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Chapter Four Postmodern Humility and Its Other Foucault Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. —Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power” I Several ways could be found to describe the intellectual commonalities between the work of Michel Foucault and that of Jacques Derrida. Despite the limitations of the term, I have chosen the word “postmodern ” because these two thinkers clearly operate in an intellectual space beyond and based on Heidegger’s critique of modernity as laid out in “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Age of the World Picture.” Moreover, Foucault himself uses the image of the picture, specifically Diego Velázquez’s Las Meniñas (1656), as an entrée into his account of the beginnings of modernity in his book The Order of Things. There he notes, among several other unusual features of the painting, that the focal point of the canvas is not one of the paintings on the background wall, but rather a mirror. Reflected in the mirror are the images of King Philip IV of Spain and his queen watching the painter paint a portrait of their daughter and her attendants (las meniñas). What Foucault notes, however, is that whoever looks at the painting is actually opposite the mirror and hence stands in “the place of the king.”1 Following Heidegger, the modern technological age can be seen as the era in which humans qua humans became the focal point for our understanding of the world, taking the place held in earlier eras by kings and gods. From this viewpoint, one way of understanding the 89 90 Ontological Humility postmodern would be as a way of thinking that puts human mastery of the world into question. Another aspect of this text worth noting underscores how Foucault ’s work moves beyond the “humanism” found in Sartre’s existentialism that marks it, for Heidegger, as still steeped in modernity. In the “Foreword to the English edition” [sic], Foucault makes a considerable effort to distinguish the approach to the material he discusses in this book from one “which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, . . .which places its own point of view at the origin of all history . . .” (OT xiv). Foucault seeks to emphasize the extent to which the subject is shaped by the objects that he or she observes, especially in the human (i.e., social) sciences; the extent to which acts are imbedded, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, in a largely implicit perceptual world; and the extent to which history is shaped by factors outside human control, and often human knowledge. The place of the king is no longer taken by “man,” because the postmodern world is not a picture at which “man” gazes, but a network of interrelationships that exceed our grasp at every moment. There is no Being in Foucault, but there are beings, things that are ordered. As his thought progresses it becomes clearer that, for him, the development of “biopower” has already moved human existence squarely into the realm of a “standing reserve” that Heidegger attributes to things alone. We have already moved, that is, from being Subjects to being subjected (as Voldemort seeks to subject even his followers to his arbitrary power). In his earlier work, Foucault makes this point by tracing detailed “archeologies” or “genealogies” of major institutions of modern European life: the medical clinic, the insane asylum, the prison. The Order of Things is somewhat different in that it traces the development of three intellectual fields of thought—philology, biology, and economics—from what he calls the “pre-classical” period to the forms they take in the nineteenth century. What he establishes, in brief, is that in each of these fields, the basic understanding of the subject matter—language, life, money—switches from a static array of variables in fixed time/space to a roughly evolutionary model seen, not from a “god’s-eye view” as before, but from the perspective of how humans can intervene in and control its future development in ways that serve human purposes. The conclusion he draws echoes in different ways both Aristotle and Heidegger: “man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. . . . As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (OT 386–387). In his later work, however, Foucault is concerned less with the end of the age of “man...

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