Michel Foucault consigns thinking to its indeterminate future as much as its complex arché, “an unthought which [thinking] contains entirely.” Let us quote the following important passage in full: “The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled-up nature or a stratified history; it is, in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality. This obscure space so readily interpreted as an abyssal region in man’s nature, or as a uniquely impregnable fortress in his history, is linked to him in an entirely different way; it is both exterior to him and indispensable to him: in one sense, the shadow cast by man as he emerged in the field of knowledge; in another, the blind stain by which it is possible to know him. In any case, the unthought has accompanied man, mutely and uninterruptedly, since the nineteenth century. Since it was really never more than an insistent double, it has never been the object of reflection in an autonomous way; it has received the complementary form and the inverted name of that for which it was the Other and the shadow: in Hegelian phenomenology, it was the An sich as opposed to the Für sich; for Schopenhauer it was the Unbewusste; for Marx it was alienated man; in Husserl’s analyses it was the implicit, the inactual, the sedimented, the non-effected—in every case, the inexhaustible double that presents itself to reflection as the blurred projection of what man is in his truth, but that also plays the role of a preliminary ground upon which man must collect himself and recall himself in order to attain his truth.” It is surprising that Foucault does not see this spectral man-beside-man emerge until the nineteenth century; as though thinking were not accompanied from the very outset by a phantom double, be it the Socratic daimon or, at all times during which thinking interprets itself as male, the figure of female assistance; not even to mention all the animals that haunt the subject in order to assure it of its animal origins, which, like all that is repressed, acquire the presence of a phantom. What is decisive is that within the subject or beside it, in extreme proximity to it, something non-subjective is lodged or abides, an element that is now blind and obtuse, now clairvoyant but forever lays claim to its presence. We might address it as the elemental itself, as chaos or wild nature, as a pre-subjective stratum of orderless materiality and Dionysian-archaic groundlessness that allows no thinking to come to rest, for it appeals to any thinking to be thought as long as the status of the unthought applies to it. Any thinking, any subject, it would seem, has “already ‘left’ itself in its own being.” A chasm opens up within it so that it understands that to think itself—to be self-consciousness, thinking thinking itself—means to attend to this split or rift, this wound that will not close. That makes thinking, as Foucault puts it, “a perilous act.” The opening toward an element that closes itself off to it, that denies it full self-consciousness, closed self-presence, that, by slipping from its grasp, destabilizes the subject in its entirety and makes it stumble in order to call upon it to adopt a conception of itself that would leave the phantasms of a presence and self-presence rid of all specters behind. That the subject, moving on the trace of its own disappearance, encounters, on the line of its rampant absence, itself as though it were its own spectral double, means that it is itself a phantasm, one that does not cease to beset itself by riddling itself with questions it cannot answer. The legacy of metaphysics would perhaps be nothing but this riddling that drills a hole into the subject, never ceasing to drill, a hole or hollow large enough to make room for all sorts of specters that begin to spread through the subject and will ultimately supplant it altogether. And yet: as Derrida has shown, it would be a mistake to trust in the deferred action of specters, as though there had ever been a non-spectral subject whose unperturbed self-certainty and self-presence were only now being unsettled by a spectral power.