A Deleuzian Undercurrent to Foucault’s “What is an Author?” (part 3: Excursus into Althusser)

By Gordon Hull

Back in Before Times, I wrote a couple of posts beginning to make the case for a Deleuzian influence behind Foucault’s “What is an Author” (part 1, part 2).  This post resumes that series… Recall that Foucault’s narrative in “Author” distinguishes between those who found a science, like Galileo, and those who are an “initiator [instaurateur]” of discourses.  Examples of the latter are Marx and Freud.  So let’s consider how the Foucault of the late 1960s reads Marx, given that he pretty much despises Marxism.  For example, in Order of Things, he worked hard to say that Marxism was not genuinely revolutionary:

“At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of  disturbing and, above all, no power to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it. Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else. Though it is in opposition to the ‘bourgeois’ theories of economics, and though this opposition leads it to use the project of a radical reversal of History as a weapon against them, that conflict and that project nevertheless have as their condition of possibility, not the reworking of all History, but an event that any archaeology can situate with precision, and that prescribed simultaneously, and according to the same mode, both nineteenth-century bourgeois economics and nineteenth-century revolutionary economics. Their controversies may have stirred up a few waves and caused a few surface ripples; but they are no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool” (OT 285).

On this reading, the 19^th-century project is to merge humanism and history into one larger, utopian project: “History will cause man’s anthropological truth to spring forth in its stony immobility; calendar time will be able to continue; but it will be, as it were, void, for historicity will have been superimposed exactly upon the human essence” (OT 286).  It wasn’t until Nietzsche that this conceptual apparatus declined, as he “made it glow into brightness again for the last time by setting fire to it” (OT 286).