Epistemes and the History of Being

Michael Schwartz

The question o f the essence o f know ledge is, everywhere an d alw ays, already a thinking pro ject o f the essence o f m an an d his position w ithin beings, as w ell a s a pro jection o f these beings them selves.

— M artin H eidegger, N ietzsche, vol. 3 , The Will to Pow er as K now ledge a n d a s M etaphysics

Foucault was explicit in his last interviews that for him Heidegger was “ an overwhelming influence,” 1 “ the essential philosopher” who deter­mined his “ entire philosophical developm ent.” 2 Yet he never wrote an

article, let alone a book, about Heidegger; and his published remarks about the thinker who determined his entire philosophical develop­ment are few and brief. N or are Heideggerian themes self-evident in his writings. If we take Foucault at his word about his philosophical roots, we are left to unearth and explicate the Heideggerian dimensions o f his thought.5

One of the major books in Foucault’s oeuvre is his 1966 study The Order o f Things. As a number of commentators have noted, Foucault’s history o f epistemes has strong affinities with the unfolding o f epochs in the history of Being.4 To put the matter coarsely, both narrate stages in the rise and subsequent decentering o f representation in Western European culture. But even if the content and storyline o f the two

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projects are very close, this leaves unexamined their respective theo­retical orientations. For w hat is an episteme? And how does its level o f analysis stand with regard to that o f the history o f Being? In what follow s I address these issues, limiting m yself to the task o f bringing to light Foucault’s critical encounter with Heidegger in The Order o f Things. I stress those texts o f Heidegger's that Foucault would most likely have know'n, and offer abundant citation to demonstrate Fou­cault’s appropriation and critical reworking o f the history o f Being. The present essay is com m entarial, its approach intertextual.

The Order of Things, as I hope to show, subscribes to H eidegger’s claim that knowledge and science have become prim ary determinants o f existence:

The question of knowledge as such, and of science in particular, is now to assume priority, not only because “ science” determines our most proper area of work, but above all because knowledge and knowing have attained an essential power within Western history. “ Science" is not simply one field of “ cultural” activity among others; science is a fundamental power in that confrontation by dint of which Western man is related to beings and asserts himself in their midst.'

As expounded here in the 19 6 1 Nietzsche volumes (with com parable remarks having appeared in essays and books published earlier), this thesis would have especially interested Foucault, whose archaeologi­cal projects from the History o f Madness onward were engagements with and within the tradition o f the French history and philosophy of science.h It is a thesis that could only have reinforced Foucault’s sense of the importance of writing a history o f epistemes.

Yet, the two thinkers do not proceed to address the question of knowledge in quite the same manner. Heidegger’s philosophical “ step back” allowed him to survey the regional sciences and their m etaphys­ical groundings while still sounding the question o f Being. As we shall see, Foucault, for his part, brackets the Being question and dives more deeply into the epistemic details o f first-order scientific inquiry, there­by challenging basic Heideggerian assumptions— even as The Order of Things w ould have been impossible without the history of Being as its model.

EpistemeTow ard the end o f the original 19 6 6 preface to The Order o f Things, Foucault explains that

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the present study is, in a sense, an echo o f m y undertaking to w rite a h istory o f m adn ess in the C lassical age; it h as the sam e articu lations in tim e, takin g the end o f the R en aissan ce as its starting-poin t, then encountering, at the beginning o f the nineteenth century, just as my history o f m adn ess did , the threshold o f a m odernity that we have not yet left behind. But w hereas in the history o f m adn ess 1 w as in­vestigating the w ay in which a culture can determ ine in a m assive, general form the difference that lim its it, I am concerned here with observing how a culture experiences the prop in quity o f things, how it establishes the tabu la o f their relation sh ips and the order by which they m ust be considered. I am concerned, in short, w ith a history ol resem blance. . . . The history o f m adn ess w ould be ] then] the history o f the O ther . . . w hereas the history o f the order im posed on things w ould be the h istory o f the sam e— o f that w hich, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities.

Foucault is here correlating The Order o f Things to his earlier study, the History o f Madness ( 19 6 1) . Both operate with the same periodi­zation o f Renaissance, classical, and modern ages; but whereas the History o f Madness explores “ the limit-experience o f the Other, ” s The Order of Things is concerned with a culture’s sense o f order. Foucault explains that this sense of order is governed by an a priori of resem­blance that is specific to a particular period, hence it is a “ historical a priori.” y And in The Order o f Things, this historical a priori of resem­blance constitutes an episteme: that “ epistemological field . . . in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its ra ­tional value or to its objective form s, grounds its positivity and there­by manifests a history which is not that o f its [know ledge’s] grow ing perfection, but rather that of its [historical! conditions of possibili­ty." 10 Foucault’s book explicates the successive configurations o f this field since the Renaissance.

The Order o f Tilings is accordingly an unconventional history o f knowledge. It inspects not so much the accumulated bodies o f know l­edge as it brings to light the historically changing conditions o f such knowledge. Further, inasmuch as the a priori o f resemblance coordi­nates the propinquity of identities for a given culture, Foucault m ain­tains that an episteme “ makes manifest the modes of being of order.” 1 1 In The Order of Things, knowing is understood to be inextricably woven with and disclosive o f modes o f being.

It is here instructive to recall that Fleidegger, in several passages in his writings from the 19 3 0 s onward, took up discussion o f the ancient

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Greek notion of episteme (especially in its resonance with pbysis).1- In “ The Question Concerning Technology,” he explains that

From earliest tim e until Plato the w ord tecbne is linked with the w ord epistem e. Both w ords are nam es for kn o w in g in the w idest sense. They m ean to be entirely at hom e in som ething, to understand and be expert in it. Such know ing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealin g .1!

Heidegger is retrieving what he takes to be the ontological import o f know ing, forgotten in modern metaphysical construals o f a subject representing an already constituted object-sphere, but sedimented in the ancient Greek understanding of knowing as involved with the “ event” of Being itself. This view o f episteme, as an opening up that is a revealing, complements H eidegger’s questioning o f the truth of Being and his creative retrievals o f the terms o f ancient Greek aletheia— truth-as-the-unconcealing-of-beings. M etaphysical versions o f truth and knowledge, Heidegger argues, alw ays forget Being in concentrat­ing on beings. By reviving what he takes to be the ancient Greek un­derstandings of truth-as-a/i?/7; m and know ing-as-episteme, Heidegger is striving to deepen and "overcom e” (Verwindung) our epistemologi- cal habits of thought, pressing metaphysics beyond its reified assum p­tions toward the question o f Being itself.14

N ot only does Heidegger retrieve episteme as a knowing that re­veals beings, articulating w hat the conjunction of knowing and being could mean in The Order of Things, but he also— to sound once again the terms of Foucault's phrasing— theorizes Being as an a priori that preordinates the likeness and equality am ong beings. Once again crea­tively drawing upon Greek deliberations, Heidegger advances that:

E quality already unfolds essentially in the unconcealed; likeness “ i s ” before we, with our perceiving, explicitly view, observe, and indeed con sider like things as like. In ou r com po rtm en t tow ard s sim ilar things, equality has a lready com e into view in ad van ce. E quality , Being-alike, as Being— that is, as presence in the un con cealed— is w hat stan ds essentially in view, and in such a w ay that it first brings “ v iew " and “ the o p en ” with it, holds them open, and grants visibili­ty o f sim ilar b e in gs.1'

Being is an a priori because in the Opening o f Being, similarities among beings alw ays already shme forth.

Heidegger goes on to elucidate that this “ a priori, when rightly conceived as the previous /Vor-herigel, first reveals its time-ly essence

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in a more profound sense o f ‘tim e,’ which our contem poraries do

not presently wish to see, because they do not see the concealed es­sential connection between Being and T im e.” 16 This more profound sense of “ tim e” is, for Heidegger, bound up with history— not his­

tory in the sense o f a chronology o f events and happenings, but his­tory as the previous itself, as the opening, as that which regions.1, H ei­degger contends that “ H istory as Being— indeed, as com ing from the essence o f Being itself— remains unthought.” 18 Up until now “ H egel’s

history of philosophy is the only philosophical history heretofore, and it will remain the only one until philosophy is forced to think

historically— in a still more essential and original sense o f that w ord— taking its own most grounding question [i.e., “ w hat is Being itself?” ]

as its point o f departure.” 14 H eidegger’s answer to think historv-as- Being is Semsgeschichte. The a priori, conceived as the previous, would not be then for Heidegger a constant. Likenesses among beings would have a history.

It would seem that Foucault makes this thought-path the explicit project o f The Order o f Things, conjoining the trope o f “ Being as

the a priori o f likeness” to that of “ H istory as Being” to advance the

study’s guiding notion o f a “ historical a priori o f resem blance.” He takes up Heidegger’s retrieval of ancient episteme as a knowing-that- reveals, only to recast it so that episteme is now to be construed as the

historical conditions o f knowledge that exhibit the mode o f being o f order, with this order coming forth via the a priori of resemblance. Although Foucault never said as much, the principal terms o f investi­gation in The Order o f Things are decidedly Heideggerian.

F>en Foucault’s construal o f the relation between the w ho and what o f knowing finds its precedent in Heidegger, for whom the human knower and the to-be-known are not substantive entities, not ontic

constants, but relata that are determined by the relatans o f knowing:

Form ally viewed, know ing consists in the relation o f a know er to w hat is know ahlc and know n. Yet this relation does not lie som e­w here indifferently hv itself, like the relation o f a felled tree trunk in the forest to a rock lying nearby, a relation we m ay or m ay not com e across. The relation that distinguishes know ing is alw ays the one in which we ourselves are related, and this relation vibrates through out our basic posture. Th is basic posture expresses itself in the w ay we take beings and ob jects in advan ce, in the w ay w e have determ ined w hat is decisive in our relation to them .211

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And as articulated a few pages later in the same Nietzsche lecture:

[F ]or w hat is kn o w able and w hat kn ow s are each determ ined in their essence in a unified w ay from the sam e essential groun d. We m ay not separate either one, nor wish to encounter them separately. K now ing is not like a bridge that som ehow subsequently connects tw o existent b an ks o f a stream , but is itself a stream that in its flow first creates the banks and turns them to w ard each other in a m ore orig inal w ay than a bridge ever co u ld .21

For Heidegger knowing does not connect an already existent knower to an already existent entity-to-be-known, but is w hat constitutes these

poles in the first place. Stated in terms o f the history o f Being, the who and w hat o f know ing are epochally corevealed in the unconcealing w ithdraw al of Being.

There would thus be a history o f the human knower whose char­acter would be determined in advance by a given culture’s mode of

knowing. The Order of Things takes up this theme. In the Renaissance, knowing is the recognition o f the similitudes, with the knower consti­tuted as a designator or interpreter who traces and outlines the corre­

spondences already laid out in G od ’s created w orld. In the classical episteme, knowing is the representation o f tables o f identities and d if­ferences, with the knower constituted as a subject who grounds the representations that it presents to itself in reestablishing the order o f things. And in the modern episteme, the figure of M an emerges as both the knower and what prim arily is to be known, as both the sub­ject and object o f knowledge, with M an ’s representations now finding their deeper conditions in life, labor, and language, as these facets of

existence are disclosed in new modalities o f knowledge. The proce­dures of knowing proper to each of the epistemes determine the char­acter o f the knower.

From the notion o f an episteme as the historical a priori o f re­semblance to the positing o f the ways o f knowing as prior to and de­ciding the character o f the human knower, Foucault’s project in The O rder of Things is decisively Heideggerian. And yet— and this must

be stressed, due to Foucault’s great indebtedness to Heidegger— there are subtle and im portant differences between their two philosophical histories. Contained in The Order o f Things, I shall attempt to show, is an unannounced critique o f the history o f Being that is in part em­powered by turning Heidegger against Heidegger.

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Science and Philosophical ReflectionIn the preface to The Order of Things, there is a long paragraph that is central to Foucault’s self-understanding o f his project. I quote it in its entirety:

The fundam ental codes o f a culture— those governing its lan guage, its schem as o f perception , its exch anges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy o f its p ractices— establish for every m an, from the very first, the em pirical orders with which he will be dealing and within w hich he will be at hom e. At the other extrem ity o f thought, there are the scientific theories or the ph ilo soph ica l in terpretations which exp la in w hy order exists in general, w hat universal law it obeys, w hat principle can accoun t for it, and w hy this particu lar order has been established and not som e other. But between these tw o regions, so distant from one another, lies a dom ain w hich, even though its role is m ainly an interm ediary one, is nonetheless fundam ental: it is m ore con fused , m ore obscu re , and p rob ab ly less easy to analyze. It is here that a culture, im perceptibly deviating from the em pirical orders prescribed for it by its prim ary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relin­quishes its im m ediate and invisible pow ers, frees itse lf sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possib le ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there ex ists, below the level o f its spon tan eou s orders, things that are in them selves cap ab le o f being ordered , that belong to a cer­tain u n spoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists. As though em an cipatin g itself to som e extent from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grid s, the culture superim posed on them another kind o f grid which neutralized them , which by this su perim position both revealed and excluded them at the sam e tim e, so that the culture, by this very process, cam e face to face with order in its prim ary state. It is on the basis o f this newly perceived order that the codes o f lan­gu age, perception , and practice are criticized and rendered partia lly invalid. It is on the basis o f this order, taken as a firm foun dation , that general theories as to the ordering o f things, and the in terpreta­tion that such an ordering involves, will be constructed. T hus, be­tween the already “ en cod ed” eye and the reflexive know ledge there is a m iddle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it a p ­pears, accord in g to the culture and the age in question , continuous and g rad u ated or d iscon tin uous an d piecem eal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force o f tim e, related to a series o f variab les o r defined by separate system s o f coherences, com posed o f resem blances which are either successive or correspon d­ing, organized arou n d increasing differences, etc. T h is m iddle region, then, in so far as it m akes m anifest the m odes o f being o f order, can

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be posited as the m ost fundam ental o f all: anterior to w ords, percep­tions, and gestures, which are then taken to be m ore or less exact, m ore or less happy, expression s o f it (which is why this experience o f order in its pure prim ary state alw ays plays a critical role); m ore solid , m ore archaic, less du b ious, alw ays m ore “ tru e” than the theo­ries that attem p t to give those exp re ssio n s exp lic it form , e x h au s­tive ap p lication , or ph ilosophical foun dation . T h u s, in every culture, between the use o f w hat one m ight call the ordering codes and re­flections upon order itself, there is the pure experience o f order and its m odes o f being. The present study is an attem pt to analyze that experien ce.”

Foucault is not positing here “ regions o f thought” as proper to a fac­ulty psychology or a transcendental subjectivity, nor does “ regions” refer to the arrangement of social spaces where modes of thinking take place. Flere “ regions” (perhaps echoing the phenom enological notion o f “ regional ontologies” ) conjures a spatial metaphor about the interrelationships among a culture’s w ays o f understanding and know ­ing, especially as these pertain to that culture’s sense o f order.

There are three basic regions. The most immediate is where the codes o f everyday life manifest a spontaneous but provisional and revisable empirical order. At the other pole is the highest region o f thought, philosophical reflection as well as generalizing scientific theo­ries like physics, which attempt to “ explain w hy order exists in gener­a l.” But what interests Foucault most is the “ middle region,” which “ liberates order itself.” Foucault contends that “ in so far as this jmid- dle] region makes manifest the modes o f being o f order, [itj can be posited as the most fundamental of all; anterior to words, perceptions and gestures, which are then taken to be more or less exact, more or less happy, expressions o f it .” “ A nterior” as an attribute o f this region shifts the figurative register from the spatial to the tem poral. The middle region is “ spatially” between the other tw o regions but also “ tem porally” prior, because it governs their sense of order.

“ Anterior to w ords, perceptions, and gestures,” the middle region is presym bolic. Its most direct expression is that region o f thought concerned with resemblance and “ closest” to it (perhaps to be under­stood as this middle region’s overlay), namely, the nongeneralizing sci­ences such as natural history, biology, and economics. These sciences produce bodies o f knowledge that revise the sense o f order operative in the everyday realm— which is how, in Foucault’s understanding, the sciences constitute and orient our w ays o f existence. The particular

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sciences therefore receive the greatest measure of attention in The Order o f Things. But this does not exclude other regions o f thought from consideration. For in its attempt to explain a culture’s sense of order, the highest region reflects upon and gives indication of this order. It is telling, then, that Foucault does not, as would the tradition­al philosopher, take up residence in this highest region, so to view the mode o f being of order from above, but as archaeologist goes beneath hath these regions of knowing, science and reflection, to ascertain their common ground in the episteme.

It is o f particular note, then, that this line o f inquiry was antici­pated by Heidegger in his third Nietzsche lecture. As he explains:

To he ab le to carry ou t m etaphysical reflection concerning his field, the scientific researcher m ust therefore tran spose h im self into a fun­dam entally different kind o f thinking; he m u st becom e fam iliar with the insight that this reflection on his field is som eth ing essentially different from a m ere broadening o f the kind o f thinking otherw ise practiced in research, whether that broadening be in degree and scope, in generalization , or even in w hat he sees as a degeneration . H o w ­ever, the dem and for an essentially different thinking for reflection on a particu lar field does not signify regu lation o f the sciences by ph ilosophy but, on the contrary, recognition o f the higher k n o w l­edge concealed in every science, on which the w orth o f that science rests..........Science an d reflection on the specific fields are both h istori­cally groun ded on the actu al dom inance o f a particu lar in terpreta­tion of Being , an d they a lw ays m ove in the dom inant circle o f a p a r ­ticular conception o f the essence o f truth.11

In other words, for Heidegger the interpretation of Being of a given epoch grounds both the regional sciences and reflection upon those sciences. Similarly, for Foucault, an episteme opens the space for and governs the local sciences and philosophical reflection, with both these regions of thought registering the middle region’s presymbolic experi­ence of order.

In essays like the “ Age o f the World Picture” and “ Science and R eflection ,” Heidegger shows how the interpretation of Being of an epoch grounds sciences as diverse as physics, historiography, and linguistics, developing probing and insightful analyses o f the proce­dures and metaphysical assumptions o f these areas of inquiry.24 Yet in comparison to Foucault, he does not advance detailed analyses o f the sciences he discusses. Although he devotes entire lecture courses to thinkers such as Nietzsche and Hölderlin, Heidegger never would do

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so for any figure o f a regional science, nor for any modern scientific discipline. Heidegger clearly privileges philosophical and poetic think­ing over first-level scientific research, envisioning philosophy as the more difficult and greater task: “ The transition from scientific think­ing to metaphysical reflection is essentially more alien and thus more difficult than the transition from prescientific, everyday thinking to the kind o f thinking we do in the sciences. The transition to meta­physics is a leap. The transition to science is a steady development of earlier determinations of an already existing w ay of representing.” 25 This leap, moreover, is an ascension, philosophy assuming a “ high a l­titude” stance, as suggested in m any Heideggerian texts, like the fo l­lowing from the first Nietzsche lecture:

In ph ilosoph y the Being o f beings is to be thought. For ph ilo soph y ’s thinking and questionin g there is no loftier and stricter com m itm ent.In con trast, all the sciences chink alw ays only o f one being am on g others, one particu lar region o f beings. They are com m itted by this region o f beings only in an indirect m anner, never straigh tforw ard ly so. Because in ph ilosoph ical thought the highest com m itm ent pre­vails, all great thinkers think the sam e .26

Philosophy’s thinking and questioning are defined as the loftiest, as the highest commitment. In Foucault’s scheme, this locates philosophy in thought’s highest region, enabling generalizing reflection by estab­lishing a certain distance from what is to be reflected. Heidegger, o f course, sees this stance less in terms of traditional notions of reflection and instead as what facilitates our most immediate receptivity and at- tunement to Being.27 Although claiming that both science and reflec­tion (Besinnung) on science are grounded in a com mon interpretation o f Being, and while, in at least one instance, interjecting that even the great thinkers are influenced by “ contem poraries and traditions,” 28 Heidegger focuses on those thinkers he views as having attuned to Being. His “ step back” eschews nitty-gritty analysis o f the regional sciences and their procedural nuances, because thinkers do not, like scientists, study “ one being among others,” but attune to Being itself, disclosing the interpretation o f Being that underwrites each and every scientific discipline.

Viewed in light o f Foucault’s model o f regions, however, Heideg­ger’s approach appears one-sided, privileging higher-level reflection to the exclusion o f more detailed and sustained exam ination o f the local sciences, which for Foucault constitute the region of thought that im ­

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pacts most directly on the everyday experience o f order. Heidegger as­sumes that the thought of the great thinkers of the tradition subsumes

and grounds that o f the scientist; Foucault, while mindful of philo­sophical reflection, sees the regional sciences as the surest access to the middle region’s sense o f order. As he exclaim s: “ Only those who can­not read will be surprised that I have learned such things [about m od­

ern thinking and its problematics] more clearly from Cuvier, Bopp, and Ricardo than from Kant and H egel.” 29 Foucault’s archaeology lo­cates itself below science and reflection, broadening its approach as com pared to what it takes to be the elevated and one-sided stance o f philosophy.

All o f this, I want to propose, is for Foucault a criticism o f the his­tory of Being, which concerns itself exclusively with those great thinkers w ho purportedly attune to Being. Foucault w ould seem to be taking up a line o f thought inaugurated by Heidegger— that both science and philosophy share a common ground— only to reformulate it as a cri­tique of the high-mindedness o f the history o f Being.30

Two Kinds of PhilosophyThe Order o f Things, I am suggesting, rewrites the history o f Being as

an epistemic history o f the experience o f order. Although Foucault draw s heavily upon Heidegger in form ulating the very notion o f an episteme and its ontological import, he critically reworks his source material. There is at least one text in which this critical encounter with

Heidegger finds more explicit expression, an interview titled “ W hat Is a Philosopher?” from 19 6 6 , the same year as the publication o f The Order o f Things. Foucault concludes the interview with the following:

We can envisage, m oreover, tw o kinds o f ph ilosoph er: the kind w ho open s up new avenues o f thought, such as H eidegger, and the kind w ho in a sense p lays the role o f an arch aeo logist, studying the space in which thought un fo lds, as well as the conditions o f that thought, its m ode o f con stitu tion .31

As brief as these rem arks are, they can, in light o f our findings, prove extremely helpful in understanding Foucault’s envisioning o f the sta­tus of his archaeological project in The Order o f Things and its rela­tion to Heidegger.

First, we need to note that there is a meaningful symmetry of pre­sentation made between the philosopher w ho founds a new path o f

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thought, as exem plified by Heidegger, and the philosopher as archae­ologist, implicitly Foucault himself, who studies and defines the space and conditions of thought. This parallelism o f presentation suggests that these two projects are in some w ay complementary, com parable, or analogous. Second, we need once again to pay heed to Foucault’s spatial m etaphors— that one mode o f philosophizing opens a new path o f thought, hence is trailblazing, while the other maps the space o f thinking, with the implication that as a broader project defining the conditions o f modern thought in general, archaeology would map the terrain in which the original philosopher forges her path. In other w ords, H eidegger’s history o f Being opens up a new avenue of think­ing, with archaeology taking up this path, extending and broadening its contours, so to circumscribe the space o f modern thinking, includ­ing the avenue o f thought that was its departure site. A rchaeology in­vestigates the wider grounds— the epistemic space— in which not only the regional sciences, but also philosophy take their p lace.52

Although the history o f epistemes is a rewriting of the history of being and is impossible w ithout the latter project as its model, it would seem to understand itself as accounting for the space of modern thought in which Heidegger travels. And, to be sure, Foucault’s de­lineation o f the modern episteme can be interpreted as locating some o f the fundamental questions and topics o f the history o f Being within the wider space o f modern concerns. Three themes stand out.

First, Heidegger takes the thought/unthought trope to be proper to the lineages of great thinkers since antiquity. The history o f Being is constructed from those thinkers, those philosophers and poets, who have attuned to Being so that Being speaks through them. In addition, each thinker, in thinking Being, also deposits an unthought to her own thinking, an unthought that only a subsequent great thinker can bring to light. Foucault, in turn, acknowledges that one m ay indeed think the unthought, but counters that it is a mode o f knowing proper and internal to the modern episteme. The modern gap between the “ I think” and the " I am ," he maintains, necessitates that every act o f thinking the unthought— thinking Being, so to speak— can never eliminate this gap, leaving what is newly thought with its own unthought condi­tions. Furthermore, this movement o f thought is by no means re­stricted to Heidegger’s canon of “ great thinkers,” but is common to both philosophers and regional investigators. From this vantage point, not only would focusing on the great thinkers unnecessarily delimit

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discussion and analysis o f an episteme, but the scenario of a “ com m u­nity” o f great thinkers who, by transcending epochal confines, think the unthought of each other, is to misconstrue what is properly the movement o f both philosophical and scientific-regional thought with­in (or at least with regard to) the space of the modern episteme. Fou­cault's implicit criticism would be that Heidegger misplaces and pro­jects the thought/unthought trope too broadly onto Western history as a whole.

A second critical point aims at the heart of Heidegger’s project— at the presumed loftiness o f the Being question. For Heidegger, philos­ophy has alw ays been addressing, if never explicitly asking, certain principal questions. In the first o f the Nietzsche lectures, he distin­guishes between the guiding and the grounding questions of Western philosophy.'4 The guiding question, which philosophy has periodi­cally asked, has been: “ W hat is the being?” But the deeper, grounding question of philosophy, never explicitly broached by philosophy, hence philosophy’s own founding radical unthought, is: “ W hat is Being it­self?” Heidegger’s task is to disclose this radical and founding un­thought o f philosophy, since with “ the question of the essence o f Being we are inquiring in such a w ay that nothing remains outside the ques­tion, not even nothingness.” 35

Foucault concurs that, at least for us moderns, being has become a principal issue. He even goes so far as to contend that in post-Kantian thinking the question o f being has displaced the question of truth .’ 6 But this is not the same as claiming that being questions have been the unstated backdrop of the tradition all along. That is to say, given the modern episteme, we today may be compelled to ask questions o f being— as with Foucault’s own seeking o f the mode of being of order— but this is not identical to ascribing that question to the suppressed, unthought, or implicit concern o f past ages. M oreover, whereas H ei­degger sees the grounding question of philosophy as alw ays having been “ W hat is Being itself?” Foucault sees the gap between the “ I think” and the “ I am ” that characterizes the modern cogito as leading “ to a whole series o f questions concerned writh being,” 37 not to one com manding question grasped as the unthought, forgotten, or hidden thematic o f the tradition of thought since antiquity.

Third, if to repeat what others have already noted, Foucault would seem to implicate Heidegger's history o f Being as falling into the im­pulsion o f the retreat and return of the orig in .,s Heidegger does often

1 76 Michael Schwartz

seem at various turns in his writing o f the history o f Being to posit an origin or beginning to the metaphysical tradition, even if this be­ginning is plural and dispersed among various ancient thinkers. The Foucault o f The Order of Things, however, is skeptical about all at­tempts to locate a historical origin, since with ongoing research an even earlier origin will readily come to light, subverting the founda­tional and essentializing intent o f the priorly posited origin. By seek­ing to locate in ancient philosophy the origins of metaphysics— where metaphysics is construed as founding the nihilistic trajectory of Western history—Seinsgeschichte would fall into this self-deluding movement o f modern thinking.

In sum, Foucault’s presentation o f the modern episteme can be in­terpreted as accounting for the space in which questions and themes basic to H eidegger’s history o f Being take their place. By situating m ajor tropes o f the history o f Being in its broader epistemic context, Foucault implies that there is overstatement and a self-imposed nar­rowness to the Heideggerian project, that Heidegger tends to project specifically modern conditions o f thinking and questioning onto West­ern thought all along.

The Order of Things understands itself as presenting the epis­temic context o f Heidegger’s thought. And yet, if Foucault’s own ar­chaeological project is an extension and expansion o f the Heidegger­ian path, how does archaeology stand in the modern episteme? W hat, in short, w ould be the conditions of possible knowledge that would enable one to write a history o f epistemes?

Archaeology’s UnthoughtTo be sure, nowhere in The Order o f Things does Foucault broach the issue o f how as a whole his version o f philosophical history fits into the epistemic space o f modern thought. He does assert in several pas­sages that his pursuit of specific topics has been made possible by m odernity’s epistemological field. M ost notably, he acknowledges that the questions he raises about the relation between the being o f M an and the being of language are proper to our times.39 But beyond Fou­cault’s own testimony, there are several w ays that the archaeological project can be seen as conform ing to the current episteme.

First, Foucault’s archaeology o f the human sciences is a historical inquiry, so can be grasped as finding its governance in the modern episteme’s generative trope of H istory (2 18 -2 0 ) . Second, as a mode of

Epistemes and the History o f Being 177

philosophical inquiry as well, archaeology can be seen as operating as the M em ory that “ lead[s] thought back to the question o f knowing what it means for thought to have a history,” accom plishing this by unearthing the historical conditions o f knowing and thinking since the Renaissance (2 19 -2 0 ) . Third , Foucault’s study attempts to disclose the unthought that makes the thought o f a historical culture possible, a line o f investigation that takes up the modern episteme’s trope o f thinking the unthought (but without assuming that this trope is inter­nal to premodern procedures of knowing). And fourth, Foucault’s ar­chaeology, in seeking to lay bare the mode o f being o f order, asks an ontological question that as such is properly modern.

Yet despite apparent conform ity to the modern episteme, the ar­chaeological project edges beyond the space o f thinking that it maps. For exam ple, historical inquiry, as proper to the modern episteme, analyzes empiricities as organic structures that perform a function, where these organic structures form a chronological series based on analogies, thereby constituting an “ evolutionary” history. But an epis­teme is surely not an empiricity. And as the condition o f possible knowledge, it is difficult to fathom what it would mean for an epis­teme to be an organic structure that is functional in a w ay com parable to, say, a microbe. N or does archaeology chart a series o f historical constellations o f knowing that can be seen as “ evolving” over time, which would point to some kind of progress in or direction to Reason, contrary to Foucault’s own assessment o f his project.40

Perhaps most pertinent is that archaeology is conducted in The O rder o f Things at the sam e time as history and philosophy. But, then, as a philosophical history concerned with disclosing the se­quence of epistemes since the Renaissance, how could archaeology— as philosophy— situate itself in the space between history and History, so to function as the M em ory o f thought’s history, if it, too, is a histo­ry? This seeming conundrum is just one w ay of noting that The Order o f Things never defines the specific epistemic conditions o f archaeolo­g y ’s status as a new form o f philosophical history. But then should it? Or, more to the point, can it? According to the dictates of the modern episteme, archaeology as a mode o f historical inquiry aspires to know History,41 but will never close the gap between itself as an exercise in history and H istory as the condition and receding “ source” o f all histories. This unbridgeable gap between history and H istory is noth­ing other than an instantiation of the thought/unthought trope— that

I7S Michael Schwartz

archaeology may be able to disclose the unthought o f modern think­ing, but can only do so by leaving undisclosed conditions o f knowing that make it possible.

Understanding itself as less original but more broadly based than the history of Being, Foucault’s project makes no attempt to account exhaustively for its conditions o f possibility. The “ narrow er” if more originary path o f thought— the history o f being— is contained within the modern episteme, while the “ broader” if less originary form of

thought— Foucault’s ow n episteme project— necessarily exceeds the space o f modern thought that it unveils. Foucault is forthright about

the limitations of his project, acknowledging that the “ event [of the emergence o f the modern episteme], probably because we are still caught inside it, is largely beyond our com prehension.” 42 Even as it proclaims great breadth and scope for its analyses. The Order o f Things does not assert the certainty of its findings, nor does it propose some final, fixed Archimedean vantage point from which henceforth to con­duct philosophical history. (In this respect it is noteworthy that Fou­cault quickly adopted the analysis o f discursive practices in lieu o f the historical study of epistemes.)43

W hat the study does afford Foucault is the ability to sidestep some o f the pitfalls he sees in other modern projects, as with positing a founding origin to one’s historical narrative. All well and good. But then in the end, for all its theoretical rew orking of and challenge to the Heideggerian project, just how' different are the particulars of Foucault’s account from those o f the history of Being? To explore this would require an extensive analysis of the detailed content of their re­spective philosophical histories, a task that far exceeds the present study. W hat we can do, in bringing this essay to a close, is briefly to consider how Foucault views the relation o f words and things as well as the “ schem a” o f time and space, as these are terms central to his analysis o f an episteme. And this will lead us into some concluding re­flections on modern finitude.

Words and Things, Time and SpaceWith regard to explicating a culture’s w ay o f knowing, Foucault sub­mits that the conjunction of words and things is not to be taken as a metaphysical or ontological invariant, but as a flexible, historical fold that warrants our scrutiny. This view of words and things can be seen as part of his critical encounter with Heidegger— at least if we accept

Epistemes and the History of Being 179

Gilles Deleuze’s contention that, on this issue, Foucault was parting w ays with certain phenomenological presuppositions that Heidegger purportedly held. As Deleuze summarizes in his Foucault book:

In H eidegger and M erleau-Ponty, Light opens up a speaking no less than a seeing, as if signification haunted the visible which in turn m ur­m ured m eaning. T h is cannor be so in Foucault, for w hom the light- Being refers only to visibilities, and language-Being to statem ents ."*4

Although Deleuze is reflecting on the Foucauldian project as a whole, his remarks are pertinent to the character o f an episteme in The Order o f Things. For Foucault states at the outset o f the study that he is in­terested in exposing and exploring “ that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together.” ’45 The book’s French title— Les mots et les choses— thus attests to one o f the key features of an episteme, that the fold be­tween words and things is specific to and is first established within a given epistemic constellation.

According to Foucault, in the Renaissance words were part of the Order o f Creation, w oven am idst and m arking the similitudes of things. In the classical age language retreats into the mind o f the sub­ject as the signifying “ m edium ” that represents the tables o f identities and differences. And in modernity language becomes unmoored from representation, leaving representation in need o f deeper grounds, with language becoming dispersed in culture, even manifesting beyond the episteme as the counterdiscourse o f literature. For his part, Heidegger engages in creative retrievals o f past understandings o f the being of language, as with his meditations on ancient Greek logos. But these musings on the essence o f language are by no means as explicitly his- toricist as Foucault’s, and often sound a transepochal and normative understanding of language’s essence. One can readily imagine Foucault seeing his own analyses of words and things as com plexifying and ad­vancing beyond the Heideggerian project.

Foucault takes an additional step. N ot only does he see the rela­tion between words and things as a historical variable, but so, too, the “ schem a” o f time and space. An episteme, Foucault contends, exhibits the experience o f time and space characteristic o f a culture.4'' N ow Heidegger, for his part, in the late lecture “ Time and Being,” did speak of time-space, but in a different register than does Foucault, and as part of an autocritique of section 70 o f Being and Time, where he had tried to derive spatialitv from temporality. As he states in the lecture:

W ith this presencing, there opens up w hat w e call tim e-space. But with the w ord “ tim e” we no longer m ean the succession o f now s. Accordingly, tim e-space no longer m eans m erely the d istance be­tween tw o now -points o f calculated tim e. . . . T im e-space now is the nam e for the openness which opens up in the m utual self-extending o f futura) ap pro ach , p a st and present. T h is openness exclusively and prim arily provides the space in which space as w e usually know it can u n fo ld .4"

Heidegger is here positing a more general model o f the Opening of Being. The time-space he is speaking o f is “ before” ordinary time and space. In contrast Foucault’s discussions in The Order o f Things would seem directed in the main to the more everyday senses o f these terms.

For Foucault, then, a “ schem a” o f time and space is integral to the operations o f a given episteme. In the Renaissance the Order of Creation is eternal, hence fundam entally spatial. Time unfolds as the duration of the human knower tracing out the correspondences o f the text o f the w orld . One can begin anywhere and end anywhere, begin at any time and end at any time, starting either with things or with w ords, since they m utually imply and inform G o d ’s Order. Knowing in the Renaissance is an infinite task, open ended, a weak form of knowledge. In the classical age Order is what the human knower has to reconstitute. G o d ’s created Order is no longer immediately appar­ent in the w orld, having been dispersed by time, requiring the know ­ing subject to represent and cognitively reform the order of things. Time is both what has disrupted the Order o f creation and the condi­tion that permits the subject to restore facets o f this Order in the ta­bles o f identities and differences. Representation in modernity, h ow ­ever, undergoes a crisis, leading to a decisive “ mutation o f Order into H istory.” 48 God is dead; things are no longer products of Creation, evacuating any sense o f a preestablished Order o f things. Time, which in the classical episteme dispersed the Order of Creation, now pene­trates to the essence o f things, with the consequence that empiricities are doubly temporal, emerging historically in analogical succession and perform ing functions as organic structures. The narrative plot o f Foucau lt’s history turns on the epistem ological break between the premodern predominance o f space and Order and the modern irre- ducibility o f time and History. M odernity is a distinctive chapter in the history o f the Same. Know ing now m otors the incessant order-ing and reorder-ing o f things, constituting M an— the subject and object of knowledge— as “ a mode of being . . . alw ays open, never finally delim­

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Epistemes and the History of Being 1S I

ited, yet constantly transversed.” 49 Said otherwise, with the transition from Order to H istory— from a presumed metaphysical totality to a restless knowing that is effectively totalizing— the history o f the Same reaches a kind o f terminus where there is no longer ready access to an “ outside” beyond the epistemic grids that define and constitute human being as M an.

B y radically historicizing the relation between words and things as well as the “ schem a” o f time and space, Foucault does indeed dis­tance archaeological analysis from the history o f Being. And in doing so he ends up offering an interpretation o f modern experience and e x ­istence that parallels and complements w hat Heidegger viewed as the fate o f the subject in the “ circuits” o f Enfram ing (Gestell):

Th e subject-object relation thus reaches, for the first time, its pure “ re la tio n al,” i.e., ordering, character in which both the sub ject and the object are sucked up as standing-reserves. T h at does not m ean that the sub ject-object relation vanishes, but rather the opp osite : it now atta ins to its m ost extrem e dom inance, which is predeterm ined from out o f E nfram ing. It becom es a standing-reserve to be c o m ­m anded and set in order.511

Here we meet the issue, explored by Béatrice Han in her excellent con­tribution to this volum e, o f the modern character of finitude.

The Foucault of The Order o f Things and the Heidegger o f later writings like the Bremen lectures see modern finitude as conditioned by and caught within totalizing networks that objectify M an through the w ays o f knowing (Foucault) or disclose human being as a mere resource alw ays already on call for the demands o f the “ System ” (Hei­degger). The issue for both authors is not prim arily a conceptual prob­lem for philosophy, and certainly not a problem of epistemological self-grounding or self-justification (as we have seen, Foucault seems to suggest that his own archaeological project cannot account for itself in any complete way, without this necessarily being some sort of de­fect). With important and significant differences o f concern and em ­phasis, the com mon “ problem ” for these two thinkers might be sum ­marized as how, given modern conditions o f finitude, we might achieve something like radical (Foucault) or authentic (Heidegger) transcen­dence o f such all-defining, totalizing processes.

In the Bremen lectures, Heidegger suggests that we poetically at­tune to the ancient Greek sendings o f Being, so to disclose ourselves in the fourfold as m ortals, thereby opening ourselves up to Being and

182 M ich ad Schit \7 rtz

Time, ungrounding our self-interpretations in the acknowledgm ent of the being-towards death of self and others. And this creative retrieval is to be achieved through the saving power of art— which can poetical­ly bring forth earth, sky, mortals, and imm ortals as these are granted and folded together within the Open.51 Similarly, in the essay “ Thought from the O utside," published in the same year as The Order of Things, Foucault suggests that it is through the modern counterdiscourse of lit­erature, as exemplified in the writings o f Blanchot, that we have a path to move beyond the dictates o f the modern episteme. The “ I speak” of literature, unlike the epistemic “ I think” (with its diremption from the “ I am ” ), effaces rather than constitutes the speaking-writing subject, effecting the “ death” o f the “ I ” w ho is M an himself. N or is this ef- facement nihilistic, but on the contrary realizes a profound w akefu l­ness that is itself a radical se//-forgetting:

Th is [self-j forgetting , however, should not be confused with the scat­teredness o f d istraction or the slum ber o f vigilance; it is a w ak efu l­ness so alert, so lucid , so new, that it is a good-bye to night and a pure open in g on to a day to com e. In this respect forgettin g is extrem e attentiveness— so extrem e that it e ffaces any singu lar face that m ight present itself to it. . . . It is a forgetting that rhe w ait rem ains a w ait­ing: an acute attention to w hat is rad ically new, with no bond o f resem blance [hence tran sgressin g the Sam e] or continuity with any­thing else (the new ness o f the w ait draw n outside o f itself and freed from the past [hence transgressing H istory ]; attention to w hat is m ost pro fou n dly old (for deep dow n the w ait has never sto pped w aiting).52

Literature’s voiding o f the “ I ” realizes an alm ost mystical, contem pla­tive awareness that transcends constitution as a self or subject.51 Like the later Heidegger, albeit in a distinctive manner, the Foucault of the m id-1960s looks to the literary arts as a means o f transcending m od­ern finitude.

H aving worked out his engagement with the history o f Being in The Order o f Things, Foucault quickly ventured into new lines o f thought informed by what he had learned in this critical encounter with Heidegger, leaving behind forever the analysis o f epistemes. He would likewise soon drop the proposal o f literature as a “ w ay out,” only to return toward the end of his life to the modernist theme of art’s redemptive power, reconfigured anew as the aesthetics of existence.54

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, “ Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault, Octo­ber Zn, 19 S 2 ,” 111 Technologies of Self: Seminar with M ichel Foucault, ed. Luther H.

Episteines and the History o f Being 1 S3

Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), r 2 - 1 3.

2 . Michel Foucault, "The Return o f M orality,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Inter­view and O ther Writings, 19 7 7 - 19 ^ 4 (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 250.

3 . Foucault credited Dreyfus and Rabinow for being the first to note the influence o f Heidegger upon his thought: “ I was surprised when two of my triends in Berkeley wrote something about me and said that Heidegger was influential [Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. M ichel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chi­cago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)]. O f course it was quite true, but no one in France has ever perceived it" ("Truth, Power, Self,” 1 2 - 1 } ). Besides the groundbreaking commentaries of Dreyfus and Rabinow, there is the fundamental study by Rainer Forst that demonstrates how Heideggerian themes, especially those from Being and Tune, re­peatedly inform Foucault’s work throughout ("Endlichkeit Freiheit Individualität: Die Sorge um das Selbst bei Heidegger und Foucault," in Ethos der M oderne: Foucaults Kritik der Aufklärung, ed. Eva Erdmann, Rainer Forst, and Axel Honnerh [Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1990], 14 6 -8 6 ; ct. R. Kevin Hill's "Foucault’s Critique of Heidegger,” Philosophy Today 34 |winter 1989]: 3 3 4 - 4 1 , which argues that the early- archaeological works are a critique of Being and Time). For a recent full-length study- on Heidegger and Foucault, see Lee Joseph Braver, "A Thing of This World: Anti-Realism and Epistemology in Heidegger and Foucault” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1999).

4 . For example, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of M odernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, M ass.: M IT Press, 1987), 266; and Stephen David Ross, "M odernity and the Misrepresentation o f Representation," in Dialectic and Narrative, ed. Thomas R. Flynn and Daha Judovitz (Albany: State Uni- versity o f New York Press, 199 3), 139 -4 0 .

5 . M artin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols., ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 3:20.

6. See Gary Gutting, M ichel Foucault's Archaeology o f Scientific Reason (Cam ­bridge, England, and N ew York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); see also Peter Dews, “ Foucault and the French Tradition o f Historical Epistemology,” 111 The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contem porary European Philosophy (London and New York: Verso, 19 9 5), 39—58.

7 . Michel Foucault, The O rder of Things: An Archaeology o f the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 19 73), xxiv.

8. Ibid.9 . One o f Foucault’s principal questions is: “ What historical a priori provided the

starting-point from which it was possible to define the great checkerboard o f distinct identities established against the confused, undefined, faceless and, as it were, indifferent background of differences?” (ibid). For critical evaluation o f the concept o f a “ historical a priori” as it is variously formulated in Foucault's oeuvre, see Beatrice Han, Uontologic manquee de M ichel Foucault: Entre Thistorique et Ic transcendental (Grenoble: Jerome M illon, 1998).

10. Foucault, The O rder of Things, xxii.1 1. Ibid., xxi.12. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 :18 9 ; 3 :22; and 4 :16 4 .13. Heidegger. “ The Question Concerning Technology,” m The Question Concern­

ing Technology and O ther Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 19 7 7 ). 1 3- See also, idem, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Pow er as Art, 57.

14. On Verwindung (contra Überwindung) in Heidegger’s “ overcoming” ot meta­physics, see Gianni Vattimo, “ Nihilism and the Post-Modern in Philosophy,” in The End o f M odernity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 164 , 17 1 - 8 0 .

15. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 :16 2 .

; 84 Michael Schwartz

16 . Ibid., 1 63.17. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M . Anderson and E. Hans Freund

(New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 79.18. Ibid., 2 4 1 . See also idem, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New

York: Harper and Row, T969), 45.19. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1 : 18 6 .20 . Ibid., 3:69.21 . Ibid., 3 :83.22 . Foucault, The O rder o f Things, x x -x x i. For an important reading o f the book’s

preface that diverges from the interpretation I shall be offering, see Han, L ’ontologie nianquSe de M ichel Foucault, 9 2 - r o ’,.

23 . Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3 :43-4 4 .24 . Heidegger, “ The Age o f the World Picture” and "Science and Reflection,” in

The Question Concerning Technology, 1 1 5-82.25 . Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:43.26 . Ibid., 1 :3 5 -3 6 .27 . See the discussions of Gelessenheit (“ releasement” in Heidegger, Discourse on

Thinking).28 . Idem, Nietzsche, 3 :23.29 . Foucault, The O rder o f Things, 307.30 . Gary Gutting, in his very important and invaluable book on Foucault's archae­

ology of scientific reason, notes: “ But far more important is the fact that Foucault’s ex­tension of the history of concepts (via the notion o f an episteme] undermines the privi­leged role o f disciplines in the history of thought and knowledge. For Bachelard and Canguilhelm, each particular domain of knowledge (e.g., chemistry, biology) emerged at some point from prescientific confusion and has, since that point, developed progres­sively as a unified body of scientific knowledge. There may be sharp conceptual breaks, but subsequent concepts are rectifications o f earlier ones and contain them as special cases of a broader and more adequate explanation of the world. Accordingly, the his­tory of science is written from the normative standpoint o f current science, which pro­vides the historian with standards for judging past scientific work by the extent to which it is preserved in today’s science. For Foucault, however, the possibility of the en­tire conceptual development o f any discipline is based on deeper concepts, shared by other disciplines, and themselves subject to transformations over time that are not con­trolled by any discipline” (Gutting, M tchel Foucault's Archaeology o f Scientific Reason. 2 19 ). Foucault took this one step further. Not only does he regard an episteme as regu­lating the various regional sciences but also as governing higher-order reflection, a view that (as I have attempted to show) has its precedent in Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures.

31 . Michel Foucault, “ Philosophy and the Death o f G od ,” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jerome R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 86. The essay was originally pub­lished under the title "Q ue’est-ce qu’un philosophie?” See idem, Dits et écrits 19 5 4 -19 8 8 , ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 4 volumes (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), I ;552 _ 53-

32 . On the place of philosophical reflection in the modern episteme, see Foucault, The O rder o f Things, 347.

33 . Foucault, The O rder o f Things, 322 -28 (“ The ‘Cogito’ and the Unthought” ).34 . See Heidegger, Nietzsche, r:4, 67-68. For comparable articulations o f this theme,

see idem, Nietzsche, 3 :18 9 -9 0 , and 4 : 1 5 1 - 5 2 , 2 0 7 , 2 1 1 .

35 . Ibid., 68.36 . Foucault, The O rder of Things. 323.37 . Ibid., 325.38 . Ibid., 328 -3 5 (“ The Retreat and Return o f the O rigin” ). On Foucault’s criticism

Epistemes and the History o f Being 185

of Heidegger, see Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, M ichel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d. ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5 8 -4 1; and Gutting, M ichel Foucault's Archaeology o f Scientific Reason, 223.

39 . Foucault, The O rder o f Things, 30740 . Ibid., xxi.41 . Ibid., 1 19 .42 . Ibid., 22T; see also 2 1 7 - 18 .43 . Foucault developed the notion of discursive practices in his 1969 methodologi­

cal tract The Archaeology o f Know ledge. In the 19 7 0 foreword to the English edition of The O rder o f Things he redescribed the episteme-project in terms o f this new theory of discourse. For discussion about Foucault’s periodic redescription of his previous work in light o f his current project, see my "Critical Reproblemization: Foucault and the Task of Modern Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy 9 1 (September-October 1998): 19 - 2 1 .

44 . Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University o f M inne­sota Press, 1988), i n .

Deleuze's invocation o f a language-Being and a light-Being suggests an ontology that is not incompatible with Foucault’s own passing remarks in The Order of Things about the epistemic imposition o f order upon a pregiven chaos— itself a formulation very close to that in chapter 1 1 of Heidegger’s third Nietzsche lecture, titled “ Knowing as Schematizing a Chaos in Accordance with Practical Need.” In the subsequent chap­ter, “ The Concept o f ‘Chaos,’ ” Heidegger explains that "jc jhaos is the name for a pecu­liar prelim inary projection o f the w o rld as a w hole and for the governance o f that world. . . . The fundamental experience of the world as 'chaos' has its roots here [in the perspective of animals, animality, and biologism]. But since the body is for Nietzsche a structure of dominance, 'chaos' cannot mean a turbulent jumble. Rather, it means the concealment o f unmastered richness in the becoming and streaming o f the world as a W'hole” (Nietzsche, 3:80, italics mine; see also 3:92).

In The O rder of Things, order and chaos are by no means centered 011 animality and the body. But chaos understood as the “ concealment of unmastered richness” does seem to be in accord with the upshot o f Foucault’s “ ontological commitments,” at least as far as these can be teased out o f the text. Cf. Han, L'ontologie manquée.

4 5 . Foucault, The O rder o f Things, xviii.4 6 . Ibid., xxi, and in the case o f modernity, 3 2 1 and 333 . This formulation has a

neo-Kantian ring to it (for Foucault’s creative appropriation and redeployment of the Kantian notions o f “ transcendental aesthetic” and “ transcendental dialectic,” see ibid., 3 1 9 ). It calls to mind works like Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy o f Sym bolic Form — and indeed, in 1966, the same year as the publication of Les mots et les choses, Foucault reviewed in glowing terms the French translation of Cassirer’s Philosophy o f Enlighten­ment, concluding that “ this book . . . founds the possibility of a new history of thought” ("Une histoire restée muette,” in Dits et écrits, 1:549).

4 7 . M artin Heidegger, "Tim e and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stam- baugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1 9 7 2 ), 14.

48 . Foucault, The O rder of Things, 220.4 9 . Ibid., 322.50 . Heidegger, "Science and Reflection,” in Questions Concerning Technology, 17 3 .51 . Heidegger, “ The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter

(New York: Harper and Row, 19 7 1) , 178 -8 0 . Toward the end o f his life Heidegger ex­pressed doubts as to the viability o f this creative retrieval o f the ancient Greek under­standing o f Being as a way o f “ overcom ing’’ modern world-disclosure.

52 . Michel Foucault, M aurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Zone Books, T990). 56-^7. M any of the effects of literature, as

IS 6 Michael Schwartz

expounded in the Blanchot essay, would seem to he precise counterpoints to facets of the modern episteme as defined in The O rder o f Things— for example, literature as a forgetting of the past (and hence a self-forgetting) would contrast philosophy’s function in the modern episteme as the Memory o f thought having a history (the latter constitut­ing and sustaining the "1 think” ).

53 . Foucault’s description of the effacement o f the subject as a heightening o f atten- tiveness, as a wakefulness, as a forgetting o f the past, as a calm nonanticipatory and al­ways present waiting— this account has much in common with the highest levels of spiritual realization in the world's wisdom traditions, for which see Ken Wilber. A Brief History o f Everything, id ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 1 98 ff.

54 . Foucault’s ethical project of practices of self is a creative and brilliant return to and reworking o f Heideggerian themes from Division II o f Being and Time, themes that Foucault had previously explored in his earliest publications. See Michael Schwartz, "Repetition and Ethics in Late Foucault,” Telos 1 1 7 (tall 1999): 1 1 3 - 3 2 .