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3. Orientalism Foucault, Genealogy, History The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us. . . . If genealogy in its own right gives rise to questions concerning our native land, native language, or the laws that govern us, its intention is to reveal the heterogeneous systems which, masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity —Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” The state of mind that is concerned with origins is . . . theological. By contrast, and this is the shift, beginnings are eminently secular, a gentile [Vico] continuing activity. —Edward Said, Beginnings As I observed in the previous chapter, the Michel Foucault who influenced Said in framing the question Orientalism poses about Western knowledge production is the Foucault not of Said’s Beginnings—Foucault the archaeologist /structuralist—but the Foucault of Surveiller et punir. More specifically, it was the Foucault not of Folie et déraison (1961; Madness and Civilization), Naissance de la clinique (1963; The Birth of the Clinic), Les Mots et les choses (1966; The Order of Things), L’Archéolgie du savoir (1969; The Archaeology of Knowledge), and “L’Ordre du discours” (1971; “The Discourse of Language”) but of Surveiller et punir (1975; published in English in 1977)—the Foucault who had, through “a concrete experience that [he] had with prisons, starting in 1971–2,”1 discovered what had eluded him as an archaeologist/structuralist in the earlier texts: the relationality between knowledge production—the truth discourse of the Enlightenment épistémè—and the social institutions of power and discipline that had emerged in the wake of the French Revolution , that is, with the collapse of the ancien régime and the rise of the Orientalism 71 “democratic” bourgeoisie. Commenting retrospectively on precisely this inbetween moment in his thought (and on the discursive turn in the period of the Enlightenment), Foucault said in response to his interlocutors’ question about his opposition to structuralism: In short, there is a problem of the regime, the politics of the scientific statement . At this level it’s not so much a matter of knowing what external power imposes itself on science, as of what effects of power circulate among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of power, and how and why at certain moments that regime undergoes a global modification. It was these different regimes that I tried to identify and describe in The Order of Things, all the while making it clear that I wasn’t trying for the moment to explain them, and that it would be necessary to try and do this in a subsequent work. But what was lacking here [in his archaeological phase] was this problem of the “discursive regime,” of the effects of power peculiar to the play of statements. I confused this too much with systematicity, theoretical form, or something like a paradigm. This same problem of power, which at that time I had not yet properly isolated, emerges in two very different aspects at the point of juncture of Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things.2 To be more specific, this Foucault is the one who had discovered the Nietzsche of The Genealogy of Morals, or to put it according to my argument in chapter 2, the Nietzsche whom Foucault came to understand for the first time only after reading Heidegger, presumably Being and Time, which, elaborating Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical will to retrieve the contingency of being from Being, absence from Presence, and the Dionysian from Apollonian in the name of historicity, inaugurates Heidegger’s de-struction (Destruktion) of the Western (onto-theo-logical) philosophical tradition. Again, this was the philosophical tradition that, under the aegis of metaphysical inquiry (thinking meta ta physika: after or above physis) interpreted the be-ing of being as Being, as a summum ens, a total thing or picture), thus betraying the will to power over the nothingness of being (temporality, difference, singularity) inhering in its binary logic. Closer, but not alien to the concerns of Said’s Orientalism , this was also the interpretation of being that founded the (official) Occident—that set off the known and domesticated world (the oikoumene; Latin, orbis terrarium) in a binary opposition to terra incognita (the unknown and uncharted rest of...

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