Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault

Abstract

Les Mots et les choses' was and remains a fashionable book in France. It was much talked about; it may even have been read. More importantly, the book and its author have acquired, on a smaller scale but very quickly, the kind of influence which Sartre's and Levi-Strauss' books Freud's even, or Marx's have had. That is, some of its theses, more or less vaguely understood, are in danger of becoming articles of faith among intellectuals. Foucault is not only an attractive and a persuasive writer; he has quite clearly those qualities which make for leadership in St. Germain des Pres: that is, he gives the impression of saying something radically new while, at the same time, his discoveries turn out, the young reader's satisfaction, fit supremely well into the general movement of ideas currently in vogue. It almost seems that reconcile the new with the fashionable, all that is required is a hermetic turn of phrase at crucial points, and the coining, preferably, of a special vocabulary of terms borrowed from some technical discipline whose meaning no one can be quite sure about. That is how structuralism came upon us, and now it is the turn of Foucault's archaeology of knowledge, whose inspiration is both structuralist enough be familiar and respectable and at the same time radical in its rejection of all previous methods. Quite simply, and daringly, Foucault proposes apply the structural the study of intellectual history. His subject is nothing less than the making of the modern mind. Disregarding all his predecessors, Foucault wipes the slate clean: no one had ever understood anything about the origins of our culture. All the scholarship of the past century or two was wasted effort, for lack of the which alone can supply the answers. Once freed of the errors of the historical method, the application of his own archaeological method leads stupendous and totally unexpected results the discovery, first of all, that man is a recent invention.2 The study of man to naive