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

abstractions but, as The Order of Things everywhere insists, firmly anchored historical units, then
Descartes, as a matter of historical and archaeological necessity, belongs to the Renaissance
and his thought—in so far as it is Classical—will therefore again be premonitory and precocious.
18 The author of the cogito, as critic of scholastic resemblance, as Classical rationalist, as
harbinger of the Age of Man, would then impinge upon each and every one of the epistemi. Were
this not ominous enough, there are further reasons why Cartesianism must be repelled.
For one—though this may seem somewhat incidental—the autobiographical framework within
which the cogito is elaborated would pose certain problems for Foucault. The Meditations
requires that for the time of the demonstration the reading subject insert himself into the
Cartesian biography, that he follow Descartes in his quest of certainty, that he sit within that
uncertain body by that uncertain fire and confront the evil demon. As Descartes suggests, the
trials and triumphs of the Meditations are experiences which the reader must make his own. And
indeed it is this purely autobiographical structure—which is the structure also of the Discourse on
Method—that delivers the cogito from the brink of solipsism. If the reading subject installs himself
within the meditating subject, if he becomes Cartesian, then the cogito effectively declares 'I think,
therefore we exist'. While the cogito is true for Descartes, then it is also true for anyone who
wishes to faithfully participate in its unfolding. And that an inalienably autobiographical act should
become the founding act of the sciences of consciousness, this is an archetype that archaeology
can scarcely afford to acknowledge. Jacques Derrida asks of Freud and psychoanalysis: 'how
can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give to a worldwide
institution its birth?' 19 A similar question could be put to Descartes and the sciences of the
subject.
Moreover, in lodging the philosophical dissertation within an autobiographical narrative,
Descartes was not propagating an eccentric or eclectic mode. To the contrary, he was writing
within a well-established discursive tradition, one which not only found monumental expression in
the Essays of Montaigne, but informed the whole host of mémoires that appeared in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. This phenomenon, or discursive field, cannot (archaeologically or
otherwise) be detached from the post-Medieval insurgence of interest in man, in bringing
scientific and philosophical knowledge into harmony with personal experience and practical
conduct. It also coincides with the seminally ethnological studies to be found in the records of
generals, missionaries and explorers, an ethnologism which appears in Descartes' own work,
particularly in this 'Second Discourse'. This is a rich area for archaeological delving, one which we
might have expected Foucault to excavate. However, within the economy of The Order of Things,
to do so would involve opening the very issue of Renaissance humanism which the text is
determined to bypass.20
But the most serious threat that Descartes poses to The Order of Things concerns the death of
man, for which his birth is perhaps only a preparation. If the ground of knowledge can only be
changed by a sudden, seismic upheaval which entirely evacuates the previous episteme and
provides the clearing for its successor, then the death of man—as the event that attends the
close of the modern episteme—can only occur in like fashion. Just as man had no precedent in
the Classical episteme, so too he will be irretrievably lost to futurity like a prisoner trapped in a
forgotten tower. Even at the end of the text, when this point has been spelled out again and
again, Foucault still deems it necessary to stress that the appearance of man
was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old
concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and
philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the
archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps
nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of
which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what
its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical
thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be
erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (387)
We cannot know how, when, or why the next cataclysm will take place, but we can 'certainly
wager', and wager, too, with a quiet certainty, what its outcome will be. And on the basis of what?
Of man's absolute absence before 1800, of his absolutely unique arrival with the modern
episteme. As with all deaths, birth is the first, the necessary, and the sufficient condition, but with