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Part I — Foucault: From Man to System In June 1966, shortly after the publication of Les Mots et les choses , Michel Foucault was interviewed by Pierre Dumayet for the French television programme Lectures pour tous . The interview is valuable not simply because Foucault explains the argument of his recently published book, but because he states with unusual directness what is at stake in his approach. The question is not what human beings are in themselves, nor how an already constituted subject comes to know the world. It is how the figure of the human being itself became historically available as an object of knowledge. Foucault begins by challenging the assumption that the human sciences uncover a pre-existing human reality. Their development, he argues, has not brought us closer to some positive, concrete essence of the human. Rather, it has revealed the historical systems within which particular forms of human individuality become possible: “L’Homme a été […] une figure très...

Part I — Foucault: The System and the Forbidden 1. The System When Foucault opens Technologies of the Self , he does not begin with sexuality as a private experience or with desire as something that originates within the individual. He begins with a system: “rules, duties, and prohibitions,” together with the “interdictions and restrictions” associated with sexuality. The vocabulary is significant. It presents sexuality first as a field organized by distinctions between what may and may not be done, what is permitted and what is forbidden. The individual appears within an already established order of obligations and limits. This also points to what Foucault means by sexuality . He is not simply referring to a natural domain of sexual acts, desires, and pleasures. Sexuality is a historically constituted field in which conduct, desire, knowledge, norms, and relations to oneself become organized. The question is therefore not simply how individuals behave sexually, but how they come...

Part I — Barthes: Discovering the Remainder 1. The Remainder Near the end of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes gives semiology a definition that sounds less like the description of an academic discipline than a declaration of allegiance: « La sémiologie serait dès lors ce travail qui recueille l'impur de la langue, le rebut de la linguistique, la corruption immédiate du message : rien moins que les désirs, les craintes, les mines, les intimidations, les avances, les tendresses, les protestations, les excuses, les agressions, les musiques, dont est faite la langue active. » “Semiology would consequently be that labour which collects the impurity of language (langue), the waste of linguistics, the immediate corruption of the message: nothing less than the desires, the fears, the appearances, the intimidations, the advances, the blandishments, the protests, the excuses, the aggressions, the various kinds of music out of which active language (langu...