rajan,the phenomenological allegory from death and the labyrinth to the order of things

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

The Phenomenological Allegory: From "Death and the Labyrinth" to "The Order of Things"Author(s): Tilottama RajanSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 439-466Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773428 .

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The Phenomenological Allegory: From Death and the Labyrinth to The Order of Things

Tilottama Rajan English, Western Ontario

Abstract Although after 1969 Michel Foucault sharply distinguishes his work from

phenomenology, this essay argues for a more complex relation in his early work between a philosophy oriented toward consciousness and life and one committed to

language and structure. It uses a Deleuzian figure to suggest that in the work before The Archaeology of Knowledge phenomenology and deconstruction "enfold" each other, so that each is at once the inside and the outside of the other, its condition of possibility and the limit against which it is tested. Arguing that literature for Foucault is the hiding-place of a cryptic phenomenology, the essay begins with Death and the

Labyrinth, Foucault's study of the way Raymond Roussel's textual machines enfold his unreadable life. Not only is Roussel an uncanny double for Foucault himself; the book's publication on the same day as the more overtly structuralist Birth of the Clinic also discloses the methodological and disciplinary doubleness of Foucault's corpus. The remainder of the essay traces this doubleness in The Order of Things, considered both as a network of ideas and as a literary text. It explores how Foucault uses the

space between Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Blanchot, and Bataille to develop a uniquely deconstructive anthropology, a counterhistory of rationality. If Foucault's work is nevertheless an ordering of the knowledge (Geisteswissenschaften), it is also an alle-

gory of the place of phenomenology in contemporary theory: a phenomenology of theoretical styles in which the Renaissance is associated through the title of the first section with Merleau-Ponty's The Prose of the World, and in which structuralism is

figured as classicism. Moving from the Renaissance through classicism to the dark underside of the modern, and from "language" through "discourse" to the return

Poetics oday 19:3 (Fall 1998). Copyright ? 1998 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.



440 Poetics Today 19:3

of language in the negative mode of "literature," Foucault thus rethinks phenomenology as "deconstruction" through a dialectical encounter with structuralism.

1

In 1963 Michel Foucault published not only The Birth of the Clinic but also a book on the early-twentieth-century novelist Raymond Roussel that was not translated until much later as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Ray- mond Roussel.' Reflecting on his interest in Roussel in the accompanying interview with Charles Ruas, Foucault (1986a [1963]: 185) says tantaliz-

ingly: "No one has paid much attention to this book, and I'm glad; it's

my secret affair. You know, he was my love for several summers." In the same 1984 interview, Roussel's texts are explicitly linked to the structuralist novels of his disciple Alain Robbe-Grillet, so as to inscribe the former's modernist experiments within the postmodern turn away from phenomenology toward a new objectivism focused on "things," their structures, and on humans themselves as things.2 But in the first chapter of Death and the Labyrinth, Roussel's life occupies the place also occupied in Foucault's theoretical landscape by Maurice Blanchot, whose work on the death of the author in the process of writing emerges, not so much from the linguistic turn as we now conceive it, as from a negative and post-Heideggerian phenomenology. Or perhaps one should say that in Blanchot's theoretical texts, phenomenology and the decentering of the subject enigmati- cally "enfold" one another-an enigma repeated by Foucault's enfolding of Roussel's "life" with his textual machines, so as to make consciousness at once the inside and outside of structure.3

Interestingly, Roussel, appropriated for structuralism by Robbe-Grillet

1. There has been little sustained analysis of the book on Roussel or of its place in Foucault's

corpus, although Dennis Hollier (1992: 136-37) comments briefly and perceptively on the

relationship between The Birth of the Clinic and Death and the Labyrinth, as texts that are both

organized around "death as the key to reading." 2. Robbe-Grillet's critique of Sartre in his 1958 essay "Nature, Humanism, Tragedy" (1965: 49-75) forms the centerpiece of For a New Novel, which provides a theoretical counterpart to his fictional experiments with a chosisme that avoids the temptations of "humanism" by focusing on the pure description of things rather than the analysis of consciousness. 3. I borrow the figure of the fold from Gilles Deleuze. As a form of involution and compli- cation, turning and returning, the fold gathers differences into an enigmatic continuum. It is a conceptual figure that allows the inside to become, at any moment, the outside. Whereas Deleuze treats the fold as unfolding dormant possibilities (1993 [1988]: 73-75), Mario Per- niola also links it to the enigma (1995: 0o). Deleuze himself has written on the fold as an

aspect of Foucault's thought and style (1988 [1986]: 94-123), but his discussion does not deal with Foucault's work before The Archaeology of Knowledge, nor does he focus on the way Fou- cault folds phenomenology and structuralism into each other.



Rajan * From Death and the Labyrinth to The Order of Things 441

(1965: 79-88), had sought treatment from the Heideggerian analyst Lud-

wig Binswanger, on whom Foucault wrote his first monograph in 1956. Foreshadowing Foucault's later sense that the syncresis of phenomenology and psychoanalysis was a missed encounter,4 Binswanger had not known what to make of Roussel. Roussel's (dis)appearance on the scene of phenomenological psychoanalysis, and his recovery decades later as a proto- structuralist, frame Foucault's own career within a (self-)analysis in which "Roussel" is a paleonym that unfolds the covering over of phenomenology by (post)structuralism. That Roussel is Foucault's uncanny double is clear from the juxtaposition of the 1984 interview, which concealed the further secret of Foucault's own death, with the book's first chapter, which deals with Roussel's enigmatic suicide behind a door "locked from the inside"

(1986a [1963]: 4). Together, the interview and the study on Roussel invite us to read Foucault's corpus in terms of a hermeneutics of the closet. They confess and perform a certain nonidentity in this corpus, between the public Althusserian Foucault, with his interest in institutions and discursive structures, and a phenomenological Foucault, with his love of literature, to whom nobody has paid "much attention."5

This nonidentity makes Foucault part of a broader movement trace- able in the careers of theorists loosely labeled "poststructuralist."6 At issue here is the place of phenomenology in contemporary theory. Following the (post)structuralist turn from "consciousness" and "being" to "language" and "structure," we now think of theory as having followed a teleologi-

4. Foucault's two 1956 monographs both draw on phenomenological and/or existential psychoanalysis. "Dream, Imagination and Existence" (1993 [1956]) is a commentary on Bin- swanger; Mental Illness and Psychology (1987 [1956]) has connections to the work of R. D. Laing and David Cooper, and the English translation of Madness and Civilization first appeared in a series edited by Laing. Thereafter, however, Foucault's relationship to both phenomenology and psychoanalysis becomes more evasive and oblique, as if he wishes to draw on them but resists any direct affiliation with them. Merleau-Ponty comments usefully on the missed encounter between phenomenology and psychoanalysis in a 1960 essay (1993). 5. Two exceptions are Simon During (1992) and Dieter Freundlieb (1995), both concerned with how Foucault's work can be applied to literary study. Neither, however, is interested in Foucault's work as literature, nor with literature as a site at which the early Foucault rethinks phenomenology. 6. The present essay is part of a larger study dealing with the place of phenomenology in the early careers of various theorists associated with "the linguistic turn." Crucial to my argument is a distinction between a "deconstruction" made possible by the work of Sartre and Blanchot, and its reconfiguration as "poststructuralism" after the rediscovery of Ferdi- nand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss. Whereas "deconstruction" (which I would see as characteristic of the early Foucault) is symbiotically linked to phenomenology, poststructuralism is in many ways complicit with structuralism, thus necessitating the abjection of terms such as "consciousness" and "experience." For further development of this distinction see Rajan 1993, 1995.




cal trajectory from phenomenology to (post)structuralism, and as drawing on the former only as an antithetical stimulus to defining the latter more

precisely. We likewise take at face value Foucault's post-1968 dismissals of

phenomenology as a philosophy of "experience" and the "subject" that is innocent of language,7 and we accept his resulting marginalization of his own "earliest books" as a "very imperfect sketch" of his (post)structuralist archaeologies and genealogies (1972 [1969]: 14-15). But Foucault's corpus can be divided into diverse phases, in each of which there are different ten-

sions, with the phase that concerns us here (from 1963 to 1966) exhibiting a

complex enfolding of phenomenology within the very turn to archaeology and structure that seems to repudiate it.8 In allowing phenomenology and

(post)structuralism to enfold each other, Foucault created a uniquely self-

reflecting form of theory that he was to forsake in his later work. In what follows I focus on The Order of Things as the theoretical summa of this phase. However, I approach it by way of the book on Roussel-a book that is

already about the fold, inasmuch as it reads Roussel's corpus as a baroque structure "constructed on multilevels of secrecy, one ordering the other, but without any of them ... being absolutely revelatory" (1986a [1963]: 7). Roussel provides a figure for reading Foucault's own work that the latter

increasingly resists after The Archaeology of Knowledge, where he abandons the fold and the double for "an enunciative domain identical with its own surface" (1972 [1969]: 119). But in reissuing Death and the Labyrinth at the end of his life, Foucault reopens his work to precisely this double reading that joins and separates inside and outside, past and present, and, more

obliquely, phenomenology and (post)structuralism.

7. See the preface to the English edition of The Order of Things, written four years after the

publication of the French edition (1970 [1966]: xiv), as well as Foucault 1988: 21; and the

1984 interview with Ruas (1986a [1963]: 174). 8. Freundlieb (1995: 301-5) divides Foucault's career into four phases, beginning with an

"early archaeological phase" that explores various counterdiscourses to rationality, proceed- ing through later archaeological and genealogical phases, and culminating in a renewed concern with problems of self-formation located in an "aesthetics of existence." Other

periodizations of Foucault's work are provided by Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983; Megill 1985: 204-25; Sheridan 1980. While many of these schemas concede an early phenomenological phase in Foucault's career, Alan Megill places the turn to structuralism in The Order of Things, whereas Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow place it even earlier, in The Birth of the Clinic. I myself would agree with Freundlieb's description of the last three segments of Foucault's

career, but would see the initial years as more complex, by positing a straightforwardly phenomenological phase (from 1954 to 1961), and then (till The Order of Things) a period in which

phenomenology is intertwined with a (post)structuralism not yet separated into "structuralism" and "poststructuralism" (this separation being an Anglo-American phenomenon).




2

Foucault's interest in phenomenology begins straightforwardly in 1954 with two studies-"Dream, Imagination and Existence" and Mental Illness and Psychology--that draw, somewhat differently, on Heideggerian psychoanalysis and on an existential psychoanalysis inspired by Sartre. But it is in the early sixties that his interest in "being" and the "unthought" is inscribed in the dialogue with (post)structuralism that concerns us here, and that requires us to read his work as a form of doubling and folding. A case in point is The Birth of the Clinic: at first glance a genealogy of medi- cine and its discourses that we can read in terms of the same theoretical codes as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. But this self-confessed "structuralist study" is also drawn into Nietzschean concerns with man's relation to "counter-nature, death, in short, the whole dark underside of disease . . . offered to the brightness of the gaze" (1986b [1963]: xix, 195). Focusing on the gaze, neither as surveillance nor as a cogito, but as an un-

happy consciousness produced by medical positivism's inability to achieve

identity with itself in its language, Foucault makes social history into a closet for ontological questions completely absent from Discipline and Pun- ish. Conversely, he attempts through structuralism a refiguration of phenomenology that refuses us the privilege of dwelling in thought, by think-

ing being through a discipline that "articulates [man] ... upon something other than himself" (1970 [1966]: 331).

Interestingly, Foucault published his book on the clinic on the same day as his book on Roussel, thus simultaneously folding these two very different texts into each other and providing a figure for the reading of his own texts. Roussel's work, Foucault (1986a [1963]: 7) suggests in discussing the novelist's posthumous How I Wrote Certain of My Books, is "constructed on multilevels of secrecy, one ordering the other, but without any of them having a universal value or being absolutely revelatory." Using the key that Roussel provides in this last book, "a key which is itself locked up" (ibid.: 5), Fou- cault reads Roussel on two "levels" that are related laterally rather than in terms of surface and depth. On the one hand, he is concerned with the texts as tremendously complicated "machines" and "game[s]" whose technical experimentation foreshadows the nouveau roman with its turn away from phenomenology to a focus on language as its own object (ibid.: 14, 175). These machines defamiliarize words so as to disclose "a chasm in the identity of language" (ibid.: 17). Referring to the discussions in eighteenth- century grammar of how a single word is used to represent more than one thing, Foucault (ibid.: 16) describes Roussel's fascination with "tropological shifts," with rhetorical figures such as "catachresis, metonymy, meta-




lepsis ... and many other hieroglyphs drawn by the rotation of words into the voluminous mass of language." At work here is the same interest, later described by Paul de Man (1986: 36) with reference to Saussure's discussion of hypograms, in a literature "structured by the coded dispersal (or dissemination) of an underlying word or proper name," a literature that "substitutes a process of formal elaboration for a referential reading."

On the other hand, as if to challenge the complacency of this self- enclosed language that brackets all reference, Foucault in the first and last

chapters of his book on Roussel inscribes these (post)structural language games in the enigma of Roussel's life as a form of being toward death. In

June 1933 Roussel settled in Palermo, "where he spent every day drugged and in an intense state of euphoria," but on the morning he was due to leave for a drug cure he was found dead, behind a door that "had been

open at all times" but was now "locked from the inside" (1986a [1963]: 4). Foucault approaches the texts by way of Roussel's death, not to suggest that it provides a key to their bizarre experimentation, but as a way of in-

dicating "that one must look further and in greater depth" (ibid.: 7), or as a way of marking the incomplete and mutually supplementary status of life and text. Locating in the texts the structures of a pathological world

(un)available for noematic analysis (ibid.: 159-60) and thus arousing in us a desire for the phenomenological reading he cannot provide, Foucault makes us aware of the intentionality of the transcendental reduction whose simulacrum Roussel had seemed to grasp through an autoreferential lan-

guage. It would seem, moreover, that Roussel's death functions within Foucault's reading of the texts as a moment of(dis)closure, the locked door

being an inverted repetition of the Heideggerian clearing: "The death, the

lock, and this closed door formed, at that moment, and for all time, an

enigmatic triangle where Roussel's work is both offered to and withdrawn from us" (ibid.: 4).

Foucault links Roussel to a concern with language in itself that he finds in writers as diverse as Blanchot, Stephane Mallarme, and the nouveaux romanciers. De Man (1986: 96-97) later discusses this same concern in connection with Walter Benjamin's concept of reine Sprache (pure language), as "language completely devoid of any kind of meaning function, lan-

guage which would be pure signifier, . . . a purely technical linguistic language . . . limited to its own linguistic characteristics." Reine Sprache as de Man (ibid.) represents it, is "inhuman," a site of "linguistic events" that are independent "of any intent ... or any desire we might have." But seen

through the locked door of Roussel's death this language, as well as the

(post)structuralist project for which his texts serve as a figure, encrypts a concern with the enigma of Being, though displaced from the phenome-




nality of a philosophical discourse that would claim to grasp Being as

meaning. This is in fact Foucault's point: that even a concern with lan-

guage in itself is part of the project of a for-itself, a project that is in this case unreadable because the door is locked on the inside. Whether Roussel was aware of the phenomenological desire that mobilized his apparently (post)structural writing is unclear. But Foucault's own interest in the Rous- selian hypotext is clearly phenomenological as well as formal. Thus, the chasm in the identity of language becomes "a thin blade that slits the identity of things, showing them as hopelessly double and self-divided" (Foucault 1986a [1963]: 23; emphasis added). Likewise, the very process by which Roussel's "language, in its reversal of style, surreptitiously tries to say two

things with the same words" (ibid.: 16) becomes the process by which Fou- cault says two things about Roussel. Each of these modes of reading is, as it were, the unconscious of the other. Gesturing toward a phenomenological psychoanalysis of Roussel's textual world, Foucault recognizes formalism

(whether in literature or in criticism) as one of those "ideal objectivities" critiqued by Derrida (1978 [1962]: 26) in Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geome- try": a pure materiality that is simply the reversed mirror image of the pure phenomenality we find in Husserl. At the same time, Foucault stops us from coming to rest in the interiority of a psychobiographical approach, defamiliarizing it through a focus on the uncanny formal surface of texts that interrupt cognition with what de Man (1986: 37) calls "the uncontrol- lable power of the letter as inscription."

Foucault (1986a [1963]: 172) tells us that he "developed an affection for

[Roussel's] work, which remained secret, since I didn't discuss it." Making the acquaintance of Robbe-Grillet at about the same time, by a "mental lapse that can't have been entirely innocent," Foucault "never spoke of Roussel with him" (ibid.), perhaps because he sensed that the avant-

garde novelist would find his way of reading Roussel queer and out of fashion. Phenomenology is Foucault's secret, one to which he could not

easily confess in a structuralist environment. Indeed, it is probably this subtext in Foucault's reading of Roussel that put off Robbe-Grillet, who in 1963 wrote what seems at first sight a very similar essay on "Enigmas and Transparency in Raymond Roussel," but who finally admitted that he did not much like Foucault's book. Noting Roussel's fascination with mys- teries and concealed exits, Robbe-Grillet (1965: 81, 84) sees their purpose as "purely formal" and attributes to Roussel an "opacity" that is an "excessive transparency," in which there are "only surfaces, no inside, no secret." Roussel is in fact made to figure Robbe-Grillet's own project of creating a "flat and discontinuous universe where each thing refers only to itself" (ibid.: 86), a literature that is chosiste rather than humaniste.




Robbe-Grillet's structuralist representation of Roussel allows us to see

by contrast why Foucault's reading remains, though in a curiously negative way, phenomenological. Where Robbe-Grillet uses the figure of a locked drawer that turns out to be empty, Foucault (1986a [1963]: 4, 11) speaks of a door that seems to open and close, of words that are "filled and emptied by the possibility of there being yet another meaning." The images of doors and exits, and the notion of a "void" (ibid.: 11) that is also a space, evoke the Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontian notions of (dis)closure and opening (ouverture), as do the recurrent accounts of Roussel's texts in terms of the visible and the invisible (ibid.: 58, 66). Foucault's book is, moreover, traversed by figures of light and darkness that recall not only Nietzsche, but also what Derrida (1982: 132) in "The Ends of Man" identifies as "the

phenomenological metaphor" par excellence, elaborated through "all the vari- eties of phainesthai, of shining, lighting, . . . etc." Roussel's texts, however,

open onto an absence: a death through which he "defines the empty shell where his existence will be evident to others" (Foucault 1986a [1963]: 156). Reading his texts, one does not know "whether there is a secret or none," and paradoxically, to affirm that a secret exists would be to close the door,

"dr[ying] up Roussel's work at its source, preventing it from coming to life out of this void which it animates" (ibid.: lo-11). Correspondingly, the texts

provide only a negative illumination. For the figure used in connection with them is not actually that of light, but of a "solar void" that is also "its own mirror and nocturnal opposite" (ibid.: 164). This figure provides the title of the last chapter, "The Enclosed Sun," and recalls the black light (noire lumiere) of Emmanuel Levinas's much earlier essay on Blanchot (1975: 0o), which Foucault would probably have read before writing his own essay on Blanchot in 1966. Using figures of night and absence, Blanchot seems to deconstruct the Heideggerian notion of clearing. But Blanchot, as Sarah Lawall has said, is Heidegger with a minus sign (1968: 221), or phenomenology turned toward its nocturnal opposite. Black light (later picked up in

Julia Kristeva's "black sun") figures that turning, identifying the phenomenological unconscious that underwrites deconstruction in the early sixties.

Blanchot's work can be seen as a reinscription of Heidegger that shifts his concern with the being of language from the phenomenality of philosophical discourse to the materiality of a literature that functions as philosophy's nocturnal mirror. Foucault further unsettles the phenomenality of the clearing by approaching Roussel's texts through a psychoanalysis of the ways in which his language encrypts the Real. He provides what he had sketched in Mental Illness and Psychology: namely, a "noematic analysis" of the spatiotemporal structures that constitute Roussel's pathological world,




but in the form of a "phenomenological analysis [that] rejects an a priori distinction between normal and pathological" (1987 [1956]: 50, 56). The last chapter is shadowed by the figure of Pierre Janet, Roussel's "alienist" or psychologist. It places Foucault's reading of the Rousselian hypotext in a genealogical line that leads less to de Man than, by way of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's notion of cryptonomy,9 to Kristeva's analysis of experimental literature as a form that cannot finally be reduced to its own linguistic characteristics. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva describes the fetishism of the signifier that organizes experimental literature as a withdrawing of language from its "symbolic" or phenomenal function, so as to open it out as a "semiotic [or material] articulation." Fetishism is "a compromise with the thetic," which uses things as signs because it is still stuck in abjection (Kristeva 1984: 63-64). The fetishiz-

ing of signs as things is a phenomenon that Kristeva discusses at greater length in "Within the Microcosm of 'The Talking Cure."' Here she speaks of "borderline patients' attachment to the signifier": "The analyst notices a tendency to play with signifiers: puns, portmanteau words, the conden- sation of signifiers. . . . Yet this manipulation of the signifier leaves the

analyst, as well as the patient, at special moments-that is, moments of

suffering-with a feeling of void" (1983: 43, 42). To accept at face value this simulation of a self-referential language, she suggests, is to give theoretical

support to "the notion of the maternal phallus": in other words, to replace the paternal fiction of a transcendental signified with its mirror image, the transcendental signifier, and thus to make the subject "master of lalangue, if not of language" (ibid.: 36).1' In analyzing Roussel's language, then, Fou- cault does two things. He makes it the site for a reflection on (non)being, disclosing an ontological subtext in deconstruction that is marked much more reticently in Derrida's (1973 [1967]: 40) brief statement that language "is the process of death at work in signs." But beyond that, Foucault provides a psychoanalysis of the (post)structuralist flattening of the Real into the signifier. For despite Roussel's simulation of a "language which only speaks about itself," his obsession with masks, doublings, and tropological

9. In a work that obviously connects with the fascination with the anagram/hypogram evinced by theorists as diverse as de Man and Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1993 [1976]: 195-212), Abraham and Torok (1986 [1976]) argue that a patient's words can be read ana- grammatically as concealing certain meanings (which, however, are ultimately unreadable, like Jacques Lacan's Real). Words are thus swallowed by the patient and "encrypted" as things inside the psyche. o1. "Lalangue" is Lacan's word for a realm akin to Kristeva's (1983: 34-35) semiotic: "Some-

thing completely different from communication or dialogue, . . . the domain of equivocation and Witz.... animated by affects that involve the presence of non-knowledge."




shifts discloses death as the unconscious of "the play of duplication and

repetition" that covers up "the proliferating emptiness of language" (Fou- cault 1986a [1963]: 167, 160, 165).

Foucault, in short, was drawn to Roussel for two reasons: because Rous- sel created highly complex textual mechanisms that redirected attention from the signified to the signifier, and because those mechanisms concealed the ontological questions that he did not ask except in death. In- scribing Roussel's life as the inside of his texts, Foucault uses that inside to make the reader rethink the technology of structuralism from outside its own exteriority. "Roussel" thus figures the relationship that exists in Fou- cault's own work between structuralism and phenomenology, or between the history of social practices attempted in The Birth of the Clinic (and later in Discipline and Punish) and the ontological questions that the very writing of such a history risks deferring. The relationship between Roussel's texts and his life is reenacted in the relationship between The Birth of the Clinic, as the kind of text by which, it seems, "Foucault" was later represented (and perhaps wished to be represented)," and the ostensibly "secret" life he led

through writers such as Roussel and Blanchot. Thus, the publication of the two books- The Birth of the Clinic and Death and the Labyrinth- on the same

day inscribes the very project of archaeology/genealogy within an autocri-

tique notably absent from later enactments of this project in studies such as Discipline and Punish. For the book on Roussel is the unconscious of its

public counterpart, linked to it by "underground passages" (Foucault 1972 [1969]: 17) that are particularly evident in the preface and conclusion to The Birth of the Clinic. Reentering the latter by way of these (Nietzschean) passages, we become aware that Foucault is performing a self-analysis in which the rationality of "theory" is called to account for "life," such that

Theory itself becomes what it describes: namely, a fold, a form of thinking between the cogito and its doubles.

3

In the remainder of this essay I shall suggest that Roussel's fascination with labyrinths, his concealment of his life behind the locked door of his

11. In an interview with P. Caruso, Foucault indicates that he has always had difficulty rec-

onciling the conflicting attractions of literature and the positive social sciences (quoted in Gane 1991: 41). Although the early work is built around a subterranean dialogue between the two, "literature" increasingly disappears from Foucault's archaeological and genealogical work, to the point that Mike Gane (ibid.) says of the literature-social science tension: "This may be true of Foucault as an intellectual personality, but his writings fall decisively into the positive tradition." It seems, however, that in his last phase Foucault again seeks an

engagement between literature and the social sciences.




texts, and his opening and closing of that door in the moment of death, provide us with a way of understanding Foucault's own work as a kind of closet. As Michel de Certeau (1986: 172-73) notes (although with frus- tration at the resulting "obscurity"), The Order of Things seems to embody "the opposition it so often underlines between 'surface effects' and the hidden 'ground' they ceaselessly signify and conceal." This opposition can be described as de Certeau characterizes it, with reference to Foucault's subject matter: as one between "the 'positivism' of science or the 'objectivity of things"' on the one hand, and the "nocturnal underside" onto which these positivities open as we discover that "the fabric of words and things [holds] within its net the secret of its own ungraspable negation" (ibid.). Or it can be described with reference to Foucault's method: as an opposition between intellectual history and ontology, or between the "structural

analysis of discourses" (Foucault 1986b [1963]: xvii) and the rethinking of the subject that this analysis both signifies and conceals. However we describe this opposition, it is important that we experience the baroque structure of The Order of Things as Foucault (1986a [1963]: 7) himself describes Roussel's texts: as "constructed on multilevels of secrecy, one ordering the other, but without any of them having a universal value or being absolutely revelatory." In this sense, The Order of Things must be "read as an open site" (1970 [1966]: xii): overlapping phenomenology with structuralism, it avoids choosing between them, or "avoids the distinction without eliminating it or rendering it impossible" (1993 [1956]: 32).

Foucault's turn to something like structuralism, with its attendant "formalization" of analysis, is signaled by his term archaeology, which he uses to defamiliarize mimetic or "living history" (1989: 4, 18). But The Order of Things also remains profoundly phenomenological in its structuring by figures of depth and telos that are absent from the nonnarrative format of The Archaeology of Knowledge. In synchronic terms, it is shaped by a distinction between the invisible and the visible aligned with the difference of "language" (langage) from the "discourse" that will later become Fou- cault's exclusive concern. In diachronic terms, this difference is worked out in relation to a counter-Hegelian (or Nietzschean) phenomenology in- volving the replacement of language by discourse in the transition from the Renaissance to the classical period, and the return of language in the more opaque and dispersed medium of "literature," as a form of Dasein that marks the end of man. Structuralist in its attention to what Foucault calls "the system" or "network of simultaneities" that organizes each episteme (1989: 4), The Order of Things is also persistently dialectical (in the manner of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy) in its own organization as a history of "rationalities" whose goal is to disclose the ontological unconscious




of rationality. Indeed, it is worth noting that insofar as he allies himself with structuralism at this stage, Foucault describes it as a historical symp- tom, as "the awakened and troubled consciousness of modern thought" (1970 [1966]: 208; emphasis added). Thus, he seems to reach beyond it, to "a

perhaps inaccessible discourse-which would at the same time be an on-

tology and a semantics" (ibid.). Crucial to Foucault's endeavor is the difference between language and

discourse,'2 which in many ways anticipates Kristeva's distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic. This distinction makes archaeology in The Order of Things not simply into a historical taxonomy but also into a meta- critical (and self-reflexive) scheme of evaluation for Theory itself. Briefly, "language," which first appears in the Renaissance, involves a ternary rather than binary organization of the sign. In other words, it presupposes not simply a relationship between signifier and signified, but also a resemblance between the two that "ma[k]e[s] it possible to see in the first the mark of the second" (ibid.: 64). This configuration is one in which "lan-

guage and things [are] endlessly interwoven," so that language is a form of being rather than a "function" (ibid.: 54, 79). It would be easy to see the third term linking signifier and signified as a version of the transcendental signified, but in fact as the metaphors of play and weaving indicate, "resemblance" is a (dis)similarity between words and things that keeps the

relationship between meaning and being perpetually open, "oscillating endlessly between one and three terms" (ibid.: 42). "Language," in other

words, circulates meaning between words and things so as to "inscribe"

it, not as identity but as differance, in "the fabric of the world" (ibid.: 43). But inscription is by no means the same thing as hypostasis. As "mark" or

trace, resemblance makes words and things interchangeable, so that these elements can play either "the role of content or of sign, that of secret or of indicator" (ibid.: 34), thus making the relationship of priority between

writing and substance undecidable. With the advent of the classical period, this "more complex organiza-

tion" is "fixed in a binary form" that renders words "stable" by laying out their relationships on a flat surface (ibid.: 64, 42). Resemblance (a quality of things) is replaced by "comparison" (a function of order) and is de- nounced "as a confused mixture" that must be subjected to a structural

analysis "in terms of identity and difference" (ibid.: 52, 54). The "facts of discourse" are located paradigmatically and syntagmatically

not as autonomous nuclei of multiple significations, but as events and func- tional segments gradually coming together to form a system. The meaning of

12. The distinction is briefly discussed by Alan Megill (1985: 204, 208), who nevertheless differs from this essay in seeing The Order of Things as largely a structuralist work.




a statement [is] defined not by the treasure of intentions that it might contain, revealing and concealing it at the same time, but by the difference that articulates it upon other real or possible statements, which are contemporary to it or to which it is opposed in the linear series of time. (Foucault 1986b [1963]: xvii)

The result, as Foucault says, is "an immense reorganization of culture" (1970 [1966]: 43) through a restructuring of the ways in which we know and perceive. Whereas "resemblance" had located knowledge in the shift- ing relationship between words and things, "order" locates it purely within

"representation" or the system of signs: "Once the existence of language has been eliminated, all that remains is its function in representation: its nature and its virtues as discourse" (ibid.: 81). Because the two parts of the sign are no longer required to pass through the detour of the world for signification to occur, signifier and signified now enjoy a "pure and simple connection" (ibid.: 67) in the flat and tabular space of an order that needs no further commentary. But this is by no means a merely technical muta- tion. Discourse does not indicate anything that remains unexpressed within the sign: it assumes "no remainder" and consequently no discrepancy between the visible and the invisible. Supposing "nothing in excess of what has been said, but only the fact of its historical appearance" (Foucault 1986b [1963]: xvii), discourse would seem to posit a self-sufficient rationality profoundly resistant to archaeology as "the double articulation" of

ethnology and psychoanalysis upon each other (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 381). As these remarks suggest, the distinction between language and dis-

course is not existentially neutral. Classicism, as an epistemological re- arrangement that associates knowledge with order rather than being, is itself an ontology: "An ontology defined negatively as an absence of nothingness, a general representability of being, and being as expressed in the presence of representation" (ibid.: 206). With classicism we witness the disappearance of the "massive and intriguing existence of language" as a form of Dasein (ibid.: 79), in which words and things enfold each other. But it would be a simplification to see Foucault as merely constructing a binary opposition between two periods. For the Renaissance, during which "language" first emerges, occupies a profoundly ambiguous position in The Order of Things, as is signaled by the lyricism of this section, which is geno- textually the source of its power but phenotextually the sign of a naivete that Foucault himself recognizes in describing lyric as the twin of positivism (1986b [1963]: 198). This ambiguity is nowhere more evident than in his attitude to "commentary" as the preeminent epistemological form of the Renaissance. On the one hand, Foucault (ibid.: xvii) seems to eschew commentary, yearning for an analysis of the statement that would be limited to "the fact of its historical appearance," not one that would be defined phe-




nomenologically "by the treasure of intentions that it might contain, re-

vealing and concealing it at the same time." But on the other hand, this re-

jection of "interpretation" in favor of "formalization" (1989: 4; 1970 [1966]: 40-41) sits oddly with everything else that Foucault says, including what remains as late as 1969 a critique on his part of "formalization" and "mathe- matization" (1989 [1978]: 13). For Foucault himself speaks constantly of

language as something that reverberates "behind" or "beneath" itself, as an excess or, more properly, a lack. One would therefore expect him to

privilege commentary as the analytic reflex of a language in which "the signified is revealed only in the visible, heavy world of a signifier that is itself burdened with a meaning that it cannot control" (1986b [1963]: xvi-xvii).

Foucault's ambivalence toward commentary is connected with his reservations about language, which, as we shall see, is a phenomenological category. The error of the Renaissance is to theologize excess by encod-

ing interpretation as exegesis, thus grounding commentary in the illusion of "an original Text" (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 41). Correspondingly, Renais- sance semiotics also practises an Apollonian sublimation of diff6rance, ap- parent in Foucault's description of it as inconsistently a "unitary and triple system" (ibid.: 64), more logocentric and yet more complex than classical binarism. In the end, then, the rationality of discourse is contested not by language, but by the "literature" that emerges on the far side of the dis- sociation of sensibility brought about by classicism (ibid.: 43). Literature is the ascetic negative of language, its return as a being "separated" from

things (ibid.: 49) after the reinscription of excess as lack. Language in the Renaissance had been possessed of a certain materiality, "both because

things themselves hide and manifest their own enigma like a language and because words offer themselves to men as things to be deciphered" (ibid.: 35). Classical discourse, by contrast, instituted a nominalism (ibid.: 296) that entailed a different kind of idealism. As pure representation, it established itself in a phenomenality that allowed for nothing outside

representation. In this sense, classicism, though antianthropological in its

emphasis on the sign (Foucault 1989: 8-9), is also allied with the cogito in

attributing to "discourse" the power subsequently given to man to "represent the order of things" (ibid.: 5; 1970 [1966]: 312). Indeed, as Foucault's

analysis of Velazquez's Las Meninas suggests,'3 the introduction of man,

though positivist on one level, also marks the intentional structure of ratio-

nality by articulating it upon its finitude in transposing space into time

13. I refer to the fact that the painting elides "that which is its foundation," namely, "the

person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance" (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 16). To restore that "foundation," it seems, would be to deconstruct representation as a "network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints" (ibid.: 4).




and structure into life. Not surprisingly, then, the nineteenth century is marked by a return of commentary (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 298), combined with a renewed sense of the "being" of language as that which exceeds both "man" and "order." But this being is now encrypted in literature as "the manifestation of language in its thickness" (Foucault 1989: 7). It can no longer be deciphered, since it possesses "neither sound nor interlocu- tor" and has "nothing to say but itself" (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 300). Nor can it any longer be made to "do" anything, preferring to "enclose itself within a radical intransitivity" (ibid.) that makes it the nocturnal mirror of

production, enlightenment, and capital. Foucault's text, as these remarks suggest, is not just a table of epistemes

reducible to a diagrammatic "order." 4 It also doubles as a phenomenology of theoretical styles reminiscent of the tripartite metasemiotics of culture in Hegel's aesthetics. Turning this phenomenology in a reflexive direction by opening with a painting that implicates its spectators as well as its

painter, Foucault brings these intellectual styles into a confrontation with their own (non)being. He attempts the difficult task of a phenomenology that is at once post-Hegelian and post-Heideggerian, cultural and onto-

logical. Moreover, it is not just the Geisteswissenschaften but Foucault's own discourse that is the subject of this phenomenology. For in retro-

spect his fondness, already incipient in The Birth of the Clinic, for a mode of analysis that "would evade the fate of commentary" by analyzing only the "statement" and the "event" in the "fact" of their "appearance" (1986b [1963]: xvii), must itself be seen as a disciplinary formation: a classicism inscribed within its own ontological unconscious.

4

As a structural study that conceals a more profound ontological project, The Order of Things also allegorizes Foucault's own relationship to contemporary philosophy. For embedded in its history of epistemes is his attempt to rethink phenomenology through a dialectical encounter with a structuralism figured as classicism. The early work is full of references to "the visible and the invisible" (ibid.: xii)-the title of the book on which Merleau-Ponty was working when he died in 1961. Moreover, Foucault at one time considered entitling his archaeology of the human sciences The Prose of the World, the title of a text by Merleau-Ponty that would be published posthumously (Eribon 1991: 155). Choosing instead to use this title

14. Foucault's own use of the diagram as a material marker of his neostructuralism (1970 [1966]: 201) is picked up by David R. Shumway (1989: 51, 79).




for the section on the Renaissance, Foucault inscribes the thought of his

precursor within a past that is both naive and originary: a past that cannot properly represent the book as a whole, but from which in some sense the entire project of The Order of Things unfolds. That position is in keeping with the way Foucault (1970 [1966]: 325-26) situates phenomenology itself, not in the later "Foreword to the English Edition," but in the text itself:

If phenomenology has any allegiance it is to the discovery of life, work and language; and also to the new figure which, under the old name of man, first

appeared less than two centuries ago; it is to the interrogation concerning man's mode of being and his relation to the unthought. This is why phenomenology . . . in so far as . . . it revived the problem of the a priori and the transcendental motif, has never been able to exorcize its insidious kinship, its

simultaneously promising and threatening proximity, to empirical analyses of man; it is also why, though it was inaugurated by a reduction to the cogito, it has always been led to questions, to the question of ontology. The phenomenological project continually resolves itself, before our eyes, into a description- empirical despite itself-of actual experience, and into an ontology of the un-

thought that automatically short-circuits the primacy of the "I think."

The mixed hermeneutic signals sent by this passage are undoubtedly re-

sponsible for the widespread misunderstanding of the entire subsection in which it occurs. Because of its association with humanism and with the

cogito, one assumes that Foucault must be condemning phenomenology. And yet scattered through this passage are terms that Foucault clearly valo-

rizes, such as the "unthought," and more surprisingly "language," which he will later condemn phenomenology for ignoring. While "life, work and language" also constitute the trinity that underwrites the nineteenth-

century episteme (ibid.: 250), phenomenology's alliance with the material and the empirical pulls aporetically in different directions. Empiricism, on the one hand, leads to a mimetic investment in history and experience, and thus to what Foucault dismisses as "anthropology." It is for this rea- son that phenomenology revives the "transcendental motif" as a way of

resisting "psychologism" (ibid.: 325) by insisting on what Sartre calls the transcendence of the ego: its existence as a function that is not immanent within man. On the other hand, empiricism is also a way of complicating the abstraction of Husserl's "transcendentalism" through a return to what

Merleau-Ponty calls "perception" as the site of differences bracketed by the phenomenological reduction. Moving between empiricism and transcendentalism as ways of protecting the cogito, phenomenology also finds itself using them to question the very primacy of the "I think." As a result, its legacy lies in the questions it raises: in its profoundly un-Cartesian will-

ingness to think from and within its own gaps.




Seen from this perspective, The Order of Things is Foucault's attempt to think from the questions left unanswered in Merleau-Ponty's last book, or more accurately to think in the obscure clearing that Merleau-Ponty opens up between himself and Sartre. Thus, while The Order of Things is a history of the disappearance of "language" and its return as litera-

ture, this narrative also allegorizes Foucault's own relationship to a phenomenology projected back into the Renaissance and reinscribed more

negatively as "deconstruction," after the break between words and things effected by structuralism. Foucault's terms are often closer to Merleau-

Ponty's than one might think. His references to the "raw, historical" being of language (ibid.: 35) manifestly recall the latter's use of the sensible to "restore to us the brute being of the unreflected" (Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964]:

74). That Foucault often locates in language what Merleau-Ponty associates with perception is a sign of his participation in that "vast shift . . . from a form more dense in living models to another more saturated with models borrowed from language" (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 360). But Fou- cault also refers to the "density of perception," and to a "region where

'things' and 'words' have not yet been separated," so that "seeing and saying are still one" in an intermingling of the semiotic and the Symbolic (1986b [1963]: xiii, xi; cf. 1970 [1966]: 43). Through "language," moreover, he seems to be straining toward something nondiscursive: whether ideal- ized in the Renaissance, where language possesses the "ancient solidity of... a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world," or deidealized at the turn of the century, where it returns as a literature "rejected as discourse and re-apprehended in the plastic violence of the shock, [where it] is re- ferred back to . . . the tortured body, to the materiality of thought, to the flesh" (1970 [1966]: 43, 383)?

Merleau-Ponty's "perception," in other words, is an important "pre- text" for Foucault's return to language, particularly when taken in con- junction with the former's emphasis on the flesh and the chiasm,'5 as well as with his concept of "inscription" (Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964]: 63, 197).

15. The term chiasm (Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964]: 130-55, 215) means "intertwining" and can be distinguished from de Man's aporia, which signifies an "unpassable path" between opposites rather than this intertwining in which they simultaneously cross, coincide, and differ. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty develops the figure of the chiasm in connection with his concept of the flesh (la chair), which now replaces his earlier and simpler notion of the lived body (Leib) (simpler because it suggests an embodiment rather than a disembodiment of spirit in matter). In connection with the flesh, Merleau-Ponty describes the chiasmatic intertwining of subject and object, perception and language, and the act of seeing with what is seen. The chiasm is Merleau-Ponty's version of the fold. Indeed, he describes the experience of the flesh as a "coiling over of the visible upon the visible" that "traverses me and constitutes me as a seer," without allowing the "me" to be a point of origin, since the "I" is thereby enfolded into other bodies and spaces (ibid.: 140).




It is important to remember that perception is not the act of a subject; rather, it is "a confused totality where all things, the bodies and minds, are

together" in a world of "non-language significations" or "indications" that are "differences" and not "positive" terms (ibid.: 63, 171). Using perception to

figure Heidegger's thinking beyond subjectivity, Merleau-Ponty therefore

privileges "the sensible" over the concept. The sensible, as a "medium in which there can be being without it having to be posited" (ibid.: 214), is one version of what Foucault (1970 [1966]: 324) is seeking when he speaks of a

way in which thought "can be in the forms of non-thinking." But it would be wrong to equate Merleau-Ponty with what develops from him, for he idealizes deconstruction as phenomenology, eliding the destructive violence associated with the flesh in Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille.'6

Through the Renaissance Foucault bids farewell to his own nostalgia for what his predecessor had sought, namely, a differance without dualism, or a world that precedes the choice between identity and differance. In-

stead, he inscribes phenomenology within two narratives: a Nietzschean

eschatology that tells of the occultation and return of the Dionysian, and a

Hegelian dialectic in which the sensible must be reapprehended at a more

profound point on a negative spiral as the materiality of writing. Struc- turalism is the midpoint of both narratives. As an Apollonian veil that seeks in discourse a phenomenality without material remainder, it is also a necessary stage in the deconstruction of that unselfconsciousness that

(re)covers differance in a form of (dia)logocentrism. That Foucault is in some ways closer to Merleau-Ponty than to Hei-

degger has much to do with Merleau-Ponty's last book. The Visible and the Invisible is a sustained disagreement with the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, whose presence seems excessive in relation to what Merleau-Ponty is actu-

ally saying. "Sartre" figures a certain gap in Merleau-Ponty's work, and it is this gap that leads Foucault to preserve the latter's terminology, but as if superimposing it "upon itself in a secret verticality" so as to open within it "an infinite space where doubles reverberate."'7 Crucial to Merleau-

Ponty's "difference" from Sartre is his attempt to rethink the latter's con-

cept of the prereflective cogito: a project that recurs in Kristeva's concept of the semiotic. For in critiquing Sartrean negativity, Merleau-Ponty also finds in the prereflective cogito the possibility of what he himself calls the "tacit cogito." Briefly, Merleau-Ponty is critical of Sartre for an inverse

16. For a reading of Merleau-Ponty that radicalizes him, and that in effect places him between phenomenology and deconstruction (though without foregrounding the latter term), see Leder 199o. 17. I borrow Foucault's account of how Blanchot conceives language in "Language to In-

finity" (Foucault 1977: 58-59).




Cartesianism that divides existence not between extended and thinking matter, but between being and nothingness. Reducing man to a "negativity" excluded by the "world as positivity," this dualism has the paradoxi- cal effect of protecting the desire for the bounded ego, while also preclud- ing an openness upon being that allows for "interaction" between thought and things (Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964]: 52-74). However, Merleau-Ponty (ibid.: 69) finds in Sartre's prereflective cogito a trace of that prethetic world he himself terms "perception," as if Sartre recognizes for a moment "the denseness of an unreflected being" admitted in the for-itself. Develop- ing that trace, Merleau-Ponty senses in Sartre the possibility of a promise he never fulfills: the promise of "a broader sense of being, which contains

Being and nothingness" (ibid.: 69-70), and of which the very end of the book is the abjected remainder.

Merleau-Ponty, in short, recasts Being and Nothingness within his own at-

tempt to establish a relationship between thought and the unthought, or between the for-itself as what Foucault calls "thought-conscious-of-itself" and the in-itself as a form of "non-thought" (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 324) inaccessible to reflection, and yet present as a "density" at the very heart of the cogito. This attempt is continued in the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible, where he distinguishes a tacit cogito from a "language cogito," and where he also distinguishes the speaking and thinking subjects that are "the subject of a praxis" from a perceiving subject that is "a tacit, silent Being-at (Etre-a)" possessed of no more than an anonymous selfhood

(Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964]: 179, 201-2). That the tacit cogito is in some

ways very close to what Foucault describes as the "modern" cogito should now be clear. For Foucault (1970 [1966]: 324) does not so much reject the cogito as distinguish the "modern" from the Cartesian cogito, in a passage that signals a certain continuity with the terms of previous philosophy:

The modern cogito is as different from Descartes' as our notion of transcendence is remote from Kantian analysis.... In the modern cogito ... we are concerned to grant the highest value, the greatest dimension, to the distance that both separates thought-conscious-of-itself and whatever, within thought, is rooted in non-thought. The modern cogito (and this is why it is not so much the discovery of an evident truth as a ceaseless task constantly to be undertaken afresh) must traverse, duplicate, and reactivate in an explicit form the articulation of thought on everything within it, around it, and beneath it which is not thought but which is nevertheless not foreign to thought. ... In this form, the cogito will not therefore be the sudden and illuminating discovery that all thought is thought, but the constantly renewed interrogation as to how thought can reside elsewhere than here, and yet so very close to itself; how it can be in the forms of non-thinking.




Whereas Descartes sought to insulate mind from body, what Foucault defines here is a phenomenological cogito, intentionally articulated upon its outside or unthought. Foucault's understanding of this cogito develops in important ways in the space between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. For one

thing, Merleau-Ponty was dissatisfied with the tacit cogito, feeling perhaps that he should not even use the term cogito for what he was trying to articu- late. Foucault shared this dissatisfaction with a philosophy of consciousness

signaled by the qualifier tacit. Indeed, he probably shared Merleau-Ponty's later reservations about his own retention of a tacit "cogito" (Merleau- Ponty 1968 [1964]: 171). But modern cogito remains an appropriate term for

Foucault, who is closer to Sartre than to Heidegger in defining man as a "dimension . . . which extends from a part of himself not reflected in a cogito to the act of thought by which he apprehends that part" (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 322; emphasis added). Secondly, and more importantly, Merleau-

Ponty can still be accused of idealizing the unthought in ways with which he was himself uneasy, and which contribute to giving The Visible and the Invisible the unconcluded quality noted by its editor (Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964]: xx-xxvii). This uneasiness comes out in the working notes, which are often more radical than the text itself, as for instance in the striking statement that "perception opens the world to me as the surgeon opens a

body, catching sight, through the window he has contrived, of the organs in full functioning" (ibid.: 218). But it also emerges in the very choice of "Sartre" as a figure through whom to pursue the Heideggerian project of

finding a place for the unthought. For in contrast to Heidegger, who can see Sartre's differences from him only as mistakes, Merleau-Ponty tries to see where Sartre might have gone. Seeking the common ground between himself and his contemporary, he also allows us to glimpse the mutually supplementary relationship between himself and Sartre.

Merleau-Ponty's "completion" of Sartre is clear enough. Even as Sartre

projects the density of an unreflected being away from the self, abjecting it in Nausea as being "de trop," he also recognizes it as something within the cogito, and thus allows for a more fruitful relationship between being and nothingness. What is less clear is why Merleau-Ponty would want to invest both this relationship and his own notion of the chiasm (ibid.: 215) in "Sartre": a figure dismissed by Heidegger with defensive condescension

(Heidegger 1993 [1947]: 231-33). What we sense in this move is something that never quite happens in the text: namely, a rearticulation of the tacit

cogito in the diff6rance between Sartrean and Heideggerian "being," but

one that would still differ from the rearticulations attempted by Blanchot

and Levinas. Conceding the enormous importance of Sartrean negativity to French philosophy, Merleau-Ponty (1968 [1964]: 215) in effect recog-




nizes that the phenomenality of the "clearing" must be inscribed within a radical materiality (mis)recognized by Sartre as the en-soi: "One cannot account for this double 'chiasm' by the cut of the For Itself and the cut of the In Itself. A relation to Being is needed that would form itself within

Being-This at bottom is what Sartre was looking for." If Merleau-Ponty's work generally is a point of beginning for The Order

of Things, then his last book in particular is a starting point for Foucault's

important section on "The 'Cogito' and the Unthought." It is Merleau-

Ponty who recognized the importance of locating Being within the cogito, as something by which thought is outside itself "yet so very close to itself"

(Foucault 1970 [1966]: 324). This articulation of thought with the un-

thought is crucial to Foucault, both because he does not want to iden-

tify the cogito with nothingness, as in Sartre's inverse Cartesianism, and because he does not want to abandon self-consciousness in favor of the "inertia" of the material (ibid.: 322), as in Robbe-Grillet's anti-Sartrean chosisme. But Foucault also responds to the space left by Merleau-Ponty: to his need to deal with a negativity that, for him, is (mis)represented by Sartre. Deconstructing the unthought as Merleau-Ponty never quite did, Foucault turns not so much to Sartre as to Bataille and Blanchot, who are seldom named in The Order of Things but who preoccupied his attention between 1963 and 1966. Both of these writers allow Foucault to deconstruct phenomenology--in the sense of continuing its attempt to think the nature of "being," of continuing it more negatively, but also of not

tying this negativity to the failure of the cogito. Thus, Foucault's 1963 essay on Bataille, "A Preface to Transgression," picks up on the latter's use of

phenomenological phrases such as "inner experience" and "the sovereign Subject" in a strange and empty way, as if this terminology is inhabited by "another language that also speaks and that [the philosopher] is unable to dominate" (1977: 42). Lacking a clear subject or context, Foucault's essay performs rather than defines Bataille's experience interieure, as a transgression that transgresses nothing, an inside that is not an inside because there is no outside against which to define it. Bataille rewrites phenomenology by hollowing it out from within.'8 He allows Foucault to think "excess" in a more tragic way than Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger, as a nonproductive negativity or "radical intransitivity" (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 300) irrecuper- able into any kind of clearing or even Destruktion.

Where Bataille locates this negativity in the Sadean practice of excess -

18. It is arguable, of course, that this is a partial reading of Bataille. As the emphasis on language indicates (1977: 42), Foucault reads Bataille through Blanchot and neglects more conventionally "transgressive" and binary texts such as Bataille's "The Psychological Struc- ture of Fascism."




in the "violence" of a "language" that has been "rejected as discourse"

(ibid.: 383)- Blanchot finds it in a literature conceived in terms of "death, the mirror and the double" (Foucault 1977: 66). That Blanchot is Heideg- ger with a minus sign is suggested not only by Levinas's earlier essay on the French writer, but also by Foucault's own description of him in terms that echo Heidegger's essay on "Language" as the most obvious pre-text for the

opposition of "language" to "man" at the end of The Order of Things.19 In his

monograph on Blanchot, also written in 1966, Foucault (1987 [1966]: 15)

speaks of "the being of language" that "appears for itself with the disappearance of the subject," and of the "irremediable incompatibility between the appearing of language in its being and consciousness of the self in its

identity." Defining "literature" as the nonidentity or exteriority of language to itself, he echoes and inverts Heidegger: "And if, in this setting 'outside of itself,' [language] unveils its own being, the sudden clarity reveals not a folding back but a gap, not a turning back of signs upon themselves but a dispersion" (ibid.: 12). As a deconstruction of "Heidegger," "Blanchot"

figures his simultaneous renunciation and survival in a discourse on the end of man that is affectively very different from that of Heidegger himself on the one hand and Derrida on the other. This same refiguration of the phenomenological project can be seen in the relationship of Blanchot to Merleau-Ponty, or of "literature" to "language." For Foucault's work is traversed by the strange association of language with murmuring: a figure used to signify "that language is speaking of itself, that the letter is not the

letter, but the language which doubles it within the same system of reality" (1977: 57). Used by both Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot, and by Foucault with reference to Blanchot, the figures of murmuring and of a language that repeats itself "to infinity" are also used with reference to "language" and its return as literature.20 They thus inscribe The Order of Things in Fou-

19. According to Heidegger (1975: 197), "language is neither expression nor an activity of man." According to Foucault (1989: 8; cf. also 1970 [1966]: 339), "where there is a sign, there man cannot be." 20. Foucault uses the term murmur with reference to Blanchot in his two essays on the latter

(1977: 55-56, 60; 1987 [1966]: 17, 25) and also quotes Blanchot as using the word (1987 [1966]: 22); he uses it with reference to the Renaissance conceptions of language and particularly in relation to "resemblance" in The Order of Things (1970 [1966]: 41, 58, 69, 120); finally, he uses it with reference to the unthought and the unconscious as well as with reference to literature (ibid.: 103, 327). The notion of language as repeating itself to infinity, which is central to Foucault's 1963 essay on Blanchot, "Language to Infinity," is repeated with reference to the Renaissance (ibid.: 41). Finally, the figure of murmuring can also be seen as linked to a

highly phenomenological cluster of terms that includes glittering, shimmering, shining, and appearing (the last two being both rendered by the German word Schein (ibid.: 300, 325, 382, 386; 1987 [1966]: 18).




cault's reading of Blanchot as the hidden story of how phenomenology became deconstruction.

5

Blanchot, it can be argued, facilitates the transition from phenomenology to deconstruction by transferring Sartre's analysis of nothingness from the

cogito to writing. This transference helps to clarify what Foucault is doing in de-positing being in language rather than perception as early as the section on the Renaissance. It underwrites even more clearly his use of literature to deconstruct language. For Blanchot, literature is "what constitutes the outside of every work, what ploughs up every written language and leaves on every text an empty claw mark" (Foucault 1989: 22). Literature is the outside of language as deconstruction is the outside of phenomenology. But as important as what Foucault derives from Blanchot and Bataille is their style of thinking: a style unlike anything in Merleau-Ponty or Sartre. As Foucault (1987 [1966]: 21) himself points out, it "is extremely difficult to find a language faithful to this thought. Any purely reflexive discourse runs the risk of leading the experience of the outside back to the dimension of interiority." Foucault comes closest to capturing the undialectical negation (ibid.: 22) underlying this thought in "A Preface to Transgression." This essay, as we have noted, is closed in on itself and profoundly resistant to discursive assimilation: it does not discuss texts by Bataille or concepts in his work. Rather, it performs Bataille's deconstruction (or "transgression") as an unassignable negation, "a visibility devoid of shape" (ibid.: 53). In effect, it constructs a style of "the outside" that cannot be taken back "to the interiority of our philosophical reflection and the positivity of our knowledge" (ibid.: 16).

Needless to say, this is not the style of The Order of Things, which we can much more easily "repatriate to the side of consciousness" (ibid.: 21). Thus, it is important to recognize the radical difference between Foucault's work and Blanchot's or Levinas's transposition of Sartrean nothingness into a

Heideggerian reflection on (non)being. For The Order of Things moves rest-

lessly between an analytic of finitude that takes us toward what Foucault this time calls the "interiority" of a being without transcendental guaran- tees, and "the exteriority of knowledge" (1970 [1966]: 354)-a dimension

totally absent from Blanchot's work. Correspondingly, the domain of Fou- cault's research is not the pure negativity of literature, but the ambiguous positivity of the (human) sciences. Foucault's relationship to the "human sciences" requires clarification, since his ostensible focus is the disciplines




that deal with "life, labour, and language," which he describes somewhat

curiously as "sciences" (ibid.: 351), or as "empirical," rather than "theoretical," sciences (1989: 55). But though he is concerned with what we know as "biology, economics, and philology (or linguistics)," his analytic frame- work is provided by the "human sciences": "psychology, sociology, and the

history of culture, ideas or science" (1970 [1966]: 366, 154). The human sciences occupy a strange space between positivity and reflexiveness. Re-

sisting the structuralist attempt to claim for them the same certainty and

cognitive self-identity as the sciences, Foucault describes their pretentions in that direction as making them "dangerous intermediaries in the space of knowledge" (ibid.: 348), but also sees their emergence as "correlated to a sort of 'de-mathematicization"' by which they "surreptitiously" lead the sciences back to the analytic offinitude (ibid.: 349, 354). This is because the human sciences are "meta-epistemological" practices that "extend" from "what man is in his positivity (living, speaking, labouring being) to what enables this same being to know (or seek to know) what life is" (ibid.: 355, 353). They therefore repeat the structure of the modern cogito, which "extends from a part of [man] not reflected in a cogito to the act of thought by which he apprehends that part" (ibid.: 322). This structure is evident in the

"duplication" (redoublement) that defines their existence. Not only do they repeat themselves in a reflection on what they do; they are also in an uneasy "position of duplication" (ibid.: 354) with regard to the sciences. Foucault describes this position as one of "vicinity" (ibid.: 366) or metonymy; but we could also describe it as de Man does the relationship between words and things, namely, as an attempt of the pour-soi to achieve a being-in-itself that would allow its existence to coincide at all times with its essence (de Man 1984 [1960]: 2-5). Arising after the sciences, the human sciences can

never be their own foundation; rather, they mimic or simulate the sciences, and thus mark both the latter and themselves with the fundamental negativity of not being what they are. Their relationship to the sciences is part of the pattern of "doubles" that Foucault also traces with reference to the

cogito and the unthought as well as the empirical and the transcendental. This doubling marks the human sciences with a certain inessentiality but also makes them the unconscious of the sciences: "They exist only in so far as they dwell side by side with those sciences-or rather beneath them, in the space of their projections" (Foucault 1970 [1966]: 366).

Duplication and reflection also characterize language, which, in the

1963 essay on Blanchot, is described as a work of "reduplication," a "doubled writing" that behind "its visible and permanent signs" mirrors and repeats itself so as to disclose itself as already existing behind itself, active beyond itself, to infinity" (1977: 55-57). Indeed, the vocabulary of




duplication and repetition is most extensively worked out in the book on Roussel, whose texts are inhabited by a "subsurface language" that works behind or beneath the actual text, "speak[ing] of something other than what is said" (Foucault 1986a [1963]: 66). Thus, it should be clear that in The Order of Things Foucault transfers to epistemology and history those structural features of language that he had insisted must also "be read as

ontological indications" (1977: 57). More specifically, he constructs the his-

tory of rationality around the duplication of the sciences as the human sciences, and before that the duplication of the "theoretical" as the "em-

pirical" sciences. This "doubling," which covers over "the profound void

underlying objects and words," also has ontological ramifications that are transferred from language, where the repetition of the signified in the signifier is symptomatic of "the duplication of life in death" and therefore of "the moment when death erupts in life" (1986a [1963]: 28, 68).

What we should emphasize, however, is the profound distance that separates a reflection on perception or language from its transposition into "the history of culture, ideas or science." For in turning to history, Foucault extends phenomenology by placing his work in the space between different phenomenologies. Deidealizing Merleau-Ponty's focus on a being that exceeds the cogito by locating this being in language rather than in the sensible, Foucault also differs from both Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot in

replacing the "density of perception" and of "things closed in upon themselves" (i986b [1963]: xiii) with "the density of the historic,"21 as a kind of unconscious that maintains with knowledge "a relation that is strange, undefined, ineffaceable" (1970 [1966]: 327). On the one hand, this trans-

position into history of the negativity of Dasein places under erasure a

phenomenology committed to the cogito, in which man "creat[es] and re- creat[es] his positivity" through the Geisteswissenschaften (ibid.: 379). But on the other hand, history, even when viewed in material rather than phe-

21. Foucault first published The Birth of the Clinic in 1963, but then revised it in 1972. In the 1963 edition, the relevant sentence has "I1 s'agit d'une etude structurale qui essaie de dechif- frer dans l'6paisseur de l'historique les conditions de l'histoire elle-meme" (1963: xv). In the 1972 revision, this is changed to "il s'agit d'une etude qui essaie de degager dans l'epaisseur du discours les conditions de son histoire." The English translation corresponds to neither passage but rather conflates the two (1986b [1963]: xix). James Bernauer provides a useful account of the differences between the two versions of The Birth of the Clinic (1990: 188- 92). Bernauer sees the 1972 revision as attempting to cut Foucault's ties to structuralism. It seems, however, that Foucault is also concerned to replace structural terms with ones that make the text methodologically consistent with the recently published Archaeology of Knowl- edge. In the above passage, "history" is replaced by "discourse," and history is in fact located within discourse. On page xiii of both French versions--with the English translation (i986b [1963]: xvii) being again a conflation of both versions-Foucault twice replaces structuralist terminology with the neostructuralist word discourse in his 1972 revision.




nomenal terms, cannot yield an experience of pure negativity: it is con-

cerned, as Hegel says, with the forms by which man "produces" himself in

the world through his work, and not with what Blanchot calls "workless-

ness" (desoeuvrement). The density of history, in other words, allows Foucault

to bring together the two strains that had preoccupied him in the fifties:

namely, a concern with ontology and a concern with what remains, para-

doxically, a deconstructed anthropology. Each of these concerns orders or

enfolds the other, but without either of them "having a universal value or

being absolutely revelatory" (1986a [1963]: 7).

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rajan,the phenomenological allegory from death and the labyrinth to the order of things

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