Preface

43
second of these was ‘dividing practices’, by which humans are
differentiated from one another in various ways (for example, the mad and
the sane, the sick and the healthy, knowers and the known). Equally people
differentiate themselves by objectivizing themselves as subjects of
knowledge. People also learn to themselves into subjects in various ways.
In so doing, they are learning to recognize themselves as distinct kinds of
subjects, quite different from other kinds of subjects.
Incidentally radical metaphysics may offer a part solution to
Foucault’s perceived circularity of the human sciences, and with it the fate
of anthropology (and cultural studies). 48 Insofar as we subsume our
subjects under articulatory notions like culture, we commit the kind of
vicious circularity I noted earlier. Insofar as they stand apart from, and
may be critical of, the knowing scholars’ reflections on themselves, they
refuse this subsumption. No wonder those untamed native intellectuals
need herding into the corrals of culture, by being befriended and
overinterpreted by anthropologists. They threaten the whole edifice. The
solution is only in part though, because it is humanities’ and human
sciences’ scholars who in the end still articulate these intellectuals to the
world.
Taking radical metaphysical inquiry this far creates a serious
problem. The more reflective scholars recognize that their arguments are
not simply timelessly true. Rather they are framed by current paradigms
(Kuhn), are part of a process of conjecture and refutation (Popper) or
whatever. If not carefully circumscribed however, such arguments threaten
to question the authority and authenticity of academia itself. So the
developing discourse of ‘western’ academic thinking must constitute the
ultimate frame of reference, the yardstick against which all thought must be
judged. To relinquish such absolute criteria of judgement would be to
emperil the whole edifice of scholarly thought. Without such an a priori
guarantee, there would be nothing in principle to determine that proper
knowledge consists, of necessity, in translating other people’s thinking into
the categories of academic thought – rather than, say, vice versa, or a
48 As Foucault argues at length, it is Kant’s thinking about humans/culture as the subject,
object and limiting possibility of knowledge that is central to the project of modernity. It
is therefore an anthropological project in a broad sense.
Anthropology constitutes perhaps the fundamental arrangement that has governed and
controlled the path of philosophical thought from Kant until our own day. This
arrangement is essential, since it forms part of our history; but it is disintegrating before
our eyes, since we are beginning to recognize and denounce in it, in a critical mode, both a
forgetfulness of the opening that made it possible and a stubborn obstacle standing
obstinately in the way of an imminent new form of thought (Foucault 1970: 342).