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PARTISAN REVIEW
bilities created by the initiators of a discursivity
(I
take Marx and Freud as
examples because I believe they are both the first and the most important) are
completely different from the possibilities created by the author of a novel.
Ann Radcliffe's texts served as a model for other works . To say that Ann Rad–
cliffe founded the gothic novel of the nineteenth century means that one will
find in that genre the theme of the heroine caught in her own innocence, the
symbol of the secret castle which functions as an anti-city, the figure of the
dark , doomed hero who vows
to
make the world pay for the evil he has en–
dured, and so on . But Freud and Marx have opened the field to something
besides themselves, yet belonging to what they established . To say that Freud
founded psychoanalysis does not simply mean that one finds the concept of
the libido or the technique of dream analysis in the work of Karl Abraham or
Melanie Klein. Freud created the possibility of a number of divergences from
his own ideas, all of which enhance the entire field of psychoanalysis .
At the same time , there is a new problem. After all, Galileo did not
simply make possible those who repeated the laws he formulated , he made
possible pronouncements quite different from his own. If Cuviet is the
founder of biology ,or Saussure oflinguistics , it is not because they have been
imitated, it is not because someone has incorporated the concept of the
organism or of the sign ; it is because,
to
some extent , Cuvier made possible
the theory of evolution which was opposed to his own nonevolutionary
thought ; it is because, to a certain degree , Saussure made possible a genera–
tive grammar which is very different from his structural analyses .
As distinguished from the founding of a "scientificity," the inaugura–
tion of a " discursivity" does not take part in subsequent transformations ; it
remains necessarily above and beyond them. The result is that one defines the
validity of a proposition by reference
to
the work of these initiators , whereas in
the case ofGalileo or Newton, it is by reference
to
the structure of physics and
cosmology that one can affirm the validity of any proposition .
We understand that what is encountered as a necessity in such discursi–
vities is the necessity of a "return to the beginning ." Here too , it is necessary
to distinguish these returns from the phenomena of rediscovery and ' ' bring–
ing up to date " which are frequently produced in the sciences. I would give as
an example Chomsky who in his book on Cartesian grammar has rediscovered
a form of knowledge which runs from Cordonney to Humboldt : it is a ques–
tion ofa retrospective labeling of the historical inquiry . The history of mathe–
matics is rich in this kind of phenomenon (I refer to the study which Michel
Serres has devoted to mathematical anamnesis) . But, what is meant by the
return? I believe that in this way one can designate a movement which has its
own specificity and which accurately characterizes the establishment of a
discursivity. In order for there
to
be a return , in effect , it is first necessary for
