Offering Theory. John Mowitt
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who is called upon to invest in the collaborative labor of making the text produce sense (Barthes 1975, 4). In addition to interrupting the “readable” obsession with what the author means (either consciously or unconsciously), this approach queerly “sexualizes” the experience of this interruption. I say “queerly” because Barthes is openly corroding the authentic link between sexed bodies and sexuality, replacing it with a concept of sexual practice that bleeds into a field of activities that would appear, at first glance, to have little or nothing to do with sex. And while some have criticized this as the quintessential expression of Barthes’s troubling, even closeted, asceticism, I think his effort to specify the practical, ordinary field of what Foucault calls the “apparatus” (dispositif, so, the nonpositive or negative) of sexuality is crucial intellectual and political work. Barthes, after all, was not advocating reading instead of having sex. Read Incidents. Nor, for that matter, was he advocating reading (a book) while having sex, although the “thinking of another” underscored in A Lover’s Discourse might in a pinch be construed in such terms. Instead, he was inviting those of us who “enjoy” the roughness of reading to see it as a way to proliferate the angles that might be explored for the production of carnal knowledge.
Thus, my reading of the inaugural lecture approaches it as though Foucault were “cruising” me, that is, reading him as though he were inviting me to participate in his desire to speak without knowing either where or who I am. As we shall see, this slippery drama of the voice, one’s encounter with it, is an absolutely crucial aspect of the inaugural lecture. Indeed, it is here in this when and where of the lecture that Theory happens; not precisely its queer theory, but a queerness that resonates, that sounds within the Theory we misname by calling it “Foucauldian.”
Anyone who has read the inaugural lecture carefully has probably been struck by the peculiar self-reflexivity of its opening.
I wish I could have slipped surreptitiously into this discourse which I must present today, and into the ones I shall have to give here, perhaps for many years to come. I should have preferred to be enveloped by speech […]. I should have preferred to become aware that a nameless voice was already speaking long before me, so that I should only have needed to join in, to continue the sentence it (lui) had started and lodge myself […], in its interstices […]. I should have liked there to be a voice behind me which had begun to speak a very long time before, doubling in advance everything I was going to say, a voice which would say, “You must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps its done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opened.” (Foucault 1981, 51)
Jean Lacouture, who covered the lecture for Le Monde, was clearly struck by this opening gambit in which he heard the faint sound of a repudiation of May ‘68 through Foucault’s refusal to execute a bold prise de parole (a “taking” of the floor) (Lacouture 1970, n.p.). And, Lacouture was not alone. When interviewed in the mid-1980s by Foucault’s later biographer, Didier Eribon, another member of Foucault’s audience, Claude Lévi-Strauss—when asked about his opinion of Foucault’s work—said this about the lecture:
His work touches me because of its stylistic qualities—I recall his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France. It was very beautiful in a literary way, tinged with feeling. On the other hand, I have reservations about an attitude that seems to repeat at every turn, Watch out, things are not as you believe, it is the other way around. In a word, an attitude that says black is white and white is black. This enlightens me concerning the author’s opinions, but tells me nothing else: a photographic negative and positive both contain the same amount of information. (Lévi-Strauss 1991, 72)
A faint refusal tinged with feeling (“strange pain, strange sin”) manages to attract the attention of both journalism and anthropology. However, what makes Foucault’s delineation of the enunciation of the lecture especially interesting is not chiefly the sentiment of humility or anxiety that it gives expression to (both are perfectly comprehensible given the occasion) but the details of the desire that it enunciates. Why this fascination with slipping into someone else’s discourse, or being addressed from behind by a voice without a name—a fascination given concrete expression through Foucault’s extended citation of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable? To answer these questions, as well as those raised at the outset, our reading has to trace this intertextual ping through the page, through the lecture hall, through the bilingual border between French and English.
The citation from Beckett comes from the tail end of The Unnamable. It is where Beckett’s text coils back on itself, devouring everything that has preceded that moment as the “prehistory” of a story readers assume they have, in fact, just read. The tortured temporality of this characteristically “modernist” moment is duly reflected in the voicing of the passage where the narrator shifts back and forth between the position of subject and object, the speaker and the spoken. In this respect, one might argue that the allusion to Beckett is motivated by the symmetry between his staging of the instability of the narrator and Foucault’s problematization of the moment of enunciation; his own acting of lecturing and thereby entering the order of discourse. This line of argumentation is encouraged when, later in Foucault’s lecture, he takes up the problematic status of the author. Aside from the fact that Foucault’s discussion of the author stresses its function in the immanent channeling of discourse—the very theme of his own opening remarks—this development prompts us (as if whispered to) to return to Foucault’s nearly contemporaneous essay “What Is an Author?” where one of the only two other sustained published allusions to Beckett’s work is to be found.
This essay, written in 1969 and revised during the early 1970s, opens and closes with a citation from the opening of Beckett’s third text in his collection, Texts for Nothing. It reads, “Leave. I was going to leave all that. What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matters who’s speaking” (Beckett 1967, 85). As many will know, Foucault exploits the citation to question the traditional importance assigned by literary criticism to the author as the presumed guarantor of a text’s meaning. His point is not to dismiss the author as a sociohistorical being, but to challenge the way this being is abstracted and made to function as an interpretive device. Now, even at this rudimentary level of analysis it is not hard to hear how this line of inquiry converges with the one inaugurating the inaugural lecture. In both cases, the boundaries, the lips of discourse—particularly as these might be conceived in relation to the agency of its enunciation—are not only raised as issues, but they are figured into the contours of Foucault’s texts (the beginning of the lecture and the end of the essay) at their own boundaries, as if to execute formally, almost anatomically, the interplay of voices wished for in the inaugural lecture. Once we sense this, it becomes difficult to treat these references to Beckett as mere citations or allusions. They are reaching for more. In addition, if we continue to treat these references as though they were motivated by nothing more than Foucault’s perception of a certain analogy or symmetry between his immediate situation as an inductee at the Collège de France, and Beckett’s quintessentially modernist experience of writing, then I think we risk missing something decisive about the gestures being carried out by—not simply in, but by—the inaugural lecture. We miss our encounter with Theory in its reading.
Let us then return to the lecture and detail its rhythm more carefully. It is divided into eight segments (parts of which were suppressed, on the evening of its delivery, for reasons of time), the last of these reiterating and giving concrete expression to the theme of locating or losing one’s voice in the voice of another. Thus, the suspension opened in the first segment is provided with closure in the eighth. Aside from the fact that the final segment testifies to Foucault’s ability to master the rigors of organic form, it is striking because this segment takes the lecture in the most traditional of directions, as if the space of the occasion were writing itself into the lecture. In effect, it converts it into an homage. Specifically, Foucault discusses his debt (and the economic vocabulary is not coincidental) to three men: George Dumézil, a comparative historian of religion (later credited by Foucault with solving the riddle of Socrates’