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Social Science Information
http://ssi.sagepub.com/content/10/2/7.citation
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DOI: 10.1177/053901847101000201
1971 10: 7Social Science Information
Michel Foucault
Orders of discourse
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What is This?
- Apr 1, 1971Version of Record>>
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7
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Orders of discourse
Inaugural lecture delivered at the College de France*
I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all
the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have
preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings.
At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless
voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking
up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices
as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There
would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me,
while I stood in its path a
slender gap - the point of its possible disappear-
ance.
Behind me, I should like to have heard (having been at it long enough already,
repeating in advance what I am about to tell you) the voice of Molloy, beginning
to speak thus: &dquo;I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say
words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until
they say me - heavy burden, heavy sin; I must go on; maybe it’s been done
already; maybe they’ve already said me; maybe they’ve already borne me to
the threshold of my story, right to the door opening onto my story; I’d be
surprised if it opened&dquo;.
A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the
obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves, right from the outside,
on the other side of discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering
its particular, fearsome, and even devilish features. To this all too common
feeling, institutions have an ironic reply, for they solemnise beginnings, surrounding
them with a circle of silent attention; in order that they can be distinguished
from far off, they impose ritual forms upon them.
Inclination speaks out: &dquo;I don’t want to have to enter this risky world of
*
This lecture was delivered in French at the College de France on December 2nd, 1970.
The original French text has been published with the title L’ordre du discours (Paris, Gallimard,
1971). The English translation is due to Rupert Swyer.
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discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I
would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely
open, with others responding to my expectations, and truths emerging, one
by one. All I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it,
a happy wreck&dquo;. Institutions reply: &dquo;But you have nothing to fear from launching
out; we’re here to show you discourse is within the estabhshed order of
things, that we’ve waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set
aside for it a
place which both honours and disarms it; and if it should
happen to have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who give it that
power&dquo;.
Yet, maybe this institution and this inclination are but two converse responses
to the same anxiety: anxiety as to just what discourse is, when it is
manifested materially, as a written or spoken object; but also, uncertainty faced
with a transitory existence, destined for oblivion at
any rate, not belonging
to us; uncertainty at the suggestion of barely imaginable powers and dangers
behind this activity, however humdrum and grey it may seem; uncertainty
when we suspect the conflicts, triumphs, injuries, dominations and enslavements
that lie behind these words, even when long use has chipped away their
rough edges.
What is so perilous, then, in the fact people speak, and that their speech
proliferates? Where is the danger in that?
Here then is the hypothesis I want to advance, tonight, in order to fix the
terrain or
perhaps the very provisional theatre within
which I shall be
working. I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse
is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain
number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers,
to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.
In a society such as our own we all know the rules of exclusioll. The most
obvious and familiar of these concerns what is prohibited. We know perfectly
well that we are not free to say just anything, that we cannot simply speak
of anything, when we like or where we like; not just anyone, finally, may
speak of just anything. We have three types of prohibition, covering objects,
ritual with its surrounding circumstances, the privileged or exclusive right
to speak of a particular subject; these prohibitions interrelate, reinforce and
complement each other, forming a complex web, continually subject to modification.
I will note simply that the areas where this web is most tightly woven
today, where the danger spots are most numerous, are those dealing with politics
and sexuality. It is as though discussion, far from being a transparent, neutral
element, allowing us to disarm sexuality and to pacify politics, were one of
those privileged areas in which they exercised some of their more awesome
powers. In appearance, speech may well be of little account, but the prohibitions
surrounding it soon reveal its links with desire and power. This
should not be very surprising, for psychoanalysis has already shown us that
speech is not merely the medium which manifests or
dissembles -
desire;
. I ’tr ~ ,.:.,.&dquo;..! . ;,’t,..: .’&dquo;r! -’
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it is also the object of desire. Similarly, historians have constantly impressed
upon us that speech is no mere verbalisation of conflicts and systems of
domination, but that it is the very object of man’s conflicts.
But our society possesses yet another principle of exclusion; not another
prohibition, but a division and a rejection. I have in mind the opposition:
reason and folly. From the depths of the Middle Ages, a man was mad if
his speech could not be said to form part of the common discourse of men.
His words were considered nul and void, without truth or significance, worthless
as evidence, inadmissible in the authentification of acts or contracts, incapable
even of bringing about transubstantiation the
transformation of bread
into flesh - at Mass. And yet, in contrast to all others, his words were credited
with strange powers, of revealing some hidden truth, of predicting the future,
of revealing, in all their naivete, what the wise were unable to perceive. It is
curious to note that for centuries, in Europe, the words of a madman were
either totally ignored or else were taken as words of truth. They either fell
into a void rejected
the moment they were proferred or
else men deciphered
in them a naive or cunning reason, rationality more rational than that
of a rational man. At all events, whether excluded or secretly invested with
reason, the madman’s speech did not strictly exist. It was through his words
that one recognised the madness of the madman; but they were certainly the
medium within which this division became active ; they were neither heard
nor remembered. No doctor before the end of the 18th century had ever
thought of listening to the content how
it was said and why - of these
words ; and yet it was these which signalled the difference between reason and
madness. Whatever a madman said, it was taken for mere noise; he was
credited with words only in a symbolic sense, in the theatre, in which he stepped
forward, unarmed and reconciled, playing his role: that of masked truth.
Of course people are going to say all that is over and done with, or that it
is in the process of being finished with, today; that the madman’s words are
no longer on the other side of this division; that they are no longer nul and
void, that, on the contrary, they alert us to the need to look for a sense behind
them, for the attempt at, or the ruins of some &dquo;oeuvre&dquo;; we have even come
to notice these words of madmen in our own speech, in those tiny pauses when
we forget what we are talking about. But all this is no proof that the old
division is not just as active as before; we have only to think of the systems
by which we decipher this speech; we have only to think of the network of
institutions established to permit doctors and psychoanalists to listen to the
mad and, at the same time, enabling the mad to come and speak, or, in desperation,
to withhold their meagre words; we have only to bear all this in mind to
suspect that the old division is just as active as ever, even if it is proceeding
along different lines and, via new institutions, producing rather different
effects. Even when the role of the doctor consists of lending an ear to this
finally liberated speech, this procedure still takes place in the context of a
hiatus between listener and speaker. For he is listening to speech invested
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with desire, crediting itself for
its greater ;exultation or for its greater
anguish with
terrible powers. If we truly require silence to cure monsters,
then it must be an attentive silence, and it is in this that the division lingers.
It is perhaps a little risky to speak of the opposition between true and false
as a third system of exclusion, along with those I have mentioned already.
How could one reasonably compare the constraints of truth with those other
divisions, arbitrary in origin if not developing out of historical contingency not
merely modifiable but in a state of continual flux, supported by a system
of institutions imposing and manipulating them, acting not without constraint,
nor without an element, at least, of violence?
Certainly, as a proposition, the division between true and false is neither
arbitrary, nor modifiable, nor institutional, nor violent. Putting the question
in different terms, however - asking what has been, what still is, throughout
our discourse, this will to truth which has survived throughout so many centuries
of our history; or if we ask what is, in its very general form, the kind of
division governing our will to knowledge - then we may well discern something
like a system of exclusion (historical, modifiable, institutionally constraining)
in the process of development.
It is, undoubtedly, a historically constituted division, For, even with the
6th century Greek poets, true discourse in
the meaningful sense -
inspiring
respect and terror, to which all were obliged to submit, because it held sway
over all and was pronounced by men who spoke as of right, according to
ritual, meted out justice and attributed to each his rightful share; it prophesied
the future, not merely announcing what was going to occur, but contributing to
its actual event, carrying men along with it and thus weaving itself into the
fabric of fate. And yet, a century later, the highest truth no longer resided
in what discourse was, nor in what it did: it lay in what was said. The day
dawned when truth moved over from the ritualised act potent
and just of
enunciation to settle on what was enunciated itself: its meaning, its form,
its object and its relation to what it referred to. A division emerged between
Hesiod and Plato, separating true discourse from false; it was a new division
for, henceforth, true discourse was no longer considered precious and desirable,
since it had ceased to be discourse linked to the exercise of power. And so the
Sophists were routed.
This historical division has doubtless lent its general form to our will to
knowledge. Yet it has never ceased shifting: the great mutations of science
may well sometimes be seen to flow from some discovery, but they may equally
be viewed as the appearance of new forms of the will to truth. In the 19th
century there was undoubtedly a will to truth having nothing to do, in terms of
the forms examined, of the fields to which it addressed itself, nor the techniques
upon which it was based, with the will to knowledge which characterised
classical culture. Going back a little in time, to the turn of the 16th and 17th
centuries and
particularly in England - a will to knowledge emerged which,
anticipating its present content, sketched out a schema of possible, observable,
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measurable and classifiable objects; a will to knowledge which imposed upon
the knowing subject in
some ways taking precedence over all experience a
certain position, a certain viewpoint, and a certain function (look rather than
read, verify rather than comment), a will to knowledge which prescribed (and,
more generally speaking, all instruments determined) the technological level
at which knowledge could be employed in order to be verifiable and useful
(navigation, mining, pharmacopoeia). Everything seems to have occurred
as though, from the time of the great Platonic division onwards, the will to
truth had its own history, which is not at all that of the constraining truths:
the history of a range of subjects to be learned, the history of the functions of
the knowing subject, the history of material, technical and instrumental
investment in knowledge.
But this will to truth, like the other systems of exclusion, relies on institutional
support: it is both reinforced and accompanied by whole strata of
practices such as pedagogy naturally
-
the book-system, publishing,
libraries, such as the learned societies in the past, and laboratories today.
But it is probably even more profoundly accompanied by the manner in which
knowledge is employed in a society, the way in which it is exploited, divided
and, in some ways, attributed. It is worth recalling at this point, if only
symbolically, the old Greek adage, that arithmetic should be taught in democracies,
for it teaches relations of equality, but that geometry alone should
be reserved for oligarchies, as it demonstrates the proportions within
inequality.
Finally, I believe that this will to knowledge, thus reliant upon institutional
support and distribution, tends to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint
upon other forms of discourse I
am speaking of our own society.
I am thinking of the way Western literature has, for centuries, sought to base
itself in nature, in the plausible, upon sincerity and science in
short, upon
true discourse. I am thinking, too, of the way economic practices, codified
into precepts and recipes as
morality, too have
sought, since the 18th
century, to found themselves, to rationalise and justify their currency, in a
theory of wealth and production; I am thinking, again, of the manner in
which such prescriptive ensembles as the Penal Code have sought their bases
or justifications. For example, the Penal Code started out as a theory of
Right; then, from the time of the 19th century, people looked for its validation
in sociological, psychological, medical and psychiatric knowledge. It is as
though the very words of the law had no authority in our society, except
insofar as they are derived from true discourse. Of the three great systems of
exclusion governing discourse prohibited
words, the division of madness
and the will to truth I
have spoken at greatest length concerning the third.
With good reason: for centuries, the former have continually tended toward
the latter; because this last has, gradually, been attempting to assimilate the
others in order both to modify them and to provide them with a firm foundation.
Because, if the two former are continually growing more fragile and
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less certain to the extent that they are now invaded by the will to truth, the
latter, in contrast, daily grows in strength, in depth and implacability.
And yet we speak of it least. As though the will to truth and its vicissitudes
were masked by truth itself and its necessary unfolding. The reason
is perhaps this: if, since the time of the Greeks, true discourse no longer responds
to desire or to that which exercises power in the will to truth, in the
will to speak out in true discourse, what, then, is at work, if not desire and
power? True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and
power, is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the
will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it
seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it.
Thus, only one truth appears before our eyes: wealth, fertility and sweet
strength in all its insidious universality. In contrast, we are unaware of the
prodigious machinery of the will to truth, with its vocation of exclusion. All
those who, at one moment or another in our history, have attempted to remould
this will to truth and to turn it against truth at that very point where truth
undertakes to justify the taboo, and to define madness; all those, from Nietzsche
to Artaud and Bataille, must now stand as (probably haughty) signposts
for all our future work.
There are, of course, many other systems for the control and delimitation
of discourse. Those I have spoken of up to now are, to some extent, active .
on the exterior; they function as systems of exclusion; they concern that
part of discourse which deals with power and desire.
I believe we can isolate another group : internal rules, where discourse
exercises its own control ; rules concerned with the principles of classification,
ordering and distribution. It is as though we were now involved in the
mastery of another dimension of discourse : that of events and chance.
In the first place, commentary. I suppose, though I am not altogether
sure, there is barely a society without its major narratives, told, retold and
varied; formulae, texts, ritualised texts to be spoken in well-defined circumstances
; things said once, and conserved because people suspect some hidden
secret or wealth lies buried within. In short, I suspect one could find a kind of
gradation between different types of discourse within most societies: discourse
&dquo;uttered&dquo; in the course of the day and in casual meetings, and which disappears
with the very act which gave rise to it; and those forms of discourse that lie
at the origins of a certain number of new verbal acts, which are reiterated,
transformed or discussed; in short, discourse which is spoken and remains
spoken, indefinitely, beyond its formulation, and which remains to be spoken.
We know them in our own cultural system: religious or juridical texts, as well
as some curious texts, from the point of view of their status, which we term
&dquo;literary&dquo; ; to a certain extent, scientific texts also.
What is clear is that this gap is neither stable, nor constant, nor absolute.
There is no question of there being one category, fixed for all time, reserved for
fundamental or creative discourse, and another for those which reiterate,
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expound and comment. Not a few major texts become blurred and disappear,
and commentaries sometimes come to occupy the former position. But
while the details of application may well change, the function remains the
same, and the principle of hierarchy remains at work. The radical denial of
this gradation can never be anything but play, utopia or anguish. Play, as
Borges uses the term, in the form of commentary that is nothing more than
the reappearance, word for word (though this time it is solemn and anticipated)
of the text commented on; or again, the play of a work of criticism talking
endlessly about a work that does not exist. It is a lyrical dream of talk
reborn, utterly afresh and innocent, at each point; continually reborn in all
its vigour, stimulated by things, feelings or thoughts. Anguish, such as
that of Janet when sick, for whom the least utterance sounded as the &dquo;word
of the Evangelist&dquo;, concealing an inexhaustible wealth of meaning, worthy
to be broadcast, rebegun, commented upon indefinitely: &dquo;When I think&dquo;,
he said on reading or listening; &dquo;When I think of this phrase, continuing its
journey through eternity, while I, perhaps, have only incompletely understood
it...&dquo;
I
But who can fail to see that this would be to annul one of the terms of the
relationship each time, and not to suppress the relationship itself? A relationship
in continual process of modification; a relationship taking multiple and
diverse forms in a given epoch: juridical exegesis is very different and
has
been for a long time from
religious commentary; a single work of literature
can give rise, simultaneously, to several distinct types of discourse. The
Odyssey, as a primary text, is repeated in the same epoch, in Berand’s translation,
in infinite textual explanations and in Joyce’s Ulysses.
For the time being, I would like to limit myself to pointing out that, in what
we generally refer to as commentary, the difference between primary text and
secondary text plays two interdependent roles. On the one hand, it permits
us to create new discourses ad infinitum: the top-heaviness of the original text,
its permanence, its status as discourse ever capable of being brought up to
date, the multiple or hidden meanings with which it is credited, the reticence
and wealth it is believed to contain, all this creates an open possibility for
discussion. On the other hand, whatever the techniques employed, commentary’s
only role is to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down.
It must and
the paradox is ever-changing yet inescapable say,
for the
first 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: in the distance there is, perhaps, nothing
other than what was there at the point of departure : simple recitation. 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. The open
multiplicity, the fortuitousness, is transferred, by the principle of commentary,
from what is liable to be said to the number, the form, the masks and the
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14
circumstances of repetition. The novelty lies no longer in what is ~aid,butcircumstances of repetition. The novelty lies no longer in what is said, but
in its reappearance.
I believe there is another principle of rarefaction, complementary to the
first : the author. Not, of course, the author in the sense of the individual who
delivered the speech or wrote the text in question, but the author as the unifying
principle in a particular group of writings or statements, lying at the origins of
their significance, as the seat of their coherence. This principle is not constant
at all times. All around us, there are sayings and texts whose meaning or
effectiveness has nothing to do with any author to whom they might be attributed
: mundane remarks, quickly forgotten; orders and contracts that are
signed, but have no recognisable author; technical prescriptions anonymously
transmitted. But even in those fields where it is normal to attribute a work to
an author literature,
philosophy, science the
principle does not always
play the same role; in the order of scientific discourse, it was, during the Middle
Ages, indispensable that a scientific text be attributed to an author, for the
author was the index of the work’s truthfulness. A proposition was held to
derive its scientific value from its author. But since the 17th century this function
has been steadily declining; it barely survives now, save to give a name to
a theorem, an effect, an example or a syndrome. In literature, however, and
from about the same period, the author’s function has become steadily more
important. Now, we demand of all those narratives, poems, dramas and
comedies which circulated relatively anonymously throughout the Middle Ages,
whence they come, and we virtually insist they tell us who wrote them. We
ask authors to answer for the unity of the works published in their names; we
ask that they reveal, or at least display the hidden sense pervading their work; we
ask them to reveal their personal lives, to account for their experiences and the
real story that gave birth to their writings. The author is he who implants,
into the troublesome language of fiction, its unities, its coherence, its links
with reality.
I know what people are going to say: &dquo;But there you are speaking of the
author in the same way as the critic reinvents him after he is dead and buried,
when we are left with no more than a tangled mass of scrawlings. Of course,
then you have to put a little order into what is left, you have to imagine a
structure, a cohesion, the sort of theme you might expect to arise out of an
author’s consciousness or his life, even if it is a little fictitious. But all that
cannot get away from the fact the author existed, irrupting into the midst of
all the words employed, infusing them with his genius, or his chaos&dquo;.
Of course, it would be ridiculous to deny the existence of individuals who
write, and invent. But I think that, for some time, at least, the individual
who sits down to write a text, at the edge of which lurks a possible c~uvre,
resumes the functions of the author. What he writes and does not write, what
he sketches out, even preliminary sketches for the work, and what he drops as
simple mundane remarks, all this interplay of differences is prescribed by the
author-function. It is from his new position, as an author, that he will fashion
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15
from
all he might have said, from all he says daily, at any time the
still
shaky profile of his ceuvre.
Commentary limited the hazards of discourse through the action of an
identity taking the form of repetition and sameness. The author principle
limits this same chance element through the action of an identity whose form
is that of individuality and the I.
But we have to recognise another principle of limitation in what we call, not
sciences, but &dquo;disciplines&dquo;. Here is yet another relative, mobile principle, one
which enables us to construct, but within a narrow framework.
The organisation of disciplines is just as much opposed to the commentary- _
principle as it is to that of the author. Opposed to that of the author, because
disciplines are defined by groups of objects, methods, their corpus of propositions
considered to be true, the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques
and tools: all these constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available
to whoever wishes, or whoever is able to make use of them, without there
being any question of their meaning or their validity being derived from whoever
happened to invent them. But the principles involved in the formation of
disciplines are equally opposed to that of commentary. In a discipline, unlike
in commentary, what is supposed at the point of departure is not some meaning
which must be rediscovered, nor an identity to be reiterated; it is that which
is required for the construction of new statements. For a discipline to exist,
there must be the possibility of formulating and
of doing so ad infinitum fresh
propositions.
But there is more, and there is more, probably, in order that there may be
less. A discipline is not the sum total of all the truths that may be uttered
concerning something; it is not even the total of all that may be accepted, by
virtue of some principle of coherence and systematisation, concerning some
given fact or proposition. Medicine does not consist of all that may be truly
said about disease ; botany cannot be defined by the sum total of the truths one
could say about plants. There are two reasons for this, the first being that
botany and medicine, like other disciplines, consist of errors as well as truths,
errors that are in no way residuals, or foreign bodies, but having their own
positive functions and their own valid history, such that their roles are often
indissociable from that of the truths. The other reason is that, for a proposition
to belong to botany or pathology, it must fulfil certain conditions, in a
stricter and more complex sense than that of pure and simple truth: at any rate,
other conditions. The proposition must refer to a specific range of objects;
from the end of the 17th century, for example, a proposition, to be &dquo;botanical&dquo;,
had to be concerned with the visible structure of plants, with its system of
close, and not so close resemblances or with the behaviour of its fluids; (but it
could no longer retain, as had still been the case in the 16th century, references
to its symbolic value or to the virtues and properties accorded it in
antiquity). But without belonging to any discipline, a proposition is obliged
to utilize conceptual instruments and techniques of a well-defined type; from
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the 19th century onwards, a proposition was no longer medical it
became
&dquo;non-medical&dquo;, becoming more of an individual fantasy or item of popular
imagery - if it employed metaphorical or qualitative terms or notions of essence
(congestion, fermented liquids, dessicated solids); in return, it could -
it
had to appeal
to equally metaphorical notions, though constructed according
to a different functional and physiological model (concerning irritation,
inflamation or the decay of tissue). But there is more still, for in order to
belong to a discipline, a proposition must fit into a certain type of theoretical
field. Suffice it to recall that the quest for primitive language, a perfectly acceptable
theme up to the 18th century, was enough, in the second half of the
19th century, to throw any discourse into, I hesitate to say error, but into
a world of chimera and reverie into
pure and simple linguistic mons-
trosity.
Within its own limits, every discipline recognises true and false propositions,
but it repulses a whole teratology of learning. The exterior of a science is
both more, and less, populated than one might think: certainly, there is immediate
experience, imaginary themes bearing on and continually accompanying
immemorial beliefs; but perhaps there are no errors in the strict sense of the
term, for error can only emerge and be identified within a well-defined process;
there are monsters on the prowl, however, whose forms alter with the history
of knowledge. In short, a proposition must fulfil some onerous and complex
conditions before it can be admitted within a discipline; before it can be pronounced
true or false it must be, as Monsieur Canguilhem might say, &dquo;within
the true&dquo;.
People have often wondered how on earth 19th-century botanists and biologists
managed not to see the truth of Mendel’s statements. But it was precisely
because Mendel spoke of objects, employed methods and placed himself within
a theoretical perspective totally alien to the biology of his time. But then,
Naudin had suggested that hereditary traits constituted a separate element
before him; and yet, however novel or unfamiliar the principle may have been,
it was nevertheless reconcilable, if only as an enigma, with biological discourse.
Mendel, on the other hand, announced that hereditary traits constituted an
absolutely new biological object, thanks to a hitherto untried system of filtrage
: he detached them from species, from the sex transmitting them, the
field in which he observed being that infinitely open series of generations in
which hereditary traits appear and disappear with statistical regularity. Here
was a new object, calling for new conceptual tools, and for fresh theoretical
foundations. Mendel spoke the truth, but he was not dans le vrai (within
the true) of contemporary biological discourse: it simply was not along such
lines that objects and biological concepts were formed. A whole change in
scale, the deployment of a totally new range of objects in biology was required
before Mendel could enter into the true and his propositions appear for the
most part, exact. Mendel was a true monster, so much so that science could
not even properly speak of him. And yet Schleiden, for example, thirty yearsat Universitaet Konstanz on February 15, 2013ssi.sagepub.comDownloaded from
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earlier, denying, at the height of the 19th century, vegetable sexuality, was
committing no more than a disciplined error.
It is always possible one could speak the truth in a void; one would only be
in the true, however, if one obeyed the rules of some discursive &dquo;policy&dquo;
which would have to be reactivated every time one spoke.
Disciplines constitute a system of control in the production of discourse,
fixing its limits through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent
reactivation of the rules.
We tend to see, in an author’s fertility, in the multiplicity of commentaries and
in the development of a discipline so many infinite resources available for the
creation of discourse. Perhaps, so, but they are nonetheless principles of
constraint, and it is probably impossible to appreciate their positive, multiplicatory
role without first taking into consideration their restrictive, constraining
role.
There is, I believe, a third group of rules serving to control discourse. Here,
we are no longer dealing with the mastery of the powers contained within
discourse, nor with averting the hazards of its appearance; it is more a question
of determining the conditions under which it may be employed, of imposing
a certain number of rules upon those individuals who employ it, thus denying
access to everyone else. This amounts to a rarefaction among speaking
subjects : none may enter into discourse on a specific subject unless he has
satisfied certain conditions or if he is not, from the outset, qualified to do so.
More exactly, not all areas of discourse are equally open and penetrable;
some are forbidden territory (differentiated and differentiating) while others are
virtually open to the winds and stand, without any prior restrictions, open to
all.
Here, I would like to recount a little story so beautiful I fear it may well be
true. It encompasses all the constraints of discourse: those limiting its powers,
those controlling its chance appearances and those which select from among
speaking subjects. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Shogun heard
tell of European superiority in navigation, commerce, politics and the military
arts, and that this was due to their knowledge of mathematics. He
wanted to obtain this precious knowledge. When someone told him of an
English sailor possessed of this marvellous discourse, he summoned him to his
palace and kept him there. The Shogun took lessons from the mariner in
private and familiarised himself with mathematics, after which he retained
power and lived to a very old age. It was not until the 19th century that there
were Japanese mathematicians. But that is not the end of the anecdote, for
it has its European aspect as well. The story has it that the English sailor,
Will Adams, was a carpenter and an autodidact. Having worked in a shipyard
he had learnt geometry. Can we see in this narrative the expression of one
of the great myths of European culture? To the monopolistic, secret knowledge
of oriental tyranny, Europe opposed the universal communication of knowledge
and the infinitely free exchange of discourse.
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This notion does not, in fact, stand up to close examination. Exchange and
communication are positive forces at play within complex, but restrictive systems
; it is probable that they cannot operate independently of these. The
most superficial and obvious of these restrictive systems is constituted by what
we collectively refer to as ritual; ritual defines the qualifications required of the
speaker (of who in dialogue, interrogation or recitation, should occupy which
position and formulate which type of utterance); it lays down gestures to be
made, behaviour, circumstances and the whole range of signs that must accompany
discourse; finally, it lays down the supposed, or imposed significance of
the words used, their effect upon those to whom they are addressed, the limitations
of their constraining validity. Religious discourse, juridical and
therapeutic as well as, in some ways, political discourse are all barely dissociable
from the functioning of a ritual that determines the individual properties
and agreed roles of the speakers.
A rather different function is filled by &dquo;fellowships of discourse&dquo;, whose
function is to preserve or te reproduce discourse, but in order that it should
circulate within a closed community, according to strict regulations, without
those in possession being dispossessed by this very distribution. An archaic
model of this would be those group of Rhapsodists, possessing knowledge of
poems to recite or, even, upon which to work variations and transformations.
But though the ultimate object of this knowledge was ritual recitation, it was
protected and preserved within a determinate group, by the, often extremely
complex, exercises of memory implied by such a process. Apprenticeship
gained access both to a group and to a secret which recitation made manifest,
but did not divulge. The roles of speaking and listening were not inter-
changeable.
Few such &dquo;fellowships of discourse&dquo; remain, with their ambiguous interplay
of secrecy and disclosure. But do not be deceived; even in true discourse,
even in the order of published discourse, free from all ritual, we still find
secret-appropriation and non-interchangeability at work. It could even be
that the act of writing, as it is institutionalised today, with its books, its publishing
system and the personality of the writer, occurs within a diffuse, yet
constraining,&dquo;fellowship of discourse&dquo;. The separateness of the writer, continually
opposed to the activity of all other writing and speaking subjects, the
intransitive character he lends to his discourse, the fundamental singularity he
has long accorded to &dquo;writing&dquo;, the affirmed dissymmetry between &dquo;creation&dquo;
and any use of linguistic systems all
this manifests in its formulation (and
tends moreover to accompany the interplay of these factors in practice) the
existence of a certain &dquo;fellowship of discourse&dquo;. But there are many others,
functioning according to entirely different schemas of exclusivity and disclosure
: one has only to think of technical and scientific secrets, of the forms
of diffusion and circulation in medical discourse, of those who have appropriated
economic or political discourse.
At first sight, &dquo;doctrine&dquo; (religious, political, philosophical) would seem to
..
,
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constitute the very reverse of a &dquo;fellowship of discourse&dquo; ; for among the latter,
the number of speakers were, if not fixed, at least limited, and it was among
this number that discourse was allowed to circulate and be transmitted. Doctrine,
on the other hand, tends to diffusion: in the holding in common of a
single ensemble of discourse that individuals, as many as you wish, could
define their reciprocal allegiance. In appearance, the sole requisite is the
recognition of the same truths and the acceptance of a certain rule more
or
less flexible of
conformity with validated discourse. If it were a question of
just that, doctrines would barely be any different from scientific disciplines,
and discursive control would bear merely on the form or content of what was
uttered, and not on the speaker. Doctrinal adherence, however, involves
both speaker and the spoken, the one through the other. The speaking
subject is involved through, and as a result of, the spoken, as is demonstrated
by the rules of exclusion and the rejection mechanism brought into play when
a speaker formulates one, or many, inassimilable utterances; questions of
heresy and unorthodoxy in no way arise out of fanatical exaggeration of doctrinal
mechanisms; they are a fundamental part of them. But conversely,
doctrine involves the utterances of speakers in the sense that doctrine is, permanently,
the sign, the manifestation and the instrument of a prior adherence
adherence
to a class, to a social or racial status, to a nationality or an interest,
to a struggle, a revolt, resistance or acceptance. Doctrine links individuals
to certain types of utterance while consequently barring them from all others.
Doctrine effects a dual subjection, that of speaking subjects to discourse, and
that of discourse to the group, at least virtually, of speakers.
Finally, on a much broader scale, we have to recognise the great cleavages
in what one might call the social appropriation of discourse. Education may
well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like
our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that
in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the
well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a
political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse,
with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.
I am well aware of the abstraction I am performing when I separate, as I
have just done, verbal rituals, &dquo;fellowships of discourse&dquo;, doctrinal groups and
social appropriation. Most of the time they are linked together, constituting
great edifices that distribute speakers among the different types of discourse,
and which appropriate those types of discourse to certain categories of subject.
In a word, let us say that these are the main rules for the subjection of discourse.
What is an educational system, after all, if not a ritualisation of the word; if
not a qualification of some fixing of roles for speakers; if not the constitution
of a (diffuse) doctrinal group; if not a distribution and an appropriation of
discourse, with all its learning and its powers? What is &dquo;writing&dquo; (that of
&dquo;writers&dquo;) if not a similar form of subjection, perhaps taking rather different
forms, but whose main stresses are nonetheless analogous? May we not also
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say that the judicial system also, as well as institutionalised medicine,
constitute similar systems for the subjection of discourse?
I wonder whether a certain number of philosophical themes have not come
to conform to this activity of limitation and exclusion and perhaps even to
reinforce it.
They conform, first of all, by proposing an ideal truth as a law of discourse,
and an immanent rationality as the principle of their behaviour. They accompany,
too, an ethic of knowledge, promising truth only to the desire for truth
itself and the power to think it.
They then go on to reinforce this activity by denying the specific reality of
discourse in general.
Ever since the exclusion of the activity and commerce of the sophists, ever
since their paradoxes were muzzled, more or less securely, it would seem that
Western thought has seen to it that discourse be permitted as little room as
possible between thought and words. It would appear to have ensured that
to discourse should appear merely as a certain interjection between speaking
and thinking; that it should constitute thought, clad in its signs and rendered
visible by words or, conversely, that the structures of language themselves
should be brought into play, producing a certain effect of meaning.
This very ancient elision of the reality of discourse in philosophical thought
has taken many forms in the course of history. We have seen it quite recently
in the guise of many themes now familiar to us.
It seems to me that the theme of the founding subject permits us to elide the
reality of discourse. The task of the founding subject is to animate the empty
forms of language with his objectives; through the thickness and inertia of
empty things, he grasps intuitively the meanings lying within them. Beyond
time, he indicates the field of meanings, leaving history to make them explicit,
and in which propositions, sciences, and deductive ensembles ultimately find
their foundation. In this relationship with meaning, the founding subject has
signs, marks, tracks, letters at his disposal. But he does not need to demonstrate
these passing through the singular instance of discourse.
The opposing theme, that of originating experience, plays an analogous
role. This asserts, in the case of experience, that even before it could be grasped
in the form of a cogito, prior significations, in some ways ’already spoken,
were circulating in the world, scattering it all about us, and from the outset
made possible a sort of primitive recognition. Thus, a primary complicity
with the world founds, for us, a possibility of speaking of experience, in it,
to designate and name it, to judge it and, finally, to know it in the form of
truth. If there is discourse, what could it legitimately be if not a discrete
reading? Things murmur meanings our language has merely to extract; from
its most primitive beginnings, this language was already whispering to us of
a being of which it forms the skeleton.
The theme of universal mediation is, I believe, yet another manner of eliding
the reality of discourse. And this despite appearances. At first sight it
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would seem that, to discover the movement of a logos everywhere elevating
singularities into concepts, finally enabling immediate consciousness to deploy
all the rationality in the world, is certainly to place discourse at the centre of
speculation. But, in truth, this logos is really only another discourse already
in operation, or rather, it is things and events themselves which insensibly
become discourse in the unfolding of the essential secrets. Discourse is no
longer much more than the shimmering of a truth about to be born in its own
eyes; and when all things come eventually to take the form of discourse, when
everything may be said and when anything becomes an excuse for pronouncing
a discourse, it will be because all things having manifested and exchanged
meanings, they will then all be able to return to the silent interiority of self-
consciousness.
Whether it is the philosophy of a founding subject, a philosophy of originating
experience or a philosophy of universal mediation, discourse is really
only an activity, of writing in the first case, of reading in the second and exchange
in the third. This exchange, this writing, this reading never involve anything
but signs. Discourse thus nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the
disposal of the signifier.
What civilization, in appearance, has shown more respect towards discourse
than our own ? Where has it been more and better honoured? Where have
men depended more radically, apparently, upon its constraints and its universal
character ? But, it seems to me, a certain fear hides behind this apparent supremacy
accorded, this apparent logophilia. It is as though these taboos, these
barriers, thresholds and limits were deliberately disposed in order, at least
partly, to master and control the great proliferation of discourse, in such a
way as to relieve its richness of its most dangerous elements; to organise its
disorder so as to skate round its most uncontrollable aspects. It is as though
people had wanted to efface all trace of its irruption into the activity of our
thought and language. There is undoubtedly in our society, and I would not
be surprised to see it in others, though taking different forms and modes, a
profound logophobia, a sort of dumb fear of these events, of this mass of
spoken things, of everything that could possibly be violent, discontinuous,
querulous, disordered even and perilous in it, of the incessant, disorderly
buzzing of discourse.
If we wish I
will not say to efface this fear but
to analyse it in its conditions,
its activity and its effects, I believe we must resolve ourselves to accept
three decisions which our current thinking rather tends to resist, and which
belong to the three groups of function I have just mentioned: to question our
will to truth; to restore to discourse its character as an event; to abolish the
sovereignty of the signifier.
These are the tasks, or rather, some of the themes which will govern my
work in the years ahead. One can straight away distinguish some of the
methodological demands they imply.
. A principle of reversal, first of all. Where, according to tradition, we think
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we recognise the source of discourse, the principles behind its flourishing and
continuity, in those factors which seem to play a positive role, such as the author
discipline, will to truth, we must rather recognise the negative activity of the
cutting-out and rarefaction of discourse.
But, once we have distinguished these principles of rarefaction, once we have
ceased considering them as a fundamental and creative action, what do we
discover behind them? Should we affirm that a world of uninterrupted discourse
would be virtually complete? This is where we have to bring other
methodological principles into play.
Next, then, the principle of discontinuity. The existence of systems of rarefaction
does not imply that, over and beyond them lie great vistas of limitless discourse,
continuous and silent, repressed and driven back by them, making it
our task to abolish them and at last to restore it to speech. Whether talking
in terms of speaking or thinking, we must not imagine some unsaid thing, or an
unthought, floating about the world, interfacing with all its forms and events.
Discourse must be treated as a discontinuous activity, its different manifestations
sometimes coming together, but just as easily unaware of, or excluding
each other.
The principle of specificity declares that a particular discourse cannot be
resolved by a prior system of significations; that we should not imagine that
the world presents us with a legible face, leaving us merely to decipher it;
it does not work hand in glove with what we already know; there is no prediscursive
fate disposing the word in our favour. We must conceive discourse
as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon
them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of
their regularity.
The fourth principle, that of exteriority, holds that we are not to burrow
to the hidden core of discourse, to the heart of the thought or meaning manifested
in it; instead, taking the discourse itself, its appearance and its regularity,
that we should look for its external conditions of existence, for that which
gives rise to the chance series of these events and fixes its limits.
As the regulatory principles of analysis, then, we have four notions: event
series, regularity and the possible conditions of existence. Term for ter m
we find the notion of event opposed to that of creation, the possible conditions
of existence opposing signification. These four notions (signification, originality,
unity, creation) have, in a fairly general way, dominated the traditional
history of ideas; by general agreement one sought the point of creation, the
unity of a work, of a period or a theme, one looked also for the mark of
individual originality and the infinite wealth of hidden meanings.
I would like to add just two remarks, the first of which concerns history.
We frequently credit contemporary history with having removed the individual
event from its privileged position and with having revealed the more enduring
structures of history. That is so. I am not sure, however, that historians have
been working in this direction alone. Or, rather, I do not think one can oppose
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the identification of the individual event to the analysis of long term trends quite
so neatly. On the contrary, it seems to me that it is in squeezing the individual
event, in directing the resolving power of historical analysis onto official pricelists
(mercuriales), title deeds, parish registers, to harbour archives analysed
year by year and week by week, that we gradually perceive beyond
battles,
decisions, dynasties and assemblies the
emergence of those massive phenomena
of secular or multi-secular importance. History, as it is practised today,
does not turn its back on events; on the contrary, it is continually enlarging
the field of events, constantly discovering new layers more
superficial
as well as more profound - incessantly isolating new ensembles -
events,
numerous, dense and interchangeable or rare and decisive : from daily price
fluctuations to secular inflations. What is significant is that history does not
consider an event without defining the series to which it belongs, without
specifying the method of analysis used, without seeking out the regularity of
phenomena and the probable limits of their occurrence, without enquiring
about variations, inflexions and the slope of the curve, without desiring to
know the conditions on which these depend. History has long since abandoned
its attempts to understand events in terms of cause and effect in the
formless unity of some great evolutionary process, whether vaguely homogeneous
or rigidly hierarchised. It did not do this in order to seek out structures
anterior to, alien or hostile to the event. It was rather in order to establish
those diverse converging, and sometimes divergent, but never autonomous
series that enable us to circumscribe the &dquo;locus&dquo; of an event, the limits to
its fluidity and the conditions of its emergence.
The fundamental notions now imposed upon us are no longer those of
consciousness and continuity (with their correlative problems of liberty and
causality), nor are they those of sign and structure. They are notions, rather,
of event and of series, with the group of notions linked to these; it is around
such an ensemble that this analysis of discourse I am thinking of is articulated,
certainly not upon those traditional themes which the philosophers of the past
took for &dquo;living&dquo; history, but on the effective work of historians.
But it is also here that this analysis poses some, probably awesome philosophical
or theoretical problems. If discourses are to be treated first as
ensembles of discursive events, what status are we to accord this notion of
event, so rarely taken into consideration by philosophers? Of course, an event is
neither substance, nor accident, nor quality nor process; events are not corporeal.
And yet, an event is certainly not immaterial; it takes effect, becomes
effect, always on the level of materiality. Events have their place; they consist
in relation to, coexistence with, dispersion of, the cross-checking accumulation
and the selection of material elements; it occurs as an effect of, and in, material
dispersion. Let us say that the philosophy of event should advance in the
direction, at first sight paradoxical, of an incorporeal materialism. If, on the
other hand, discursive events are to be dealt with as homogeneous, but discontinuous
series, what status are we to accord this discontinuity ? Here we
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are not dealing with a succession of instants in time, nor with the plurality
of thinking subjects; what is concerned are those caesurae breaking the instant
and dispersing the subject in a multiplicity of possible positions and functions.
Such a discontinuity strikes and invalidates the smallest units, traditionally
recognised and the least readily contested: the instant and the subject. Beyond
them, independent of them, we must conceive between
these discontinuous
series of relations which are not in any order of succession (or simultaneity)
within any (or several) consciousnesses and
we must elaborate outside
of philosophies of time and subject a
theory of discontinuous systematisation.
Finally, if it is true that these discursive, discontinuous series
have their regularity, within certain limits, it is clearly no longer possible to
establish mechanically causal links or an ideal necessity among their constitutive
elements. We must accept the introduction of chance as a category in the
production of events. There again, we feel the absence of a theory enabling
us to conceive the links between chance and thought.
In the sense that this slender wedge I intend to slip into the history of ideas
consists not in dealing with meanings possibly lying behind this or that discourse,
but with discourse as regular series and distinct events, I fear I recognise
in this wedge a tiny (odious, too, perhaps) device permitting the introduction,
into the very roots of thought, notions of chance, discontinuity and
materiality. This represents a triple peril which one particular form of history
attempts to avert by recounting the continuous unfolding of some ideal necessity.
But they are three notions which ought to permit us to link the history
of systems of thought to the practical work of historians; three directions to be
followed in the work of theoretical elaboration.
Following these principles, and referring to this overall view, the analyses I
intend to undertake fall into two groups. On the one hand, the &dquo;critical&dquo;
group which sets the reversal-principle to work. I shall attempt to distinguish
the forms of exclusion, limitation and appropriation of which I was speaking
earlier; I shall try to show how they are formed, in answer to which needs,
how they are modified and displaced, which constraints they have effectively
exercised, to what extent they have been worked on. On the other hand, the
&dquo;genealogical&dquo; group, which brings the three other principles into play:
how series of discourse are formed, through, in spite of, or with the aid of
these systems of constraint: what were the specific norms for each, and what
were their conditions of appearance, growth and variation.
Taking the critical group first, a preliminary group of investigations could
bear on what I have designated functions of exclusion. I have already examined
one ofthese for a determinate period: the disjunction of reason and madness
in the classical age. Later, we could attempt an investigation of a taboo
system in language, that concerning sexuality from the 16th to the 19th century.
In this, we would not be concerned with the manner in which this has progressively
-
and happily disappeared,
but with the way it has been altered and
rearticulated, from the practice of confession, with its forbidden conduct,
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named, classified, hierarchised down to the smallest detail, to the belated,
timid appearance of the treatment of sexuality in 19th-century psychiatry and
medicine. Of course, these only amount to somewhat symbolic guidelines,
but one can already be pretty sure that the stresses will not fall where we expect,
and that taboos are not always to be found where we imagine them to be.
For the time being, I would like to address myself to the third system of exclusion.
I will envisage it in two ways. Firstly, I would like to try to visualise
the manner in which this truth within which we are caught, but which we
constantly renew, was selected, but at the same time, was repeated, extended
and displaced. I will take first of all the age of the Sophists and its beginning
with Socrates, or at least with Platonic philosophy, and I shall try to see how
effective, ritual discourse, charged with power and peril, gradually arranged
itself into a disjunction between true and false discourse. I shall next take the
turn of the 16th and 17th centuries and the age which, above all in England,
saw the emergence of an observational, affirmative science, a certain natural
philosophy inseparable, too, from religious ideology for
this certainly
constituted a new form of the will to knowledge. In the third place, I shall
turn to the beginning of the 19th century and the great founding acts of modem
science, as well as the formation of industrial society and the accompanying
positivist ideology. Three slices out of the morphology of our will to
knowledge; three staging posts in our philistinism.
I would also like to consider the same question from quite another angle.
I would like to measure the effect of a discourse claiming to be scientific medical,
psychiatric or sociological on
the ensemble of practices and prescriptive
discourse of which the penal code consists. The study of psychiatric
skills and their role in the penal system will serve as a point of departure and
as basic material for this analysis.
It is within this critical perspective, but on a different level, that the analysis
of the rules for the limitation of discourse should take place, of those among
which I earlier designated the author principle, that of commentary and that
of discipline. One can envisage a certain number of studies in this field. I
am thinking, for example, of the history of medicine in the 18th and 19th
centuries; not so much an account of discoveries made and concepts developed,
but of grasping from
the construction of medical discourse, from all its
supporting institutions, from its transmission and its reinforcement, but also
the constraint to
transform itself how
the principles of author, commentary
and discipline worked in practice; of seeking to know how the great
author principle, whether Hippocrates, Galen, Paracelsus and Sydenham, or
Boerhaave, became a principle of limitation in medical discourse; how, even
late into the 19th century, the practice of aphorism and commentary retained
its currency and how it was gradually replaced by the emphasis on case-histories
and clinical training on actual cases; according to which model medicine sought
to constitute itself as a discipline, basing itself at first on natural history and,
later, on anatomy and biology.
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One could also envisage the way in which 18th and 19th-century literary
criticism and history have constituted the character of the author and the form
of the work, utilising, modifying and altering the procedures of religious
exegesis, biblical criticism, hagiography, the &dquo;lives&dquo; of historical or legendary
figures, of autobiography and memoirs. One day, too, we must take a look
at Freud’s role in psycho-analytical knowledge, so different from that of
Newton in physics, or from that an author might play in the field of philosophy
(Kant, for example, who originated a totally new way of philosophizing).
These then, are some of the projects falling within the critical aspect of the
task, for the analysis of instances of discursive control. The genealogical
aspect concerns the effective formation of discourse, whether within the limits
of control, or outside of them, or as is most frequent, on both sides of the delimitation.
Criticism analyses the processes of rarefaction, consolidation and
unification in discourse; genealogy studies their formation, at once scattered,
discontinuous and regular. To tell the truth, these two tasks are not always
exactly complementary. We do not find, on the one hand, forms of rejection,
exclusion, consolidation or attribution, and, on a more profound level, the
spontaneous pouring forth of discourse, which immediately before or after its
manifestation, finds itself submitted to selection and control. The regular
formation of discourse may, in certain conditions and up to a certain point,
integrate control procedures (this is what happens, for example, when a discipline
takes on the form and status of scientific discourse). Conversely,
modes of control may take on life within a discursive formation (such as literary
criticism as the author’s constitutive discourse) even though any critical
task calling instances of control into play must, at the same time, analyse the
discursive regularities through which these instances are formed. Any genealogical
description must take into account the limits at play within real formations.
The difference between the critical and the genealogical enterprise is
not one of object or field, but of point of attack, perspective and delimitation.
Earlier on I mentioned one possible study, that of the taboos in discourse
on sexuality. It would be difficult, and in any case abstract, to try to carry
out this study, without at the same time analysing literary, religious and ethical,
biological and medical as well as juridical discursive ensembles: wherever
sexuality is discussed, wherever it is named or described, metaphorised, explained
or judged. We are a very long way from having constituted a unitary,
regular discourse concerning sexuality; it may be that we never will, and that
we are not even travelling in that direction. No matter. Taboos are homogeneous
neither in their forms nor their behaviour whether in literary or medical
discourse, in that of psychiatry or of the direction of consciousness. Conversely,
these different discursive regularities do not divert or alter taboos in the
same manner. It will only be possible to undertake this study, therefore, if
we take into account the plurality of series within which the taboos, each one
to some extent different from all the others, are at work.
We could also consider those series of discourse which, in the 16th and
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17th centuries, dealt with wealth and poverty, money, production and trade.
Here, we would be dealing with some pretty heterogeneous ensembles of
enunciations, formulated by rich and poor, the wise and the ignorant, protestants
and catholics, royal officials, merchants or moralists. Each one has its
forms of regularity and, equally, its systems of constraint. None of them
precisely prefigures that other form of regularity that was to acquire the momentum
of a discipline and which was later to be known, first as &dquo;the study of
wealth&dquo; and, subsequently, &dquo;political economy&dquo;. And yet, it was from the
foregoing that a new regularity was formed, retrieving or excluding, justifying
or rejecting, this or that utterance from these old forms.
One could also conceive a study of discourse concerning heredity, such as it
can be gleaned, dispersed as it was until the beginning of the 20th century,
among a variety of disciplines, observations, techniques and formulae; we
would be concerned to show the process whereby these series eventually
became subsumed under the single system, now recognised as epistemologically
coherent, known as genetics. This is the work Franqols Jacob has just
completed, with unequalled brilliance and scholarship.
It is thus that critical and genealogical descriptions are to alternate, support
and complete each other. The critical side of the analysis deals with the systems
enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles
of ordering, exclusion and rarity in discourse. We might, to play with
our words, say it practises a kind of studied casualness. The genealogical side
of discourse, by way of contrast, deals with series of effective formation of
discourse: it attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not
mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting
domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false
propositions. Let us call these domains of objects positivist and, to play on
words yet again, let us say that, if the critical style is one of studied casualness,
then the genealogical mood is one of felicitous positivism.
At all events, one thing at least must be emphasised here: that the analysis .
of discourse thus understood, does not reveal the universality of a meaning,
but brings to light the action of imposed rarity, with a fundamental power
of affirmation. Rarity and affirmation; rarity, in the last resort of affirmation ,
- certainly not any continuous outpouring of meaning, and certainly not any
monarchy of the signifier.
And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension
of theory call all this if
its appeal is stronger than its meaning for
them - structuralism.
I am well aware that I could never have begun to undertake these researches
I have just outlined to you, were I not able to benefit from the aid of certain
models and props. I believe I owe much to Monsieur Dum6zil, for it was he
who encouraged me to work at an age when I still thought writing a pleasure.
But I owe a lot, too, to his work; may he forgive me if I have wandered from
the meaning and rigour of his texts, which dominate us today. It is he who
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taught me to analyse the internal economy of discourse quite differently from the
traditional methods of exegesis or those of linguistic formalism. It is he who
taught me to refer the system of functional correlations from one discourse to
another by means of comparison. It was he, again, who taught me to describe
the transformations of a discourse, and its relations to the institution.
If I have wished to apply a similar method to discourse quite other than legendary
or mythical narratives, it is because before me lay the works of the historians
of science, above all, that of Monsieur Canguilhem. I owe it to him that
I understood that the history of science did not necessarily involve, either
an account of discoveries, or descriptions of the ideas and opinions bordering
science either from the side of its doubtful beginnings, or from the side of
its fall-out; but that one could that
one should treat
the history of science
as an ensemble, at once coherent, and transformable into theoretical models
and conceptual instruments.
A large part of my indebtedness, however, is to Jean Hyppolite. I know
that, for many, his work is associated with that of Hegel, and that our age,
whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or through
Nietzsche, is attempting to flee Hegel: and what I was attempting to say earlier
concerning discourse was pretty disloyal to Hegel.
But truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have
to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent
to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge,
in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian.
We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one
of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless,
waiting for us.
If, then, more than one of us is indebted to Jean Hyppolite, it is because he
has tirelessly explored, for us, and ahead of us, the path along which we may
escape Hegel, keep our distance, and along which we shall find ourselves
brought back to him, only from a different angle, and then, finally, be forced
to leave him behind, once more.
First, Hyppolite took the trouble to give some presence to this great, slightly
phantomlike shadow that was Hegel, prowling through the 19th century,
with whom men struggled in the dark. He gave Hegel this presence with his
translation of the Phenomonology of the mind; proof of the extent to which
Hegel came to life in this text was the number of Germans who came to consult
this text in order to understand what, for a moment at least, had become the
German version. -~ .
From this text, Hyppolite sought out and explored all the issues, as though
his chief concern hdd become: can one still philosophize where Hegel is no
longer possible? Can any philosophy continue to exist that is no longer Hegelian
? Are the non-Hegelian elements in our thought necessarily nonphilosophical
? Is that which is antiphilosophical necessarily non-Hegelian?
As well as giving us this Hegelian presence, he sought not merely a meticulous
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historical description: he wanted to turn Hegel into a schema for the experience
of modernity (is it possible to think of the sciences, politics and daily
suffering as a Hegelian ?) and he wanted, conversely, to make modernity the
test of Hegelianism and, beyond that, of philosophy. For Hyppolite, the
relationship with Hegel was the scene of an experiment, of a confrontation
in which it was never certain that philosophy would come out on top. He
never saw the Hegelian system as a reassuring universe; he saw in it the field
in which philosophy took the ultimate risk.
From this stem, I believe, the alterations he worked, not within Hegelian
philosophy, but upon it, and upon philosophy as Hegel conceived it; from this
also, a complete inversion of themes. Instead of conceiving philosophy as a
totality ultimately capable of dispersing and regrouping itself in the movement
of the concept, Jean Hyppolite transformed it into an endless task, against the
background of an infinite horizon. Because it was a task without end, it
was also a task in process of continuous recommencement, given over to the
forms and paradoxes of repetition. For Hyppolite, philosophy, as the thought
of the inaccessible totality, was that which could be rejected in the extreme
irregularity of experience; it was that which presents and reveals itself as the
continually recurring question in life, death and in memory. Thus he transformed
the Hegelian theme of the end of self-consciousness into one of repeated
interrogation. But because it consisted in repetition, this philosophy did not
lie beyond concepts; its task was not that of abstraction, it was, rather, to
maintain a certain reticence, to break with acquired generalisations and continually
to reestablish contact with the non-philosophical; it was to draw as
close as possible, not to its final fulfilment, but to that which precedes it, that
which has not yet stirred its uncertainty. In order not to reduce them, but
to think them, this philosophy was to examine the singularity of history, the
regional rationalities of science, the depths of memory in consciousness;
thus arose the notion of a philosophy that was present, uncertain, mobile all
along its line of contact with non-philosophy, existing on its own, however,
and revealing the meaning this non-philosophy has for us. But, if it is in
repeated contact with non-philosophy, where then lies the beginning of
philosophy? Is it already there, secretly present in that which is not philosophy,
beginning to formulate itself half under its breath, amid the murmuring
of things? But, perhaps, from that point on, philosophy has no raison
d’être, or, maybe, philosophy should start out on a priori foundations?
We see, thus, the theme of the foundations of discourse and its formal
structure substituting itself for the Hegelian one of present movement.
The final alteration Jean Hyppolite worked upon Hegelian philosophy was
this: if philosophy really must begin as absolute discourse, then what of history,
and what is this beginning which starts out with a singular individual, within a
society and a social class, and in the midst of struggle ?
These five alterations, leading to the very extremities of Hegelian philosophy,
doubtless forcing it to spill over its own limits, evoke by turns the great figuresat Universitaet Konstanz on February 15, 2013ssi.sagepub.comDownloaded from
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of modern philosophy Jean Hyppolite ceaselessly opposed to Hegel: Marx,
with his questions of history; Fichte, and the problem of the absolute beginnings
of philosophy; Bergson’s theme of contact with non-philosophy; Kierkegaard,
with the problem of repetition and truth; Husserl, and the theme of
philosophy as an infinite task, linked to the history of our rationality. Beyond
these philosophical figures we can perceive all those fields of knowledge Hyppolite
invoked around his own questions: psychoanalysis, with its strange logic
of desire; mathematics and the formalisation of discourse; information theory
and its application to the analysis of life in
short, all those fields giving rise
to questions of logic and existence, continually intertwining and unravelling
their links.
I think this work, articulated in a small number of major books, but, even
more, invested in research, teaching, in a perpetual attentiveness, in an everyday
alertness and generosity, in its apparently administrative and pedagogic
responsibilities (i.e., doubly political), has traversed and formulated the most
fundamental problems of our age. Many of us are infinitely indebted to
him.
It is because I have borrowed both the meaning and the possibility of what
I am doing from him; because, often, he enlightened me when I struck out
blindly; because I would like to dedicate my work to him, that I end this
presentation of my projected work by invoking the name of Jean Hyppolite.
It is towards him, towards that hiatus where
I feel at once his absence and
my failings that
the questions I now ask myself are pointing.
Because I owe him so much, I well understand that your choice, in inviting
me to teach here is, in good part, a homage to Jean Hyppolite. I am profoundly
grateful to you for the honour you have done me, but I am no less
grateful for the honour your choice does to Jean Hyppolite. If I do not feel
equal to the challenge of succeeding him, I know nonetheless that, if that
happiness should have been granted us, I should have been encouraged by
his indulgence this evening.
I now understand better why I experienced so much difficulty when I began
speaking, earlier on. I now know which voice it was I would have wished for,
preceding me, supporting me, inviting me to speak and lodging within my own
speech. I know now just what was so awesome about beginning; for it was
here, where I speak now, that I listened to that voice, and where its possessor
is no longer, to hear me speak.
Michel Foucault, Professor at the Coll~ge de France, Paris, where he holds the chair &dquo;Histoire
et système de pensee&dquo;, has published numerous articles and three major works: Histoire
de la folie A I’Age classique (1961) ; Les mots et les choses (1967) ; L ’archéologie du
savoir (1969). at Universitaet Konstanz on February 15, 2013ssi.sagepub.comDownloaded from