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Title: The Order of Discourse Author: Michel Foucault Date: Dec. 2, 1970 Language: en Topics: academics, post-structuralism, authority, authoritarianism, not-anarchist Source: *Untying the text: a post-structuralist reader* Notes: Translated by Ian McLeod
I wish I could have slipped surreptitiously into this discourse which I
must present today, and into the ones I shall have to give here, perhaps
for many years to come. I should have prepreferred to be enveloped by
speech, and carried away well beyond all possible beginnings, rather
than have to begin it myself. I should have preferred to become aware
that a nameless voice was already speaking long before me, so that I
should only have needed to join in, to continue the sentence it had
started and lodge myself, without really being noticed, in its
interstices, as if it had signalled to me by pausing, for an instant, in
suspense. Thus there would be no beginning, and instead of being the one
from whom discourse proceeded, I should be at the mercy of its chance
unfolding, a slender gap, the point of its possible disappearance. I
should have liked there to be a voice behind me which had begun to speak
a very long time before, doubling in advance everything I am going to
say, a voice which would say: ‘You must go on, I can’t go on, you must
go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until
they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go
on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already,
perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the
door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens.’ I
think a good many people have a similar desire to be freed from the
obligation to begin, a similar desire to be on the other side of
discourse from the outset, without having to consider from the outside
what might be strange, frightening, and perhaps maleficent about it. To
this very common wish, the institution’s reply is ironic, since it
solemnises beginnings, surrounds them with a circle of attention and
silence, and imposes ritualised forms on them, as if to make them more
easily recognisable from a distance. Desire says: ‘I should not like to
have to enter this risky order of discourse; I should not like to be
involved in its peremptoriness and decisiveness; I should like it to be
all around me like a calm, deep transparence, infinitely open, where
others would fit in with my expectations, and from which truths would
emerge one by one; I should only have to let myself be carried, within
it and by it, like a happy wreck.’ The institution replies: ‘You should
not be afraid of beginnings; we are all here in order to show you that
discourse belongs to the order of laws, that we have long been looking
after its appearances; that a place has been made ready for it, a place
which honours it but disarms it; and that if discourse may sometimes
have some power, nevertheless it is from us and us alone that it gets
it.’ But perhaps this institution and this desire are nothing but two
contrary replies to the same anxiety: anxiety about what discourse is in
its material reality as a thing pronounced or written; anxiety about
this transitory existence which admittedly is destined to be effaced,
but according to a time-scale which is not ours; anxiety at feeling
beneath this activity (despite its greyness and ordinariness) powers and
dangers that are hard to imagine; anxiety at suspecting the struggles,
victories, injuries, dominations and enslavements, through so many words
even though long usage has worn away their roughness. What, then, is so
perilous in the fact that people speak, and that their discourse
proliferates to infinity? Where is the danger in that?
Here is the hypothesis which I would like to put forward tonight in
order to fix the terrain — or perhaps the very provisional theatre — of
the work I am doing: that in every society the production of discourse
is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a
certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and
dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous,
formidable materiality. In a society like ours, the procedures of
exclusion are well known. The most obvious and familiar is the
prohibition. We know quite well that we do not have the right to say
everything, that we cannot speak of just anything in any circumstances
whatever, and that not everyone has the right to speak of anything
whatever. In the taboo on the object of speech, and the ritual of the
circumstances of speech, and the privileged or exclusive right of the
speaking subject, we have the play of three types of prohibition which
intersect, reinforce or compensate for each other, forming a complex
grid which changes constantly. I will merely note that at the present
time the regions where the grid is tightest, where the black squares are
most numerous, are those of sexuality and politics; as if discourse, far
from being that transparent or neutral element in which sexuality is
disarmed and politics pacified, is in fact one of the places where
sexuality and politics exercise in a privileged way some of their most
formidable powers. It does not matter that discourse appears to be of
little account, because the prohibitions that surround it very soon
reveal its link with desire and with power. There is nothing surprising
about that, since, as psychoanalysis has shown, discourse is not simply
that which manifests (or hides) desire — it is also the object of
desire; and since, as history constantly teaches us, discourse is not
simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is
the thing for which and by which there is struggle, discourse is the
power which is to be seized. There exists in our society another
principle of exclusion, not another prohibition but a division and a
rejection. I refer to the opposition between reason and madness.2 Since
the depths of the Middle Ages, the madman has been the one whose
discourse cannot have the same currency as others. His word may be
considered null and void, having neither truth nor importance, worthless
as evidence in law, inadmissible in the authentification of deeds or
contracts, incapable even of bringing about the trans-substantiation of
bread into body at Mass. On the other hand, strange powers not held by
any other may be attributed to the madman’s speech: the power of
uttering a hidden truth, of telling the future, of seeing in all naivety
what the others’ wisdom cannot perceive. It is curious to note that for
centuries in Europe the speech of the madman was either not heard at all
or else taken for the word of truth. It either fell into the void, being
rejected as soon as it was proffered, or else people deciphered in it a
rationality, naive or crafty, which they regarded as more rational than
that of the sane. In any event, whether excluded, or secretly invested
with reason, the madman’s speech, strictly, did not exist. It was
through his words that his madness was recognised; they were the place
where the division between reason and madness was exercised, but they
were never recorded or listened to. No doctor before the end of the
eighteenth century had ever thought of finding out what was said, or how
and why it was said, in this speech which nonetheless determined the
difference. This whole immense discourse of the madman was taken for
mere noise, and he was only symbolically allowed to speak, in the
theatre, where he would step forward, disarmed and reconciled, because
there he played the role of truth in a mask. You will tell me that all
this is finished today or is coming to an end; that the madman’s speech
is no longer on the other side of the divide; that it is no longer null
and void; on the contrary, it puts us on the alert; that we now look for
a meaning in it, for the outline or the ruins of some oeuvre; and that
we have even gone so far as to come across this speech of madness in
what we articulate ourselves, in that slight stumbling by which we lose
track of what we are saying. But all this attention to the speech of
madness does not prove that the old division is no longer operative. You
have only to think of the whole framework of knowledge through which we
decipher that speech, and of the whole network of institutions which
permit someone — a doctor or a psychoanalyst — to listen to it, and
which at the same time permit the patient to bring along his poor words
or, in desperation, to withhold them. You have only to think of all this
to become suspicious that the division, far from being effaced, is
working differently, along other lines, through new institutions, and
with effects that are not at all the same. And even if the doctor’s role
were only that of lending an ear to a speech that is free at last, he
still does this listening in the context of the same division. He is
listening to a discourse which is invested with desire, and which — for
its greater exaltation or its greater anguish — thinks it is loaded with
terrible powers. If the silence of reason is required for the curing of
monsters, it is enough for that silence to be on the alert, and it is in
this that the division remains. It is perhaps risky to consider the
opposition between true and false as a third system of exclusion, along
with those just mentioned. How could one reasonably compare the
constraint of truth with divisions like those, which are arbitrary to
start with or which at least are organised around historical
contingencies; which are not only modifiable but in perpetual
displacement; which are supported by a whole system of institutions
which impose them and renew them; and which act in a constraining and
sometimes violent way? Certainly, when viewed from the level of a
proposition, on the inside of a discourse, the division between true and
false is neither arbitrary nor modifiable nor institutional nor violent.
But when we view things on a different scale, when we ask the question
of what this will to truth has been and constantly is, across our
discourses, this will to truth which has crossed so many centuries of
our history; what is, in its very general form, the type of division
which governs our will to know (notre volonte de savoir), then what we
see taking shape is perhaps something like a system of exclusion, a
historical, modifiable, and institutionally constraining system. There
is no doubt that this division is historically constituted. For the
Greek poets of the sixth century BC, the true discourse (in the strong
and valorised sense of the word), the discourse which inspired respect
and terror, and to which one had to submit because it ruled, was the one
pronounced by men who spoke as of right and according to the required
ritual; the discourse which dispensed justice and gave everyone his
share; the discourse which in prophesying the future not only announced
what was going to happen but helped to make it happen, carrying men’s
minds along with it and thus weaving itself into the fabric of destiny.
Yet already a century later the highest truth no longer resided in what
discourse was or did, but in what it said: a day came when truth was
displaced from the ritualised, efficacious and just act of enunciation,
towards the utterance itself, its meaning, its form, its object, its
relation to its reference. Between Hesiod and Plato a certain division
was established, separating true discourse from false discourse: a new
division because henceforth the true discourse is no longer precious and
desirable, since it is no longer the one linked to the exercise of
power. The sophist is banished. This historical division probably gave
our will to know its general form. However, it has never stopped
shifting: sometimes the great mutations in scientific thought can
perhaps be read as the consequences of a discovery, but they can also be
read as the appearance of new forms in the will to truth. There is
doubtless a will to truth in the nineteenth century which differs from
the will to know characteristic of Classical culture in the forms it
deploys, in the domains of objects to which it addresses itself, and in
the techniques on which it is based. To go back a little further: at the
turn of the sixteenth century (and particularly in England), there
appeared a will to know which, anticipating its actual contents,
sketched out schemas of possible, observable, measurable, classifiable
objects; a will to know which imposed on the knowing subject, and in
some sense prior to all experience, a certain position, a certain gaze
and a certain function (to see rather than to read, to verify rather
than to make commentaries on); a will to know which was prescribed (but
in a more general manner than by any specific instrument) by the
technical level where knowledges had to be invested in order to be
verifiable and useful. It was just as if, starting from the great
Platonic division, the will to truth had its own history, which is not
that of constraining truths: the history of the range of objects to be
known, of the functions and positions of the knowing subject, of the
material, technical, and instrumental investments of knowledge. This
will to truth, like the other systems of exclusion, rests on an
institutional support: it is both reinforced and renewed by whole strata
of practices, such as pedagogy, of course; and the system of books,
publishing, libraries; learned societies in the past and laboratories
now. But it is also renewed, no doubt more profoundly, by the way in
which knowledge is put to work, valorised, distributed, and in a sense
attributed, in a society. Let us recall at this point, and only
symbolically, the old Greek principle: though arithmetic may well be the
concern of democratic cities, because it teaches about the relations of
equality, geometry alone must be taught in oligarchies, since it
demonstrates the proportions within inequality. Finally, I believe that
this will to truth — leaning in this way on a support and an
institutional distribution — tends to exert a sort of pressure and
something like a power of constraint (I am still speaking of our own
society) on other discourses. I am thinking of the way in which for
centuries Western literature sought to ground itself on the natural, the
‘vraisemblable’, on sincerity, on science as well — in short, on ‘true’
discourse. I am thinking likewise of the manner in which economic
practices, codified as precepts or recipes and ultimately as morality,
have sought since the sixteenth century to ground themselves,
rationalise themselves, and justify themselves in a theory of wealth and
production. I am also thinking of the way in which a body as
prescriptive as the penal system sought its bases or its justification,
at first of course in a theory of justice, then, since the nineteenth
century, in a sociological, psychological, medical, and psychiatric
knowledge: it is as if even the word of the law could no longer be
authorised, in our society, except by a discourse of truth. Of the three
great systems of exclusion which forge discourse — the forbidden speech,
the division of madness and the will to truth. I have spoken of the
third at greatest length. The fact is that it is towards this third
system that the other two have been drifting constantly for centuries.
The third system increasingly attempts to assimilate the others, both in
order to modify them and to provide them with a foundation. The first
two are constantly becoming more fragile and more uncertain, to the
extent that they are now invaded by the will to truth, which for its
part constantly grows stronger, deeper, and more implacable. And yet we
speak of the will to truth no doubt least of all. It is as if, for us,
the will to truth and its vicissitudes were masked by truth itself in
its necessary unfolding. The reason is perhaps this: although since the
Greeks ‘true’ discourse is no longer the discourse that answers to the
demands of desire, or the discourse which exercises power, what is at
stake in the will to truth, in the will to utter this ‘true’ discourse,
if not desire and power? ‘True’ discourse, freed from desire and power
by the necessity of its form, cannot recognise the will to truth which
pervades it;3 and the will to truth, having imposed itself on us for a
very long time, is such that the truth it wants cannot fail to mask it.
Thus all that appears to our eyes is a truth conceived as a richness, a
fecundity, a gentle and insidiously universal force, and in contrast we
are unaware of the will to truth, that prodigious machinery designed to
exclude. All those who, from time to time in our history, have tried to
dodge this will to truth and to put it into question against truth, at
the very point where truth undertakes to justify the prohibition and to
define madness, all of them, from Nietzsche to Artaud and Bataille, must
now serve as the (no doubt lofty) signs for our daily work.
There are, of course, many other procedures for controlling and
delimiting discourse. Those of which I have spoken up to now operate in
a sense from the exterior. They function as systems of exclusion. They
have to do with the part of discourse which puts power and desire at
stake. I believe we can isolate another group: internal procedures,
since discourses themselves exercise their own control; procedures which
function rather as principles of classification, of ordering, of
distribution, as if this time another dimension of discourse had to be
mastered: that of events and chance. In the first place, commentary. I
suppose — but without being very certain — that there is scarcely a
society without its major narratives, which are recounted, repeated, and
varied; formulae, texts, and ritualised sets of discourses which are
recited in welldefined circumstances; things said once and preserved
because it is suspected that behind them there is a secret or a
treasure. In short, we may suspect that there is in all societies, with
great consistency, a kind of gradation among discourses: those which are
said in the ordinary course of days and exchanges, and which vanish as
soon as they have been pronounced; and those which give rise to a
certain number of new speech-acts which take them up, transform them or
speak of them, in short, those discourses which, over and above their
formulation, are said indefinitely, remain said, and are to be said
again. We know them in our own cultural system: they are religious or
juridical texts, but also those texts (curious ones, when we consider
their status) which are called ‘literary1; and to a certain extent,
scientific texts. This differentiation is certainly neither stable, nor
constant, nor absolute. There is not, on the one side, the category of
fundamental or creative discourses, given for all time, and on the
other, the mass of discourses which repeat, gloss, and comment. Plenty
of major texts become blurred and disappear, and sometimes commentaries
move into the primary position. But though its points of application may
change, the function remains; and the principle of a differentiation is
continuously put back in play. The radical effacement of this gradation
can only ever be play, utopia, or anguish. The Borges-style play of a
commentary which is nothing but the solemn and expected reappearance
word for word of the text that is commented on; or the play of a
criticism that would speak forever of a work which does not exist. The
lyrical dream of a discourse which is reborn absolutely new and innocent
at every point, and which reappears constantly in all freshness, derived
from things, feelings or thoughts. The anguish of that patient of
Janet’s for whom the least utterance was gospel truth, concealing
inexhaustible treasures of meaning and worthy to be repeated,
re-commenced, and commented on indefinitely: ‘When I think,’ he would
say when reading or listening, ‘when I think of this sentence which like
the others will go off into eternity, and which I have perhaps not yet
fully understood .‘4 But who can fail to see that this would be to annul
one of the terms of the relation each time, and not to do away with the
relation itself? It is a relation which is constantly changing with
time; which takes multiple and divergent forms in a given epoch. The
juridical exegesis is very different from the religious commentary (and
this has been the case for a very long time). One and the same literary
work can give rise simultaneously to very distinct types of discourse:
the ‘Odyssey’ as a primary text is repeated, in the same period, in the
translation by Berard, and in the endless ‘explications de texte’, and
in Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. For the moment I want to do no more than indicate
that, in what is broadly called commentary, the hierarchy between
primary and secondary text plays two roles which are in solidarity with
each other. On the one hand it allows the (endless) construction of new
discourses: the dominance of the primary text, its permanence, its
status as a discourse which can always be re-actualised, the multiple or
hidden meaning with which it is credited, the essential reticence and
richness which is attributed to it, all this is the basis for an open
possibility of speaking. But on the other hand the commentary’s only
role, whatever the techniques used, is to say at last what was silently
articulated ‘beyond’, in the text. By a paradox which it always
displaces but never escapes, the commentary must say for the first time
what had, nonetheless, already been said, and must tirelessly repeat
what had, however, never been said. The infinite rippling of
commentaries is worked from the inside by the dream of a repetition in
disguise at its horizon there is perhaps nothing but what was at its
point of departure — mere recitation. Commentary exorcises the chance
element of discourse by giving it its due; it allows us to say something
other than the text itself, but on condition that it is this text itself
which is said, and in a sense completed. The open multiplicity, the
element of chance, are transferred, by the principle of commentary, from
what might risk being said, on to the number, the form, the mask, and
the circumstances of the repetition. The new thing here lies not in what
is said but in the event of its return. I believe there exists another
principle of rarefaction of a discourse, complementary to the first, to
a certain extent: the author. Not, of course, in the sense of the
speaking individual who pronounced or wrote a text, but in the sense of
a principle of grouping of discourses, conceived as the unity and origin
of their meanings, as the focus of their coherence. This principle is
not everywhere at work, nor in a constant manner: there exist all around
us plenty of discourses which circulate without deriving their meaning
or their efficacity from an author to whom they could be attributed:
everyday remarks, which are effaced immediately; decrees or contracts
which require signatories but no author; technical instructions which
are transmitted anonymously But in the domains where it is the rule to
attribute things to an author — literature, philosophy, science — it is
quite evident that this attribution does not always play the same role.
In the order of scientific discourse, it was indispensable, during the
Middle Ages, that a text should be attributed to an author, since this
was an index of truthfulness. A proposition was considered as drawing
even its scientific value from its author. Since the seventeenth
century, this function has steadily been eroded in scientific discourse:
it now functions only to give a name to a theorem, an effect, an
example, a syndrome. On the other hand, in the order of literary
discourse, starting from the same epoch, the function of the author has
steadily grown stronger: all those tales, poems, dramas or comedies
which were allowed to circulate in the Middle Ages in at least a
relative anonymity are now asked (and obliged to say) where they come
from, who wrote them. The author is asked to account for the unity of
the texts which are placed under his name. He is asked to reveal or at
least carry authentification of the hidden meaning which traverses them.
He is asked to connect them to his lived experiences, to the real
history which saw their birth. The author is what gives the disturbing
language of fiction its unities, its nodes of coherence, its insertion
in the real. I know that I will be told: ‘But you are speaking there of
the author as he is reinvented after the event by criticism, after he is
dead and there is nothing left except for a tangled mass of scribblings;
in those circumstances a little order surely has to be introduced into
all that, by imagining a project, a coherence, a thematic structure that
is demanded of the consciousness or the life of an author who is indeed
perhaps a trifle fictitious. But that does not mean he did not exist,
this real author, who bursts into the midst of all these worn-out words,
bringing to them his genius or his disorder.’ It would of course, be
absurd to deny the existence of the individual who writes and invents.
But I believe that — at least since a certain epoch — the individual who
sets out to write a text on the horizon of which a possible oeuvre is
prowling, takes upon himself the function of the author: what he writes
and what he does not write, what he sketches out, even by way of
provisional drafts, as an outline of the oeuvre, and what he lets fall
by way of commonplace remarks — this whole play of differences is
prescribed by the author-function, as he receives it from his epoch, or
as he modifies it in his turn. He may well overturn the traditional
image of the author; nevertheless, it is from some new author-position
that he will cut out, from everything he could say and from all that he
does say every day at any moment, the still trembling outline of his
oeuvre. The commentary-principle limits the chance-element in discourse
by the play of an identity which would take the form of repetition and
sameness. The author-principle limits this same element of chance by the
play of an identity which has the form of individuality and the self. We
must also recognise another principle of limitation in what is called,
not sciences but ‘disciplines’: a principle which is itself relative and
mobile; which permits construction, but within narrow confines. The
organisation of disciplines is just as much opposed to the principle of
commentary as to that of the author. It is opposed to the principle of
the author because a discipline is defined by a domain of objects, a set
of methods, a corpus of propositions considered to be true, a play of
rules and definitions, of techniques and instruments: all this
constitutes a sort of anonymous system at the disposal of anyone who
wants to or is able to use it, without their meaning or validity being
linked to the one who happened to be their inventor. But the principle
of a discipline is also opposed to that of commentary: in a discipline,
unlike a commentary, what is supposed at the outset is not a meaning
which has to be rediscovered, nor an identity which has to be repeated,
but the requisites for the construction of new statements. For there to
be a discipline, there must be the possibility of formulating new
propositions, ad infinitum. But there is more; there is more, no doubt,
in order for there to be less: a discipline is not the sum of all that
can be truthfully said about something; it is not even the set of all
that can be accepted about the same data in virtue of some principle of
coherence or systematicity. Medicine is not constituted by the total of
what can be truthfully said about illness; botany cannot be defined by
the sum of all the truths concerning plants. There are two reasons for
this: first of all, botany and medicine are made up of errors as well as
truths, like any other discipline — errors which are not residues or
foreign bodies but which have positive functions, a historical
efficacity, and a role that is often indissociable from that of the
truths. And besides, for a proposition to belong to botany or pathology,
it has to fulfil certain conditions, in a sense stricter and more
complex than pure and simple truth: but in any case, other conditions.
It must address itself to a determinate plane of objects: from the end
of the seventeenth century, for example, for a proposition to be
‘botanical’ it had to deal with the visible structure of the plant, the
system of its close and distant resemblances or the mechanism of its
fluids; it could no longer retain its symbolic value, as was the case in
the sixteenth century, nor the set of virtues and properties which were
accorded to it in antiquity. But without belonging to a discipline, a
proposition must use conceptual or technical instruments of a
well-defined type; from the nineteenth century, a proposition was no
longer medical — it fell ‘outside medicine’ and acquired the status of
an individual phantasm or popular imagery — if it used notions that were
at the same time metaphorical, qualitative, and substantial (like those
of engorgement, of overheated liquids or of dried-out solids). In
contrast it could and had to make use of notions that were equally
metaphorical but based on another model, a functional and physiological
one (that of the irritation, inflammation, or degeneration of the
tissues). Still further: in order to be part of a discipline, a
proposition has to be able to be inscribed on a certain type of
theoretical horizon: suffice it to recall that the search for the
primitive language, which was a perfectly acceptable theme up to the
eighteenth century, was sufficient, in the second half of the nineteenth
century, to make any discourse fall into — I hesitate to say error —
chimera and reverie, into pure and simple linguistic monstrosity. Within
its own limits, each discipline recognises true and false propositions;
but it pushes back a whole teratology of knowledge beyond its margins.
The exterior of a science is both more and less populated than is often
believed: there is of course immediate experience, the imaginary themes
which endlessly carry and renew immemorial beliefs; but perhaps there
are no errors in the strict sense, for error can only arise and be
decided inside a definite practice; on the other hand, there are
monsters on the prowl whose form changes with the history of knowledge.
In short, a proposition must fulfil complex and heavy requirements to be
able to belong to the grouping of a discipline; before it can be called
true or false, it must be ‘in the true’, as Canguilhem would say. People
have often wondered how the botanists or biologists of the nineteenth
century managed not to see that what Mendel was saying was true. But it
was because Mendel was speaking of objects, applying methods, and
placing himself on a theoretical horizon which were alien to the biology
of his time. Naudin, before him, had of course posited the thesis that
hereditary traits are discrete; yet, no matter how new or strange this
principle was, it was able to fit into the discourse of biology, at
least as an enigma. What Mendel did was to constitute the hereditary
trait as an absolutely new biological object, thanks to a kind of
filtering which had never been used before: he detached the trait from
the species, and from the sex which transmits it; the field in which he
observed it being the infinitely open series of the generations, where
it appears and disappears according to statistical regularities. This
was a new object which called for new conceptual instruments and new
theoretical foundations. Mendel spoke the truth, but he was not ‘within
the true’ of the biological discourse of his time: it was not according
to such rules that biological objects and concepts were formed. It
needed a complete change of scale, the deployment of a whole new range
of objects in biology for Mendel to enter into the true and for his
propositions to appear (in large measure) correct. Mendel was a true
monster, which meant that science could not speak of him; whereas about
thirty years earlier, at the height of the nineteenth century, Scheiden,
for example, who denied plant sexuality, but in accordance with the
rules of biological discourse, was merely formulating a disciplined
error. It is always possible that one might speak the truth in the space
of a wild exteriority, but one is ‘in the true’ only by obeying the
rules of a discursive ‘policing’ which one has to reactivate in each of
one’s discourses. The discipline is a principle of control over the
production of discourse. The discipline fixes limits for discourse by
the action of an identity which takes the form of a permanent
re-actuation of the rules. We are accustomed to see in an author’s
fecundity, in the multiplicity of the commentaries, and in the
development of a discipline so many infinite resources for the creation
of discourses. Perhaps so, but they are nonetheless principles of
constraint; it is very likely impossible to account for their positive
and multiplicatory role if we do not take into consideration their
restrictive and constraining function.
There is, I believe, a third group of procedures which permit the
control of discourses. This time it is not a matter of mastering their
powers or averting the unpredictability of their appearance, but of
determining the condition of their application, of imposing a certain
number of rules on the individuals who hold them, and thus of not
permitting everyone to have access to them. There is a rarefaction, this
time, of the speaking subjects; none shall enter the order of discourse
if he does not satisfy certain requirements or if he is not, from the
outset, qualified to do so. To be more precise: not all the regions of
discourse are equally open and penetrable; some of them are largely
forbidden (they are differentiated and differentiating), while others
seem to be almost open to all winds and put at the disposal of every
speaking subject, without prior restrictions. In this regard I should
like to recount an anecdote which is so beautiful that one trembles at
the thought that it might be true. It gathers into a single figure all
the constraints of discourse: those which limit its powers, those which
master its aleatory appearances, those which carry out the selection
among speaking subjects. At the beginning of the seventeenth century,
the Shogun heard tell that the Europeans’ superiority in matters of
navigation, commerce, politics, and military skill was due to their
knowledge of mathematics. He desired to get hold of so precious a
knowledge. As he had been told of an English sailor who possessed the
secret of these miraculous discourses, he summoned him to his palace and
kept him there. Alone with him, he took lessons. He learned mathematics.
He retained power, and lived to a great old age. It was not until the
nineteenth century that there were Japanese mathematicians. But the
anecdote does not stop there: it has its European side too. The story
has it that this English sailor, Will Adams, was an autodidact, a
carpenter who had learnt geometry in the course of working in a
shipyard. Should we see this story as the expression of one of the great
myths of European culture? The universal communication of knowledge and
the infinite free exchange of discourses in Europe, against the
monopolised and secret knowledge of Oriental tyranny? This idea, of
course, does not stand up to examination. Exchange and communication are
positive figures working inside complex systems of restriction, and
probably would not be able to function independently of them. The most
superficial and visible of these systems of restriction is constituted
by what can be gathered under the name of ritual. Ritual defines the
qualification which must be possessed by individuals who speak (and who
must occupy such-and-such a position and formulate suchand-such a type
of statement, in the play of a dialogue, of interrogation or
recitation); it defines the gestures, behaviour, circumstances, and the
whole set of signs which must accompany discourse; finally, it fixes the
supposed or imposed efficacity of the words, their effect on those to
whom they are addressed, and the limits of their constraining value.
Religious, judicial, therapeutic , and in large measure also political
discourses can scarcely be dissociated from this deployment of a ritual
which determines both the particular properties and the stipulated roles
of the speaking subjects. A somewhat different way of functioning is
that of the ‘societies of discourse’, which function to preserve or
produce discourses, but in order to make them circulate in a closed
space, distributing them only according to strict rules, and without the
holders being dispossessed by this distribution. An archaic model for
this is provided by the groups of rhapsodists who possessed the
knowledge of the poems to be recited or potentially to be varied and
transformed. But though the object of this knowledge was after all a
ritual recitation, the knowledge was protected, defended and preserved
within a definite group by the often very complex exercises of memory
which it implied. To pass an apprenticeship in it allowed one to enter
both a group and a secret which the act of recitation showed but did not
divulge; the roles of speaker and listener were not interchangeable.
There are hardly any such ‘societies of discourse’ now, with their
ambiguous play of the secret and its divulgation. But this should not
deceive us: even in the order of ‘true’ discourse, even in the order of
discourse that is published and free from all ritual, there are still
forms of appropriation of secrets, and non-interchangeable roles. It may
well be that the act of writing as it is institutionalised today, in the
book, the publishingsystem and the person of the writer, takes place in
a ‘society of discourse’, which though diffuse is certainly
constraining. The difference between the writer and any other speaking
or writing subject (a difference constantly stressed by the writer
himself), the intransitive nature (according to him) of his discourse,
the fundamental singularity which he has been ascribing for so long to
‘writing’, the dissymmetry that is asserted between ‘creation’ and any
use of the linguistic system — all this shows the existence of a certain
‘society of discourse’, and tends moreover to bring back its play of
practices. But there are many others still, functioning according to
entirely different schemas of exclusivity and disclosure: e.g.,
technical or scientific secrets, or the forms of diffusion and
circulation of medical discourse, or those who have appropriated the
discourse of politics or economics. At first glance, the ‘doctrines’
(religious, political, philosophical) seem to constitute the reverse of
a ‘society of discourse’, in which the number of speaking individuals
tended to be limited even if it was not fixed; between those
individuals, the discourse could circulate and be transmitted. Doctrine,
on the contrary, tends to be diffused, and it is by the holding in
common of one and the same discursive ensemble that individuals (as many
as one cares to imagine) define their reciprocal allegiance. In
appearance, the only prerequisite is the recognition of the same truths
and the acceptance of a certain rule of (more or less flexible)
conformity with the validated discourses. If doctrines were nothing more
than this, they would not be so very different from scientific
disciplines, and the discursive control would apply only to the form or
the content of the statement, not to the speaking subject. But doctrinal
allegiance puts in question both the statement and the speaking subject,
the one by the other. It puts the speaking subject in question through
and on the basis of the statement, as is proved by the procedures of
exclusion and the mechanisms of rejection which come into action when a
speaking subject has formulated one or several unassimilable statements;
heresy and orthodoxy do not derive from a fanatical exaggeration of the
doctrinal mechanisms, but rather belong fundamentally to them. And
conversely the doctrine puts the statements in question on the basis of
the speaking subjects, to the extent that the doctrine always stands as
the sign, manifestation and instrument of a prior adherence to a class,
a social status, a race, a nationality, an interest, a revolt, a
resistance or an acceptance. Doctrine binds individuals to certain types
of enunciation and consequently forbids them all others; but it uses, in
return, certain types of enunciation to bind individuals amongst
themselves, and to differentiate them by that very fact from all others.
Doctrine brings about a double subjection: of the speaking subjects to
discourses, and of discourses to the (at least virtual) group of
speaking individuals. On a much broader scale, we are obliged to
recognise large cleavages in what might be called the social
appropriation of discourses. Although education may well be, by right,
the instrument thanks to which any individual in a society like ours can
have access to any kind of discourse whatever, this does not prevent it
from following, as is well known, in its distribution, in what it allows
and what it prevents, the lines marked out by social distances,
oppositions and struggles. Any system of education is a political way of
maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourses, along with the
knowledges and powers which they carry. I am well aware that it is very
abstract to separate speechrituals, societies of discourse, doctrinal
groups and social appropriations, as I have just done. Most of the time,
they are linked to each other and constitute kinds of great edifices
which ensure the distribution of speaking subjects into the different
types of discourse and the appropriation of discourses to certain
categories of subject. Let us say, in a word, that those are the major
procedures of subjection used by discourse. What, after all, is an
education system, other than a ritualisation of speech, a qualification
and a fixing of the roles for speaking subjects, the constitution of a
doctrinal group, however diffuse, a distribution and an appropriation of
discourse with its powers and knowledges? What is ‘ecriture’ (the
writing of the ‘writers’) other than a similar system of subjection,
which perhaps takes slightly different forms, but forms whose main
rhythms are analogous? Does not the judicial system, does not the
institutional system of medicine likewise constitute, in some of their
aspects at least, similar systems of subjection of and by discourse?
I wonder whether a certain number of themes in philosophy have not come
to correspond to these activities of limitation and exclusion , and
perhaps also to reinforce them. They correspond to them first of all by
proposing an ideal truth as the law of discourse and an immanent
rationality as the principle of their unfolding, and they re-introduce
an ethic of knowledge, which promises to give the truth only to the
desire for truth itself and only to the power of thinking it. Then they
reinforce the limitations and exclusions by a denial of the specific
reality of discourse in general. Ever since the sophists’ tricks and
influence were excluded and since their paradoxes have been more or less
safely muzzled, it seems that Western thought has taken care to ensure
that discourse should occupy the smallest possible space between thought
and speech. Western thought seems to have made sure that the act of
discoursing should appear to be no more than a certain bridging (apport)
between thinking and speaking — a thought dressed in its signs and made
visible by means of words, or conversely the very structures of language
put into action and producing a meaning-effect. This very ancient
elision of the reality of discourse in philosophical thought has taken
many forms in the course of history. We have seen it again quite
recently in the guise of several familiar themes. Perhaps the idea of
the founding subject is a way of eliding the reality of discourse. The
founding subject, indeed, is given the task of directly animating the
empty forms of language with his aims; it is he who in moving through
the density and inertia of empty things grasps by intuition the meaning
lying deposited within them; it is likewise the founding subject who
founds horizons of meaning beyond time which history will henceforth
only have to elucidate and where propositions, sciences and deductive
ensembles will find their ultimate grounding. In his relation to
meaning, the founding subject has at his disposal signs, marks, traces,
letters. But he does not need to pass via the singular instance of
discourse in order to manifest them. The opposing theme, that of
originating experience, plays an analogous role. It supposes that at the
very basis of experience, even before it could be grasped in the form of
a cogito, there were prior significations — in a sense, already said —
wandering around in the world, arranging it all around us and opening it
up from the outset to a sort of primitive recognition. Thus a primordial
complicity with the world is supposed to be the foundation of our
possibility of speaking of it, in it, of indicating it and naming it, of
judging it and ultimately of knowing it in the form of truth. If there
is discourse, then, what can it legitimately be other than a discreet
reading? Things are already murmuring meanings which our language has
only to pick up; and this language, right from its most rudimentary
project, was already speaking to us of a being of which it is like the
skeleton. The idea of universal mediation is yet another way, I believe,
of eliding the reality of discourse, and despite appearances to the
contrary. For it would seem at first glance that by rediscovering
everywhere the movement of a logos which elevates particularities to the
status of concepts and allows immediate consciousness to unfurl in the
end the whole rationality of the world, one puts discourse itself at the
centre of one’s speculation. But this logos, in fact, is only a
discourse that has already been held, or rather it is things themselves,
and events, which imperceptibly turn themselves into discourse as they
unfold the secret of their own essence. Thus discourse is little more
than the gleaming of a truth in the process of being born to its own
gaze; and when everything finally can take the form of discourse, when
everything can be said and when discourse can be spoken about
everything, it is because all things, having manifested and exchanged
their meaning, can go back into the silent interiority of their
consciousness of self. Thus in a philosophy of the founding subject, in
a philosophy of originary experience, and in a philosophy of universal
mediation alike, discourse is no more than a play, of writing in the
first case, of reading in the second, and of exchange in the third, and
this exchange, this reading, this writing never put anything at stake
except signs. In this way, discourse is annulled in its reality and put
at the disposal of the signifier. What civilisation has ever appeared to
be more respectful of discourse than ours? Where has it ever been more
honoured, or better honoured? Where has it ever been, seemingly, more
radically liberated from its constraints, and universalised? Yet it
seems to me that beneath this apparent veneration of discourse, under
this apparent logophilia, a certain fear is hidden. It is just as if
prohibitions, barriers, thresholds and limits had been set up in order
to master, at least partly, the great proliferation of discourse, in
order to remove from its richness the most dangerous part, and in order
to organise its disorder according to figures which dodge what is most
uncontrollable about it. It is as if we had tried to efface all trace of
its irruption into the activity of thought and language. No doubt there
is in our society, and, I imagine, in all others, but following a
different outline and different rhythms, a profound logophobia, a sort
of mute terror against these events, against this mass of things said,
against the surging-up of all these statements, against all that could
be violent, discontinuous, pugnacious, disorderly as well, and perilous
about them — against this great incessant and disordered buzzing of
discourse. And if we want to — I would not say, efface this fear, but —
analyse it in its conditions, its action and its effects, we must, I
believe, resolve to take three decisions which our thinking today tends
to resist and which correspond to the three groups of functions which I
have just mentioned: we must call into question our will to truth,
restore to discourse its character as an event, and finally throw off
the sovereignty of the signifier.
These are the tasks, or rather some of the themes, which govern the work
I should like to do here in the coming years. We can see at once certain
methodological requirements which they imply. First of all, a principle
of reversal: where tradition sees the source of discourses, the
principle of their swarming abundance and of their continuity, in those
figures which seem to play a positive role, e.g. , those of the author,
the discipline, the will to truth, we must rather recognise the negative
action of a cutting-up and a rarefaction of discourse. But once we have
noticed these principles of rarefaction, once we have ceased to consider
them as a fundamental and creative instance, what do we discover
underneath them? Must we admit the virtual plenitude of a world of
uninterrupted discourses? This is where we have to bring other
methodological principles into play. A principle of discontinuity, then:
the fact that there are systems of rarefaction does not mean that
beneath them or beyond them there reigns a vast unlimited discourse,
continuous and silent, which is quelled and repressed by them, and which
we have the task of raising up by restoring the power of speech to it.
We must not imagine that there is a great unsaid or a great unthought
which runs throughout the world and intertwines with all its forms and
all its events, and which we would have to articulate or to think at
last. Discourses must be treated as discontinuous practices, which cross
each other, are sometimes juxtaposed with one another, but can just as
well exclude or be unaware of each other. A principle of specificity: we
must not resolve discourse into a play of pre-existing significations;
we must not imagine that the world turns towards us a legible face which
we would have only to decipher; the world is not the accomplice of our
knowledge; there is no prediscursive providence which disposes the world
in our favour. We must conceive discourse as a violence which we do to
things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them; and it is
in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of
their regularity. The fourth rule is that of exteriority: we must not go
from discourse towards its interior, hidden nucleus, towards the heart
of a thought or a signification supposed to be manifested in it; but, on
the basis of discourse itself, its appearance and its regularity, go
towards its external conditions of possibility, towards what gives rise
to the aleatory series of these events, and fixes its limits. Four
notions, then, must serve as the regulating principle of the analysis:
the event, the series, the regularity, the condition of possibility.
Term for term we find the notion of event opposed to that of creation,
series opposed to unity, regularity opposed to originality, and
condition of possibility opposed to signification. These other four
notions (signification, originality, unity, creation) have in a general
way dominated the traditional history of ideas, where by common
agreement one sought the point of creation, the unity of a work, an
epoch or a theme, the mark of individual originality, and the infinite
treasure of buried significations. I will add only two remarks. One
concerns history. It is often entered to the credit of contemporary
history that it removed the privileges once accorded to the singular
event and revealed the structures of longer duration. That is so.
However, I am not sure that the work of these historians was exactly
done in this direction. Or rather I do not think there is an inverse
ratio between noticing the event and analysing the long durations. On
the contrary, it seems to be by pushing to its extreme the fine grain of
the event, by stretching the resolution-power of historical analysis as
far as official price-lists (les mercuriales), title deeds, parish
registers, harbour archives examined year by year and week by week, that
these historians saw — beyond the battles, decrees, dynasties or
assemblies — the outline of massive phenomena with a range of a hundred
or many hundreds of years. History as practised today does not turn away
from events; on the contrary, it is constantly enlarging their field,
discovering new layers of them, shallower or deeper. It is constantly
isolating new sets of them, in which they are sometimes numerous, dense
and interchangeable, sometimes rare and decisive: from the almost daily
variations in price to inflations over a hundred years. But the
important thing is that history does not consider an event without
defining the series of which it is part, without specifying the mode of
analysis from which that series derives, without seeking to find out the
regularity of phenomena and the limits of probability of their
emergence, without inquiring into the variations, bends and angles of
the graph, without wanting to determine the conditions on which they
depend. Of course, history has for a long time no longer sought to
understand events by the action of causes and effects in the formless
unity of a great becoming, vaguely homogeneous or ruthlessly
hierarchised; but this change was not made in order to rediscover prior
structures, alien and hostile to the event. It was made in order to
establish diverse series, intertwined and often divergent but not
autonomous, which enable us to circumscribe the ‘place’ of the event,
the margins of its chance variability, and the conditions of its
appearance. The fundamental notions which we now require are no longer
those of consciousness and continuity (with their correlative problems
of freedom and causality), nor any longer those of sign and structure.
They are those of the event and the series, along with the play of the
notions which are linked to them: regularity, dimension of chance
(alea), discontinuity, dependence, transformation; it is by means of a
set of notions like this that my projected analysis of discourses is
articulated, not on the traditional thematics which the philosophers of
yesterday still take for ‘living’ history, but on the effective work of
historians. Yet it is also in this regard that this analysis poses
philosophical, or theoretical, problems, and very likely formidable
ones. If discourses must be treated first of all as sets of discursive
events, what status must be given to that notion of event which was so
rarely taken into consideration by philosophers? Naturally the event is
neither substance nor accident, neither quality nor process; the event
is not of the order of bodies. And yet it is not something immaterial
either; it is always at the level of materiality that it takes effect,
that it is effect; it has its locus and it consists in the relation, the
coexistence, the dispersion, the overlapping, the accumulation, and the
selection of material elements. It is not the act or the property of a
body; it is produced as an effect of, and within, a dispersion of
matter. Let us say that the philosophy of the event should move in the
at first sight paradoxical direction of a materialism of the
incorporeal. Furthermore, if discursive events must be treated along the
lines of homogeneous series which, however, are discontinuous in
relation to each other, what status must be given to this discontinuity?
It is of course not a matter of the succession of instants in time, nor
of the plurality of different thinking subjects. It is a question of
caesurae which break up the instant and disperse the subject into a
plurality of possible positions and functions. This kind of
discontinuity strikes and invalidates the smallest units that were
traditionally recognised and which are the hardest to contest: the
instant and the subject. Beneath them, and independently of them, we
must conceive relations between these discontinuous series which are not
of the order of succession (or simultaneity) within one (or several)
consciousnesses; we must elaborate — outside of the philosophies of the
subject and of time — a theory of discontinuous systematicities.
Finally, though it is true that these discontinuous discursive series
each have, within certain limits, their regularity, it is undoubtedly no
longer possible to establish links of mechanical causality or of ideal
necessity between the elements which constitute them. We must accept the
introduction of the alea as a category in the production of events.
There once more we feel the absence of a theory enabling us to think the
relations between chance and thought. The result is that the narrow gap
which is to be set to work in the history of ideas, and which consists
of dealing not with the representations which might be behind discourse,
but with discourses as regular and distinct series of events — this
narrow gap looks, I’m afraid, like a small (and perhaps odious) piece of
machinery which would enable us to introduce chance, the discontinuous,
and materiality at the very roots of thought. This is a triple peril
which a certain form of history tries to exorcise by narrating the
continuous unravelling of an ideal necessity. They are three notions
that should allow us to connect the history of systems of thought to the
practice of historians. And they are three directions which the work of
theoretical elaboration will have to follow.
The analyses which I propose to make, following these principles and
making this horizon my line of reference, will fall into two sets. On
the one hand the ‘critical’ section, which will put into practice the
principle of reversal: trying to grasp the forms of exclusion, of
limitation, of appropriation of which I was speaking just now; showing
how they are formed, in response to what needs, how they have been
modified and displaced, what constraint they have effectively exerted,
to what extent they have been evaded. On the other hand there is the
‘genealogical’ set, which puts the other three principles to work: how
did series of discourses come to be formed, across the grain of, in
spite of, or with the aid of these systems of constraints; what was the
specific norm of each one, and what were their conditions of appearance,
growth, variation. First, the critical set. A first group of analyses
might deal with what I have designated as functions of exclusion. I
formerly studied one of them, in respect of one determinate period: the
divide between madness and reason in the classical epoch. Later, I might
try to analyse a system of prohibition of language, the one concerning
sexuality from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The aim would be
to see not how this interdiction has been progressively and fortunately
effaced, but how it has been displaced and re-articulated from a
practice of confession in which the forbidden behaviour was named,
classified, hierarchised in the most explicit way, up to the appearance,
at first very timid and belated, of sexual thematics in
nineteenth-century medicine and psychiatry; of course these are still
only somewhat symbolic orientation-points, but one could already wager
that the rhythms are not the ones we think, and the prohibitions have
not always occupied the place that we imagine. In the immediate future,
I should like to apply myself to the third system of exclusion; this I
envisage in two ways. On the one hand, I want to try to discover how
this choice of truth, inside which we are caught but which we
ceaselessly renew, was made — but also how it was repeated, renewed, and
displaced. I will consider first the epoch of the Sophists at its
beginning, with Socrates, or at least with Platonic philosophy, to see
how efficacious discourse, ritual discourse, discourse loaded with
powers and perils, gradually came to conform to a division between true
and false discourse. Then I will consider the turn of the sixteenth
century, at the time when there appears, especially in England, a
science of the gaze, of observation, of the established fact, a certain
natural philosophy, no doubt inseparable from the setting-up of new
political structures, and, inseparable, too, from religious ideology;
this was without a doubt a new form of the will to know. Finally, the
third orientation-point will be the beginning of the nineteenth century,
with its great acts that founded modern science, the formation of an
industrial society and the positivist ideology which accompanied it.
These will be my three cross-sections in the morphology of our will to
know, three stages of our philistinism. I would also like to take up the
same question again, but from a quite different angle: to measure the
effect of a discourse with scientific claims — a medical, psychiatric,
and also sociological discourse — on that set of practices and
prescriptive discourses constituted by the penal system. The starting
point and basic material for this analysis will be the study of
psychiatric expertise and its role in penal practices. Still looking at
it from this critical perspective, but at another level, the procedures
of limitation of discourses should be analysed. I indicated several of
these just now: the principle of the author, of commentary, of the
discipline. A certain number of studies can be envisaged from this
perspective. I am thinking, for example, of an analysis of the history
of medicine from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The objective
would be not so much to pinpoint the discoveries made or the concepts
put to work, but to grasp how, in the construction of medical discourse,
and also in the whole institution that supports, transmits and
reinforces it, the principle of the author, of the commentary, and of
the discipline were used. The analysis would seek to find out how the
principle of the great author operated: Hippocrates and Galen, of
course, but also Paracelsus, Sydenham, or Boerhaave. It would seek to
find out how the practice of the aphorism and the commentary were
carried on, even late into the nineteenth century, and how they
gradually gave place to the practice of the case, of the collection of
cases, of the clinical apprenticeship using a concrete case. It would
seek to discover, finally, according to what model medicine tried to
constitute itself as a discipline, leaning at first on natural history,
then on anatomy and biology. One could also consider the way in which
literary criticism and literary history in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries constituted the person of the author and the figure of the
oeuvre, using, modifying, and displacing the procedures of religious
exegesis, biblical criticism, hagiography, historical or legendary
‘lives’, autobiography, and memoirs. One day we will also have to study
the role played by Freud in psychoanalytic knowledge, which is surely
very different from that of Newton in physics (and of all founders of
disciplines), and also very different from the role that can be played
by an author in the field of philosophical discourse (even if, like
Kant, he is at the origin of a different way of philosophising). So
there are some projects for the critical side of the task, for the
analysis of the instances of discursive control. As for the genealogical
aspect, it will concern the effective formation of discourse either
within the limits of this control, or outside them, or more often on
both sides of the boundary at once. The critical task will be to analyse
the processes of rarefaction, but also of regrouping and unification of
discourses; genealogy will study their formation, at once dispersed,
discontinuous, and regular. In truth these two tasks are never
completely separable: there are not, on one side, the forms of
rejection, exclusion, regrouping and attribution, and then on the other
side, at a deeper level, the spontaneous surging-up of discourses which,
immediately before or after their manifestation, are submitted to
selection and control. The regular formation of discourse can
incorporate the procedures of control, in certain conditions and to a
certain extent (that is what happens, for instance, when a discipline
takes on the form and status of a scientific discourse); and conversely
the figures of control can take shape within a discursive formation (as
is the case with literary criticism as the discourse that constitutes
the author): so much so that any critical task, putting in question the
instances of control, must at the same time analyse the discursive
regularities through which they are formed; and any genealogical
description must take into account the limits which operate in real
formations. The difference between the critical and the genealogical
enterprise is not so much a difference of object or domain, but of point
of attack, perspective, and delimitation. Earlier on I mentioned one
possible study, that of the taboos which affect the discourse of
sexuality. It would be difficult, and in any case abstract, to carry out
this study without analysing at the same time the sets of discourses —
literary, religious or ethical, biological or medical, juridical too —
where sexuality is discussed, and where it is named, described,
metaphorised, explained, judged. We are very far from having constituted
a unitary and regular discourse of sexuality; perhaps we never will, and
perhaps it is not in this direction that we are going. No matter. The
taboos do not have the same form and do not function in the same way in
literary discourse and in medical discourse, in that of psychiatry or in
that of the direction of conscience. Conversely, these different
discursive regularities do not have the same way of reinforcing,
evading, or displacing the taboos. So the study can be done only
according to pluralities of series in which there are taboos at work
which are at least partly different in each. One could also consider the
series of discourses which in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries
dealt with wealth and poverty, money, production, commerce. We are
dealing there with sets of very heterogeneous statements, formulated by
the rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, protestants and
catholics, officers of the king, traders or moralists. Each one has its
own form of regularity, likewise its own systems of constraint. None of
them exactly prefigures that other form of discursive regularity which
will later take on the air of a discipline and which will be called ‘the
analysis of wealth’, then ‘political economy’. Yet it is on the basis of
this series that a new regularity was formed, taking up or excluding,
justifying or brushing aside this one or that one of their utterances.
We can also conceive of a study which would deal with the discourses
concerning heredity, such as we can find them, up to the beginning of
the twentieth century, scattered and dispersed through various
disciplines, observations, techniques and formulae. The task would then
be to show by what play of articulation these series in the end
recomposed themselves, in the epistemologically coherent and
institutionally recognised figure of genetics. This is the work that has
just been done by Francois Jacob with a brilliance and an erudition
which could not be equalled. Thus the critical and the genealogical
descriptions must alternate, and complement each other, each supporting
the other by turns. The critical portion of the analysis applies to the
systems that envelop discourse, and tries to identify and grasp these
principles of sanctioning, exclusion, and scarcity of discourse. Let us
say, playing on words, that it practises a studied casualness. The
genealogical portion, on the other hand, applies to the series where
discourse is effectively formed: it tries to grasp it in its power of
affirmation, by which I mean not so much a power which would be opposed
to that of denying, but rather the power to constitute domains of
objects, in respect of which one can affirm or deny true or false
propositions. Let us call these domains of objects positivities, and let
us say, again playing on words, that if the critical style is that of
studious casualness, the genealogical mood will be that of a happy
positivism. In any event, one thing at least has to be emphasised:
discourse analysis understood like this does not reveal the universality
of a meaning, but brings to light the action of imposed scarcity, with a
fundamental power of affirmation. Scarcity and affirmation; ultimately,
scarcity of affirmation, and not the continuous generosity of meaning,
and not the monarchy of the signifier. And now, let those with gaps in
their vocabulary say — if they find the term more convenient than
meaningful — that all this is structuralism.
I know that but for the aid of certain models and supports I would not
have been able to undertake these researches which I have tried to
sketch out for you. I believe I am greatly indebted to Georges Dumezl,
since it was he who urged me to work, at an age when I still thought
that to write was a pleasure. But I also owe a great deal to his work.
May he forgive me if I have stretched the meaning or departed from the
rigour of those texts which are his and which dominate us today. It was
he who taught me to analyse the internal economy of a discourse in a
manner quite different from the methods of traditional exegesis or
linguistic formalism. It was he who taught me to observe the system of
functional correlations between discourses by the play of comparisons
from one to the other. It was he who taught me how to describe the
transformations of a discourse and its relations to institutions. If I
have tried to apply this method to discourses quite different from
legendary or mythical narratives, it was probably because I had in front
of me the works of the historians of science, especially Georges
Canguilhem. It is to him that I owe the insight that the history of
science is not necessarily caught in an alternative: either to chronicle
discoveries or to describe the ideas and opinions that border science on
the side of its indeterminate genesis or on the side of its later
expulsions, but that it was possible and necessary to write the history
of science as a set of theoretical models and conceptual instruments
which is both coherent and transformable. But I consider that my
greatest debt is to Jean Hyppolite. I am well aware that in the eyes of
many his work belongs under the aegis of Hegel, and that our entire
epoch, whether in logic or epistemology, whether in Marx or Nietzsche,
is trying to escape from Hegel: and what I have tried to say just now
about discourse is very unfaithful to the Hegelian logos. But to make a
real escape from Hegel presupposes an exact appreciation of what it
costs to detach ourselves from him. It presupposes a knowledge of how
close Hegel has come to us, perhaps insidiously. It presupposes a
knowledge of what is still Hegelian in that which allows us to think
against Hegel; and an ability to gauge how much our resources against
him are perhaps still a ruse which he is using against us, and at the
end of which he is waiting for us, immobile and elsewhere. If so many of
us are indebted to Jean Hyppolite, it is because he tirelessly explored,
for us and ahead of us, this path by which one gets away from Hegel,
establishes a distance, and by which one ends up being drawn back to
him, but otherwise, and then constrained to leave him once again. First
of all Jean Hyppolite took the trouble to give a presence to the great
and somewhat ghostly shadow of Hegel which had been on the prowl since
the nineteenth century and with which people used to wrestle obscurely.
It was by means of a translation (of the ‘Phenomenology of Mind’) that
he gave Hegel this presence. And the proof that Hegel himself is well
and truly present in this French text is the fact that even Germans have
consulted it so as to understand better what, for a moment at least, was
going on in the German version. Jean Hyppolite sought and followed all
the ways out of this text, as if his concern was: can we still
philosophise where Hegel is no longer possible? Can a philosophy still
exist and yet not be Hegelian? Are the non-Hegelian elements in our
thought also necessarily non-philosophical? And is the
anti-philosophical necessarily non-Hegelian? So that he was not merely
trying to give a meticulous historical description of this presence of
Hegel: he wanted to make it into one of modernity’s schemata of
experience (is it possible to think science, history, politics and
everyday suffering in the Hegelian mode?); and conversely he wanted to
make our modernity the test of Hegelianism and thereby of philosophy.
For him the relation to Hegel was the site of an experiment , a
confrontation from which he was never sure that philosophy would emerge
victorious. He did not use the Hegelian system as a reassuring universe;
he saw in it the extreme risk taken by philosophy. Hence, I believe, the
displacements he carried out, not so much within Hegelian philosophy but
upon it, and upon philosophy as Hegel conceived it. Hence also a whole
inversion of themes. Instead of conceiving philosophy as the totality at
last capable of thinking itself and grasping itself in the movement of
the concept, Jean Hyppolite made it into a task without end set against
an infinite horizon: always up early, his philosophy was never ready to
finish itself. A task without end, and consequently a task forever
re-commenced, given over to the form and the paradox of repetition:
philosophy as the inaccessible thought of the totality was for Jean
Hyppolite the most repeatable thing in the extreme irregularity of
experience; it was what is given and taken away as a question endlessly
taken up again in life, in death, in memory. In this way he transformed
the Hegelian theme of the closure on to the consciousness of self into a
theme of repetitive interrogation. But philosophy, being repetition, was
not ulterior to the concept; it did not have to pursue the edifice of
abstraction, it had always to hold itself back, break with its acquired
generalities and put itself back in contact with nonphilosophy. It had
to approach most closely not the thing that completes it but the thing
that precedes it, that is not yet awakened to its disquiet. It had to
take up the singularity of history, the regional rationalities of
science, the depth of memory within consciousness — not in order to
reduce them but in order to think them. Thus there appears the theme of
a philosophy that is present, disquieted, mobile all along its line of
contact with non-philosophy, yet existing only by means of
non-philosophy and revealing the meaning it has for us. If philosophy is
in this repeated contact with non-philosophy, what is the beginning of
philosophy? Is philosophy already there, secretly present in what is not
itself, starting to formulate itself half-aloud in the murmur of things?
But then perhaps philosophical discourse no longer has a raison d’etre;
or must it begin from a foundation that is at once arbitrary and
absolute? In this way the Hegelian theme of the movement proper to the
immediate is replaced by that of the foundation of philosophical
discourse and its formal structure. And finally the last displacement
that Jean Hyppolite carried out on Hegelian philosophy: if philosophy
must begin as an absolute discourse, what about history? And what is
this beginning which begins with a single individual, in a society, in a
social class, and in the midst of struggles? These five displacements,
leading to the extreme edge of Hegelian philosophy, and no doubt pushing
it over on to the other side of its own limits, summon up one by one the
great figures of modern philosophy, whom Hyppolite never ceased
confronting with Hegel: Marx with the questions of history, Fichte with
the problem of the absolute beginning of philosophy, Bergson with the
theme of contact with the non-philosophical, Kierkegaard with the
problem of repetition and truth, Husserl with the theme of philosophy as
an infinite task linked to the history of our rationality. And beyond
these philosophical figures we perceive all the domains of knowledge
that Jean Hyppolite invoked around his own questions: psychoanalysis
with the strange logic of desire; mathematics and the formalisation of
discourse; informationtheory and its application in the analysis of
living beings; in short, all those domains about which one can ask the
question of a logic and an existence which never stop tying and untying
their bonds. I believe that Hyppolite’s work, articulated in several
major books, but invested even more in his researches, in his teaching,
in his perpetual attention, in his constant alertness and generosity ,
in his responsibilities which were apparently administrative and
pedagogic but in reality doubly political, came upon and formulated the
most fundamental problems of our epoch. There are many of us who owe him
an infinite debt. It is because I have no doubt borrowed from him the
meaning and possibility of what I am doing, and because he very often
gave me illumination when I was working in the dark, that I wanted to
place my work under his sign, and that I wanted to conclude this
presentation of my plans by evoking him. It is in his direction, towards
this lack — in which I feel both his absence and my own inadequacy —
that my questionings are now converging. Since I owe him so much, I can
well see that in choosing to invite me to teach here, you are in large
part paying homage to him. I am grateful to you, profoundly grateful,
for the honour that you have done me, but I am no less grateful for the
part he plays in this choice. Though I do not feel equal to the task of
succeeding him, I know that, on the other hand, if such a happiness
could have been granted us tonight, he would have encouraged me by his
indulgence. And now I understand better why I found it so difficult to
begin just now. I know now whose voice it was that I would have liked to
precede me, to carry me, to invite me to speak, to lodge itself in my
own discourse. I know what was so terrifying about beginning to speak,
since I was doing so in this place where I once listened to him, and
where he is no longer here to hear me.