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

the indices 'Descartes' and 'Nietzsche' respectively. We will also attempt to argue that these
operations—in principle so different—work toward a common end.
Cogito And The Birth Of Man
Up to Merleau-Ponty there is almost no French philosopher of the modern period who was not, in
the most fundamental sense, 'Cartesian'.
James Edie 6
Discourse . . . is so complex a reality that we riot only can, but should, approach it at different
levels and with different methods.
Michel Foucault7
Upon publication of The Order of Things, one of its passages in particular attracted considerable
attention, an attention certainly in excess of its content and, perhaps also, of the seriousness with
which it was intended. 'At the deepest level of Western knowledge', Foucault wrote, 'Marxism
introduced no real discontinuity . . . Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in
water; that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.' (261–2) Marxism, he continues, 'may have
stirred up a few waves and caused a few surface ripples; but they are no more than storms in a
children's paddling pool.' (262) These contentions swiftly met with ample and indignant redress
from the French left, as, too, Hegel's absence from archaeology was contested by certain parties.
Foucault's dismissive treatment of Descartes, too, has often been noted, but has yet to be
subjected to serious scrutiny.
Approaching The Order of Things, a central text by a thinker who—in his opposition to the
constitutive role of consciousness, to dualism, rationalism, the autonomy of the subject—is so
manifestly anti-Cartesian, we might be forgiven for anticipating some declaration of the necessity
of breaking with the Cartesian influence that has for so long held sway over French philosophy.
But the idea of a continuous tradition of Western thought is precisely what The Order of Things is
contracted to resist at every turn. Descartes is a figure constituted in the interstices of a specific
configuration of knowledge, the Classical system of representation, and there can be no
transposition of the ideas of the Discourse on Method or the Meditations into any era not
governed by this arrangement. The philosophy of Descartes is separated from the modern
episteme by an unbridgeable rift in the order of things which occurred at the beginning of the
nineteenth century when Classical representation disintegrated allowing the anthropological era
to commence. If the thought of The Order of Things is then anti-Cartesian, it is not so in the sense
of discovering a form of thought which evades or challenges the Cartesian epistemology, but
rather in that it denies that there is any such thing as an enduring Cartesianism at all. It is, we
might say, 'aCartesian'.
Foucault does pay a certain tribute to Descartes, though strictly as his discourse flourished in situ.
The criticism, in the Regulae, of the Renaissance theory of resemblances is seen as an important
and exemplary moment in the transition to the Classical system of representations. 8 But
Descartes' contribution to the Classical order itself is held to be of no especial significance: 'This
new configuration may, I suppose, be called rationalism''; one might say, if one's mind is filled
with ready-made concepts, that the seventeenth century marks the disappearance of the old
superstitious or magical beliefs and the entry of nature, at long last, into the scientific order.' (54)
Two pages later Foucault writes: 'Under cover of the empty and obscurely incantatory phrases
''Cartesian influence" or "Newtonian model", our historians of ideas are in the habit of . . .
defining Classical rationalism as the tendency to make nature mechanical and calculable.' (56)
The Cartesian and Newtonian discourses, so far from being central to an understanding of the
Classical science of order are rather considered to be obstacles to the study of this arrangement
at its deepest level. Foucault then proceeds to depose Descartes and Newton at a single stroke.
Mathematics and mechanics, it is argued, had little impact on Classical science of order. What is
claimed, simply, is that since there are no traces of mathematicisation or mechanisation in the
emergent empirical sciences of general grammar, natural history, and the analysis of wealth, and
since these new discourses did reflect the science of order, then the mathematics and mechanics
of Descartes and Newton are lateral and nugatory in respect of the fundamental structure of
classical science.9 Foucault's reasoning here is woefully exiguous, and it is easy to see how this
syllogism could be reversed to declare the irrelevance of the new empiricisms.10 Nonetheless
this disengagement is achieved (however tardily) and Foucault develops his compelling analysis
of the Classical Age untroubled by the Cartesian question.