Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

7 Enveloped in a Nameless Voice: Foucault’s “The Thought of the Outside” (1966)

174 7 Enveloped in a Nameless Voice: Foucault’s “The Thought of the Outside” (1966) If, like Foucault, we had started our investigation earlier, farther back than the beginning of the twentieth century, we would have traced out a development that went from transcendence in the Middle Ages (from the transcendence of God or another world), across the Classical epoch, to immanence in the nineteenth century (to the immanence of subjective experience), and then from immanence to—to what, today? A transformation of immanence into what Foucault calls “screams and fury.”1 Like Heidegger, he also calls this transformed immanence “the nothing,” “the void.” Following Bergson, we have called this empty space “multiplicity.” Like Merleau-Ponty, Foucault—as we see in his description of Velasquez’ Las Meninas painting (MC: 19–31/OT: 3–16)—discovers the multiplicity by means of the mirror relation. Or, more precisely, as Foucault says at the end of his career in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, “[to constitute an ethics of the self] is perhaps an urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensible task, if it is true that there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself.”2 We encountered the self-relation, in a word, auto-affection, in Heidegger when he coined tautological sentences like “the nothing nothings” and, especially, “language is language.” What Heidegger discovers within this tautology is the threshold, the difference. Foucault too finds what he calls “a minuscule hiatus” in the middle of this relation (MC: 351/OT: 340). This “out of joint” self-relation requires a reform not only of psychology, as Foucault showed in his first great book, The History of Madness, but Enveloped in a nameless voice · 175 also a reform of philosophy, indeed, an overcoming of metaphysics. As Foucault says in The Order of Things, “Modern thought [thought in the twentieth century] . . . will contest even its own metaphysical impulses, and show that reflections upon life, labor, and language . . . express the end of metaphysics” (MC: 328/OT: 317). Or, as he says in “What Is Enlightenment ?” “[critique] is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value. . . . It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science. . . . It will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, thinking what we are, do, or think.”3 As we see here, for Foucault, the end of metaphysics does not eliminate philosophy. Instead, it calls for a history of thought that aims to invent new forms of thought. Such new forms must be a thinking that is beyond logic, even beyond reason. It calls for a thought of the murmur, it calls for a thought of the outside. It is contemporary literature, for Foucault, that most displays this new form of thought. For Foucault, as for Heidegger and MerleauPonty , literature and poetry show that it is language who speaks, not man. Thus, in our final chapter we shall examine Foucault’s 1966 essay on Maurice Blanchot’s writings, which is called “The Thought of the Outside.” As Foucault says, “Blanchot . . . [represented] for me . . . an invitation to call into question the category of the subject, its supremacy, its foundational function.”4 Thus “The Thought of the Outside” begins with a movement beyond Cartesianism. Perhaps more than any other text we have examined, “The Thought of the Outside” demonstrates the transformation of immanent subject experience (“lived experience,” “Erlebnis,” as Husserl would say) into multiplicity. As we have seen, however, starting with Heidegger this transformation also includes a transformation of who we are. Although Foucault does not speak of dwelling in “The Thought of the Outside,” the essay concerns an experience. The experience of the outside transforms our thinking about the past and the future. Foucault suggests this new mode of thinking under the Blanchotian title of “awaitingforgetting .”5 Awaiting-forgetting, however, amounts to me “wanting to be enveloped by speech and carried well beyond every possible beginning. [It amounts to me] loving to see in myself, at the moment of speaking, a nameless voice that was preceding me for a long time.”6 Awaiting-forgetting “enmeshes” us, makes us be “lodged” in the non-formal voice of no one. This amounts to a transformation of us, of man. In order to lead us 176 · Early Twentieth-Century...