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

of necessity take place outside that arrangement of knowledge, but neither can it issue from the
vantage point of modernity, for Foucault would then be presenting not an understanding of the
deepest stratum of Classical thought, but a history of the present as it views the past; an
operation in which what are called the elements of Classical thought would be no more than
merely material for allegory, for a revaluation of how our modern habits of thought negotiate the
long distant past.
Moreover, and more worryingly still, the archaeological discourse of the modern episteme cannot
itself belong to the modern episteme, for then it could only speak for, and not about the rules of
formation for the anthropological arrangement. If it formed a part of the modern configuration, The
Order of Things would represent another monument to the anthropological era, to the discourse
on man, his destiny and ends. Kant writes of man as the end of all nature, Hegel of the end and
fulfilment of man as that mystical journey of mind toward itself in time, Marx of the simultaneous
dissolution and beatitude of man in classless society, Nietzsche of the übermensch, Husserl of an
ultimate intersubjectivity, Heidegger of the shepherd of being—there would then be no reason not
to see in Michel Foucault's thesis of the-death-of-man-as-the-end-of-man the latest instance of
the modern preoccupation with the eschatological horizons of humanity.59
Yet Foucault insists that this is not the case. Archaeology is a radical break with anthropologism,
it transgresses the limits of this era. What he does not say, however, is that in order to transgress
these limits, it must also transcend the formal conditions which dictate to all other discourses the
ground and limit of their possibility. The episteme must be described from the point of view of an
ideal exteriority. Only from a mystical and privileged continuum alterior to all epistemi can the
archaeologist range, circumscribe and re-present discursive history, and only from this place can
he proscribe its future. 60 Foucault is therefore always already in possession of the
transcendence which he bestows upon Nietzsche for in the last analysis, it is still Foucault who
purportedly has unique access to the true historical mission and significance of the Nietzschean
discourse, he who has ultimate powers of appropriation within an archaeology of the human
sciences which is all his own. His is the discourse of all discourses, the one site from which the
rules of formation of four centuries of writing can be revealed. Foucault therefore cannot avoid
becoming the author of his own text, and it is precisely the monumental and totalising nature of
that text which conspires to make the authority of the archaeologist unconscionably
problematic.61
The whole range of texts which make more modest or local claims, those which are avowedly
impressionistic, fictional or subjective will not imply transcendentally remote authors; rather such
a subject tends to arise from high philosophical or theoretical texts, particularly in the case of
texts which—like Foucault's, like Hegel's—attempt to tell the truth of history, for such a tale can
only be told from the annex of a pure distance, an ahistorical alterity. And where the problems of
ideal detachment are grave enough for Hegelian history, they are entirely calamitous for a text
which seeks to lay the ghost of the idealist subject. Prime amongst the ironies of Foucault's
project is that, even supposing that it had succeeded in its aim, history would still have been left
to depose the subject of archaeology. Foucault has little enough success in ousting those authors
whose influence he wished to deny. The one subject he could never in principle dislodge is
Michel Foucault.
Archaeology offered no ways around this dilemma. Whilst Hegelian history might attempt to
devolve its authority onto the world-animating Geist, in the archaeological science there can be
no such telos which could assume the burden of its historical narrative: history, in its ruptures, its
transformations, unfolds in the mind of the archaeologist, the mind which sees, recounts and
motivates the story of language, knowledge, the birth and disappearance of man. Foucault might
only have resisted becoming the transcendental subject of The Order of Things by inscribing his
text within the determinism it promulgates. As such, this would require Foucault to constitute the
archaeologist as a historical being responding to the circumstances of his day, on the
understanding that the past as he presents it is delivered sub specie modernus, and not from the
sanctity of an ideal omniscience. It would involve, that is, a situating of the speaker, an
engagement with his material and his times, a perspectivism in the Nietzschean sense. 62 Yet to
have done so would have been to admit the impossibility of there ever existing anything like an
archaeology of the human sciences as The Order of Things construes this mission.
Ironically, however, it is as a historical document rather than as the text of documentary history