idiotropic

Each chapter opens with pages of tedious foreplay culminating in a gushing, euphoric climax in the last paragraph, as in the fourth chapter of The Achaeology of Knowledge:

(this quote is about the way in which social discourses, such as ‘psychopathology’ or ‘economics’, produce themselves and simultaneously produce the subjectivity of the individuals who take part in them)

“In the proposed analysis, instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifying function of a subject, the various enunciative modalities manifest his dispersion.  To the various statuses, the various sites, the various positions that he can occupy or be given when making a discourse.  To the discontinuity of the planes from which he speaks.  And if these planes are linked by a system of relations, this system is not established by the synthetic activity of a consciousness identical with itself, dumb and anterior to all speech, but by the specificty of a discursive practice.  I shall abandon any attempt, therefore, to see discourse as a phenomenon of expression — the verbal translation of a previously established synthesis; instead, I shall look for a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity.  Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined.  It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed.  I showed earlier that it was neither by ‘words’ nor by ‘things’ that the regulation of the objects proper to a discursive formation should be defined; similary, it must now be recognized that it is neither by recourse to a transcendental subject nor by recourse to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of its enunciations should be defined.”

- Michel Foucault, The Formation of Enunciative Modalities, from The Archaeology of Knowledge.

[I realize this may not be a popular post.]