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PETER
CAWS
point. What Lacan seems to be saying is that the subject cannot
give an analytic account of itself, only paradoxes, hints and images;
and this being the case "there is no science of man."
There is no science of man, because the man of science does not
exist, only its subject.
It is known that I have always felt a repugnance for the term
sciences humaines,
which seems to me a call to slavery itself.
One of the most powerful structuralist blows against traditional
humanism was administered by the publication in 1966 of Michel
Foucault's
Les Mots et les choses.
The starting-point for the reflec–
tions which resulted in the book, he says in the preface, was a text
of Borges, which is worth quoting for itself as well as for the light
it throws on the structuralist enterprise.
This text cites "a certain Chinese encyclopedia" where it is written
that "animals are divided into: a) belonging to the Emperor, b)
embalmed, c) tame, d) suckling pigs, e) mermaids, f) fabulous,
g) dogs running free, h) included in the present classification,
i) which behave like madmen, j) innumerable, k) drawn on camel–
skin with a very fine brush,
I)
et cetera, m) which have just broken
their leg, n) which from a distance look like flies."
And Foucault continues:
In our astonishment at this taxonomy what strikes us with sudden
force, what, because of its setting, is presented to us as the exotic
charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own:
the stark impossibility of thinking
that.
Why, Foucault asks, do we find Borges' imaginary Chinese classifica–
tion so preposterous? Into what intellectual straitjacket has our own
history forced us? And he concludes that our resistance to this kind
of spontaneous absurdity, our demand for logical coherence even
where it is unnecessary, is again a product of the invention of
man
as
an embodiment of analytic reason. Until early modern times individ–
ual and collective subjectivity were absorbed in Discourse, a human
activity (a linguistic one, which in context amounts to the same
thing) constituting the world as intelligible and summing up all that
could be said about it. The rise of science led to the fragmentation
and dissolution of this conceptual and linguistic unity, by drawing
attention to separable properties of the world - biological, economic,
philological- and pursuing them independently. But it then became
