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

might be consistently and productively lodged within the archaeological description of the modern
episteme, does he follow a reading entirely ruinous to the requisite transindividuality of his
analyses?
As we have said, by this stage in his text, Foucault has written away almost all authority for the
contention that the figure of man is disappearing. Such a thesis would present enormous
difficulties to a methodology which had the full array of dialectical anticipation and teleology at its
disposal, but in a text which has legislated against seeing the structures, instabilities and general
tendencies of the past as indicative of the future configuration of knowledge, the redoubtable
problematics of prediction become still greater again.
The most convincing demonstration of the necessity of the disappearance of man will always be
that which exposes the contradictions and instabilities of the humanist discourse within which his
figure is constituted. And Foucault's account of the anthropological doubles moves a good way in
that direction. Yet it is here, precisely at the point where archaeology's counterhumanism is at its
strongest, that Foucault is compelled to forestall his analysis, to fudge the issue as to whether the
separation of man into distinct and incompatible characterisations does indeed prefigure the
arrival of a de-anthropologised episteme. Having forced himself into this corner, the figure of
Nietzsche proves of particular strategic significance to Foucault at this point. In grounding the
entire counterhumanist thrust of the last hundred years or so in the solitary persona of Nietzsche,
Foucault avoids the progressional series running from Marx through Nietzsche, Freud,
Heidegger, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, (Foucault)—a series which would strike at both the epistemic
and anti-teleological bases of archaeology. In order to consolidate his thesis, Foucault resorts to
a transepistemic author through whom he provides warrants for the death of man without
sacrificing the coherence and autonomy of the epistemi; the notion of a transepistemic author
possessing, as it will, the peculiar and tactical property of preserving the episteme whilst licensing
departures from its determinations. The valorisation of Nietzsche's discourse therefore belongs to
the same economy that has suppressed the Cartesian cogito. Nietzsche's premonitions preside
over the death of man in the same way as the deracination of the Cartesian influence ensures his
unique birth with Kant. And the question of the death of man is, as we know, inseparable from the
question of his birth: 'man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end'. (387)
The absence of Descartes facilitates the first proposition, the presence of Nietzsche motivates the
second. Indeed, as regards these two figures, the transindividual postulate of The Order of
Things collapses on both fronts. Descartes and Nietzsche attest—by counterpoint—to the
irresistibility of the author. The Cartesianism which Foucault denies can only be muffled not
silenced; the Nietzscheanism he espouses will not make itself heard without the voice of the
master.
This is neither the first, nor will it be the last time that Foucault will have recourse to Nietzsche in
this precursive and foundational manner. Throughout Foucault's writing life the name of Nietzsche
will always be one of the most important signposts for future work, the most significant point of
return for modern thought. In Madness and Civilization, Nietzsche is presented as the great
harbinger of the life of unreason, a modern hero who resists the 'gigantic moral imprisonment' of
Western rationality. 34 Even The Birth of the Clinic turns to Nietzsche at a crucial point in its
denouement.35 In a 'Preface to Transgression', transgression itself—the thought of a futurity of
which we can only glimpse the 'calcinated roots, . . . promising ashes'—is 'that form of thought to
which Nietzsche dedicated us from the beginning of his works and one which would be,
absolutely and in the same motion, a Critique and an Ontology, an understanding that
comprehends both finitude and being.'36 Indeed, this essay presents, in crystalline form, the
dominant thesis of The Order of Things:
Kant . . . ultimately relegated all critical investigations to an anthropological question; and
undoubtedly, we have subsequently interpreted Kant's action as the granting of an indefinite
respite to metaphysics, because dialectics substituted for the questioning of being and limits the
play of contradiction and totality. To awaken us from the confused sleep of dialectics and of
anthropology, we required the Nietzschean figures of tragedy, of Dionysus, of the death of God,
of the philosopher's hammer, of the Superman [Übermensch] approaching with the steps of a
dove, of the Return.37
Here again Foucault's attitude to Nietzsche is completely uncritical. It is assumed that Nietzsche
achieved his intention to break with the Kantian system, and that in so doing he opened up the