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PICTURES ON THE WALL AS REP OF MAN/ART ALTERED REL IN RESISTANCE

What is it that makes this the adoption of dead man’s existentiality? Foucault’s books, not just The Order of Things but also Madness and Civilisation and The Birth of the Clinic constitute a struggle. The struggle is to institute into the early modern age, here specifically the 16th Century, a rebel history that can scarcely have been said to have taken place in any literal sense of events that happened or documents that were received into the body of memories or societies. But it can be created, and the mark of that creation is Foucault’s legacy, a reclamation, a new formation, of the obsolescent notion of genesis upon which the West has grounded its thought. To find the existence of a dead man you have to find how to create it first.


Alongside the ‘mathesis of quantifiable order’ which Foucault locates in the age that produced Leibniz, there is also taxinomia and genesis (or genetic analysis), the compilation of the index of the world, and its order of creation. The three intertwine, each inside the other; each outside the other:

‘Taxinomia establishes the table of visible differences; genesis presupposes a progressive series; the first treats of signs in their spatial simultaneity, as a syntax; the second divides them up into an analgon of time, as a chronology. In relation to mathesis, taxinomia functions as an ontology confronted by an apophantics; confronted by genesis, it functions as a semiology confronted by history.’ 12

The history of man-made genesis, as here, is folded within the construction of other models- and by confronting it those models find their orientation and their limits. In his recent Grammars of Creation, George Steiner has posited an uncertain future in the light of Western thought’s decay and discarding of creation and a sense of things being made from the beginning towards the end 13. Contrarily, Edward Said locates the shift specifically in high-modernism’s time, when the generative model was replaced by a filiative model 14. Both Said and Steiner have been noteworthy amongst the most esteemed of living critics for the reserve that steadies their high praise for Foucault, but they’re both guilty of glossing over the potent new genesis that he presents. It’s Idealist in form- and it breaks when it comes up against catastrophic limits.