Textual Politics: Foucault and Derrida Author(s): Michael Sprinker Source: boundary 2, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1980), pp.

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Textual Politics: Foucault and Derrida

Michael Sprinker
"Omens, presentiments, signals pass day and night through our organism like wave impulses. To interpret them or to use them, that is the question. The two are irreconcilable. Cowardice and apathy counsel the former, lucidity and freedom the latter."
- Walter Benjamin

"It is with history that we must reconcile ourselves."

- Jean Hyppolite

As criticism and theory come more and more into the limelight in literary studies, as the number of journals, books, and conferences devoted to literary theory and critical method increases geometrically each year, and as the lessons and methods of all this "critical inquiry"' seep into pedagogical practice and produce an even greater number of students who will soon themselves be teachers implementing a similar pedagogy in their own classrooms - as all these institutional consequences of the current and (to me at least) exciting debate over criticism and theory begin to

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assume a primary significance, it is necessary to look critically and suspiciously at the current critical scene. For criticism and theory are fast becoming institutionalized, and not only do they appear to be changing the shape of the field of literary studies, but they are increasingly becoming a field of study, a discipline if you will, unto themselves. This was probably inevitable, since traditional methods of literary study (close reading of the New Critical sort, textual scholarship trained on the canon, literary history written on the model of Taine and Saintsbury) have produced in recent years (partly for demographic reasons - there are many more souls engaged in professional literary study today than were thirty or even twenty years ago) an increasing quantity of moribund work, much of it formulaic and uncreative, little more than elaborations of received methods of interpretation applied to specific texts and authors. The sudden infusion of heretofore unfamiliar critical discourses, structuralism, hermeneutics, speech-act theory, psychoanalysis (revised and revivified itself in France), phenomenology - most being imported from Europe and affronting the conventional pieties of Anglo-American literary study - can be seen to have reinvigorated literary criticism and to have led to a number of salutary changes in the face of literary study. (It is difficult now, for example, to use the word "reading" in the comparatively innocent and unreflective way one might have used it twenty years ago.) Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to regard the current explosion in literary theory and critical methodology without suspicion. The frequently uttered claim of contemporary theory to a revolutionary praxis within the institution of literary study, the so-called "scandal" created by new critical languages, is decidedly less revolutionary and scandalous than one might think. It may be that literary theory is hardly more threatening to the literary academy than an adolescent child to its parent, though it is certain that both child and parent have difficulty acknowledging their kinship at times. The problem I wish to explore, then, is not the appropriateness or the validity of contemporary theory versus traditional praxis, but the claims of contemporary theory to a revolutionary praxis and the tendency of certain powerful methods of reading and interpretation to mystify and conceal behind a radical rhetorical posture their essential conservatism and their continuation of the fundamental traditions of the literary academy. My way into this problem will trace the paths followed by two of the most influential figures on contemporary American criticism and theory, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.2 Let me begin, ignoring for the moment the question no reader of Foucault or Derrida can avoid being self-conscious about - the problematic of beginning itself - by quoting from Foucault's polemical rejoinder to Derrida's essay, "Cogito et historie de la folie." The passage is particularly significant for my purposes, since it addresses directly the institutional consequences of Derrida's thought. In it, Foucault attacks what he contemptuously labels Derrida's "petite p6dagogie":

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[It is] a pedagogy which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text, but that in it, in its interstices, in its spaces and its omissions, reigns the reserve of the origin; that it is thus not at all necessary to seek elsewhere, but that in this very place, not in the words to be sure, but in the words as erased, in their grid, is spoken "the sense of being." A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters this sovereignty without limit that permits them to reread the text indefinitely.3 Whatever one might say about Derrida's writing itself (certainly Foucault is not entirely just to the rigor and the intellectual range of Derrida's texts, which often manifest a "relentless erudition"4 comparable to Foucault's own), Foucault has accurately portrayed much that might today be called the Derridean pedagogy proliferating in American academic circles under the name of deconstruction. Whatever his wishes or intentions in the matter, and whatever the difference (which in many cases is great indeed) between the achievement of Derrida's own writing and the work of his disciples and imitators, Derrida's texts have been comfortably assimilated by a wide range of critics, teachers, and students in this country, and they bid to become (as Jeffrey Mehlman noted not long ago in Diacritics5) a tyrannical orthodoxy, an orthodoxy precisely of the order described by Foucault: "which gives to the voice of the masters this sovereignty without limit that permits them to reread the text indefinitely."6 Like any orthodoxy, as Foucault has done so much to show, Derridean deconstruction closes off many avenues of thought; it excludes certain kinds of statements and certain kinds of inquiry (for instance, the archival work that one associates with Foucault), claiming absolute priority for exegesis, for reading and interpretation which are produced by no other forces than the collision of text with reader.7 Foucault's polemic thus challenges Derrida on some fundamental points: that Derrida's readings are ahistorical, that Derrida's own discourse merely revives familiar hermeneutical models which are themselves historically determined,8 and that, far from liberating the text from worn-out and tiresome traditions of reading and interpretation, Derrida has enclosed the text in a hermetic casing which enshrines the text's sovereignty (like the Bible in scriptural hermeneutics, the Derridean text becomes a sacred object) and at the same time guarantees the sovereignty of the Derridean reader. The difference between Derrida and Foucault is the difference between the exegetical and the poetic-creative, between, say, the interpretation of the Bible among the Church Fathers and the creative revision of the Bible in Milton and Blake, or between what Harold Bloom has called weak and strong poets. To put it another way (one that is perhaps not entirely just to Derrida, but fairly representative of much of 77

the work he has fathered among American literary critics9), the alternatives presented for contemporary criticism by Derrida and Foucault are, roughly, the endless repetition of (though admittedly vigorous and sophisticated) commentary versus the energetic production of new statements that arise from within discourse but resist and subvert it at the same time. So stated, it is not difficult to predict which alternative most of us would choose. But as I have said, Foucault's critique of Derrida's "little pedagogy" is perhaps not a just presentation of Derrida's position, however much that position has been normalized by critics in the academy.10 From the moment he burst upon the intellectual scene (roughly 1967 with the publication of De la grammatologie, L'Ecriture et la diffdrence and La Voix et le phenomene), Derrida has spoken a revolutionary rhetoric, announcing the closure of Western philosophy, the birth of grammatology, the end of the book and the beginning of writing, and stressing themes of violence, usurpation, and transgression (it is not accidental that Derrida is much interested in Artaud and Bataille). Recently, in Glas, he sounded the death-knell of philosophy, though he has been effectively tolling this bell (or beating this drum - see his essay "Tympan"l 1) all along. Derrida's works undertake a radical critique of the Western tradition in philosophy and, not incidentally, of literature as well. The position from which he launches his critique is within that tradition, even though at times he claims to be on its "margins." As he says in Of Grammatology: "We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace, which cannot not take the scent into account, has already taught us that it was impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely. Wherever we are: in a text where we already believe ourselves to be."12 The beginning and continuing question raised by Derrida is the epistemology of the text in an era of ontological incertitude. His "departure" (sortie - the French suggests the aggressive militancy of Derrida's project) is "radically empiricist. It proceeds like a wandering thought on the possibility of itinerary and of method" (OG, p. 162). One must be wary, however, for this beginning is scarcely pure or absolute but is itself inscribed within and circumscribed by the discourse of philosophy. Derrida's writing begins within a text (the "general text"l13 is that of Western philosophy, literature, the human sciences - all writing in the West - but the local instances are almost invariably the "major" authors in the literary and philosophical tradition, Rousseau, Hegel, Mallarme, Plato, Heidegger, Husserl), and yet it aims at an explosion of the text itself in the activity of reading (lecture): The writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be 78

governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce. (OG, p. 158) Reading is commentary, but it is also much more. Derrida believes that the "moment of doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading," but truly critical reading goes further. At the same time, however, reading "cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it"; reading remains bound by the text, limited in its scope to the structure which the text itself imposes, inside the text in a most radical way. As Derrida says in virtually the same breath as the passages just quoted: "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" (OG, p. 158). Reading does not so much confront the text as wage a guerilla war against the text's hegemony. The resistance of the text to this disentangling or "unstitching" (dd-coudre, a word that plays an important role in Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus, "La pharmacie de Platon") produces the signifying structure of the reading. Reading and text are mutually constitutive and irreducible.14 But such an extension of textuality is inherently problematic, since it begs the question of who or what produces critical reading. Derrida has addressed this question in a number of places,15 but each time he has essentially finessed the point by producing yet another reading which does not establish the grounds of its own possibility but rather shows how the attempt to reach such a stable beginning point or ground is always already differentiated into oppositions that undermine the project of such a pure beginning. In effect, Derrida constructs himself through what he has called "deconstruction." Deconstruction is thus a constitutive process that proceeds by a kind of pure Hegelian negation but rejects the Hegelian conclusion that negation is at the same time an Aufhebung. As he says in the "Positions" interview: "Were there a definition of diffirance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian sublation everywhere that it is operative."16 Very much in the manner of Nietzsche (whose aphoristic energies Derrida's writing often resembles1 7), Derrida produces the will in a thorough dismantling of all volition. His perpetual employment of the French phrase vouloir-dire to designate "meaning" (German Bedeutung)18 reveals how intimately intertwined the categories of will and signification are for Derrida. Derrida's readings are at once free and determined, acts of willing that can never realize more than a rewriting of what has been recorded and preserved elsewhere. Derrida's paradoxical and seemingly all but impossible project is 79

carried out in part through the coining of a dizzying array of neologisms and through his exploitation of numerous fortuitous puns, through the creation, in a sense, of a Derridean code one must learn in order to make one's way through the labyrinth of Derrida's texts. Some of the words Derrida finds in the texts he read (pharmakon, pli, supp/lment, hymen); others he conceives himself (diffdrance, ddconstruction, dissdmination). But whether he discovers them fortuitously in texts or creates them for the moment of his writing, these anti-words or anti-concepts all share in the fundamental semantic undecidability that Derrida believes is characteristic of all texts. Derrida cites this undecidability with respect to the concept of "allusion" in Mallarm6:
Allusion ... is precisely the operation that we call here

by analogy undecidable. An undecidable proposition, the possibility of which G6del demonstrated in 1931, is a proposition which, being given a system of axioms which govern a multiplicity, is neither an analytic or deductive consequence of the axioms, nor in contradiction with them, neither true nor false with regard to these axioms. A tertium datur without synthesis. "Undecidability" here does not indicate some enigmatic equivocalness, some "historical" ambiguity, some poetical mystery of the word hymen, some inexhaustible ambivalence of a word in "natural" language, still less some "Gegensinn der Urworte" (Abel). It is not a question here of repeating with regard to hymen what Hegel undertook with such German words as Aufhebung, Urteil, Meinen, Beispiel, etc., being astonished with this chance which installs a natural language into the element of speculative dialectic. What counts here is not the lexical richness, the semantic infinity of a word or a concept, its depth or its volume, the sedimentation in it of two contradictory significations (continuity and discontinuity, inside and outside, identity and difference, etc.). What counts here is the formal or syntactical practice which composes and decomposes it.19 Derrida carries out a rigorous critique of formalist and thematic criticism,20 demonstrating how this criticism can never escape the reductive position of "semanticizing" what is without determinate semantic content. Formalism and thematism fail to realize what Paul de Man calls the aporias of the text, its blindnesses. A text for Derrida is always unstable, impenetrable, illogical: "A text is only a text if it hides at first glance, at the first coming to it, the law of its composition and the

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rule of its play. More: A text always remains imperceptible. The law and the rule are not sheltered in the inaccessibility of a secret, they simply never betray themselves, in the present, to anything that we could rigorously denominate a perception."21 Hence, the practically endless task of reading and interpretation noted by Foucault and cheerfully proclaimed by Derrida's numerous disciples. In a text there is God's plenty, and something left over for the cat. But to stop here, to reside comfortably in the belief that all texts are undecidable and to glory in the recognition that this invests criticism with the equivalent of Dostoievskian freedom is, aside from the rather disquieting glibness of its skepticism, an evasion of the very problem that Derridean reading sets out to attack. If undecidability comes more and more to be the conclusion reached by the Derridean theory of the text, then it is clear that the privileged signification Derrida has tried to banish from reading has been reinserted into critical discourse. To say that a text is undecidable is to have made a decision about it; to argue that all texts are mise en abyme is at one and the same time to plunge them into an endless self-reflexivity and to make the fact of self-reflexivity the referent of one's own textual practice-which is effectively to removeone's own text (the critical reading) from the abyss of self-reflexion. As Richard Rorty has perceptively noted, "There is a side of Derrida which looks unfortunately constructive, a side which makes it look as if he in the end succumbs to nostalgia, to the lure of philosophical system-building, and specifically that of constructing yet another transcendental idealism."22 The building blocks of this newly constructed transcendental idealism are those anti-concepts or anti-words that Derrida carries with him from text to text as if they had some privileged status within language and could serve to elucidate, while themselves escaping from, the problematic of language itself. Derrida is certainly aware of this difficulty and attempts to deal with it directly in "La double seance": What goes for "hymen" goes, mutatis mutandis, for all those signs which, like pharmakon, supplement, and diffirance and a few others, have a double, contradictory, and undecidable value, which is always linked to their syntactical form, whether that might be somehow "interior" and articulating and combining two incompatible significations under the same yoke, hyphen (uph'en), or whether it might be "exterior," dependent on the code by which the word is made to operate. But the syntactical composition or decomposition of the sign makes the question of interior or exterior quite irrelevant. What we have to do with therefore are more or less larger syntactical operating units, and with
differing economies of condensation.

admit into the space of their play both contradiction

. ... These "words"

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and non-contradiction (as well as the contradiction and the noncontradiction between contradiction and noncontradiction). Without dialectical relief, without even any respite, they belong somehow both to the consciousness and to the unconscious, of which Freud has told us that it is tolerant of as well as insensitive to contradiction. To the extent then that the text depends on these "words," that it is folded around them, the text therefore acts out a double scene. It operates in two absolutely different places, even if they are only separated by a veil, passed through and not passed through at one and the same time, slightly ajar. The double science to which these two theaters must give birth would have been called doxa and not epistme' by Plato, because of the indecision and instability fundamental to it.23 But once again, Derrida has merely substituted instability, indecision, doxa for stability, decidability, epistdme. Derrida's "double science" does not just depend upon and originate in a unitary theory of knowledge, but more importantly, it becomes, as the words, concepts, and the predictability of the conclusions accumulate in his work, a kind of inviolable system that not only repeats itself endlessly (this is perhaps more true of Derrida's imitators than of Derrida himself), but denies the possibility of any reading reaching a point other than the terminus of undecidability.24 It is at this point that the Derridean pedagogy becomes subject to the critique begun by Foucault. The logic (or perhaps illogic) of Derrida's work is compelling, perhaps invulnerable (in the same way that Godel could describe a system of propositions as internally consistent even though it could produce propositions which contradicted its own axioms25), but one can and, I propose, ought to criticize Derrida on ontological grounds-grounds that, I scarcely need add, Derrida would not recognize as valid. In the service of such a critique, Foucault's work, especially since The Archaeology of Knowledge, is fundamental. The central question for Foucault has always been one of method, of how to do historical work that is not bound by the constraints of traditional intellectual history, and it is in their methods of criticism and analysis that Foucault and Derrida differ profoundly. In his response to Derrida's unfavorable reading of Folie et ddraison, Foucault argues that it is not enough for Derrida merely to "read" the text of Descartes's Meditations, even in the intense and precise way that Derrida reads any text. The reader must also determine the regularities of the discursive practice which govern Descartes's "meditation" and which produce the Cartesian discourse under the pressure of intra- and extra-textual determinants:

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It is this double reading that the Meditations require: an ensemble of propositions forming a system that each reader must traverse if he wishes to demonstrate the truth; and an ensemble of modifications forming an exercise that each reader must effectuate, by which each reader must be affected, if he wishes to be in his turn the subject enunciating, on his own account, this truth.26 For Foucault, the production of the Cartesian discourse does not depend upon an absolutely pure philosophical beginning (as Derrida argues it does), but upon the discursive practice which enables this discourse to be produced at all. Thus, any reading of Descartes must not only take into account but must describe and analyze the rule of meditative practice which makes Descartes's meditation possible. Neither the Cartesian meditation nor the reading of it is free from the constraints of discursive regularities which are specific to the historical and political moments which each inhabits and which intersect in the moment of the critical reading of the Cartesian text. At this point, the essential opposition between Derrida and Foucault emerges. Derrida contends that Foucault's language cannot possibly escape from the traps of ordinary language, that Foucault's writing is merely a reaffirmation of the Cartesian cogito, and that it is radically (I use this word advisedly, with a proper sense of its etymology) determined by the sedimentation of the Western family of languages which privilege unity, presence, and reason over heterogeneity, absence, and madness. Hence, Foucault's desire to write the history of madness is chimerical, since no writing can do more than reinscribe the series of terms representing reason's sovereignty over and production of madness, a sovereignty which precedes all thought whatever. Foucault, in his turn, challenges Derrida on grounds of the inability of Derridean reading to specify differences. According to Foucault (and his reasoning seems almost irresistible on this point in the light of much of Derrida's other writing), for Derrida all thinkers are one thinker, the history of Western thought is but a series of permutations on a central theme (presence, God, logocentrism, the transcendental reduction, the cogito), and all differences can be collapsed (as Derrida collapses the Cartesian distinction between cogito and doubt, or the Foucauldian distinction between reason and madness) into a unitary concept of reason. In short, Foucault claims that for Derrida, Foucault says the same thing as Descartes, who says the same thing as Husserl, who says the same thing as Plato, and so on.27 Oddly enough, what one comes to is Foucault, who has been accused of being unable to account for historical change,28 taking Derrida to task for reducing history to a Platonic series (and thus denying the very possibility of historical change), and for failing to specify differences in and between texts because of his inattention to the discursive practice within and

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through which the text is produced. But who has made more of the concept of textual difference than Derrida? And how can Foucault's archaeologies avoid the textual destiny, described by Derrida, which haunts all the discourses written from within the Western family of languages? If Derrida is correct in his belief that the tropes of language fix the boundaries of all discourse, and, moreover, that texts are completely inscribed within a discursive domain with no connection to non-discursive formations or forces (this I take to be the force of "il n'y a pas de hors-texte"), can it not then be said that Foucault's archaeologies arise from within and are governed by precisely those familiar tropes of presence and logocentrism which Derrida has uncovered everywhere in the Western tradition of philosophical writing? Let me put the matter another way by formulating these questions in terms that Foucault would be more likely to acknowledge as valid for his own work. In his recent books, Foucault has become obsessed with the concept of power, particularly insofar as power is linked inextricably to knowledge and to the production of discourses in modern society. In Surveiller et punir, he establishes the modern prison as both the symbol of and an actual location in the grid of power that permeates modern political and social life. Foucault's aim in writing the history of the prison is to expose what is hidden in the discursive regularity of modern disciplinary knowledge, namely, its relationship to power in modern society, for the exercise of power in modern times is at once the most visible and most secret feature of a society's functioning: Power in the West is what displays itself the most, and thus what hides itself the best: what we have called "political life" since the 19th century is the manner in which power presents its image (a little like the court in the monarchic era). Power is neither there, nor is that how it functions. The relations of power are perhaps among the best hidden things in the social body.29 Foucault's purpose is to show how contemporary social structures can be seen effectively at work in the actual practice of penality. For Foucault, the modern prison is simply the reflex of modern society in which a technocratic apparatus of surveillance and control (symbolized by Bentham's panopticon) has proliferated and penetrated into virtually every nook and cranny of social structure.30 Foucault shows how the prison (and modern society generally) raises epistemological and political questions at the same time; the two realms of knowledge and power cannot be separated either in practice or in theory. To analyze the concept of prison is to consider how it came about as an instrument of knowledge and to demonstrate how knowledge is produced by the technology of power. But if all modern knowledge is intimately wedded to

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the exercise of power, one can properly demand of Foucault himself how he can produce knowledge that is: 1) not produced by the disciplinary procedures he sees everywhere dominating the field of knowledge; 2) not subject to the same assimilation, regularization and normalizing that has plagued all attempts to inaugurate new discourses in the last two centuries. In short, are Foucault's archaeologies (of the prison, the clinic, the asylum, and most recently of sexuality) outside or to the side of the discursive regularities which he calls disciplines, and if they are, is there not still the danger (essentially the same danger he attributes to the Derridean "petite pedagogie") that Foucault has simply founded a new discipline called archaeology which produces knowledge according to rules and procedures familiar in other disciplines? In other words, as both Edward Said and Derrida claim, Foucault's archaeologies are subject to the rigorous epistemological analysis that Derrida has so vigorously pursued in the texts of other thinkers. If, as Said argues, the central problem for Foucault is the epistemology of the text, is it not necessary to turn this instrument back upon itself and question the epistemology of Foucault's own texts? Such is the problem posed by Foucault himself in his only book of pure methodology and theory, The Archaeology of Knowledge. Confronted with a variety of charges levelled at his earlier writings (above all at Les Mots et le choses), Foucault wished in this book to describe in a systematic manner the procedures that had enabled his work up to that point in his career. Most importantly, Foucault wished to distinguish his own work from the traditional "genesis, continuity, totalization" of the history of ideas.31 Archaeology, by contrast, addresses itself to discontinuity, shifts, what might be called "faults" in the structures of knowledge in a given epoch or culture. The goal of archaeology is to articulate this discontinuous structure of knowledge and power, at the same time that such a discontinuous structure is the very principle of archaeology's own procedure of historical analysis: [Archaeology] does not try to repeat what has been said by reaching it in its very identity. It does not claim to efface itself in the ambiguous modesty of a reading that would bring back, in all its purity, the distant, precarious, almost effaced light of the origin. It is nothing more than a rewriting: that is, in the preserved form of exteriority, a regulated transformation of what has already been written. It is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description of a discourse-object. (AK, pp. 139-40) Archaeology is a descriptive procedure that transforms a body of knowledge by articulating its rules of organization and transformation. But archaeological description does not merely repeat the terms in which the

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body of knowledge itself is formulated. It is not what Derrida calls the "doubling commentary" which has its moment in every interpretation of a text. In this way, archaeology is never bound to the text (or discourse-object) in the way of Derridean reading. Rather, archaeology maps (in the sense of the term in mathematics) a historically later discourse onto an earlier one. Any archaeological description is thus a mode of knowing ("a regulated transformation of what has already been written"), hence, an exercise of power over what has been said in the past. As Foucault puts it elsewhere, his archaeologies constitute "a critique of our own time, based upon retrospective analyses."32 Foucault's methodological elaboration of the procedure of archaeological description is a theory of knowledge which can be seen to have emerged from the historical investigations he undertook into the theories of knowledge in previous epochs as they were manifested in various discourses (psychiatry, clinical medicine, the human sciences, et cetera). What these empirical or archival investigations showed is how knowledge is not something transparent or accessible to an act of simple perception, but an organized, disciplined, rigorous system that separates objects into categories and arranges them in a grid; knowledge is a radical distortion, derangement, and rearrangement of objects into regular structures or functions. Knowledge is never simply "the given" (just as reality is never simply what is "out there"); knowledge is always produced through the agency of some knower or group of knowers, even though for Foucault the knower is not so much an individual or a culture as a discourse.33 What is known, what can be known, is what can be described; description must proceed according to rules of intelligibility, rules which change over time; archaeology is the description of these rules; archaeology is a form of knowledge; archaeology must therefore be described-this is what the Archaeology of Knowledge attempts to do. Well and good, but what are the rules of transformation and the regular procedures established by Foucault? Like Derrida, Foucault evolves a set of terms to describe his practice: discursive formation, archive, statement (6nonce'), epist6m&, positivities, discourse, and so on. But unlike Derrida, Foucault does not carry over these terms into his subsequent work. In fact, it is difficult to imagine what application the theory laid out in The Archaeology of Knowledge has to any of the books Foucault has written since its appearance in 1969.34 And it is equally difficult to imagine what descriptive value The Archaeology of Knowledge has for Foucault's work as a whole. Consider, for example, the following passage in which Foucault attempts to define precisely what he means by knowledge: This group of elements, formed in a regular manner by a discursive practice, and which are indispensable to the constitution of a science, although they are not

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necessarily destined to give rise to one, can be called knowledge. Knowledge is that of which one can speak in a discursive practice, and which is specified by that fact: the domain constituted by the different objects that will
or will not acquire a scientific status
.

. .; knowledge

is

also the space in which the subject may take up a position and speak of the objects with which he deals in
his discourse ...; knowledge is also the field of

coordination and subordination of statements in which concepts appear, and are defined, applied and
transformed ... ; lastly, knowledge is defined by the

possibilities of use and appropriation offered by There are bodies of knowledge that are discourse .... independent of the sciences (which are neither their historical prototypes, nor their practical by-products), but there is no knowledge without a particular discursive practice; and any discursive practice may be defined by the knowledge that it forms. (AK, pp. 182-3). In this passage, knowledge as a useful concept that one can employ to characterize the products of disciplined inquiry vanishes in the endless complications and qualifications by which Foucault limits and defines the term. Though it is clear in this passage and throughout The Archaeology of Knowledge that Foucault produces theory in order to dissolve the positivist conception of fact and event, the activity of theory reaches such a level of abstraction, becomes so theoretical, that it is no longer possible to employ it on any specific or concrete problem. For Foucault, theory is never static or unchanging; it can never simply be repeated and reapplied to any situation one wishes; it is constantly evolving, changing, being enacted. Thus, Foucault's description of theory in his interview with Gilles Deleuze, "Les intellectuels et le pouvoir," is particularly apposite: "Theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply
practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional . ., not

totalizing ... .A 'theory' is the regional system of [a] struggle [for power] " (L, p. 208). The task undertaken in Foucault's works after The Archaeology of Knowledge is just this: the practical determination in concrete historical situations of the mechanisms and the discourses of power in Western society since the Renaissance. Foucault thus does not provide a system or regular procedure for producing knowledge at all, rather, his works are disruptions, a series of localized studies that in themselves produce theoretical apparatuses. This is perhaps most clear in Discipline and Punish, which is not only a historical inquiry into the origin of the modern prison, but is also a theoretical statement about the structure and the operation of modern

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society and about how knowledge is produced and deployed in it. Thus, there is not, nor can there ever be, a "discipline of archaeology," that is, a regular system of rules and transformations with axioms, postulates, proofs, and the like which one can learn about and master from reading Foucault's books (it is comparatively easy to "make the moves" of deconstruction; it is virtually impossible to repeat or imitate Foucault). As Foucault himself averred in an interview not long after the publication of Surveiller et punir: "The archaeology of knowledge is never more than a mode of approach."35 For Foucault, the elaboration of theory is always the outgrowth of concrete historical investigation, not something that is applied to a text or a problem from the outside but something the work itself produces as it proceeds. (In this respect, he closely resembles Derrida's claims to being always inside the text, though he differs from Derrida in his assessment of the site of texts in the grid of knowledge.) The most one can derive from Foucault in a theoretical way is an example of and certain heuristic principles for disruptive intellectual activity. In addition, of course, there is the wealth of historical detail that characterizes all of Foucault's work up to La Volont6 de savoir from which one can also learn. But the historical material can never be separated (and thus reified) from the theoretical structure which it constitutes. Foucault's work does not discover facts; it produces knowledge. In the end, Foucault is not, as Derrida clearly is, a theoretician of the text. Foucault's archaeologies and genealogies are not epistemological investigations but practical researches into the sites of modern knowledge in the grid of power deployed in the world. While Derrida vigorously questions the possibility of knowledge, Foucault begins with the fact and the material reality of signification in order to expose the conjunctions of knowledge and power that make our disciplinary society possible. For Foucault, the central problem is not the demystification of ideology, the overturning of falsehoods and historical myths. On the contrary, his focus is the positive productive potential of knowledge linked with power: In general terms, I would say that the interdiction, the refusal, the prohibition, far from being essential forms of power, are only its limits, power in its frustrated or extreme forms. The relations of power are, above all, productive.... I would say that this has always been my problem: the effects of power and the production of "truth." I have always felt uncomfortable with this ideological notion which has been used in recent years. It has been used to explain errors or illusions, or to analyze presentations-in short, everything that impedes the formation of true discourse. It has also been used to show the relation between what goes on in people's heads and their place in the conditions of production. In

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sum, the economics of untruth. My problem is the politics of truth.36 The brute, coercive materiality of discourse, its linkage with real power, is most clearly elaborated in Surveiller et punir, though it was implicit in Foucault's earlier studies of the asylum and the clinic. The origin of that book, Foucault claims, was not in the past but in the present, not simply in a wish to illuminate the history of the prison, but to understand the way in which the institutional power of the prison to control the body of the criminal grew out of certain discursive practices in a number of areas of social life (notably in schools, hospitals, and the army). The intimate connection between discourse and the exercise of power, between knowledge and the political implementation of social control, is the central achievement of the book: I am not saying that the human sciences emerged from the prison. But, if they have been able to be formed and to produce so many profound changes in the episteme, it is because they have been conveyed by a specific and new modality of power: a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful. This policy required the involvement of definite relations of knowledge in relations of power; it called for a technique of overlapping subjection and objectification; it brought with it new procedures of individualization. The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation.37 Foucault uncovers the intimate connection here between the birth of discursive practices in the human sciences and the implementation of social control in advanced industrial societies. There has been, since the eighteenth century, a shift in the structural relations of power in society, and this shift has been both enabled by and concealed behind the discursive shield of certain disciplines like penology, psychiatry, clinical medicine, and sexology. As Foucault says elsewhere: "The sciences of man were born from the moment when the procedures for surveillance and registration of individuals were put into effect."38 An administered society requires administrators; administrators require procedures, codes, a grid of practices to carry out their duties of controlling the population; it has been the task of the human sciences to elaborate the conceptual and discursive means for realizing these practices.

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Still, Derrida's question plagues Foucault's enterprise: How can Foucault differentiate himself from the discourses he analyzes? where in the grid of power and knowledge is Foucault himself situated? how can Foucault hope to do more than reinscribe the relations which he has exposed to scrutiny? Another way of asking these questions is to interrogate Foucault not only about where he is speaking from but for what purpose. In many of the interviews he has given in the past ten years, Foucault has made his position clear on this last point: His purpose is to ally himself with struggles against power which are already in existence, to aid in these struggles by giving voice and presence (people have these qualities, even if texts may not) to the needs and aspirations of groups of men who for the most part have been silenced by the discursive apparatuses of the administrative society-prisoners, inmates in asylums, patients in hospitals, the sexually deviant. Such people and the words they utter exist within the grid of power and knowledge but without access to its sources; their silence is enforced by excluding them from prevailing discursive practices and by transforming their utterances into the "true discourses" (Foucault's phrase for language that is recognized as legitimate and meaningful by men in power) of penology, psychiatry, clinical medicine, and sexology. Foucault's attempt to resist the dominance of these contemporary discursive practices recalls his early desire to tell the history of madness in its own voice, to let madness speak for itself. But to do so, Foucault must legitimate the utterances of the dispossessed; he must show how they have been silenced, not through any right or just procedure, but merely through the exercise of power. To do this, it has been necessary to situate his own discourse within the human sciences. Foucault's writing does not claim to stand outside of the discursive regularities of the modern administrative society; rather, it asserts its right to speak within this discursive practice about things not generally spoken of. As Deleuze perceptively noted in his review of Surveiller et punir: Statements say everything, but they only say what they can say, what is of the order of the "speakable." There is always an excess in relation to statements which is of another order or another form, the form of the "practicable" which cannot be spoken directly but which it is necessary to combine with the speakable.39 Discourses always create the possibility of their reversal; no discourse can exhaust the possibilities for action and for counter-discursive practices which it brings into existence in its formalizations. It is this excess, this residuum of unformalized language, which knowledge produces but cannot completely control, that Foucault brings to our attention. For example, though we have the judgments and opinions of doctors, psychiatrists, 90

police, and prison officials about criminals, the accumulation of evidentiary material, the dossiers and the archives which the administrative society requires also contain the words of the criminals themselves, words which are ignored or discounted by officials writing within the rules of their disciplines, but which can speak to another audience (Foucault's readers) in a voice now heard and understood. Out of such recognitions can spring the revolutionary action to which Foucault has allied himself. What has all of this to do with literary criticism and theory? One of the implications of Foucault's work is to reveal the role of intellectuals in advanced industrial societies. As Gramsci also saw, intellectuals serve the state by legitimating its power and extending the cultural hegemony of the ruling classes over the masses of the population. This is obviously true in the policy sciences, but it is no less true in the humanities, as the work of Chomsky, Ohmann, Said, Gouldner, Eagleton, Althusser, and Raymond Williams has shown. Literary criticism and literary theory provide the ideological superstructure for the daily work done by literary intellectuals and literature teachers, by disseminators of knowledge inside and outside the universities. These practices include classroom teaching (upon which literary criticism has an enormous residual impact-we are still, most of us, shadow-boxing with the ghosts of the New Criticism in our pedagogy), the shape and purpose of the humanities curriculum, the decorum and style required of publications in professional journals and literary reviews, the kind of training received by graduate students, the kind of books which are published by university presses and other non-trade publishers (there are fashions in scholarly publishing which are easily recognized and isolated), and much more. Criticism and theory form one part (and a very important one) of the complex ideological matrix which guides and enables intellectual work in modern society. The kind of theory one produces or deploys in his work affects not only oneself but all the students, colleagues, and non-professional readers who take account of one's work and go forth to do likewise. This work, which is supported by social institutions like the state, private foundations, and powerful individuals and corporations, takes its place in the ideological ensemble of society and either legitimates the already existing relations of power or exposes them to scrutiny and thereby forms a point of resistance to them. In recent years, especially since the spring of 1968, Foucault has become increasingly strident about the political position he and his work occupy. His most recent books and the project he is presently pursuing of publishing the memoirs of "infamous men"40 have made the political edge of his work abundantly clear. Derrida's political position, on the other hand, remains obscure.41 That this is so is, I believe, a function of the theoretical positions each has developed. Foucault's understanding and analysis of the materiality of discourse and the function of knowledge in the world necessarily elude the Derridean formulation "il n'y a pas de hors-texte." Derrida rigorously denies the possibility that texts may 91

operate in the material sphere, even that such a sphere can be demonstrated with proper philosophical rigor. This is the conclusion of his critique of Heidegger's and Husserl's phenomenology, and it motivates in various ways his criticism of other representatives of logocentrism. But brilliant and dazzling as, for example, Derrida's reading of Rousseau can often be, it is fair to ask of Derrida how the mere chain of supplements in a text can not only theorize a social structure such as Rousseau produces in The Social Contract and the Second Discourse, but can also have the effective force that Rousseau's texts achieved in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Derrida is simply unable to account for the power that texts acquire and deploy in the political and cultural sphere, where the play of signification becomes a deadly serious game in which human subjects are at stake. Though the status of the human subject is by no means unproblematic in Foucault (it is this very concept which Foucault attacks so vigorously because of its investment in power in the administrative society-the human subject is what he calls in Surveiller et punir "knowable man"), nonetheless his work forges a positive link between the discursive practice of knowledge and the material existence of men in the world. However much one can admire in Derrida's privileging of the text an undoubted theoretical rigor and an astonishing originality, and however useful and tonic one finds Derrida's dismantling of the epistemological foundations of positivism, it is yet necessary to protest that in Derrida's hands (and even more so in the hands of the American literary establishment that has assimilated him) criticism is reduced to the status of a servant of bourgeois ideology. This ideology conceals the real basis of power and the social structures which enable its functioning in modern society, thereby disabling criticism from any active political role.42 Despite his protestations to the contrary, criticism becomes, in Derrida's practice and in the practice of deconstruction in the United States, nothing more than commentary,43 what recent Marxist theorists call "philological" studies. But philological study is only half (though a necessary and important one) of the task of criticism. Careful, rigorous, analytic study of texts must be complemented by historical investigations of the conditions of textual production and the place of texts in the cultural, economic, and political spheres that surround them and contribute to their production, allow for their transmission, and either ensure their preservation or precipitate their destruction. A consciousness of these conditions and an articulation of their structure is the goal toward which the work of Michel Foucault consistently strives and, at its best, accomplishes. The power of his theoretical and practical insights provides one of the most compelling examples of what contemporary criticism can accomplish if it wills to do so. Oregon State University

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NOTES
1 One of the maddening aspects of writing about contemporary criticism and theory is that one finds continually that his vocabulary has been effectively pre-empted by others-in this case by the title of one of the standard journals. As I shall argue throughout this essay, and as Derrida himself has shown in so many ways, the problem of being already inside a discourse while trying to get outside it and thereby criticize it is central to contemporary criticism. Whether there can ever be such a space outside current critical discourse is one of the basic questions of the present essay and (if I may be so presumptuous) of contemporary criticism. An assessment of the present state of literary criticism and theory through an examination of Foucault and Derrida has been undertaken in a different way by Edward Said in his essay, "The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions," Critical Inquiry, 4 (Summer 1978), 673-714. Though I completely agree with his conviction that literary criticism and theory must be written "with a sense of the greater stake in historical and political effectiveness that literary, as well as all other, texts have had" (p. 714), and though I applaud his effort to "reinvest critical discourse with something more than contemplative effort or an appreciative technical reading method for texts as undecidable objects" (p. 713), nonetheless, I would argue for a different reading of Foucault than he offers, a reading which, I think, makes Foucault's work fundamental to literary studies by using it to show how texts (or, in Foucault's terms, discourses) exercise power outside the realm of textuality and thus how literature and criticism are always situated within relations of power and knowledge. Said criticizes Foucault for having mystified the concept of power by effectively denying its centralization in the modern world in the hands of small numbers of men, a charge against which I do not wish to defend Foucault, especially in light of some of his recent work (see The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Pantheon Books, 1978], where Foucault at one point makes this questionable statement: "Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" [p. 93] ). Nevertheless, one might reply that criticism is always practiced discursively and that the power to which it is related is also most often exercised (in the advanced industrial societies of the West at least) through the production of discourses. Criticism is a discipline in the sense that Foucault uses this word in Surveiller et punir, a mechanism not merely for limiting but, more importantly, for producing discourse which is linked to economic, social, and political conditions that support it and, in many cases, dictate its conceptual boundaries. Not only does Foucault's recent work go a long way to show how and why this is the case (as Said readily admits), but at the same time it shows the way toward a general critique of literary criticism and theory as an institution which, for various political and economic reasons, has on the whole accepted its "institutionalized marginality" (Said's own phrase in an interview with Diacritics, 6 [Fall 19761, p. 39). In other words, Foucault's analyses of knowledge and power can help one to understand the institution of criticism and thus to practice a more politically and culturally engaged criticism (which Said favors) by situating one's own work within the social and cultural conditions of one's own time. Moreover, the lessons Foucault teaches about the relations of discourses to power can be enormously illuminating for specific literary texts, the prison and the idea of the panopticon in Dickens or Kafka, for example.

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3 4

"Mon Corps, ce papier, ce feu," in Histoire de la folie a I/'ge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 602. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), p. 140 (hereafter cited as L). "Relentless erudition" is Foucault's phrase for the kind of work required to pursue the critical-historical project which he traces back to Nietzsche's genealogies and associates with his own archaeologies. "Teaching Reading: The Case of Marx in France," Diacritics, 6 (Winter 1976), 10-11. On Derrida's project of endless rereading as the paradigm of modern philosophy since Kant, see Richard Rorty, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida," New Literary History, 10 (Autumn 1978), 141-60. The similarity between Derridean reading and the reader-response criticism of Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, and others is obvious enough, though it is scarcely fair to Derrida to equate his work with theirs. Nonetheless, the fact that both deconstruction and reader-response criticism have proliferated so widely in recent criticism bespeaks a broad ground of ideological agreement between Derrideans and the reader-response critics, a ground that they share, interestingly enough, with some of their more vehement opponents like the disciples of the Chicago school, a ground that is, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, solidly within the liberal bourgeois traditions of the academy. On Derrida and hermeneutics, see David Couzens Hoy, "Hermeneutic Circularity, Indeterminacy, and Incommensurability," New Literary History, 10 (Autumn 1978), 161-73. Consider, for example, the following quotation: "Such a poem [as Stevens's "The Rock"] is incapable of being encompassed in a single logical formulation. It calls forth potentially endless commentaries, each one of which, like this essay, can only formulate and reformulate its mise en abyme" (J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure," Georgia Review, 30 [Spring 1976], 31). As the second part of this essay suggests (Georgia Review, 30 [Summer 1976], 330-48), contemporary deconstructionist criticism cannot get beyond this ironic impasse. Miller's essay is in part an attempt to describe and (in some cases) criticize the work of his fellow deconstructors Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Geoffrey Hartman. With some allowances for individual differences of temperament and style, Miller's formulation of the impasse of deconstruction can be said to be normative for much of their recent work, as well as for the work of many lesser critics influenced by Derrida. Normalization is, of course, one of the most important concepts in Foucault's recent work, related to the concepts of discipline, surveillance, and the administration of power. On normalization as a means of distributing and maintaining power in Foucault's recent writings, see Gilles Deleuze, "Ecrivain non: un nouveau cartographe," Critique, 274 (1970), 1207-27. "Tympan," in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972).

5 6

10

11

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12 13

Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 162 (hereafter cited as OG). "General text" is a term Derrida employs in an interview with J.-L. Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, published in English in two parts, "Positions," Diacritics, 2 (Fall 1972), 35-43; 2 (Spring 1973), 33-46. The range of subjects, discourses, and events indicated by this term is practically unlimited. On the "irreducibility" of "the texture of the text," see Derrida's essay, "La Forme et le vouloir-dire: Note sur la ph6nomenologie du language," in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 112-13. See especially "Signature Event Context" and "Limited Inc" in Glyph I and II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), and "Me-Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of 'The Shell and the Kernel' by Nicolas Abraham," trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics, 9 (Spring 1979), 4-12. When asked to account for the things that have been printed under his name, Derrida tends to respond with something resembling a lengthy elaboration of Barbarino's disingenuous professions of mystification on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter. "Limited Inc," Derrida's satiric reply to the attack of John Searle on the reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context," could be not unfairly summarized and respoken in John Travolta's immortal monosyllables: "What?""Where? " "Positions," p. 35. See Geoffrey Hartman, "Monsieur Texte: On Jacques Derrida, his Glas," Georgia Review, 29 (Winter 1975), 759-97; and "Monsieur Texte II: Epiphony in Echoland," Georgia Review, 30 (Spring 1976), 169-97. For Derrida's justification in translating Bedeutung as vouloir-dire, see Speech and Phenomena, pp. 18-23. "La double s6ance," in La dissemination (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 248-49. On the dismantling of thematic and formalist criticism in "La double seance," see "Positions," p. 38. "La pharmacie de Platon," in La dissemination, p. 71. "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing," p. 150. For a similar critique of Derrida's ontologizing of language, see Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 182-83. La dissemination, pp. 250-51. The translation is taken from Said, "The Problem of Textuality," pp. 695-96. Joseph Riddel's claim that "Derrida's writing has passed... far 'beyond' its 'original' stage [in De la grammatologie] " ("Re-doubling the Commentary," Contemporary Literature, 20 [Spring 19791, 243) strikes me as unconvincing (not to mention how difficult it would be to imagine anyone, even Derrida himself, going "beyond" the Derrida of De la grammatologie-where might such a "beyond" lie, except perhaps "over the rainbow" in an atopia? ).

14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24

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Riddel has taken Derrida too much at his word and has mistaken the claims made in the name of deconstruction for its actual achievement. Similarly, Riddel's claim that Derrida establishes no method for literary criticism is only correct in the sense that, strictly speaking, deconstruction is not a method at all, merely a strategy which Derrida himself has claimed is "radically empiricist." But this has not prevented numerous Anglo-American critics (Riddel among them) from co-opting Derrida into an essentially systematic methodology which has as its goal the uncovering of the undecidability of literary and philosophical texts. Moreover, as the present essay attempts to show, Derrida himself is not entirely immune to the charge of having erected a system which, however eccentric and disarticulating the appearance of its design, is quite as "recuperative" in the end as the New Criticism, traditional phenomenology, and hermeneutics it attacks. 25 26 27 See Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel's Proof (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1958). Histoire de la folie, p. 594. Derrida characterizes Foucault's reading of Descartes as a "powerful act of protection and confinement. A Cartesian act for the twentieth century" (L'Ecriture et la difference [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967], p. 85). Both Foucault and Descartes (and Plato, Mallarm6, Heidegger, Husserl, and Hegel) are trapped within the tropes of the Western languages, their seemingly different discourses reducible to the familiar set of oppositions that privilege presence over absence, speech over writing, reason over madness. For Derrida, the voice of Western philosophy is essentially univocal. On Derrida's rendering of the Western philosophical tradition as continual commentary, as writing or "abnormal philosophy," see Richard Rorty, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing," and "Derrida on Language, Being, and Abnormal Philosophy," The Journal of Philosophy, 74 (November 1977), 673-81. See Said, "The Concept of Textuality," p. 711, and Deleuze, "Ecrivain non: un nouveau cartographe," p. 1223. "Power and Sex: An Interview with Michel Foucault," Telos, 32 (Summer 1977), 157. For an analysis of these instruments of control in the United States during the 1960's, see Herbert I. Schiller, The Mind Managers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). For a more detailed and statistically concrete study of similar features of the post-World War II American knowledge industry, see Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962). Noam Chomsky's work on American intellectuals and their subservience to the state is also relevant to this discussion. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1972; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), p. 138 (hereafter cited as AK). John K. Simon, "A Conversation with Michel Foucault," Partisan Review, 38, 2(1971), 192. Cf. "What is an Author? ": "The fact that a number of texts were attached to a single name implies that relationships of homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal

28 29 30

31 32 33

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explanation, authentification, or of common utilization were established among them. Finally, the author's name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse .... In this sense, the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society" (L, pp. 123-24). 34 If there is a single term for accurately denominating Foucault's work in the 1970's, it is probably not "archaeology" but "genealogy." Thus the key to his recent books and essays might be said to be the 1971 essay, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," where Foucault comes to terms with what he calls the "rancorous will to knowledge" as he unveils a historical project which "refuses the certainty of absolutes" and acknowledges the primacy of interpretation (and thus of violence and usurpation) in history: "But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations. The role of genealogy is to record its history: the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process" (L, pp. 151-52). "Questions 1976), 74.

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

A Michel

Foucault sur la geographie," He'rodote (Janvier-Mars

"Power and Sex," p. 157. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 305. "Questions AMichel Foucault sur la g6ographie," p. 82. "Ecrivain non: un nouveau cartographe," p. 1225. See Michel Foucault, "La vie des hommes infames," Les Cahiers du chemin, 27 (15 Janvier 1977), 12-29. This is not to ignore Derrida's involvement with the GREPH (on which see Christopher I. Fynsk, "A Decelebration of Philosophy," Diacritics, 8 [Summer 19781, 80-90), though it remains to be seen whether or not this will issue in a genuinely radical political stance for Derrida. Moreover, the charges which Foucault levels against the Derridean pedagogy retain their force even in light of this commitment on Derrida's part. Michael Ryan has summed up this aspect of deconstruction very well: "By problematizing the very structure of opposition, deconstruction neutralizes the specific oppositions which sustain radical political practice-conservative/ radical, fascist/socialist, reactionary/revolutionary-and it thus theoretically, and for all practical purposes, suspends the possibility of radically opposing any system from a position outside that system" ("Anarchism Revisited: A New Philosophy," Diacritics, 8 [Summer 1978], 75-76. Foucault's explanation of the purpose of commentary is worth quoting: "Whatever the techniques employed, commentary's only role is to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down. It must.. . say, for the first

42

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time, what has already been said, and repeat tirelessly what was, nevertheless, never said. The infinite rippling of commentary is agitated from within by the dream of masked repetition .... Commentary averts the chance element of discourse by giving it its due: it gives us the opportunity to say something other than the text itself, but on condition that it is the text itself which is uttered and, in some ways, finalised" (AK, p. 221).

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