Between Emergence and Possibility

Abstract

FOUCAULT, DERRIDA, AND JUDITH BUTLER ON PERFORMATIVE IDENTITY It would seem that book is closed on relation between Jacques Derrida's work and Michel Foucault's. I As Derrida writes in a recent essay on Foucault, sometimes acrimonious debate ended with Foucault's death.2 In retrospect, however, it seems clear that acrimony of debate has covered over more productive reflection on possible intersections between their work. Perhaps such reflection is only now becoming possible, as polemics fade into background. In this essay, I'd like to suggest that one such productive way of (re)articulating differend between Foucault's work and Derrida's would be to take seriously Foucault's repeated emphasis on material conditions of emergence rather than conditions of possibility. Even in his most recognizably philosophical or methodological work-for example, in The Archaeology of Knowledge and its analysis of statement-Foucault remains skeptical of any discourse that engages itself with a transcendentalist thematics of origin: as he writes in Archaeology, statements it is not a condition of possibility but a law of coexistence.3 This Foucaultian insistence on emergence and coexistence of statements (and his concomitant emphasis on sites of chance, materiality, and discontinuity) may offer a slightly more sober way of understanding dispute with Derrida than is offered in Foucault's My Body, This Paper, This Fire, his rather vitriolic response to Derrida's reading of Madness and Civilization. Foucault's 1971 essay, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, is clear concerning stakes of this distinction between conditions of emergence and conditions of possibility. For him, Nietzsche allows us to disrupt specious privilege of metaphysical originality when he poses question of origin not in strictly transcendentalist terms-not as Ursprung-but rather in genealogical terms. Nietzsche challenges us to rethink origin in two specific ways: first, as Herkunft (stock or descent; chance, discontinuous history of Foucault calls the body-and everything that touches it: climate, diet, soil);4 second, Nietzsche asks us to think origin as Entstehung, which Foucault glosses as emergence or event, the moment of [force's] arising5 that designates a place of confrontation.6 By insisting on this distinction between conditions of possibility and conditions of emergence, Foucault's reading of Nietzsche continually highlights principle, which holds that what is found at historical beginning of things is not inviolable identity of their origin; it is dissension of other things; it is disparity.7 Genealogy consistently itself to search for `origins's-that is, it opposes itself to search for conditions of possibility, to continuous exposure of Ursprung's historico/transcendental traces in philosophy and in human sciences. It is in this context that we might recall or reexamine Foucault's objections to Derrida in Archaeology of Knowledge (though note that Derrida is never named directly in text): according to Foucault, even if one emphasizes a radically discontinuous notion of conditions of possibility, a certain kind of pernicious transcendentalism nevertheless can be purified in problematic of a trace, which, prior to all speech, is opening of inscription, gap of deferred time; it is always historico-transcendental theme that is reinvested. A theme [from which] enunciative analysis tries to free itself. In order to restore statements to their pure dispersion.... In order to consider them in their discontinuity, without having to relate them . . . to a more fundamental opening or difference. In order to seize their irruption at place and at moment at which it occurred. (AK, p. 121 ) At least provisionally, Foucault posits his emphasis on conditions of emergence (the very irruption at place and at moment at which it occurred) as a wedge to interrupt smooth disciplinary movement from objects to their governing laws of possible inscription. …