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What Is an Oeuvre?

Foucault and Literature

Jacob S. Fisher

Despite the broad influence in the humanities of historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, little has been made of his early and extended interest in literature. Instead, scholarship tends to consider his work more and more exclusively in terms of the theories of power, sexuality, and "genealogy" outlined in texts such as Surveiller et punir and the first volume of Histoire de la sexualit. Similarly, the myriad of recently published and yet-to-be-published texts from his work, his Dits et crits and lectures at the Collge de France, constitute a supplementary Foucault corpus that is little considered in contemporary scholarship--even though this supplementary corpus largely overshadows what might be considered Foucault's "work." 1 At the same time, a link obtains between these two overlooked moments in Foucault's writing. An examination of his interest in literature offers a means to extend his own theorization of the notion of a "work" (and the figure of the author), and thereby a means to establish in Foucault's work a practice that traverses its disparate elements, without reducing them to each other. 2 [End Page 279] My examination of Foucault's own development of the notion of a "work" which presupposes, for him, the notion or "function" of the author--in his well-known "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" 3 --leads me to suggest that his work constitutes a sort of "literary" experiment in the historiographic practice of establishing a relation to the past in writing. That is, rather than attempting to construct a coherent "work" out of Foucault's writing, or dismissing those texts in which he did not quite get right the "power/knowledge" dyad or his conception of the subject, we might consider instead the way in which, even within its own confines (excluding secondary literature), Foucault's work remains heterogeneous with itself; the way in which it offers the figure of a certain author, "Foucault," in relation to his work; and concomitantly, what he calls "l'absence d'oeuvre"--or, as translated by Shoshana Felman, "unaccomplishment at work." 4 This approach to Foucault's work permits a reading that avoids opposing his interest in literature and the often literary lan of his writing to the philosophical orientation of his critical projects (to the question of the concept and practices of madness, the "human" sciences, disciplinarity, sexuality, etc.). It is only from a truncated philosophical perspective that his work can sometimes be seen to search for a "literary" escape from the epistemological questions it raises. In one of the few extended treatments of Foucault's concern for literature, David Carroll adopts precisely this sort of narrow philosophical perspective, and thus relegates the critical potential of Foucault's work to what he calls an "idealized concept of disruptive discourse," and even a "reverence" for such discourse. 5 [End Page 280] In Carroll's reading, Foucault's frequent references to the "being of language" and the links he draws between the manifestation of this "being" and literature become emblematic of a nostalgia for metaphysics. Carroll depicts Foucault in this way by citing a passage from Les mots et les choses in which Foucault discusses the way the wholly representative function of language in the classical age, and its wholly significative function in modernity, cut us off from

the "being of language," or what he also calls "the profound kinship of language with the world." Referring to this passage and to Foucault's claim that only literature now manifests this "being," Carroll writes: Literature may be a "counter discourse" as Foucault argues, and it may even constitute a kind of Nietzschean "counter-memory" . . . ; but counter-discourse and counter-memory function here exactly as memory and discourse have always been supposed to function: to recover what has been forgotten, to restore what has been lost, to perpetuate the presence or being of words and things. (p. 187) According to Carroll, Foucault, through a certain literary "perspective," prescribes to his work a "privileged vantage point": literature offers, Carroll states, "a perspective 'outside' from which reason and . . . various epistemological spaces can be delimited, but which escapes delimitation by anything except itself" (p. 187). Similarly, Carroll continues, even the analytics of power found in Foucault's later work seems to be presented as if it escapes the discursive constraints that it defines. By unveiling the techniques and strategies of power, through the way power is embedded in the very forms of knowledge by which we encounter the world, Foucault (for Carroll) only repeats the constitutive gesture of power: to make discourses manifest according to his own agenda. Ultimately, Foucault's effort to escape the critical force of his own critical discourses, according to Carroll, becomes an "aesthetic solution" to the very philosophical and historical problems he hopes to treat. 6 Taking as a final example Foucault's publication of the memoir of the murderer Pierre Rivire, Carroll points out that Foucault hopes the memoir will stand without interpretation, so that it can manifest on its own the dynamics of power it is caught up in. For Carroll, this attempt at an unmediated relation to Rivire's memoir aestheticizes Foucault's project, because Foucault locates all of the [End Page 281] critical force of his work in the need to appreciate, like a work of art, those discourses which appear to disrupt the dynamics of power to which they are subject. Carroll's criticisms of Foucault reflect fairly typical claims that Foucault does not account for the way in which his own historical and philosophical analyses escape the operations of power that he brings into relief. 7 It is as if Foucault's literary insight into the operations of discourse cannot hope to disclose the dynamics of power embedded there, because in so doing these dynamics are only reproduced. This is precisely the sort of criticism made in Derrida's well-known argument that it is not possible for Foucault to avoid repeating the very exclusion of madness that he attempts to examine in Histoire de la folie. 8 Intriguingly, Shoshana Felman argues that it may be in terms of Foucault's concern for literature that his work can be understood to step aside from, rather than fall into, the sort of problems raised by Carroll and Derrida. According to Felman, Derrida faults Foucault for offering what might be understood as a literary account of madness. Derrida states, speaking of Foucault's account of Descartes, that one can only evoke madness "in the language of fiction or in the fiction of language." 9 And, Derrida claims, the "silence" of madness can only be "made present" "metaphorically," or in the "pathos" of Histoire de la folie. Considering Derrida's terminology, Felman writes: "Metaphor, pathos, fiction: without being named, it is literature which surreptitiously has entered the debate" (p. 219). Madness, Felman claims, is a metaphor in Foucault's account. It is a metaphor for what is excluded, invisible, silent, yet always working on the edges of discourse. It can refer only

obliquely--or, rather, figuratively--to itself. Thus, for Felman, Derrida places a gratuitous philosophical constraint on Foucault's account of madness, when he insists that Foucault cannot speak in the name of madness; that is, he insists only that Foucault cannot provide the full meaning of madness, which would be its concept. In Derrida's words, the "concept of madness" apparently operative in Foucault's text is "false," [End Page 282] just as, Derrida seems to imply, any such concept must be. Felman suggests, however, that Foucault is concerned more with madness as a metaphor for itself as a concept, a concept that thus always undoes itself, "has no proper meaning"--a "rigorously" "false concept." With madness we are given the question, Felman writes, "of the radical metaphoricity which corrodes concepts in their essence, a metaphor of literature, from whose obliteration philosophy proceeds" (p. 227). I would like to suggest that the question of the conceptual versus the metaphoric raised by Felman speaks to more than just the nuances of Histoire de la folie. It is easy, in the manner of Carroll and Derrida, to want to read Foucault's work in general for its conceptual underpinning. He seems always to be systematizing and categorizing the operations of knowledge, power, and the subject--to be delimiting epistemes, discourse formations, and technologies of the self. But in focusing on the gestures toward systematization easily found in much of Foucault's writing, we lose track of what I see as the literary way in which Foucault's work more broadly stands in relation to itself. Considering again the role of madness in Histoire de la folie, Felman suggests that it persists in "movement," "it is rhetorical," "an endless, metamorphic transformation" (p. 227). If we cannot speak in the name of madness, as Derrida claims, this is, for Felman, because madness "writes itself," and because in it, in its movement, "we are spoken." This is what Foucault proposes, according to Felman, when he writes of "l'absence d'oeuvre"--the absence of work or of production: "unaccomplishment at work: active incompletion of a meaning which ceaselessly transforms itself" (p. 227). It is here, where the question of "work," and in particular, of an "oeuvre," arises--and arises precisely in proximity to the question of literature--that one can sketch out a nonsystematizing Foucault, concerned more with what he calls, in L'usage des plaisirs, the task of "thinking otherwise." 10 However, the "active incompletion of meaning" at stake in Foucault's "work," this "unaccomplishment at work," need not be treated as a literary antidote to philosophy, as "the radical metaphoricity which corrodes concepts in their essence," nor as that which must be destroyed in order for philosophy to speak, "a metaphor of literature, from whose obliteration philosophy proceeds"; in so doing, Felman reproduces, in an inverted form, the opposition between philosophy and literature subscribed [End Page 283] to by Carroll and Derrida. Instead, in the words of John Johnston, it is literature, for Foucault, that "problematize[s] the boundary between philosophy and non-philosophy." 11 It allows for the sort of disruptive operation that Carroll critiques, without at the same time elevating the critical force of that disruption to Olympian heights I want to consider, therefore, how it is that with Foucault's work we may not be given the "corrosion" of concepts, the destruction of philosophy by literature, but rather the "active incompletion of a meaning which ceaselessly transforms itself," the emergence of conceptual frameworks as part of a metaphoric play of meaning. And I want to consider how it is through the historiographic dimensions of Foucault's work that these metaphorical operations come into relief; for ultimately the archives serve for Foucault as a basis out of which to refigure

philosophical questions in terms of historiographic methodology. Let me make my way into this complex intersection of historiography, literature, and philosophy through a detour into the question of the author and his work, and what they tell us about the operations of discourse. In describing in "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" the relation of "author" to "work" as part of the "founding" of what he calls "discursivities," Foucault opens up what might be viewed as a literary dimension within discourse--rather than constraining what is understood to be literary to a narrow conception of literature as a specific form of discourse. Certain identifiable, bounded, modes of discourse, each constituting a discursivity, are literary because they are caught in something like Felman's "endless, metamorphic transformation" in relation to themselves--not because of their status as "novels," "poetry," or "not philosophy." In this expanded sense, "literary" applies, in no readily containable manner, to many sorts of authors and works. Foucault thus writes in "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" that an author may at times be a "founder of discursivity," one who establishes "the possibility and the rule of formation for other texts" (p. 804), texts other than that author's own. At the same time, he argues that the founding of a discursivity is necessarily heterogeneous with its later formations in the texts of others. A discursivity is not determined through relations of analogy, as in the case of a specific genre of writing; nor is it determined by the relation of part to whole or of whole to part, as in the case of scientific disciplines. Instead, a discursivity, Foucault writes, "establishe[s] an indefinite possibility for discourse" [End Page 284] (p. 805). It allows for "a certain number of differences" (p. 805) as well as similarities. Subsequent formations of a discursivity always reinterpret the founding texts or works, reestablishing each time what it is they found. In this way, a discursivity can be characterized, for Foucault, by the "founding act" (l'acte instaurateur) in which it manifests; yet this act can only be described in terms of a "return to the origin," for the act of founding always remains "withdrawn" (en retrait) or "jutting out" (en surplomb) (p. 807) from what it founds. Indeed, in a lengthy passage omitted from the English version of "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" Foucault insists that the founding of a discursivity should be characterized in terms of a "forgetting" that necessitates a return, and vice versa. With the founding of a discursivity, we are given a constitutive play of forgetting and return. Or somewhat differently, with the founding of a discursivity, Foucault writes, "one returns to a certain empty space which the forgetting has evaded or masked, which it has covered over with a false or mistaken plenitude." 12 We are not simply dealing here with Foucault's version of discourse as an endless play of interpretation. For Foucault, a discursivity establishes "the rule of formation for other texts" and gives, to its own play of forgetting and return, a "law" (p. 808, emphasis added). I take his idiosyncratic use of the terms "rule" and "law" to refer to a principle of regularity articulated within a practice of heterogeneity. In this manner, one discursivity can be differentiated from another, and each in some way describes a positive manifestation of discourse. With the founding of discursivities, Foucault thus describes a certain literary element of an author's "work." He describes that "empty space" to which we return, in a work, and inevitably pass over, a space that is "masked" or "covered" with a "false plenitude"--recalling Felman's suggestion, in her critique of Derrida, that precisely such falseness, such "active incompletion," characterizes the "movement" of literary writing. But a discursivity also has its own particularity--again, its own "rule" or "law"--which Foucault, it

turns out, associates with the figure of the author. The return to the work as empty origin has to do, in part, with "a sort of enigmatic sewing together of the work and the author": 13 [End Page 285] In effect, it is precisely to the extent that it is a text of the author and of this author here that the text has founding value, and it is for this, because it is the text of this author, that it is necessary to return to it. 14 The figure of the author confers on a work the semblance of its particularity, its "false plenitude." It beckons a return that would establish once and for all, and yet can only undo in the perpetual necessity of this return, what is taken to be particular. Following Foucault's argument about the founding of discursivities, then, I suggest that his own work remains heterogeneous with itself. It comprises a finite but indefinite body of writing in "endless, metamorphic transformation" with respect to the figure of the author "Foucault" and the figure of his "work." For what is it to posit a Foucault, to figure the author "Foucault" in relation to "his" work? It implies a veritable return to the origin and founding of that "work" or thought which we attribute to Foucault. And yet at the same time, our positing must necessarily be a forgetting--of other Foucaults who might be found in this work, and of other works that might be found in connection to Foucault. 15 Hence, one may ask: What of Foucault's many modes of publication? Are we to read together or separately Foucault's books, essays, interviews, lectures, prefaces, journalism? Further, when we view Foucault's work as tending toward efforts at systematization and conceptualization, are we reading the shifts and departures of his work, or are we reading, separately and selectively, certain texts that might be said to make up that work? It is, after all, often noted that Foucault had a penchant for revising his ideas. It is somewhat less often noted that he tended to return repeatedly in his work to certain historical moments and questions--for example, the juncture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the French Revolution, the discourses of professional literatures, and the image of the figure of man. Yet even when readers of Foucault do note these tendencies toward revision and return, such readers usually attribute them, at least implicitly, to his attempts at systematization, understood as an effort to come up with an appropriate conceptualization of our knowledge of ourselves and [End Page 286] the past. Archaeology or genealogy? Discourse or practices? Dispositives of power or discursive formations? It is along the lines of this sort of assumption that Carroll and Derrida can fault Foucault's work for attempting to establish what would amount to a "false" ground for a philosophical system. Or conversely, it is along the lines of Foucault's shifts that for Felman the wholly negative moment of a "radical metaphoricity which corrodes concepts in their essence" suffices to constitute discourse. However, if instead we read Foucault's revisions and contradictions together, if we read the "enigmatic sewing together of the work and the author," are we not then perhaps given the image of a work and an author systematically practicing the undoing and redoing of themselves? Not "disruptive discourse" as the appeal to an impossible outside in which one's modes of analysis may be naively grounded, or which obviates critical affirmations altogether, but, again, unaccomplishment at work. Or, in Foucault's terms, l'absence d'oeuvre. The task of thinking otherwise. A return to the origin of a discursivity, which is at once a forgetting and the

law of that discursivity. I do not propose in this manner to establish the guiding principle of Foucault's work. (Indeed, can unaccomplishment constitute a principle?) But I do propose the possibility of establishing an ethic (in Foucault's sense of the term) or a methodology operative in his work--a mode of relation of that work to itself. 16 Denis Hollier argues that it is precisely Foucault's writing on literature, and the "distance" he later takes from this writing, that brings into relief such an ethic or methodology: What strikes one the most in his work is a distance vis--vis himself, the feeling that the distance separating this or that interpretive position with regard to his work is as nothing compared to the distance that he himself has already taken with regard to himself. 17 What marks the place in Foucault's work of his early and extensive writing on literature is not its prominence throughout that work, but the silence that buries it within the work (as well as within the vast secondary literature on Foucault). This writing betrays the problem of the relation of the work to itself. And it does so by bringing into relief the very undoing of one part of the work by another, "the distance that [Foucault] himself has already taken with regard to [End Page 287] himself." 18 Indeed, this ethic or methodology of Foucault's distancing himself from himself (unaccomplishment at work), of his always refiguring himself and his work within his work, is characteristic of even the vicissitudes of Foucault writing on literature (and the historiographic functions of this writing). For, in his work, Foucault seems to be singularly compelled to provide definitive statements about literature, "in the modern sense of the word" (as he says). Yet each of these statements tends to displace and cover over the definitiveness of those that have preceded it. Between Foucault's various historiographic descriptions of literature there is a certain "distance." Thus in the early essay "La folie, l'absence d'oeuvre," Foucault claims that literature stands in close proximity to a certain linguistic experience of madness, recovered by psychoanalysis. Both literature and madness appear in terms of what he calls "auto-implication": they offer wholly "esoteric" languages that, in the very movement by which they articulate themselves, also articulate the principles of their own intelligibility. In contrast, in essays on Blanchot and Bataille, as well as in Les mots et les choses, the question of literature, for Foucault, addresses the dispersion of the subject and the experience of finitude. Literature endeavors to recover the very "being of language" (l'tre du langage), which has entailed since the nineteenth century, in Foucault's notorious thesis, "the disappearance of man." Or, still elsewhere, in "La vie des hommes infmes," a rather late essay, Foucault places the origins of "modern" literature in the classical age, in the juridical practice of "placets au roi" (petitions to the king) and "lettres de cachet" (orders handed down under the seal of the king). 19 It is through these petitions and orders, Foucault argues, that an elaborate administrative apparatus comes into being that records the wretched details of daily life. In turn, as an effect of this apparatus, literature adopts an ethic of searching out the most hidden, uneasy, and scandalous aspects of our lives--which entails at the same time, as the task of literature, the production of verisimilitude. [End Page 288] Literature also seems to haunt Foucault's work, to appear here and there in the historiographic margins--from prefaces and conclusions to the beginning and end of chapters--in order to facilitate his arguments as the need arises. Thus in Histoire de la folie the work of Artaud, Hlderlin, and others recaptures a certain experience of "unreason" (draison) lost in the

classical experience of madness. In Les mots et les choses, Mallarm surfaces repeatedly to "speak" the resurgence of the being of language. And, as Carroll himself points out, in the first volume of Histoire de la sexualit, Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets helps unveil the coercive, compulsory, and epistemological status of sexuality. Still, one can pursue the literary dimensions of Foucault's work further. And now I begin to explain my repeated insistence on the affinities between the movement or metaphor of literature in Foucault's work and his historiography. For we might consider the literary way in which he often makes of the archives the very grist of his work. Denis Hollier argues, for example, that Foucault publishes the memoir of the murderer Pierre Rivire in order to demonstrate how an author is "constructed": "The archive author(ize)s itself when it finds a receiver. Foucault authorizes Rivire, he authorizes the archive in publishing it." 20 We could make a similar argument about the figure of Herculine Barbin, in Foucault's publication of Barbin's memoir; about the lives captured in the "lettres de cachet," published by Foucault and Arlette Farge, from the archives of the Bastille; about the importance of Foucault's book on Raymond Roussel and his mechanical "procedure" for writing; and even about his preface to the pseudo-linguistic speculations of the forgotten professor of grammar Jean-Pierre Brisset. Indeed, one might suggest that the extensive use of archival resources in nearly all of Foucault's major works serves the function of authorizing what were, up to that point, texts mired in their own silence. But we ought to note at the same time that it is through Rivire, Barbin, and the anonymous faces of the "lettres de cachet" that Foucault authorizes himself, emblematized in the crucial words: "presented by Michel Foucault." Having reviewed Foucault's relationship to literature and to literary/historiographic figures in this admittedly cursory manner, I suggest that at the center of his work we find the distance of that work from itself, to speak in Hollier's words. Or, to speak in Felman's words again, but toward different ends, we find "unaccomplishment at work," the heterogeneity of a "work" in relation to itself, to the systems of thought it treats, and to the systems of thought it derives [End Page 289] through positing its objects. 21 We find, in Foucault's work, a boundary marker pointing the way to the writing of others; to name only only some of the more prominent figures, it points to the writing of Borges, Sade, Nietzsche, Mallarm, Bataille, and Blanchot--as well as to Barbin, Roussel, Rivire, and Brisset, and above all to the anonymous faces of the archives. It is in this manner that the ethic or methodology of unaccomplishment at work is an ethic of the archives (and therefore profoundly historiographic). For it is precisely through the archives, in Foucault's work, that it becomes possible to undo and redo oneself and one's present. Foucault's work refigures the function of the archive, for the writing of history, as a principle of heterogeneity--where the archive is always the writing or statements of others, and the condition of possibility of our own writing and statements; and where the writing and statements of others are always an archive. 22 This is the literary dimension of Foucault's work. And counter to Carroll's argument that Foucault in this way "aestheticizes" and thereby limits the critical force of the historical and philosophical problems he treats, the literary component of Foucault's work puts into play the conceptual and historical insights attendant to "thinking otherwise." For as I have tried to show, Foucault's "authors" (and their writing) serve at once as "doubles" or "masks" for Foucault the historian--as the masks through which he becomes a historian (and produces a work)--and yet also as those who don the mask of Foucault the historian in order that they may themselves speak.

University of California, Berkeley

Jacob S. Fisher is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. His dissertation, "Foucault and His Authors," addresses the way Foucault's writing about literature brings into relief certain epistemological and ethical dimensions of his historiography.
Notes

1. In an interview at the time of the publication of Dits et crits, Franois Ewald suggested that the magnitude of these volumes alone raises the question of whether the material contained in them should be read as commentary on Foucault's books, or whether the books should be situated in a larger series of writing constituted by Dits et crits: Jean-Jacques Brochier, "Une nouvelle approche, un entretien avec Daniel Defert et Franois Ewald," Magazine littraire 325 (1994): 20. 2. For other (rare) overviews of Foucault and literature, see Raymond Bellour, "Vers fiction," in Michel Foucault, philosophe (Paris: Seuil, 1989), pp. 172-181 (translated as "Towards Fiction," in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong [New York: Routledge, 1992], pp. 148-156); Denis Hollier, "The Word of God: 'I am Dead,' " October 44 (1988): 75-87; Judith Revel, "Histoire d'une disparition: Foucault et la littrature," Le dbat 79 (1994): 82-90; idem, "Littrature et philosophie dans l'oeuvre de Michel Foucault," Mmoire de D.E.A., cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, 1991. These texts consider many of the elements of Foucault's writing that I touch upon here; for example, the figure of the author, the function of archives, the notion of distance, the ethical relation to oneself, the role of methodology, the silence within Foucault's own work about his writing on literature, the role of certain "marginal" texts in his work. Jean Roudaut also provides a brief overview of Foucault's writing on literature: Jean Roudaut, "Bibliothque imaginaire," Magazine littraire 207 (1984): 46-47; but his argument tends to aestheticize the role of literature in Foucault's writing, somewhat along the lines critiqued by David Carroll (below), rather than integrating its role into other components of his work. 3. Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" in Dits et crits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 789-821. (Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.) 4. Shoshana Felman, "Madness and Philosophy or Literature's Reason," Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 206-228, on p. 227. 5. David Carroll, "Disruptive Discourse and Critical Power: The Conditions of Archaeology and Genealogy," Humanities in Society 3/4 (1982): 175-200; quotations on pp. 189, 197. (Subsequent references to this work are given parenthetically in the text.) 6. At this juncture, Carroll also refers to the question of the political in Foucault's work, which is beyond the scope of this paper. 7. For a well-known and rigorous presentation of this critique, see Jrgen Habermas, "Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again," in idem, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 266-293. 8. Jacques Derrida, "Cogito et histoire de la folie," in idem, L'criture et la diffrence (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 51-97. 9. "Dans le langage de la fiction ou dans la fiction du langage" (ibid., p. 84); cited in Felman,

"Madness" (above, n. 4), p. 218. (Subsequent references to Felman are given parenthetically in the text.)

10. "Penser autrement" (Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualit, vol. 2, L'usage des plaisirs [Paris: Gallimard, 1984], p. 15). All translations of Foucault are my own. 11. John Johnston, "Discourse as Event: Foucault, Writing, and Literature," Modern Language Notes, 105 (1990): 801. 12. "On revient un certain vide que l'oubli a esquiv ou masqu, qu'il a recouvert d'une fausse ou d'une mauvaise plnitude" (Foucault, "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" p. 808). 13. "Une sorte de couture nigmatique de l'oeuvre et de l'auteur" (ibid., p. 809). 14. "En effet, c'est bien en tant qu'il est texte de l'auteur et de cet auteur-ci que le texte a valeur instauratrice, et c'est pour cela, parce qu'il est texte de cet auteur, qu'il faut revenir vers lui" (ibid., p. 809). 15. For another analysis of Foucault that pursues this sort of questioning, see Roger Chartier, "The Chimera of the Origin: Archaeology, Cultural History, and the French Revolution," trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1994), pp. 167-186. 16. Though this is an unconventional use of the term, I take methodology to be precisely the question of the formal relation of a work to itself. 17. Hollier, "Word of God" (above, n. 2), p. 76 (emphasis added). 18. Such an argument might also be made about the oft-noted vast stylistic shift of the second and third volumes of Histoire de la sexualit from the rest of Foucault's writing--and, of course, about numerous other shifts in Foucault's work. For this sort of reading of the last volumes of Histoire de la sexualit, though a reading that takes a different tack from mine, see Hayden White, "Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism," in idem, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 104-141. 19. Michel Foucault, "La vie des hommes infmes," in Dits et crits (above, n. 3), vol. 3, pp. 237-253. 20. Hollier, "Word of God" (above, n. 2), p. 86. 21. The chair created for Foucault at the Collge de France was called the "chaire d'histoire des systmes de pense," a name that Foucault devised. He discusses the idea of "systems of thought" in Michel Foucault, "Titres et travaux," in Dits et crits, vol. 1, pp. 842-846. 22. For examples of Foucault discussing the archive in this manner, see Michel Foucault, "Postface Flaubert," in Dits et crits, vol. 1, pp. 293-325; idem, L'archologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 169-173. Configurations 7.2 (1999) 279-290 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v007/7.2fisher.html

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