Mots et les choses, 40 years on

Les Mots et les choses, forty years on

Ian Hacking, Collge de France
For Humanities Center, Columbia University, 6th October 2005
1 1966
Les Mots et les Choses, une archologie des sciences humaines was an instant success when it was
published in April, 1966, sold out in 90 days. Everyone was talking about the famous final paragraph about
the erasure of Man, and a sentence shocking to Parisian eyes, namely Marxism swam in 19 th century
thought like a fish in the water. LExpress, Frances simulacrum to Time magazine, billed it as the greatest
revolution in philosophy since existentialism [23 May 1966].
For a good sense of one way that Foucault saw his book just after it was published, look at an
interview for La quinzaine littraire, 16 May 1966. [Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal, Dits et crits, 2
vol. edn., vol. 1, 541-546.] He is a member, he told the interviewer, of the generation who were not yet 20
during the war. (He himself was 13 when it began and 18 when France was liberated.) Much as that
generation admired Sartres courage and generosity, his passion for life, politics, and existence, he said,
we, we have discovered something else, another passion: the passion of the concept and for what I call the
system. [p. 542.]
As far as grand and overstated themes go, we find them in this interview: Our present task is to
liberate ourselves definitively from humanism, and, in this sense, our work is political. Political? Yes, for
in Foucaults view, all the regimes of East and West market their evil wares under the flag of humanism.
[p. 544.] Remember those were the days when Teilhard de Chardin was a big thing, and when Foucault
could praise Althusser and his courageous companions battling against chardino-marxism. [p. 544.]
But note also his denunciation of the monolingual narcissism of the French for thinking that they have
just discovered a new set of problems, when in fact the field of research that so engaged young French
intellectuals had emerged in America, England and France just after the first world war, when ideas were
coming in from the German- and Slavic-speaking lands. France has been called the Hexagon by the French
ever since their boundaries became roughly hexagonal. We have such hexagonal minds, Foucault
continued by saying, that De Gaulle passes among us for an intellectual.
Forty years. A few months ago in Paris I organized, as an act of local piety, what turned out to be a
very lively commemoration of a book published sixty years ago, Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of
Perception. That remains a great book. Since I own up to having been a fan of Jean-Paul Sartre ever since I
first read the man at the age of 18, I may be allowed to say that the Phenomenology is far more interesting
philosophy than anything Sartre wrote. But what an amazing time span is twenty years. The cultural and
conceptual gulf between the Phenomenology and The Order of Things is total. It was not only this book
that came on the scene. Daniel Defert observes in the absolutely terrific 90 page Chronologie which
introduces his collection of Michel Foucaults Dits et crits, that 1966 is one of the great vintage years
(grands crus) of French human sciences: Lacan, Lvi-Strauss, Benveniste, Genette, Greimas, Doubrovsky,
Todorov and Barthes published some of their most important texts. [ Vol. 1, p. 37, entry for June 1966.]
Some new generation.
2 1970
The intended title of Les Mots et les choses was LOrdre des choses, but that could not be used
because it had served as the title of one recent and one less recent book by other authors. Hence the
English translation of 1970, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences was the right
title. It had a more mixed reception when it was published in 1970 by the Tavistock Press, than the French
book had in 1966. My own response was unequivocal. I bought my third hardcover copy within the year.
On the flyleaf I wrote, This is my third copy after losing 2. Please return; I dont want to buy a 4 th @
4.60 a time! So evidently my copies were being loaned around. The book enabled me to do philosophy in
what was, for me, a new way. This does not mean that I quit doing philosophy in old ways, but that I
started also to do something different. The Archaeology of Knowledge came out in English in 1972, and I

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

wrote it up immediately in the weekly Cambridge Review so hastily that I, the editors, and the printers
all left out the a in the middle of Archaeology, thereby making it look like a French word that had lost its
accent.
In the early seventies, I gave as lectures what was to be published as, Why Does Language Matter to
Philosophy? There are some signs there, but not too many, of having read Foucault. In the spring of 1974 I
gave a course of lectures about some of Foucaults work. A colleague is reported to have told a visitor, if
you wonder why the bookshops have copies of Foucault in their front windows, it is all Hackings fault.
That spring, or the previous autumn, I gave lectures on what was to become The Emergence of
Probability, published in 1975. If you were unkind, you might call that book The Order of Things, the
footnote. But it is a footnote only to some early parts of Les Mots et les choses, Foucaults discussion of the
radical transition from the Renaissance doctrine of similitudes to the formal structures of representation.
Representation, Foucault taught, is characteristic of what in English we call, or used to call, the Age of
Reason, and what he called for his French readers, the Classical age, namely the Cartesian era when
French thought and the French language became world thought and a world language. Emergence said
nothing relevant to the second great mutation described by Foucault, the transition from representation to
history. Maybe Foucault himself had begun with the conception that I got from the book, for he said he
was writing his book about signs. That is according to Daniel Defert, [D&, I, p. 34], who says that the
first composition of the book about signs was finished in Tunisia over Christmas 1964. But in a letter of 13
February, 1965, Foucault realized that his book had changed: Ive not been talking about signs but about
order.
I myself did not even want to think about what most impressed people about his book, namely its
final marvellous paragraph announcing the incipient erasure of Man as an object of knowledge or a topic
of discourse. I did not want to think about it because it seemed to me to be a mistake.
My talk today should perhaps be called not, Les Mots et les choses, forty years on, but The Order of
Things, thirty-five years later. Today, 35 years after I read the book and reacted negatively to the end-ofMan thesis, I shall try to say what the mistake was. It is not a very exciting mistake, and I am sure others
have pointed to the problem long ago. But first I would like to say a little about the preceding, lesser,
block-buster, the book on madness. My last personal remark in this overly personal introduction is that I
was given the English abridgement, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
while I was working in Uganda, probably early 1968, but maybe late 1967, the year in which it was first
published in London by the Tavistock Press. I was bowled over by it, and thus was primed for the larger
blockbuster, archaeology in full spate. By the way, the Tavistock Press, which I have now mentioned twice,
was the publishing arm of Tavistock House, a venerable London institution for psychotherapy, hospitable
to new ideas, and which was then a base for the anti-psychiatry movement.
I had intended to talk today in some detail about the structure of the last few chapters of The Order of
Things, but gradually my plan changed. I shall say more about the earlier big book about madness,
published in 1961.
3 The timing of Folie et Draison
The big book, as I shall continue to call it, was published in 1961. The French wars of the 1950s in
Vietnam and Algeria had been lost, and the Republic had put them behind it. The sixties were the most
fertile decade of French intellectual life in the twentieth century. In addition to the list of names cited by
Defert, we recall that during that decade Gilles Deleuze published seven of his books, and Jacques Derrida
established himself. Foucaults work on madness was one of the first flowerings of this unique decade.
1961 also marks the critical rethinking of madness in the English speaking world. There was the
polemical assault on psychiatry by Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness. Erving Goffman, one of the
greatest of sociologists, published Asylums, an analysis of what actually happens in institutions for the
insane. In 1960, R. D. Laings The Divided Self: Sanity and Mental Illness had made radical proposals that
schizophrenia was a product of the family situation, not of the demented patient. None of these authors
knew of each other at the time. Laings collaborator David Cooper coined the name anti-psychiatry, and
later helped get the abridgement of Foucaults work on madness published in English.

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

The book was, then, launched in France as part of a gigantic wave of new thinking, which coincided
with brilliant anglophone voices challenging established psychiatry. All over the world Foucault was read
as a critic of psychiatry. That always happens when an author establishes that something, that we think of
as inevitable, is the product of a series of historical events. Foucaults next book was The Birth of the
Clinic: An Archaeology of the Medical Gaze. He finished it at the end of 1961, published in 1962. He
thought of it as the remains of, or fallout from, the book on madness its chute. He tried to assert in the
first pages that in writing about madness, and now in writing about medicine, he was not intending to
favour one system over another, but to say what made all of them possible at various times.
The 1961 Folie et Draison did indeed turn out to be, as its first preface promised, the beginning of a
long series of investigations. Innumerable themes found here were to be reworked over the next few years,
not least among them being that of something to be called archaeology, a neologism announced in the
same preface. Other themes: Exclusion; Conditions of possibility; The coming into being of a sense of
history; Time, yes, but also the spatial character of all Foucaults analyses is prefigured. Discursive
formation, which became a vogue phrase in American, and still clutters up undergraduate essays, had not
yet surfaced.
One thought was to be decisively dropped. It was the idea of there being some underlying truth about
madness. The idea that there is in madness an inaccessible primitive purity (F&D, p. 000, in italics).
Those words are from the original preface. Part of that preface, including those words, was suppressed by
1964. But I believe they are true to the thought that went into the book. The romantic fantasy lurks here,
the purity of the possessed, of those who not only speak the truth in paradox, like the fools in Shakespeare,
but who are themselves the truth.
Today we know all about Foucaults complete rejection of the idea of an essential self. So it is strange
to read David Coppers preface to Madness and Civilization, published in 1965. [Have to check it is in the
US 1965 1st edition, or is it only in the Tavistock edition of 1967?] He said that anti-psychiatry by
implication Laings and his own can do better than psychoanalysis. At great cost to a patient, analysis
may achieve a workable conformism defined as normality, maturity, developedness. Instead, said
Cooper: The truer goal, however, must be in terms of a recognizable synthesis of the field of social
practicality with its secret antithesis the autonomous assertion of pure, spontaneous Self. (M&C xi.)
That capital S Self is not, I believe, wholly false to Folie et Draison as originally conceived.
Everybody knows that Foucault withdrew any suggestion that there might be some pure, ahistorical,
madness, but I think it is worth looking again at what he withdrew.
4 Two books about madness?
Foucault worked on madness for a long time. The big book came out in 1961. He also submitted it for
his doctoral degree, along with a shorter thesis on Kants Anthropology from a Practical Point of View. He
was then 35 years old. The second edition of 1972 differs only in preface and appendices. In between
1961and 1972 there was an abridgement and there were translations. In the splendidly brief, and
seemingly transparent preface, for the 1972 edition, Foucault spoke, as was then his wont, of a book being
an event, which if it lives, lives through repeated doublings and simulacra. It has its own life, free of the
author.
Doublings: I suggest that there are two distinct books, 1961 and 1972. The main text of each is the
same. It is all too easy to compare them to the two Don Quixotes invented by Borges, the one written by
Cervantes, the other, identical in words, written much later by an imagined Pierre Menard. Despite the
words being the same, so much has happened that the meaning is different. 1
I shall explain this in several stages. First, the text remains, but not the title. Second, something called
unreason draison is highlighted in the first book but not the second. Third, Foucaults concept of
archaeology may change its role. All three evolutions are, I would like to say, connected with the way in
which the author liberated himself from an obsession with madness and inaccessible primitive purity. I

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, in J. L. Borges, Ficciones, Grove Press, 1962, 45-55 (original Spanish of
1939).
1

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

say author deliberately: this is not intended as a remark about the psychohistory of Michel Foucault, but
about the topics of the texts.2
5 Titles
The exact title in 1961 was Folie et Draison. Histoire de la folie lge classique. Daniel Defert,
Foucaults long time intellectual colleague, companion, and posthumous editor, laid emphasis on the exact
title of the original. That first title is a bit like Alices Cheshire Cat, of which nothing is left but the grin,
namely the subtitle. The unabridged book will appear for the first time in English later this year. It will be
called History of Madness. Even the classical age, or the age of reason, is to disappear.
A trip through the successive titles is a gradual vanishing act, which points us away from draison. At
the beginning, Unreason was right up there alongside Madness, and it was capitalized in the original
French title, as it sometimes is in the book itself. On the cover of the 1964 paperback abridgement we see
only Histoire de la folie. On the title page the full 1961 title appears in block letters, but with the title Folie
et Draison in smaller print than the subtitle Histoire de la folie. Fading, like the cat. Parts of the preface
were eliminated, including the reference to inaccessible primitive purity. This version was translated into
many languages, while only an Italian publisher did the unabridged book.
For the 1965 English version, Madness and Civilisation, Foucault restored some material that he had
cut from the 1964 French abridgement. For a moment, as we shall see, part of the cats face flickered back.
The English slightly-less-abridged abridgement reinserted a chapter that is all about unreason.
As an aside, let me say that Madness and Civilisation was widely criticized by the best of scholars
writing in English Lawrence Stone, Roy Porter, and others for being, in a word, too hexagonal. Grand
claims were made for a series of events taking place all over Europe. But there was no great confinement
in England or for that matter anywhere else outside of France. I am much more troubled by the fact that a
French scholar, Pierre Qutel, argues that it is not good history of madness even in Paris.3 It is disquieting
that nobody wanted to listen to him.4 He is now the historian running a war museum at Cherbourg. But for
better or worse, we do not read any version of the book, long or short, for history, but for a complete
rethinking of the very idea of madness.
To pass to the end of the story, in June, 1972 we have the doubling. The text of 1961 was printed
again, untouched. The old preface was now wholly deleted. A brief new preface was inserted, with its
mention of doubling. Two appendices were added. One bears on the spat with Derrida about madness in
the Cartesian Meditations. The other is very curious piece to which I shall return. It, I shall ague, is the
transition from madness to the disappearance of man., but for that we shall wait a few minutes. The most
obvious thing to notice is that the main title, Folie et Draison,was dropped. The latest doubling, to appear
early next year, is the complete English translation of everything : text, old preface, new preface,
appendices, plus further appendices, plus an introduction by the editor, plus a very short foreword by me.
6 Unreason
Unreason is only barely an English word, but it is the only possible translation of draison, an old
French word that Le petit Robert classifies as Vx ou lit old or literary.
Everybody professing to be in the know has long dismissed the English version of 1965 as a callow
abridgement. In fact it is highly instructive, for Foucault decided to reinsert the most vivid assertions
about Unreason to be found in the entire work. They include sentences like this, in the new translation:
How can we avoid summing up this experience by the single word Unreason? By that we mean all that for

Each of the authors who discusses Historie de la folie in Michel Foucault. Lire luvre (ed. Luce Giard, Grenoble :
Jrme Millin 1992) discusses the differences between the two prefaces; but I hope to convince you that there are
many more differences.
3 Pierre Qutel, Faut-il critiquer Foucault ? in Penser la folie. Essais sur Michel Foucault, Paris: Galile, 1992, 81102.
4 Rsum du dbat, ibid., 103-105
2

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

which reason is at once nearest and most distant, fullest and most empty. [The word Unreason is
italicized and capitalized.] Or in the old translation,
All that madness can say of itself, is merely reason, although it is the negation of unreason. In
short, a rational hold over madness is always possible and necessary, to the very degree that
madness is non-reason.
There is only one word which summarizes this experience: Unreason: all that, for reason,
is closest and most remote, emptiest and most complete; all that presents itself to reason in
familiar structures authorizing a knowledge, and then a science, which seeks to be positive
and all that is constantly in retreat from reason, in the inaccessible domain of nothingness.
[original italics, my underlining]
Foucault continued immediately by playing on dazzlement.
And if, now, we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations with the dream
and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as
reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled. (M&C 108)
What follows in Foucault is itself deliberately so dazzling that we, or at any rate I, am left in a state of
bedazzlement.
Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.
And this is not a metaphor. (M&C 109)
I have not found the noun dazzlement in any one-volume English dictionary, but it perfectly translates a
genuine French noun (blouissement).5 Continuing this single paragraph we get an amazing play of day
and night (italicized), which is
no longer the fatal time of the planets; it is not yet the lyrical time of the seasons; it is the
universal but absolutely divided time of brightness and darkness. A form which thought
entirely masters in a mathematical science
By the end of the paragraph we have been taken from Cartesian physics, a kind of mathesis of light,
through Racine and Georges de La Tour.6 It is stupendous stuff, to be kept on the back shelf away from
sophomores. A display of Foucaults brilliant eye for paint: the page holding the torch reveals under the
shadow of the vault the man who was his master a grave and luminous boy encounters all of human
misery; a child brings death to light. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, to the plays of Racine. All
interspersed with observations about madness itself: the madman, conversely, finds in daylight only the
inconsistencies of the nights figures; he lets the light be darkened by all the illusions of the dream. Then a
pause, a break in the page, followed by a half-way summary, in two brief paragraphs:
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of nights hallucinations and nonbeing of lights judgements.
And this much, which the archaeology of knowledge has been able to teach us bit by bit,
was already offered to us [] in the last words of Andromaque. (M&C 111-112)
We are far from finished. The curtain that falls on the last scene of Andromaque falls on the last great
tragic incarnation of madness
This had to be the last scene of the first great classical tragedy; or if one prefers the first time in
which the classical truth of madness which is the last of the preclassical theatre. A truth, in any
case, that is instantaneous, since its appearance can only be its disappearance; the lightening
flash is seen only in the advancing night.
After two more pages brilliantly re-enacting tragedies, we return to unreason:

Foucaults footnote here (deleted from the abridged edition) directs us to Pierre Nicole, the famous Jansenist, whose
name the text misspelled as Nicolle (in both editions). Nicole wrote a semi-popular series of essays on morality in 14
volumes, starting in 1671. Foucault explains (?) that dazzlement is meant in the sense of a sentence from the eighth
volume, where Nicole wondered whether the heart took part in the dazzlement of the mind.
6 Foucault writes Georges de la Tour, but of course he was Georges de La Tour.
5

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

The movement proper to unreason, which classical learning followed and pursued, had
already accomplished the whole of its trajectory in the conclusion of tragic language. After
which silence could reign, and madness disappear in the always withdrawn presence of
unreason.
was.

What we now know of unreason affords us a better understanding of what confinement

Foucault does not mention dates here, but of course he expected his readers to know them. The great
confinement of Chapter 2 was said to begin in 1656; Andromaque was first produced in 1667. De La Tour
is earlier; his most famous painting in the Louvre is 1645 (St Joseph) and he died in 1652.
One can imagine several explanations for the fact that all this material was deleted in 1964, and
reinserted in 1965. We read simply these words in the front matter: The author has added some material
from the original edition.
7 Archaeology
I have already quoted that strange passage where we first find the expression, the archaeology of
knowledge:
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of nights hallucinations and nonbeing of lights judgements.
And this much, which the archaeology of knowledge has been able to teach us bit by bit,
was already offered to us [] in the last words of Andromaque. (M&C 111-112)
Foucault in fact spoke of archaeology in the part of the preface to the 1961 book which was retained for the
1964 abridgement. There is a moving paragraph stating that there is no longer a common language by
means of which madness and reason can communicate.
the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the
evidence of a broken dialogue, []. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason
about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.
I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that
silence. (M&C, xii-xiii.)
An archaeology of silence: neither a history of psychiatry, nor an archaeology of psychiatric discourse.
Foucault wanted to understand how a certain absence of discourse became possible. The theme of silence
was reiterated in the first sentence of chapter 2, the famous chapter called The Great Confinement:
By a strange act of force, the classical age was to reduce to silence the madness whose voices
the Renaissance had just liberated, but whose violence it had already tamed. (M&C 38)
What is absent? The voice of unreason, of which there is a simulacrum only in those artworks that were the
veritable paradigms of genius in the 1960s, Nerval, Nietzsche, Hlderlin, and above all Artaud.
I suggest this is a very different kind of archaeology from his later use of the term. It is not an attempt
to understand how sentences were possible, but rather their absence.
8 Unreason and art
Unreason was not wholly pruned from the 1964 abridgement. The whole book is about the
dialectical play between madness and unreason.
In the classical period, the awareness of madness and the awareness of unreason had not
separated from one another. The experience of unreason that had guided all the practices of
confinement so enveloped the awareness of madness that it very nearly permitted it to
disappear, sweeping it along a road of regression where it was close to losing its most specific
elements.

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

But in the anxiety of the second half of the eighteenth century, the fear of madness grew at
the same time as terror in the face of unreason: and thereby these two forms of obsessive
dread, each supporting the other, constantly grew stronger. (M&C 2117)
That is, alongside madness there is also unreason; the one provokes fear, the other terror. Unreason had
much fuller play in the Renaissance, an unreason that Foucault evokes by the ship of fools and the
paintings of Bosch, especially the temptation of Saint Anthony.
Still later we read that since the end of the eighteenth century the life of unreason no longer
manifests itself except in the flashes of lightning found in works like those of Hlderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche
and Artaud which resisted through their own strength that gigantic moral imprisonment. Standard
French history and iconography of psychiatry represents Pinel casting off the chains of madmen soon after
the Bastille had fallen, so that is a story of liberating the mad. Here we are told that the new moral
treatment of insanity was also the imprisonment of unreason that had flashed so openly on the canvasses
of Hieronymous Bosch.
Casual reference books diagnose Hlderlin as a schizophrenic poet, Nietzsche as a philosopher
suffering from dementia caused by terminal syphilis, and Artaud as a bipolar (manic-depressive)
playwright. Nerval killed himself: We say suicide is caused by severe depressive illness. It is of course a
central thesis of this book, that far from these being inevitable ways of conceiving of four very strange men,
it requires a specific system (yes, system) of thought to categorize these men and myriad other people
in terms of mental disorder. But Foucault does not pander to the thought that genius and mental
disturbance are of a piece. The art of these men, as he shouts in italics on the last page of the book, is not
their insanity, but its opposite. In the old translation which you may know: Where there is a work of art,
there is no madness. (M&C 288-9.) In the new translation, Where there is art, there is no madness. In
the original, L o il y a uvre, il ny a pas de folie (HF 557).
9 Madness, the absence of a work
In May 1964, Michel Foucault contributed to a magazine issue dicussing the curent situaton in
psychiatry. [D& no. 25, 440-448; from La Table ronde.] Title: La folie, labsence duvre. Deleuze
urged Foucault to include this as one of the two appendices for 1972 edition of the big book on madness.
The translator of the forthcoming big book translates this as Madness, the absence of a work. 8 In the new
preface of 1972, Foucault explains that he has added two appendices, one about Derrida, and the other,
7

The original text reads :

Mais dans linquitude de la seconde moiti du XVIIIe sicle, la peur de la folie crot en mme temps
que la frayeur devant la draison : et par l mme les deux formes de hantise, sappuyer lune sur lautre,
ne cessent de se renforcer.

It does not matter much to the overall meaning, and I make no pretense to have got mine just right I am no
translator. But for an example of the difficulties, the 1965 translation has :
But in the anxiety of the second half of the eighteenth century, the fear of madness grew at the same
time as the dread of unreason: and thereby the two forms of obsession, leaning upon each other,
continued to reinforce each other. (M&C 211)
In the new translation:
But in the anxiety of the second half of the eighteenth century, the fear of madness grew at the same
rate as the dread of unreason: and for that reason these twin obsessions constantly leant each other
mutual support.
I will not make any suggestion as to what should be the correct translation for I am not sure there is one. The phrase
is a problem for one of Foucaults most careful readers, Frdric Gros. He, together with Arnold Davidson, edited
Michel Foucault: Philosophie. Anthologie, the standard French book of some 900 pages of selections from Foucault
for examination purposes. [Paris: Gallimard 2004.] Gros writes [p. 35]: Madness for Foucault is [] absence duvre.
And the productions (one hardly dares say uvres) (by Nietzsche, Artaud, etc) are witnesses of that absence. [p.
35.] I take it that whatever Frdric Gros meant, he wanted to distance himself from the pun on, or play with, the word
uvre. Or was there just an intended equivocation?
8

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

already published, in which I discuss a sentence that I had used a little in the dark [un peu laveugle],
namely La folie, labsence duvre. [HF 8.]9
I do not want to interpret this short essay of May 1964, and reprinted as an appendix in 1972. I do
not understand it and I do not like it. It is full of stuff like this and I quote from the forthcoming
translation:
Since Freud, Western madness has become a non-language because it has become a double
language (a language which only exists in this speech, a speech that say nothing but its language)
i.e. a matrix of the language which, strictly speaking says nothing. A fold of the spoken which is an
absence of work.
Note that the translator here writes absence of work, not absence of a work. There are lot of folds plis
in this text. Speech renders parole and language renders langue. The next paragraph runs:
One day it will have to be acknowledged that Freud did not make speak a madness that had
genuinely been a language for centuries [] he dried it out; he forced its words back to their
source, all the way back to that blank region of auto-implication where nothing is said.
But here language renders langage. My first observation is that the entire essay is totally caught up in the
play of very, very, fanciful talk about what I will just call language. A strange hyper-Saussurianism of the
day that cannot be recognized in anything Saussure ever wrote. That play with words about words was
fashionable in France 40 years ago. It is a type of linguistic philosophy so at odds with my English
philosophy of language that, let us say, I fail to understand. But the bizarre discussion of the folds in
language is, I claim, important for understanding the famous conclusion of The Order of Things.
10 Madness and Man
The essay on the absence duvre opens by saying, Perhaps one day we will no longer know what
madness was. That is the last perhaps in the piece. Artaud, we read two sentences down, will then
belong to the foundation of our language, and not to its rupture []. Thats langage. Artaud has the
biggest part in the story about to unfold. Next comes Foucaults creation, Raymond Rousssel. Nietzsche
too, of course.
After the initial announcement that madness may disappear, there is a long speculation about how we
will be seen, in our relation to madness, by this future world. Maybe near future. In the eyes of I know not
which future culture and perhaps it is very near []. Even in the second paragraph the imagined future
asks:
Why, since the nineteenth century, but also since the classical age, had [Western culture] clearly
stated that madness was the naked truth of man, only to place it in a pale, neutralized space, where
it almost entirely cancelled out? Why had it accepted the words Nerval and Artaud, and recognized
itself in their words but not in them?
But let us pass to the end. The penultimate paragraph says that madness is separating itself from mental
illness because it gathers itself in the transgressive Fold known as literature. This time the Pli is
capitalized.
Madness and mental illness are undoing their belonging to the same anthropological unity. That
unity is disappearing, with man, a passing postulate. Madness, the lyrical halo of sickness, is
ceaslessly dimming its light. And far from pathology, in language, where it folds in on itself
without yet saying anything, an experience is coming into being where our thinking is at stake; its
imminence, visible already but absolutely empty, cannot yet be named.
Thats May 1964. On the 5th of January 1965, Foucault watched out the window of his airplane took off
from the Island of Djerba, seeing the curve of the earth at the edge of the sea. On a postcard he wrote that
final sentence that ends, [] one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand
at the edge of the sea. (D& 34.) But man had been a passing postulate earlier, the anthropological unity
This sentence does not occur in the galley proofs of the translation. I hope that is just a slip! Or were there 2 prefaces
of 1972, one of which is in front of me, and the other of which was in front of the translator?
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Mots et les choses, 40 years on

was coming to an end. And earlier in absence duvre the human sciences had been called a derisory
classification, lumping psychoanalysis with linguistics and ethology.
11 Man and language
We all remember that image of the final sentence, the face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.
But when I looked again at the left hand side of the same open page of The Order of Things, I realized how
much I had suppressed the extent to which claims about language dominate the argument for the erasure
of man. I shall just quote the half of a sentence: man is in the process of perishing as the being of language
continues to shine ever brighter on our horizon. [OT 386.]
Go back a couple more pages:
From within language experienced and traversed as language, in the play of its possibilities
extended to their furthest point, what emerges is that man has come to an end, [and so on, a
sentence getting longer and longer, but more and more powerful]. [p. 383]
Immediately afterwards we get the usual suspects, namely the ones who star in absence duvre.
Artaud and Raymond Roussel. I do not find this any more compelling than I did 35 years ago. But
alongside these hyperlinguistic musings, there is an important story to tell about man. It does not have
Foucaults ending. Only his beginning.
Although we remember the last line of the book about the disappearance of man, the last chapter is
titled, The Human Sciences. The human sciences (that derisory name) are going down the same drain as
man. Indeed they are the real heart of the tale, because, as seen from Paris in the early 1960s, they are
becoming purely linguistic.
12 Anthropology
Foucault submitted two theses for his doctorate, the big book on madness, and a thesis about Kants
Anthropology from a practical point of view. The latter was never published, and officially the copies
deposited in the usual archives have been lost or stolen. In fact the best of authorities told me that he did
have a typescript, but he did not want to show it to anyone for fear it would be lost or pirated, which would
get him in trouble with the executors, Foucaults family. When I said in a so-called seminar in Paris that
the text was effectively lost, about 80 of the 160 persons present shouted in one voice, well, I have a copy.
There is even an English translation in free circulation. Live and learn.
Foucault liked to choose minor texts by Kant for building rather grand analyses think of What is
Enlightenment? These were not idle or show-off choices: he was always on to something. There is a curios
fact that in the course of his annual logic lectures Kant, who had long a list the three fundamental
questions, added a fourth before 1800. The three are, in various versions, What can we know, What ought
we to do, and For what may we hope? Then he added, What is Man? The Anthropology is not exactly an
answer to that question, but it is in the same ball park. The important point is that questions about man
are not to be answered a priori, by reflection, but by observation.
The aspect of this, that I personally know best, is the transition from 18th century moral science (that
was the name) to 19th century moral science. The former was a priori theory of man, the latter was
empirical, and often involved counting, and tabulating, and what came to be caled statistics. That was the
beginning of social science. Man, in the sense to which Foucault pointed, is inextricable from the sciences
of man.
As is well known, Foucault would have taken such a truism for what it is: boring. He made us see it in
a new and exciting way: Man and his doubles is the title and the lynch-pin of chapter 9. One simple
meaning of that complex play of allusions is that Man is the object of study and it is Man who does the
studying. Of course there is vastly more, before which one can only be nonplussed. The way in which Las
Meninas, the tour de force that opens the book, reappears as so central in the ninth chapter. But allow me
to continue reading the book backwards.

Mots et les choses, 40 years on

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13 Life, labour and language

From time to time I rethink for my own ends something about the evolution of biology, or of
linguistics. I always astonished by what a rich source Foucaults story is, of a fairly sharp creation of new
sciences. I always find illumination. I cannot vouch for economics because I do not think about it much.
One of the central ideas was that the predecessor fields of thought, natural history, general grammar, and
the theory of wealth, all ordered their objects in terms of relations of representation or exchange. The new
sciences resulted from transforming the objects into historical ones. General grammar became
philological, the species came to have histories. I am not sure this works so well for the labour theory of
value, but that is just ignorance on my part.
At any rate I am wholly content, except for trivial details, with the way in which Foucault structured
whole fields of inquiry in ways that were quite unexpected. But then comes the part where I lose my grip.
Many people say that the human sciences waste their energies imitating hard science. But Foucault has a
very complex, interesting, but I think mistaken, vision of the structure that the human sciences must
acquire, because of their need to copy the form of the sciences of biology, philology and economics. I
suspect that the argument is more dense that casual readers notice. Since I now need to be brief, I shall
state one lemma that is essential to the argument. He first provides his analysis of the model sciences. And
then he states that the human sciences can have no different organization upon which to work: there is no
space left. Here is the proposition with which he concludes. It begins with a thus. I do not think the thus
holds.
Thus, these three pairs of function and norm, conflict and rule, signification and system
completely cover the entire domain of what can be known about man. [OT 357]
He makes clear that he is not saying that one human science adopts one pair, while another chooses
another.
All these concepts occur throughout the entire volume common to the human sciences and are
valid in each of the regions included within it: hence the frequent difficulty in fixing limits not
merely between the objects, but also between the methods proper to psychology, sociology, and
the analysis of literature and myth.

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