248 The Nature of Political Theorya critique of the way Western discourses (from the Renaissance to the present) have
ordered knowledge under different perspectives (or epistemes). The central paradox
(which Foucault explores with great insight) is the emergence of the human being in
modernity as the measure of all things. The paradox is that the human being isboth
the subjectandobject of her own investigations.
What we are looking at here in Foucault is an attack on metaphysics, in terms
of its association with humanism. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, Foucault
thinks that traditional metaphysics seeks the underlying end, purpose, or meaning
of history—in the modern era it seeks it in an anthropomorphic essential human
self. In exactly the same context as Nietzsche and Derrida, he is convinced that
humanity invents itself and that the history of foundational metaphysics is a his-
tory of an error. Ethics in this scenario is also directly equivalent to Nietzsche’s will
to power. Ethics is an invention and a process of self-constitution, which is better
grasped as a form of aesthetics. This issue is explored in some of Foucault’s last
writings, particularly theCare of the Self(1990). There is therefore neither essence,
end, nor centre to human beings, only discontinuity, randomness, and chance. This
point is portrayed out well in his essay ‘What is an Author?’ Foucault sees deep-
rooted transcendental barriers to doing away with authors as intentional human
subjects. He notes that many ancient societies did not have this obsession in their
literature. The key genealogical question that should be asked in relation to both
the author and human subject in modernity is ‘How, under what conditions and
in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What
place can it occupy in each type of discourse?’ For Foucault, the crux of the matter
is ‘depriving the subject...of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as
a variable and complex function of discourse’ (Foucault 1986b: 118). In Foucault,
therefore, the author as subject ‘is a certain functional principle by which, in our
culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free
circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recom-
position of fiction’ (Foucault 1986b: 119).^16 The whole tenor of the argument is
deeply Nietzschean.
There are certain crucial points being made in the quoted passage: the self is an
inventionand aneffectof power. There is nothing inevitable about the self and the
way it is formed. What we call the subject (from Descartes to Husserl) is the result
of an anthropomorphic metaphysics (qua Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida). The
subject (like the author) is just a function of certain discourses. The human self is a
‘disciplinary project’ formed within specific cultures and metaphysical assumptions.
Further, like Nietzsche and Derrida he suggests that there is nothing ‘underneath’, no
‘noumenal’, no ‘centre’, or ‘interior life’ of any human individuals. There is in effect
no self prior to descriptions of the self in discourse. The way in which this self forms
needs to be understood through genealogy. Genealogy ‘does not pretend to go back
in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of
forgotten things’. In this sense, for Foucault Kantian questions such as ‘What is man?’
are regarded as simply a waste of time and fraudulent. We need to relinquish all this
striving for truth and objectivity.