Abstract
Throughout his impressive body of work in intellectual history, Stuart Elden has been content to remain in the background, leaving others to traffic in major interpretive gambits. His readers are typically offered a fine mesh of specific bibliographic insights spread like dew-laced morning spiderwebs over the writings of Foucault, Heidegger or Canguilhem. The Archaeology of Foucault, though, breaks subtly with this self-effacing tendency in Elden’s work, and quietly reveals a bit more of his scholarly commitments than do the other volumes. It is not marked by a bold step into the limelight. But it is telling that it is the only one of the four volumes with a title that names its method.
At the end of this volume, Elden explicitly adopts archaeology as a description of the entire four-volume series, with the caveat that it is archaeology ‘in a more literal sense than Foucault intended; work which is both excavation and reconstruction’ (pp. 211–212). Despite this caveat, the effects of Elden’s work parallel those Foucault envisioned for his own archaeological approach in a number of crucial ways. Among the most important is the complication of what ‘Foucault’ can be taken to signify as the name of an author.
In an excellent chapter on linguistics and structuralism, Elden chronicles the provenance of the lecture eventually published in English as ‘What is an author?’ Foucault argues in a lecture at SUNY Buffalo in 1970 that the idea of the author – far from designating a point of proliferation of meaning – is actually a ‘principle of thrift’, a ‘certain functional principle by which, in our culture, we limit the swarming of meaning’ (quoted on p. 135).
Elden’s archival research has turned up swarms of unpublished notes, drafts, alternative plans and recombinations of material. What Foucault said of Nietzsche in a 1967 interview applies equally to his own output: ‘Under the cloud of texts published by the author, a whole cloud of other possible texts appears – texts which are radically other, even if they are almost identical’ (quoted on p. 185). This disconcerting penumbra, so painstakingly excavated by Elden, forces upon us two conclusions. The first is that any single invocation or naming of ‘Foucault’ as an author identifiable with a small set of clear messages is a vertiginous simplification.
The second, though, seems to run contrary to the first, namely, that ‘what might appear to be quite radical breaks in Foucault’s work could be understood as a more gradual set of shifts and transitions’ (p. 210). Synchronic complexity and indefinite boundaries on the one hand, diachronic continuity on the other. This kind of ‘assemblage with a proper name’ continues to exert a uniquely powerful organizing force upon our thoughts and practices. Archaeology, for Elden as for Foucault, has never been anti-humanistic. As Elden writes, ‘Foucault is asking how we can reconsider the subject, rather than abandon it’ (p. 133). Elden’s book, and the series of which it is a part, comprise one quite compelling answer.
