The Completeness of Foucault's Table of the Classical Episteme

Abstract

Now . . . where was I?1 Toward the end of his life, Kant kept a memorandum book to compensate for his failing memory. One entry, dated February 1802, refers to his recently dismissed manservant, Martin Lampe, who had apparently treated Kant in a disrespectful way. The entry reads: "The name of Lampe must now be remembered no more."2 This singular text lends itself to a number of different readings.3 Kant appears to have written down the name of Lampe to remind himself to forget it. The paradox, of course, is that at the very moment when the note is read, its recording of the name of Lampe delays the forgetting of the name of Lampe.4 This paradox is underscored by the note's sense of urgency: "The name of Lampe must now be remembered no more [der Name Lampe mus nun vollig vergessen werden]." This wording suggests that the name of Lampe was recorded by Kant not in order to be recalled later as that which must be forgotten, but in order to be instantaneously repressed. On this reading, Kant would not have written himself a reminder at all, for he would not have destined his text to a future reading; on the contrary, he would have attempted to erase the name of Lampe by writing it. It would be tempting to read this fragment of the Kantian corpus along the lines suggested by Derrida's reading of the scrap of paper on which Nietzsche wrote "I have forgotten my umbrella"-another seemingly isolated fragment that deals with issues of memory and forgetting.5 Kant's text recalls something that is to be forgotten, while Nietzsche's recalls something that has been forgotten. In both cases, there seems to be an irreducibly diachronic relation between the act of writing and the act of forgetting, for just as Kant cannot erase the name of Lampe at the very instant he records it, so Nietzsche cannot say that now, at this very moment, I am forgetting my umbrella. What is paradoxical about both fragments is that they attest to an act of forgetting, thereby running the risk of preserving in memory that which they would destine to oblivion. This is the exact inverse of what Husserl-in yet another posthumously published fragment-identifies as the role played by writing in the constitution of certain kinds of ideal objects. In "The Origin of Geometry," Husserl suggests that writing is an inherently ambiguous phenomenon in that it enables something to be remembered (the ideal sense expressed in a text) precisely insofar as it subjects it to the risk of being forgotten (insofar as the sense of written traces can be lost).6 This is why it is possible for a cultural tradition to be extended without being comprehended-or rather, to be understood at the level of its constituted meanings but in ignorance of the sense of the sedimented foundation upon which it rests. Husserl characterizes sedimentation as a "concrete, historical a priori."7 The task of the phenomenologist is to reanimate sedimented meanings by unearthing the sequence of historical a prioris that has led up to the present. Foucault also used the term "historical a priori" to refer to conditions for the possibility of forms of thought.8 But in his use of the term, the historical a priori refers not to that which was consciously deposited in writing and then forgotten but to something that governs thought without ever having been present in thought. For Foucault, the work of an archaeologist is not transcendental because the historical a priori cannot be traced back to a forgotten founding arche. This leads to a different conception of the relationship between writing and the historical a priori, and to a correspondingly different conception of what it means to inherit a literary tradition. For Husserl, a phenomenological reading has its point of departure in the assumption that what is to be read expresses an intention which the reading seeks to reanimate. But for Foucault, the archaeologist treats texts not as expressing manifest or hidden meanings, but as indicative symptoms of that which is precisely not expressed in them. …