#60
 
 

A NOTE ON FOUCAULT

by Marcus Steinweg

Let us recall the famous sentences Michel Foucault wrote: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.” It is clear—and Deleuze underscores—that this thinking that arises in the space of the void by seeking to leave God and the humanisms of the tradition with their compatible conceptions of the subject behind, begins to outline “a new image of thought”: “a thinking that no longer opposes itself as from the outside to the unthinkable or the unthought, but which would lodge the unthinkable, the unthought within itself as thought, and which would be in an essential relationship to it.” At issue, patently, is a thinking that conceives itself as a primordial being-open toward the unthinkable and unthought, a thinking that does not simply resist the void and its own limitations, instead understanding these limitations to be elemental and constitutive of itself. At issue is a thinking that is aware of its originary (or “archaic”) ties to the unthought, which we may call the “unconscious” in order to associate it with “dim mechanisms” and “faceless determinations.” “Man and the unthought,” Foucault writes, “are, at the archaeological level, contemporaries.” This is a thinking, obviously, that has broken free of the illusion of its own omnipotence—not in order to indulge in the phantasm of total impotence, the narcissism of impotence-worship, which is nothing but an indicator of luxurious self-victimization and intellectual laziness of the sort often manifest in the celebration of the celebrant’s own weakness and vulnerability—but in order to confront both at once, the object-status of the subject as much as its subject-status, its capacity for receptivity as much as spontaneity, or to put it in Heideggerian terms: itself as geworfener Entwurf, thrown projection.

 

all PICKS von