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

world exterior to consciousness would be empirical, or nearly so. Only pure mathematics, formal
logic and extreme immaterialist and solipsistic theories would elude this definition. And Foucault
shows no interest in explaining quite what is meant here; as earlier, the dissociation is hurried
and didactic. Certainly there is nothing in this passage (whose two parts have been divided
above) to suggest that phenomenology has any stronger allegiances than to the scheme of The
Order of Things. Phenomenology is akin to the empirical sciences, and not to the cogito of
Descartes, because Foucault wishes us to believe man and his empirical study commenced in
1800: beneath the curliques and clauses, there is no other proposition.
This is not to say that it is mistaken, or wayward to point up the differences between the cogito of
Husserl and that of Descartes. It would, indeed, be naively ahistorical to regard transcendental
phenomenology as a simple continuation, or worse, completion of the Cartesian project, and to
thereby seal over the vast interregnum that separates the seventeenth century of the Meditations
from the twentieth century of Husserlian phenomenology. And it would be equally foolish to
suppose that the problems of the unthought that faced Descartes were of the same cast as those
confronting theories of consciousness today. Yet to question this continuity is not to erase the
wealth of irresistible similarities that persists: that both begin from the assumption that
consciousness is, and then proceed to ask what consciousness can determine of the conscious
being and its other; that Husserlian bracketing and Cartesian doubt both achieve a suspension of
the empirical through a reduction which seeks to establish the field of pure consciousness; that
eidetic intuition and clarity and distinctness, perform powerfully analogous functions in opening
consciousness to the apprehension of essential external forms. And, most decisively, it does not
prohibit the acceptance of differences far beyond those adduced by Foucault whilst articulating
them on the basis of revisionism. A revisionism, moreover, expressed in all its aberrant fidelity by
the founder of phenomenology himself: 'one might almost call transcendental phenomenology a
neo-Cartesianism, even though it is obliged—and precisely by its radical development of
Cartesian motifs—to reject nearly all the well-known doctrinal content of the Cartesian
philosophy'. 17
This inability to brook any degree of revisionism or influence outwith epistemi strikes at the heart
of The Order of Things. Since Foucault cannot contain the homologies between the Cartesian
cogito and the subjects of Kant and Husserl within a modest paradigm of essential conceptual
appurtenances (and no less essential historical differences), he is obliged to pursue drastic
strategies of dissociation. Phenomenology must be called an empirical science in order not to be
Cartesian, the cogito must be misread in terms of representationalism in order not to be Kantian.
These difficulties stem from archaeology's determination—at this stage—to promulgate absolutely
rigid, internally coherent and reciprocally exclusive historical/epistemic structures. During its
period of experimental development, the science of archaeology—like so many other emergent
methodologies—attempts to totalise its own inceptive operations. In order to stake its ground,
archaeology must refuse to confer, in whatever spirit of supersessive cooperation, with traditional
approaches to the history-writing of ideas, though, in so doing, it is led to remould that history in a
less persuasive way than if it had made certain concessions to conventional notions such as
influence, revision.
The phenomenological issue exemplifies these difficulties acutely. Foucault is, on the one hand,
contracted to review the phenomenological enterprise since it is the most splendid efflorescence
of the subject in the modern, anthropological era and, at the same time, a theory of
consciousness that is poised over the immense and threatening abyss of the unthought. The
phenomenological cogito is thus at the pinnacle of the anthropological episteme yet perched
before the greatest descent, thus speaking most acutely for the contradictory and hubristic
situation in which modern man discovers himself. However, the Cartesian inheritance unsettles
the very ground of the epistemic determinism upon which these beautiful and tenebrous
formulations rest. Particularly so here since the further we move into modernity the greater the
threat of Cartesianism becomes, a Cartesianism which can not only be taken up one hundred and
fifty years after its founding in the form of a transcendental subject of knowledge, but also
survives another century to be revived with Edmund Husserl. And these problems still further
compounded by the fact that Descartes also has some stake in Renaissance thought.
For Foucault, the Renaissance began in 1500 and ended in 1660. 1650, we recall, was not the
year Descartes was born but the year in which he died. If the epistemi are not vague conceptual