Volume 20, Number 8 · May 17, 1973
Crisis Critic
By Frank Kermode
The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language
by Michel Foucault, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith
Pantheon, 245 pp., $10.00
An increasing number of people seem to want to know what Michel Foucault is saying, even though the news has gotten around that he makes it very hard to find out. The reviewer's first message to these brave spirits must be a negative one: do not begin here. The Archaeology is an appendix to his earlier work, and especially to The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses, published in 1966, translated 1970, and reviewed by D. W. Harding in these pages, August 12, 1971). Without some knowledge of that work the new book must seem almost unintelligible, since it is primarily an attempt to describe and qualify the method of argument there used—as the author acknowledges—without adequate justification. Foucault has always been a repetitive as well as an obscure writer, prone to a kind of self-intoxication that can, at times, produce prose resembling erudite poetry. The new book—admirably translated—has such moments, but it is for the most part an elaborate set of methodological doodles in the margins of the old, and one easily grows impatient.
Review, 3203 words
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