Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 3

5.

Foucaults Discourse: The Historiography


of AntiHumanism

The isork of Michel to ucault, conventionally labeled as Structuralist


but consistentl denied by him to be such, is extraordinarily difhcult
to deal death in any short account. This is not onl)' because his oeuvre
is so extensive but also because his thought comes clothed in a rhetoric
apparentlJ designed to frustrate summary, paraphrase, economlcal
quotation for illustrative purposes, or translation into traditional
critical terminology.
In part, the idios ncrasy of Fouca ults rhetoric reflects a general
rcbellion of his generation against the c/and of their Cartesian heri-
tage. Against the Atticism of the older tradi tion, the new generation
is adamantly Asiatic. But the thorniness of Foucaults style is also
ideolog icallJ motivated. His interminable sentences, parentheses, repe-
titiins, neologisms, paridoxes, oxJ inorons, alternation of anals tical
ith Ivrical passages, and combination of scientistic ss ith my thic ter-
minology all appear to be consciouslv designed to render his dis-
course impenetrable to any criticaI technique based on ideoltgica I
principles di fferent from his os n.
It is difhcult, how ever, to specify Faucaults ow n ideolog ical ptisi-
t win. If he detests li beral isni because cf its equivocation and serf ice to
the social status quo, he also despises conserf atisms dependence c n
tr.ilitian . And although he often joins forces is ith 54 arx ist radic.ils in
T H E H I S T O R I O I R A P H Y O F A N I I - H U M A N I S M

spenfic causes, he sh:mcs nothing of their faith in science. The an-


,ireh ist Left he dismisses as infantile in its hopen for the future mind
a.i we in its faith in a benign hum:in nature. His ph ilosophica I position
i s close to the nihilism of Nietzschc. His discourse begins where ietzsches,
in rc Ho /r, lefr off: in the perception of the madness
,I ,ill wisdom and the toll y rf all knois'ledge. But there is noth
ing of Nietzsches optimism in Foucault. His is i chillinglv cleim per ce
ation of the transiency of till Ie.irning, but he drais=s the iniplicatious
I this perceptin in a manner that has nothing in common with
ictzsches adam untrue rigor.
And this because there is no center to Foucaults discourse. lt is ill
surface and intended to be so. For even more consistently than ietzsche,
Foucault resists the impulse to seek an origin or transcen- Herr t.if
subject that would confer any specific meaning on existence. F ucaults
discourse is willfull) superficio1. And this is consistent with the larger
purpose of a thinker who wishes to dissolve the distinction bet sseen
surfaces and depths, to show that wherever this distinction
.irises it is eiidence of the play' of organized power and that this distinc-
tion is itself the most effective w'eapon power possesses for hiding its
iperations.
The multifold operations of power are, in (oucaults vies, at once
rim st manifest and most difhcult to identify in svh at he takes to be the
fasis of cultural praxis in general, nameI;, discourse. Disconrsr is the
tC rna under ss'hich he gathers all of the forms and categories of cultural Iife,
including, apparent1)', his ois'n efforts to su bin it this life to criti cism.
Thus end isaged, and as he himset I says in The Archeolog o[ L i
/r dpc {1969), his os n work is to be regarded as a discourse
.ibiut discourse (2tJ5). It follos s, then, that if we are to comprehend
h I S istrk on its own terms, we must anal ze it as disctaurse and ss'ith
.i11 the connotations of circul ari ty, of movement back and forth, that
the Indta-Eu ropean root of this term (mrs) and its Latinate form (dis-,
ln di fferent directians, + curre r, to run suggest. Accordingly, I
h )\ 9 sought entry into the thicket of Foucaults work and, I hope, a
i; but of it b\ concentrating on its nature as discourse.
AIi approach w ill be genera 1I s rhetorico1, and mv aim isull be to
haracterize the style of Foucaults discourse. I think we wall find a clue
!CJ the meaning of his discursise stv'le in the rhett rima 1 theory of tropes.
TQ 1$ theon has serf ed as the organizing principle of Foucaults theory
**I culture, and it ss ill serf e as the minalj tical principle of this essa).
briefl v, I argue that the a u tY on I]' of Foucaul ts discourse derives pri-
<4 Minh' from its std Ie (rather than from i ts factual evidence or rigor of
Thank you for using www.freepdfconvert.com service!

Only two pages are converted. Please Sign Up to convert all pages.

https://www.freepdfconvert.com/membership

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi