Midst Anthropology's Problems

In Les Mots et les choses (1966) Michel Foucault identified three arenas of discourse that in their (unstable and incomplete) coalescence at the end of the Classical Age constituted the object called man (I'homme). This figure emerges at the intersection of three domains-life, labor, and language-unstably unified around (and constituting) a would-be sovereign subject. The doubling of a transcendental subject and an empirical object and their dynamic and unstable relations defined the form of this being. In 1966 Foucault held an epochal view of man and of modernity. In his conclusion, Foucault intimated the imminent coming of a new configuration of language about to sweep the figure of man away like "a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea" (1966:398, my translation). It now appears that this presage was miscast: In the ensuing decades, language (in its modality as poiesis) has not turned out to be the site of radical formal transformations through which this being, man, would either disappear entirely, as Foucault intimated, or would transmute into a new type of being as predicted by Gilles Deleuze (1988). Although Foucault did not directly return to his diagnosis of the "end of man," he did modify his understanding of modernity as an epoch. In his essay "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault posed the challenge of inventing a new philosophic relationship to the present; one in which modernity was taken up not through the analytic frame of the epoch but instead through a practice of inquiry grounded in an ethos of present-orientation, of contingency, of form-giving. Perhaps today one significant challenge of forging a modern ethos lies in thinking about how to relate to the issue of anthropos. Such a task may present different types of challenges to philosophical thinkers, such as Foucault, than to the anthropologist. Regardless of how one approaches those questions (an issue to which we return in the conclusion), what if we took up recent changes in the Logoi of life, labor, and language, not as indicating an epochal shift with a totalizing coherence (sovereignty, man), but rather as fragmented and sectorial changes that pose problems-both in and of themselves, as well as for attempts to make sense of what form(s) anthropos is currently being given?