Theme Issue 54

Words, Things, and Beyond: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses at 50

Cover image: from Joseph Jastrow’s “The Mind's Eye,” Popular Science Monthly 54 (January 1899), 299-312; discussed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

ARTICLES

+ PETER E. GORDON, "Introductory Remarks: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses at 50, History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 3-6.

No abstract.

+ BÉATRICE HAN-PILE, "Phenomenology and Anthropology in Foucault’s “Introduction to Binswanger’s Dream and Existence: A Mirror Image The Order of Things?" History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 7-22.

In this article, I examine the relation between phenomenology and anthropology by placing Foucault’s first published piece, "Introduction to Binswanger’s Dream and Existence" in dialectical tension with The Order of Things. I argue that the early work, which so far hasn’t received much critical attention, is of particular interest because, whereas OT is notoriously critical of anthropological confusions in general, and of "Man" as an empirico-transcendental double in particular, IB views "existential anthropology" as a unique opportunity to establish a new and fruitful relation between transcendental forms and empirical contents. This is because IB focuses on a specific object, "Menschsein" (the "being of man"), which is neither the transcendental subject nor an empirical being (a member of the class Homo sapiens). Thus for the young Foucault, existential anthropology occupies a fertile methodological middle ground between transcendental approaches (exemplified in IB by Heideggerian phenomenology) and empirical forms of analysis (exemplified by Freudian psychoanalysis). I first interpret anthropology in the light of phenomenology and defend the view that Menschsein is neither a transcendental structure nor a concrete particular, but as the instantiation of the first in the second. I argue that for anthropology to yield the full theoretical benefits Foucault claims for it, the particular cases of Menschsein examined in existential analysis have to be regarded as exemplary. I then read phenomenology back in the light of anthropology and examine how, for Foucault, the analysis of Menschsein in dreams benefits fundamental ontology by affording us a clearer view of some of the main existentiale than the focus on everyday waking experience in Being and Time. Finally, I turn to the limits and difficulties of this early position and my reading of it, and to their consequences for Foucault’s later view.

+ JEAN-CLAUDE MONOD, "Vanishing Point: Les mots et les choses, History, and Diagnosis," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 23-34.

A difficult point in The Order of Things lies in the historical situation of the archaeologist himself, especially when he speaks about the present. Is it possible to have an adequate view of the episteme in which you stand? Is not the very concept of episteme that of an unconscious determination of the space of knowledge, so that it would be an illusion to claim to be able to "objectify" one's own epistemological situation? And from what point of view can a part of this situation be considered "backward"? This article tries to show that the idea of the "death of man" can be read on two levels: first, it is possible to reconstruct the argument of an appearance and disappearance of man in the space of knowledge from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century; but then, one has to discuss the way Foucault combined his history of knowledge with a philosophical polemics against some contemporary figures. And we can wonder if Foucault's diagnosis has lost any relevance for the present.

+ NANCY PARTNER, "Foucault’s Iconic Afterlife: The Posthumous Reach of Words and Things," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 35-53.

The lasting influence of Michel Foucault's work is both instantly recognizable in that his very name can be invoked as a noun or adjective ("Foucauldian") as a critical stance or attitude without further elaboration, and yet his signature concepts have been flattened, stretched, exaggerated, and thinned as they have been applied by his most enthusiastic followers. Although Foucault has entered the canon of philosophers, he also became iconic, most notably with the typographic icon, power/knowledge, a (possibly unwanted) achievement of recognition and compression virtually unknown to other philosophers. In this essay, I consider the Foucault of the philosophical canon, and I trace some of the main routes of the iconic Foucault into acceptance or nonacceptance by the academic disciplines, notably history, political science, and anthropology, and numerous other unexpected venues where variants of Foucault's ideas have found surprising homes. I also contemplate the meaning of the status of "iconicity" as it has been analyzed by sociologists, and the possibility that iconic misreadings of Foucault's concepts have been extraordinarily "good to think with" by his critics.

+ GARY GUTTING, "The Politics of The Order of Things: Foucault, Sartre, and Deleuze," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 54-65.

Foucault's histories are typically aimed at what he regarded as intolerable political consequences of knowledge-based disciplines such as psychiatry and medicine. But The Order of Things is hard to fit into this pattern. What are the intolerable political consequences of the metaphysical and epistemological "humanism" the book attacks? To answer this question, I discuss Foucault's attitude toward Sartre and Deleuze, neither mentioned in The Order of Things but both of central importance for understanding its political significance. My conclusion is that the book fails as a political critique of Sartre (and political humanism in general) and instead expresses Foucault's personal ethical preference for Deleuzian limit-experiences.

THE SIXTH ANNUAL HISTORY AND THEORY LECTURE

+ VINCENT DESCOMBE, "The Order of Things: An Archeology of What?" History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 66-81.

Foucault’s Les mots et les choses has been translated as The Order of Things. The title of the book, both in French and in English, would remain enigmatic without the subtitle: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. But which disciplines are the human sciences to be accounted for by the archaeologist? To this question, there seem to be three possible answers. According to Foucault, such sciences as biology, political economy, and linguistics are indeed scientific disciplines that study human beings, but they are not human sciences. On the other hand, psychology and sociology do count as human sciences, although they are not really genuine sciences. As to structural disciplines (Lacanian psychoanalysis, Lévi-Straussian anthropology, structural linguistics), Foucault does not see them as successful human sciences, since he calls them “counter-human sciences." In other words, the situation of human sciences seems to be messy from the point of view of a philosopher defending the possibility of radical reflection against psychologism and more generally anthropologism. Foucault rejects Merleau-Ponty’s claim to have found a way out of anthropologism through the so-called phenomenological reduction. Then one can read Foucault’s archaeology of human sciences as an attempt to offer an alternative way for radical thinking. His archaeology turns out to be an archaeology of ourselves insofar as it applies to archaeologists themselves whatever knowledge they have gained of their object, the discontinuous “systems of thought” succeeding one another in history. The success of such an archaeology of ourselves will rest on the interpretation of what Foucault has rightly called the “return of language” at the center of our intellectual concerns.

+ FRÉDÉRIC WORMS, "Unexpected and Vital Controversies: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses in Its Philosophical Moment and in Ours," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 82-92.

An explicit controversy stirred by Foucault’s announcement of the "death of man" in Les mots et les choses had a side effect: it hid another kind of controversy between allies and friends, that is between Foucault and contemporaries of the new moment he was opening, among whom were Canguilhem, Deleuze, and Derrida. These internal and unexpected controversies are the very life of the "60s" moment in French philosophy. It so happens that they also all dealt with the question of life, thus leading to the heart of our moment today.

+ JULIAN BOURG, "Nature and the Irruptive Violence of History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 93-111.

Historical thinking has long defined itself in part through opposition to the natural, in spite of periodic critical efforts to bridge the gap. Deeper in Western traditions of historical reflection are traces of modes of thought through which the distance between human history and nature writ large tends to collapse. Two thinkers not often placed in dialogue—Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin—both unearthed aspects of this subterranean current. Foucault’s The Order of Things maps different moments of Benjamin’s trajectory: Renaissance resemblance and the metaphysics of language, classical taxonomy and the baroque “mourning-play,” and modern history and commodity culture in the nineteenth century. Violence appears periodically as the irruptive and disruptive force that conditions the natural-historical and thus an anthropocentric history that derives from it: from post-Edenic Babel to geological cataclysm and corporeal transience to the Marquis de Sade, Karl Marx, capitalism, and total war. Without in any way succumbing to naturalism, that inverse of subject-centered instrumental reasoning, both Foucault and Benjamin considered the import of the natural-historical for the eventual articulation of contemporary historical thinking and in doing so contributed to the regeneration of natural history as a mode of thought.

+ AHMED RAGAB, "Monsters and Patients: An Archeology of Medicine, Islam, and Modernity," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 112-130.

Foucault’s analysis of the history of evolutionary thought in Les Mots et les choses introduces monsters as incomplete beings that form important steps on the evolutionary ladder toward the terminal species. Monsters represent attempts by nature to achieve the perfection of the terminal species and are, therefore, significant for naturalists to construct the details of the natural continuum. Despite their incompleteness, monsters underwrite the natural continuum and evidence the grounding of this continuum in reality. To a great extent, the continuum of nature, proposed by Foucault, resembles a continuum of civilization through which the history of the world and the history of colonization were often seen. The non-European emerged as the monster that showcased the deeper history of the more-perfect European. In the same way that monsters were written into natural history as intermediary and incomplete beings, losing in the process their uniqueness as independent species, the colonized were written into the (new) World History as objects of colonization, modernization, and development and as the living fossils of a bygone European past. This new history was not only created for European consumption but was also an important part of European-style education in the colony shaping colonial and postcolonial identities and perceptions of self and other. This article uses Foucauldian monsters to understand the making of historical narratives about the precolonial past in nineteenth-century Egypt, where one of the earliest European-style medical schools in Africa and Asia was built in the early nineteenth century. In this school and surrounding emerging educational system, narratives about science, modernity, and religion produced new histories that came to form colonial subjects. Finally, the article asks about a postcolonial/post-monstrous epistemology, what it might look like and whether and how it can emerge from the postcolonial condition.

+ LAURA STARK, "Out of Their Depths: 'Moral Kinds' and the Interpretation of Evidence in Foucault’s Modern Episteme," History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 131-147.

The Order of Things is uniquely relevant to historians because it is about the contradictions of writing history in the present day, and because it makes claims absent from other books often seen as similar, such as Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For Order, the present-day modern episteme is characterized by unconscious elements that connect Man through time. These unconscious elements are only vaguely discernible to himself and are deformed in the process of representation, that is by putting experience into words. At the same time, history-writing presumes to pull these unconscious elements out of the depths of human experience, time, and space. These assumptions create contradictions for historians in the present day and warrant particular interpretations of evidence that override alternative plausible interpretations. The inescapable contradictions of writing history in the modern episteme are most apparent in histories of what philosopher Ian Hacking calls “moral kinds,” as shown by an extended analysis of a recent history article on medical experimentation on prisoners. The overarching aim of this essay is to identify stronger, weaker, and usefully plausible interpretations of historical evidence—and, inspired by Foucault, to extend the imaginative possibilities for writing history.