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

subjectivity. Foucault is always concerned to deny the existence of any Hegelian residues in his
work, even going so far as to make the unconvincing claim that he has learned more about the
nature of modern discourse from Cuvier, Bopp, and Ricardo than from Kant or Hegel—see Michel
Foucault, The Order of Things, op. cit., p. 307. Attentive readers of this text will note the
recurrence of Hegelian (and Kantian) motifs, even if unaware that Foucault's great mentor was
none other than the French Hegelian, Jean Hyppolite.
26. For Foucault, dialectic and anthropology are always 'intermingled', arising together at the
beginning of the nineteenth century and destined to disappear together at the close of the modern
episteme. Consequently, the end of anthropology will be coincident with the end of dialectic. See
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, op. cit., pp. 262–63.
27. For example, the Kantian transcendental subject met with strenuous opposition from both
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
vol. 1, trans. E.J.F. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), pp. 413–534; Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage
Books, 1968), pp. 267–71.
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R.J.
Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 41.
29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealoqy of Morals, trans. Francis
Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 177.
30. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, op. cit., p. 236.
31. 'Let me speak to them of what is most contemptible: but that is the last man . . . The earth
has become small, and on it hops the last man who makes everything small. His race is as
ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.' Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake
Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Books, 1966), p. 23. I use Kaufmann's
translation here in fidelity to The Order of Things' use of the phrase 'last man'. Hollingdale's
translation is still less propitious to Foucault's purposes: 'Behold! I shall show you the Ultimate
Man . . . The earth has become small, and on it hops the Ultimate Man, who makes everything
small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Ultimate Man lives longest.' (46)
32. For example, see David B. Alison, ed., The New Nietzsche (New York: Dell, 1977); Daniel
O'Hara, ed. Why Nietzsche Now? (Bloomington: Indiana University, Press, 1985); Stanley
Corngold, The Fate of the Self: German, Writers and French Theory (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986).
33. In the earliest days of the anthropological era Marx was still able to declare that the subject is
'the merest vapourings of idealism': 'The individuals, who are no longer subject to the division of
labour, have been conceived by philosophers as an ideal, under the name ''Man".
They have conceived the whole process, which we have outlined as the evolutionary process of
"Man", so that at every historical stage "Man" was substituted for the individuals and shown as
the motive force of history . . . Through this inversion, which from the first is an abstract image of
the actual conditions, it was possible to transform the whole of history into an evolutionary
process of consciousness.' Karl Marx, The German Ideology I (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1970), pp. 84–5. Marxism, we recall, is said to have introduced 'no real discontinuity', yet here,
over a century earlier, Marx announces the radical archaeological thesis that man is not an
aeterna veritas, that he arose as the result of certain historical pressures. Such statements, and
this aspect of Marxism, should prove invaluable to a work concerned with the emergence and the
disappearance of man but for the fact that they entirely contradict the archaeological theses that
man was born at the end of the eighteenth century, and that it was not possible to think beyond
man in the nineteenth century. We might find some explanation here of why Marx is so rigorously
excluded from The Order of Things, when in so many other of the Foucauldian texts he is
presented as a great precursor of modern discourse. The concept of episteme might withstand
the introduction of one meta-epistemic author, but the introduction of two nineteenth-century
thinkers who think beyond the universal conditions of discourse can only have the effect of
critically undermining the integrity of these epistemological fields.
34. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, op. cit. p. 278.
35. See Michel Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1973),
p. 197. Even Foucault's later work on carceral and punitive institutions would seem to take its
directions from the analysis in Nietzsche's Genealogy of the origins of morality in torture and