Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 43
History has no voice, no intelligible meaning, but structure is. Foucault makes
explicit his annihilation of the subject:
What is this anonymous system without a subject, what is it that is thinking
The “I” has exploded (see modern literature)—now is the discovery of the
“there is”. There is an on. 2 In a certain way, we have returned to the point of
view of the seventeenth century, with this difference: not putting man in the
place of God, but an anonymous thought, a knowledge without a subject, a
theoretical without an identity (in Chapsal: 1966, p. 15).
Or, as he says in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: “What matter who’s
speaking” (1969/1977a, p. 138). The anonymity and nihilism of Foucault’s position
is also evident in the way in which it is a theory, or rather a description, of pure
relations. The form of forms of relations is still the privileged structuralist concept,
an entirely synchronic, non-dialectical formulation without potential. Even the
cogito, Descartes’ atomized, closed domain of interiority, is missing in Foucault.
In the English preface to The Order of Things, Foucault rejected the designation of
structuralist: “In France, certain half-witted ‘commentators’ persist in labelling me a
‘structuralist.’ I have been unable to get it into their tiny minds that I have used none
of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis” (1973b,
p. xiv). Nevertheless, Foucault has long been discussed in those terms in the French
literature. 3 J.M.Domenach referred to “the three musketeers of structuralism, and
there are four of them, fittingly enough—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Louis
Althusser and Michel Foucault” (1967, p. 771). Sartre and Derrida are other “tiny
minds” who have characterized Foucault as a structuralist. Parain-Vial argues that
Foucault’s distrust for lived experience is what brings Foucault close to
structuralism, while his affirmation that man is not the truth of truth distances him
from it (1969, p. 184).
Foucault’s archaeological, rather than historical, enterprise is to elucidate the
epistemological field, or episteme, to describe the representations, conceptualizations
or configurations which inform the empirical sciences. Madness and Civilization and
The Birth of the Clinic are attempts to analyze the conditions under which a
scientific object constructs itself (in Caruso: 1969, p. 95). The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences, was first published in 1966 as Les Mots et les
Choses. Foucault wrote Madness and Civilization as the history of difference; The
Order of Things is, he says, “the history of resemblance, of the same, of identity” (in
Bellour: 1971, p. 137). It is perhaps his major epistemological work, a speculative
philosophy of history which asserts the death of Man. According to Foucault, the
epistemological ground is stirring under our feet, and Man as an object of knowledge
2. On is the indefinite pronoun in French, often translated as rendered in the passive voice. On dit
que becomes either “It is said that” or “They say that”.
3. One example: Editorial, Ésprit, Numéro spécial: “Structuralisms, idéologie et méthode,” vol 35,
no. 360, Mai, 1967, p. 769: “Depuis, le structuralisme s’est developpé, et il s’y est ajouté le
‘système’ de Michel Foucault.”