Foucault News

Sean Scully, “Landline Yellow Line”

I return, finally, to Foucault’s early interest in limit. But as the past 12 weeks (!!) have seeped away, I have realized that to return to this question in the context of his relation to the Tel Quel group, on the one hand, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, on the other, is too large and complex a task for a blog post. Here is a briefer engagement, which I hope can stand as a promise toward further thinking.

In January 1966, on the cusp of the April publication of Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things), Foucault writes to a friend: “Non, ce ne’st pas cela, le problème n’est pas la langue, mais les limites de l’énonciabilité”: “No, not that; the problem is not language but the limits of enunciability” (Dits et Écrits I, 36; the addressee is not named).  The problem–what