Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

(The Order of Things, p. 57), the relation itself—potent and hierarchicalised—remains between a
primary mathematical model and a derived analysis within Foucault's very account itself. Nor is
there any reason why the Cartesian mathematics and Newtonian mechanics should not have
played a dominant part in the constitution of the classical science of order even if the subsequent
empirical sciences are irreducible to mathematics and mechanism. Foucault seems here to be
erecting a forcefield between mathematical and verbal discourses which would seem to contradict
the cross-disciplinary coherencies of the epistemic continuum.
11. See René Descartes, The Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F.E. Sutcliffe
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 96.
12. Ibid., p. 103.
13. Ibid., pp. 113–31. For a brief and clear account of this argument, see J.H. Hick, Arguments for
the Existence of God (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 79–83.
14. Ibid., p, 162.
15. No adherence to the representational theory of ideas is; to be found in the Meditations. It is
speculated that Descartes might elsewhere have subscribed to this theory, but no decisive
evidence exists in support of this claim. For a statement of this contention, see Richard E.
Aquila's introduction to his Representational Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
It may of course be countered that language is the one representation that Descartes does not
seem to doubt, but the entire representational function of language is suspended within
hyperbolic doubt. Only the performative (that is non-constative, non-representational) aspect of
the cogito proposition—'I am, I exist, is necessarily true, every time I express it or conceive of it in
my mind'—guarantees the existence of the meditating subject.
16. The ontological argument, which states, at its baldest—God is a perfect being, existence is a
perfection, therefore God exists—makes no recourse to—a posteriori judgements. Descartes also
forwards other non-empirical proofs in the 'Third Meditation', again refusing the Thomistic
arguments that God represents himself to us in the world of appearances. See René Descartes,
The Discourse on Method and the Meditations, op. cit., pp. 113–31.
17. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. D. Cairns
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p. 1.
18. And, naturally, Foucault nowhere doubts that the thought of Descartes belongs to the
Classical episteme. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, op. cit., pp. 51–6.
19. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 305.
20. For a challenge to Foucault's presentation of the Renaissance, see George Huppert,
'Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault', History and Theory, 13 (1974), pp. 191–207.
21. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Book 1,
Pt.IV, pp. 251–63. Hume concludes: 'all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal
identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical rather than
philosophical difficulties. Identity depends upon the relation of ideas; and these
relations produce identity, by means of that easy transition they occasion. But as the relations,
and the easiness of the transition may diminish by insensible degrees, we can have no just
standard by which we can decide any dispute concerning the time when they acquire or lose a
title to the name of identity. All the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are
merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives me to some fiction or imaginary
principle of union, as wee have already observ'd.' (262) Herein Hume demonstrates that not only
was the question of man at issue prior to Kant, but that it also admitted of severe scepticism long
before Nietzsche, or Foucault, took arms against anthropologism.
22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher
(Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1957), p. 172.
23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common (Edinburgh: Foulis, 1910),
pp. 168–9.
24. David Carroll, 'The Subject of Archaeology or the Sovereignty of the Episteme', Modern
Language Notes 93, no. 4 (May 1978), pp. 695–722.
25. See G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975). For Hegel, the four ages of world history are: the Oriental,
the Greek, the Roman and the Germanic eras. Interestingly, this last and final era is that of