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

Foucault the precise date of parturition is also essential. Since, if man were as old as Descartes,
if man dwelt where he did not (archaeologically) belong, what is to prevent him from
perpetuating? If he lived before the last flood, how are we to know that he will not survive the
next? Epistemic seclusion, epistemic coherence is—at this stage—all that indicates that man will
disappear; and this seclusion is purchased at the price of the vigilant suppression of anything that
could be called Cartesianism. It is for the same reason that there is no archaeological space for
David Hume's still-radical proposal that the idea of the self has no epistemological foundation and
denotes at best a mere consecution of sensations: for between Descartes and Hume, the birth
and death of the subject of knowledge would seem to have been rehearsed long before man-assubject
is supposed to have come into being in the first place. 21 And as the counterhumanist
theme comes more and more to dominate The Order of Things, Foucault shows himself strangely
willing to sacrifice the corollary principle that no author can transcend epistemic determinations.
To what end? That of man. The Founder Of Futurity
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as
when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it
will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any
literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and
condemned . . . The things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas
which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things as a
tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionise the entire system of
human pursuits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson 22
'I have come too early', he then said, 'I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still
on its way, and is travelling . . . '
Friedrich Nietzsche23
In a text which purports to be written neither by a subject, nor about subjects, who or what
motivates its narrative, stands authority for its claims? By what means might such a text propose
or dispose at all? How, indeed, is it possible for that text to say or do anything? And who or what,
in this particular case, might narrate or author the death of man?
In an article entitled 'The Subject of Archaeology or the Sovereignty of the episteme', David
Carroll contends that The Order of Things is in fact organised around a subject, that in eliminating
the subject, Foucault is led to make of the episteme itself a transcendental subject.24 As Carroll
sees it, the episteme is a presence, a consciousness, the constitutive ground of all events, and
the encapsulation of 'pure experience'. Carroll's demonstration is saline, persuasive and
perspicacious. It draws out the futility of dethroning one sovereignty only to coronate another in its
stead. However, two points are neglected, and indeed must be neglected in this demonstration.
Firstly, within Foucault's analysis of modernity, the idea of the death of man has no less claim to
sovereignty. Why else should Foucault regularly reiterate the necessity of this theme when it has
no place within the modern episteme? Why not be content to simply describe the modern
arrangement of knowledge without prolepsis or prophecy? Secondly, The Order of Things does
contain a subject in the traditional sense, a subject to whom, moreover, is accredited a
sovereignty rare in any history of modern thought. The central dilemma facing Foucault in his
account of modernity is to find support for the theme of the death of man. That the death of man
is a desideratum we can have no doubt. Foucault makes this very clear on numerous occasions.
As one example among many:
To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still
ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as
their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all
knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalise without
anthropologising, who refuse to mythologise without demystifying, who refuse to think without
immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of
reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh—which means, to a certain extent, a
silent one. (342–3)
However, it is not for nothing that the archaeologist answers with a laugh, and a laugh that must
be 'to a certain extent a silent one', for while archaeology might have drawn Foucault to the
conclusion that man must soon disappear, it has also generated significant obstacles to the