, so that he could, thanks to this knowledge of himself, become again or for the first time master of himself, self-possessed. In other words, one made of man an object of knowledge so that man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence.
? Foucault Responds to Sartre 37
? Yet what happened--and for this reason one can say that man was bom in the 19 th century--was that insofar as these investigations into man as a possible object of knowl- edge (savoir) were deployed, something very serious was dis- covered: that this famous man, this human nature, this human essence or this essential human feature (ce propre de I'homme) was never discovered. When one analyzed for ex- ample the phenomena of madness or neurosis, what was dis- covered was an unconscious, an unconscious completely trav- ersed by impulses and instincts, an unconscious that func- tioned according to mechanisms and according to a topologi- cal space which had absolutely nothing to do with what one could expect of the human essence, of freedom or human exis- tence, an unconscious that functioned like a language, as has been said recently. And consequently, insofar as man was sought out in his depths, to that extent he disappeared. The further one went, the less one found. And similarly for lan- guage. From the beginning of the 19 th century the human languages had been investigated in order to try and discover some of the great constants of the human mind. It was hoped that, by studying the life of words, the evolution of grammars, by comparing languages to one another, somehow man him- self would be revealed, either in the unity of his face or in his different profiles. Yet, by penetrating into language, what did one find? One found structures, correlations, a system that is in some way quasi-logical, and man, in his liberty, in his exis- tence, there again had disappeared.
? Q: Nietzsche announced the death of God. You fore- see, it would seem, the death of his murderer, man. It's a just tum of things. Isn't the disappearance of man contained in the disappearance of god?
? 38 Foucault Responds to Sartre
? MF: This disappearance of man at the very moment that we sought him in his roots doesn't mean that the human sciences will disappear. I never said that, but rather that the human sciences will now be deployed within a space whose horizon is no longer closed or defined by this humanism. Man disappears in philosophy, not as object of knowledge (savoir) but as subject of freedom and existence. Yet, man as subject of his own consciousness and of his own liberty is really a sort of correlative image of god. Man of the 19th century is god in- carnated in humanity. There was a kind of theologizing of man, a re-descent of god to earth in which god became 19th century man theologized. When Feuerbach said that "we must recuperate on earth the treasures that have been spent in the heavens," he placed in the heart of man the treasures that man had formerly attributed to god. And Nietzsche was the one who by denouncing the death of god at the same time de- nounced this divinized man that the 19th century never ceased to dream. And when Nietzsche armounced the coming of the
superman, what he announced was not the coming of a man who would resemble a god more than a man, but rather the coming of a man who would no longer have any relation with this god whose image he continued to bear.
? Q: Is this the reason that when you speak of the end of this recent invention, you say "perhaps"?
? MF: Of course. I am sure of all this only insofar as it's a matter of doing (of my doing) a diagnosis of the present.
? You were asking me a while ago how and in what way philosophy had changed. Well, perhaps one could say this: philosophy from Hegel to Sartre has essentially been a to- talizing enterprise, if not of the world or of knowledge (sa- voir), at least of human experience. I would say that perhaps if there is now an autonomous philosophical activity, if there can
? Foucault Responds to Sartre 39
? be a philosophy that is not simply a sort of theoretical activity within mathematics or linguistics or ethnology or political economy, if there is a philosophy free or independent of all these domains, then one could define it as a diagnostic activ- ity. To diagnose the present is to say what the present is, and how our present is absolutely different from all that is not it, that is to say, from our past. Perhaps this is the task for phi- losophy now.
Q: How do you define structuralism today?
? MF: When you ask those who are classified under the rubric of "structuralism"--like Le? vi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser and the linguists, etc. --they answer that they have nothing in common with one another, or very little in common. Structu- ralism is a category that exists for others, for those who are not structuraHsts. It's from the outside that one can say that so and so are structuralists. You must ask Sartre who the structuralists are, since he thinks that Le? vi-Strauss, Althusser, Dume? zil, La- can and me constitute a coherent group, a group constituting some kind of unity that we ourselves don't perceive.
? Q: Well then, how would you define your work?
? MF: My own work? As you know, it's very limited. Very schematically, it consists of trying to discover in the history of science and of human knowledge {des connais- sances et du savoir humain) something that would be like its unconscious. My working hypothesis is roughly this: the his- tory of science and of knowledge (des connaissances) doesn't simply obey the general law of reason's progress; it's not hu- man consciousness or human reason that somehow possesses the laws of its history. Underneath what science itself knows there is something it does not know; and its history, its prog-
? 40 Foucault Responds to Sartre
ress {devenir), its periods and accidents obey a certain number of laws and determinations. These laws and determinations are what I have tried to bring to light. I have tried to unearth an autonomous domain that would be the unconscious of science, the unconscious of knowledge (savoir), that would have its own laws, just as the individual human unconscious has its own laws and determinations.
? Q; You just alluded to Sartre. You have saluted his magnificent efforts, efforts which you have said are those of a man of the 19th century trying to think in the 20th. He was even, you have said, the last Marxist. Since then Sartre has re- sponded to you. He reproaches the structuralists for constitut- ing a new ideology, which he calls the last barrier the bour- geoisie can still erect against Marx. What do you think of this?
? MF: I would say two things in response. First, Sartre is a man with too much important work to do--^literary, philo- sophical, political--to have the time to read my book. In fact, he hasn't read it. Consequently, what he says about it can't seem very pertinent to me. Secondly, I'll confess something to you. I was in the Communist Party some time ago for a few months, or a little more than several months, and at that time Sartre was defined for us as the last rampart of bourgeois im- perialism, the last stone of the edifice, etc. So it's with amused astonishment that I find this phrase coming fi-om Sartre's pen now, fifteen years later. Let's say that he and I have turned around the same axis.
? Q: You don't find any originality there?
MF: No, it's a phrase that's been around for twenty years; he uses it, that's his right. He's giving back change for money we once passed to him___
? ? Foucault Responds to Sartre 41
? Q: Sartre reproaches you, and other philosophers as well, for neglecting and showing contempt for history. Is it true?
MF; No historian has ever reproached me for this. There is a sort of myth of History for philosophers. Philoso- phers are generally very ignorant of all other disciplines out- side their own. There is a mathematics for philosophers, a bi- ology for philosophers, and also a History. For philosophers. History is a kind of grand and extensive continuity where the liberty of individuals and economic and social determinations come to be intertwined. If you touch one of these great themes --continuity, the effective exercise of human freedom, the ar- ticulation of individual liberty with social determinations-- then right away these grave gentleman begin to cry rape, and that history has been assassinated. In fact, it was some time ago that people as important as Marc Block, Lucien Fevre and the English historians put an end to this myth of History. They write history in a completely different mode. The philosophi- cal myth of History, this philosophical myth that I am accused
of having murdered, well, I would be delighted if I have killed it, since that was exactly what I wanted to do. But not at all history in general. One doesn't murder history, but history for philosophy. That's what I wanted to kill.
Q: Who are the thinkers, scholars and philosophers who have marked or influenced your intellectual formation?
? MF: I belong to a generation of people for whom the horizon of reflection was defined by Husserl in a general way, Sartre more precisely and Merleau-Ponty even more pre- cisely. It's clear that around 1950-55, for reasons that are equally political, ideological and scientific, and very difficult to straighten out, this horizon toppled for us. Suddenly it van-
?
42 Foucault Responds to Sartre
ished and we found ourselves before a sort of great empty space inside which developments became much less ambi- tious, much more limited and regional. It's clear that linguis- tics in the manner of Jakobson, the history of religions and mythologies in the manner of Dume? zil, were for us invaluable points of support.
Q: How could your position in regard to action and politics be defined?
MF: The French left has lived on a myth of sacred ignorance. What has changed is the idea that political thought can be politically correct only if it is scientifically rigorous. And in this sense, I think that the whole effort made today by a group of communist intellectuals to re-evaluate Marx's con- cepts, to finally grasp them at their roots in order to analyze them and to define the use that one can and must make of them, I think this whole effort is both political and scientific. And the idea that to devote oneself as we are doing now to properly theoretical and speculative activities is to tum away from politics strikes me as completely false. It's not because we are tuming away from politics that we are occupied with such stricdy and meticulously defined theoretical problems, but rather because we realize that every form of political ac- tion can only be articulated in the strictest manner with a rigorous theoretical reflection.
? Q: A philosophy like existentialism encouraged people to action and engagement. You are reproached for hav- ing the opposite attitude.
? MF: Well, that is a reproach. It's normal. But once again, the difference is not that we have now separated politics from theory, but rather to the contrary: insofar as we bring
? Foucault Responds to Sartre 43
? theory and politics more closely together, we refiise this poli- tics of learned ignorance that I believe characterizes the one that is called engagement.
Q: Is it a language or vocabulary that today sepa- rates the philosophers and scholars from the great public and the people with whom they live as contemporaries?
M. ; It seems to me, on the contrary, that today more than ever the transmission of knowledge (savoir) is extensive and efficacious. Knowledge in the 14th and 15th centuries, for example, was defined in a social space that was circular and restricted. Knowledge was a secret, and the authenticity of knowledge was at the same time guaranteed and protected by the fact that this knowledge didn't circulate or circulated only among a stricdy defined number of people; as soon as knowl- edge was made public, it ceased to be knowledge and conse- quently ceased to be true.
? Today we are at a very developed stage of a mutation that began in the 17th and 18 th centuries when knowledge finally became a kind of public thing. To know was to see clearly what every individual placed in the same conditions could see and verify. To that extent the structure of knowledge became public. Everyone possessed knowledge; it's simply not always the same knowledge, with the same degree of for- mation or precision, etc. But there weren't ignorant people on one side and scholars on the other. What happens at one point in knowledge is very quickly reflected at another point. And to this extent, I believe, knowledge has never been more special- ized, yet never has it communicated with itself more quickly. A
? Translated by John Johnston
? The Archeology of Knowledge
? Q: You have entitled your book The Archeology of Knowledge. Why "archeology"?
? MF: For two reasons. I first used the word somewhat blindly, in order to designate a form of analysis that wouldn't at all be a history (in the sense that one recounts the history of inventions or of ideas) and that wouldn't be an epistemology either, that is to say, the internal analysis of the structure of a science. This other thing I have called therefore "archeology. " And then, retrospectively, it seemed to me that chance has not been too bad a guide: after all, this word "archeology" can almost mean--and I hope I will be forgiven for this--descrip- tion of the archive. I mean by archive the set (I'ensemble) of discourses actually pronounced: and this set of discourses is envisaged not only as a set of events which would have taken place once and for all and which would remain in abeyance, in the limbo or purgatory of history, but also as a set that contin- ues to function, to be transformed through history, and to pro- vide the possibility of appearing in other discourses.
? 46 The Archeology of Knowledge
? Q: Isn't there also in archeology the idea of excava- tion, of a search into the past?
? MF: No doubt. The word "archeology" bothers me a little, because it recovers two themes that are not exactly mine. First, the theme of a beginning {commencement), as arche in Greek signifies. Yet I try not to study the begimiing in the sense of the first origin, of a foundation starting from which the rest would be possible. I am not searching for the first solemn moment beginning from which all of Western mathe- matics becomes possible, for example. I don't go back to Eu- clid or Pythagoras. It's always the relative beginnings that I am searching for, more the institutionalizatons or the transforma- tions than the foundings or foundations. And then I'm equally bothered by the idea of excavations. What I'm looking for are not relations that are secret, hidden, more silent or deeper than the consciousness of men. I try on the contrary to define the relations on the very surface of discourse; I attempt to make visible what is invisible only because it's too much on the surface of things.
? Q: You are interested, that is, in the phenomena, and refuse interpretation.
? MF: I'm not looking underneath discourse for the thought of men, but try to grasp discourse in its manifest exis- tence, as a practice that obeys certain rules--of formation, existence, co-existence--and systems of functioning. It is this practice, in its consistency and almost in its materiality, that I describe.
? Q: So you refuse psychology.
? MF: Absolutely. One must be able to make an his- torical analysis of the transformation of discourse without hav-
? The Archeology of Knowledge 47
? ing recourse to the thought of men, to their mode of percep- tion, their habits and the influences to which they have sub- mitted, etc.
Q: You begin your book with the observation that history and the human sciences have been inversely trans- formed. Instead of searching for the events that would consti- tute the ruptures, history now searches for continuities, whereas the human sciences search for discontinuities.
? MF: Indeed, historians today--and I am thinking of course of the Annales school, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Ferdnand Braudel--have tried to enlarge the periodizations that historians usually make. Braudel, for example, has suc- ceeded in defining a notion of material civilization that would have an extremely slow evolution: the material universe of European peasants from the end of the Middle Ages to the 18th century--the landscape, techniques, tools and crafted ob- jects, their customs--^has been modified in an extremely slow manner; one might say that it has developed on a very gradual incline. These great blocks, much more massive than the events one ordinarily isolates, have now become part of the objects that historians can describe. Thus one sees large conti- nuities appearing that until this work had never been isolated. On the other hand, the historians of ideas and of the sciences, who used to speak above all in terms of the continuous prog- ress of reason, of the progressive advent of rationalism, etc. , now insist on discontinuities and ruptures. For example, the break between Aristotelian and Galilean physics, the absolute eruption represented by the birth of chemistry at the end of the 18th century. It's from this paradox that I started: the regular historians were revealing continuities, while the historians of ideas were liberating discontinuities. But I believe that they are two symmetrical and inverse effects of the same methodo- logical renewal of history in general.
? 48 The Archeology of Knowledge
Q: Which is to say that when you attack those who mythologize history, by showing that they are attaching themselves again to the traditional philosophy of transcenden- tal consciousness, of man as sovereign, you attack them on their own ground, which is that of history. Whereas the stru- cturalists, who attack them equally, do it on another terrain.
MF: I don't believe that the structuralists have ever attacked the historians, but a certain historicism, a certain reaction and historicist mistrust with which their work col- lided. A certain number of traditional thinkers have been fiightened by structural analysis. Not, to be sure, because one began to analyze the formal relations among indifferent elements; that was done a long time ago, and there was no cause for alarm. But these traditional thinkers felt very strongly that what was in question was the status of the sub- ject. If it is true that language and the unconscious can be analyzed in structural terms, then what is there of this famous speaking subject, this man reputed to put language to work, to speak it, to transform it, to make it live! What is there of this man, reputed to have an unconscious, capable of becoming conscious of this unconscious, of assuming its burden and making a history of his fate! I believe that the belligerence or in any case the bad feelings that structuralism raised among the traditionalists was linked to the fact that they felt that the status of the subject had been put back into question.
? And they sought refuge on a terrain that appeared for their cause, infinitely more solid, that of history. And they said: let's admit that a language, considered outside its histori- cal evolution, outside of its development, consists in effect of a set of relations; let's admit that the unconscious in an indi- vidual functions Uke a structure or set of structures, that the unconscious can be located starting ft-om structural facts; there is at least one thing on which the structure will never catch:
? The Archeology of Knowledge 49
? that's history. For there is a becoming (devenir) that structural analysis will never account for, a progress which on the one hand is made of a continuity, whereas the structure by defini- tion is discontinuous, and on the other hand is made by a subject: man himself, or humanity, or consciousness, or rea- son, it matters little. For them, there is an absolute subject of history that makes history, that assures its continuity, that is the author and guarantor of this continuity. As for the struc- tural analyses, they can never take place but in the synchronic cross section cut out from this continuity of history subject to man's sovereignty.
? When one tries to put into question the primacy of the subject in the very domain of history, then there is a new panic amongst all the old faithfiil, for that was their line of defense, the point from which they could limit structural analysis--stop the "cancer"--by restricting the power of its disturbance. If, in regard to history, and precisely in regard to the history of knowledge (savoir) or of reason, one manages to show that it doesn't at all obey the same model as conscious- ness; if one succeeds in showing that the time of knowledge or of discourse is not at all organized or laid out like the time of lived experience, that it presents discontinuities and specific transformations; if finally, one shows that there is no need to pass through the subject, through man as subject, in order to analyze the history of knowledge (connaissance), one raises great difficulties, but one touches perhaps on an important problem.
? Q: As a result, you were led to challenge the philoso- phy of the last two hundred years, or, what is worse for it, to leave it aside.
? MF: Indeed, at present this whole philosophy, which since Descartes has given primacy to the subject, is falling apart before our eyes.
? 50 The Archeology of Knowledge
Q: And do you date the onset of this decline from Nietzsche?
MF: It seems to me that one could fix this moment starting from Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
Q: In addition, in your book, you denounce the an- thropologizing interpretation of Marx and the interpretation of Nietzsche in terms of a transcendental consciousness as a re- fusal to take into consideration what is new in their contri- butions.
MF: Exactly.
Q: I quote the following passage irom your introduc- tion; "To make of historical analysis the discourse of continu- ity and to make of human consciousness the originary subject of all progress and of every practice are two phases of the same system of thought, where time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never but the assumptions of consciousness. " Aren't you directly attacking Sartre there, all the more as the assumption of consciousness and totalization belong especially to his vocabulary?
MF: In using those words Sartre only takes up a general style of analysis that one can find in the work of Lucien Goldmann, Georg Luka? cs, Dilthey and the Hegelians of the 19th century. The words are certainly not specific to Sartre.
? Q: Sartre would simply be one of the end points of this transcendental philosphy that is falling apart?
MF: That's right.
? ? The Archeology of Knowledge 51
? Q; But apart from the structuralists, who find them- selves in a position analogous to your own, there are few philosophers who are conscious of the end of transcendental philosophy.
MF: On the contrary, I believe there are many, among whom I would put Gilles Deleuze in the first rank. '
Q: When, in The Order of Things, you wrote that man is to be cast aside, you unleashed "diverse movements. " Yet, in The Archeology of Knowledge, you say that not only things but even words are to be cast aside.
? MF: That's what I meant. My title The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses) was perfecdy ironic. No one saw it clearly; doubtlessly because there wasn't enough play in my text for the irony to be sufficiently visible. There is a problem: how can it happen that real things, things that are perceived, can come to be articulated by words within a dis- course. Is it that words impose on us the outline of things, or is it that things, through some operation of the subject, come to be transcribed on the surface of words. That's not at all the old problem that I wanted to treat in The Order of Things. I wanted to displace it: to analyze the discourses themselves, that is, these discursive practices that are intermediary between words and things; these discursive practices starting from which one can define what are the things and mark out the usage of words. Let's take a very simple example. In the
17th century the naturalists multiplied the descriptions of plants and animals. One can write a history of these descrip- tions in two ways. Either by starting with things and saying: the animals being what they are, the plants being such as we see them, how is it that the peo pie of the 17th and 18th centu- ries saw them and described them? What did they observe?
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What did they omit? What have they seen, what have they not seen? Or one can do the analysis in the inverse direction, by establishing the semantic field of the 17th and 18th centuries, by seeing what words and consequently what concepts they then had available, what the rules of usage for these words were, and starting from there, determining what grille or pat- tern was placed over the whole set of plants and animals. These are the two traditional analyses.
I have tried to do something else, to show that in a discourse, as in natural history, there were rules of formation for objects (which are not the rules of utilization for words), rules of formation for concepts (which are not the laws of syntax), rules of formation for theories (which are neither deductive nor rhetorical rules). These are the rules put into operation through a discursive practice at a given moment that explain why a certain thing is seen (or omitted); why it is envisaged under such an aspect and analyzed at such a level; why such a word is employed with such a meaning and in such a sentence. Consequendy, the analysis starting from things and the analysis starting from words appear at this moment as secondary in relation to a prior analysis, which would be the discursive analysis.
In my book there are no analyses of words and no analyses of things. And a number of people--the oafs and hedgehoppers--^have said it's scandalous, that in a book called Les mots et les choses there are no "things. " And the more subtle ones have said that there is no semantic analysis. Well, to be sure: I didn't want to do either.
? Q: Since your scientific trajectory begins with a sort of empirical groping, how did you arrive--^by what itinerary-- at this completely theoretical book which is The Archeology of Knowledge?
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? MF; Yes, of course, it started with empirical research on madness, sickness and mental illness, on medicine in the 18th and 19th centuries, and on the set of discipUnes (natural history, general grammar, and the exchange of money) that I treated in The Order of Things. Why has this research led me to construct the theoretical machinery of The Archeology of Knowledge, which seems to me to be a rather difficult book for the reader? I encountered several problems: when one did a history of the sciences one treated in a privileged, almost exclusive fashion the beautifiil, very formal sciences like mathematics arid theoretical physics. But when one broached disciplines like the empirical sciences, one was very con- stricted, most often being content with a sort of inventory of discoveries; it was said that these disciplines were only in sum a mix of truths and errors; in these knowledges that are so imprecise, the minds of men, their prejudices, mental habits and the influences to which they submit, the images in their heads, their dreams--^all that prevents them from acceding to the truth; and the history of these sciences was finally only the history of the mixture of these massive and numerous errors with some nuggets of truth, the problem being to know how one day someone had discovered a nugget.
Such a description bothers me for several reasons. First because, in the real historical life of men, these famous empirical sciences that the historians or the epistemologists neglect have a colossal importance. The progress of medicine has had consequences for human life, for the human species, for the eonomy of societies, and for the social organization certainly as great as those that the discoveries of theoretical physics have had. I regretted that these empirical sciences had not been studied.
? On the other hand, it seemed interesting to me to study these empirical sciences insofar as they are more closely linked to social practices than the theoretical sciences are. For
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example, medicine or political economy are disciplines per- haps lacking a high degree of scientificity, compared to mathematics; but their articulations onto social practices are very numerous and that's precisely what interested me. The Archeology that I just described is a kind of theory for a his- tory of empirical knowledge (savoir).
Q: Hence your choice, for example, of a history of madness (Madness and Civilization).
MF: Exactly.
Q; The advantage of your method, among others, is thus to function in two dimensions: diachronically and syn- chronically. For example, for Madness and Civilization (His- toire de lafolie) you go back in time and study the modifica- tions, whereas in the case of natural history in the 17th and 18th centuries, in The Order of Things, you study this science in a state that is not completely static, but more immobile.
? MF: Not exactly immobile. I tried to define the transformations: to show the discoveries, inventions, changes of perspective and theoretical upheavals that could occur start- ing from a certain system of regularities. One can show for ex- ample what makes possible the appearance of the idea of evo- lution in the 18th century in the discursive practice of natural history; or what makes possible the emergence of a theory of the organism, which was unknown to the first naturalists. Thus when certain people, happily very few in number, accused me of only describing states of knowledge and not the transforma- tions, it was simply because they hadn't read the book. If they had, if only leafing through it in a cursory fashion, they would have seen that it deals only with transformations and with the order in which these transformations occur.
? The Archeology of Knowledge 55
? Q: Your method studies the practice of discourse, a method that you base, in The Archeology of Knowledge, on the statement, which you distinguish radically from the grammatical sentence and the logical proposition. What do you mean by the statement (e? nonce? )!
MF: The sentence is a grammatical unity of ele- ments linked together by Unguistic rules. What the logicians call a proposition is a set of symbols constructed such that one can say if it is true or false, correct or not. What I call a state- ment is a set of signs that can be a sentence or a proposition, but envisaged at the level of its existence.
Q: You deny being a structuralist even if for the common consciousness you are part of the group. But your methodology has two points in common with the structural method: the refusal of an anthropological discourse and the absence of a speaking subject. Insofar as what is in question is the place and status of man, that is, of the subject, don't you align yourself automatically on the side of the structuralists?
? MF: I think that structuralism is inscribed today within a great transformation of knowledge (savoir) in the human sciences, and that this transformation is directed less toward the analysis of structures than toward the putting into question of the anthropological status, the status of the subject, and the privileges of man. And my method is inscribed within the framework of this transformation in the same way that structuralism is--along side of the latter but not in it.
? Q: You speak of structuralism's "legitimate limits. " Yet, one has the impression that structuralism tends to absorb everything: myths with Le? vi-Strauss, the unconscious with La- can, then hterary criticism--^all the human sciences pass through it.
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? MF: I don't have to speak for the structuralists.