The Paradox of Commentary: Foucault and the Control of Discourse
In The Order of Discourse, Foucault first examines procedures that operate from outside discourse: prohibition, division and rejection, and the will to truth. These procedures determine what may be said, who may speak, and which forms of speech can enter the field of legitimate discourse. He then turns to another group of procedures, described as internal because “discourses themselves exercise their own control.” The problem changes accordingly. Instead of asking how discourse is excluded from the outside, Foucault asks how its own production is organized from within.
This distinction does not separate two unrelated mechanisms. It shifts attention from the conditions under which discourse can enter a field to the principles that regulate what can be said once it is there. Foucault describes these internal procedures as principles of “classification, of ordering, of distribution,” through which another dimension of discourse must be mastered: “that of events and chance.” The issue is therefore not simply whether something may be said, but how the proliferation of statements can be given a recognizable order.
This raises a different problem of control. What happens when discourse is regulated not by preventing speech, but by determining how new speech can emerge from what has already been said? A procedure of this kind may appear to encourage rather than restrict discourse. It can generate explanations, interpretations, repetitions, and further formulations, allowing it to continue indefinitely. Yet the possibility of saying more may depend upon rules governing the relation to an earlier discourse.
Foucault's first example is commentary. At first sight, commentary seems to open discourse to an unlimited production of new statements. Its function, however, depends upon a particular relation to an established text: what is newly said must remain connected to something that has already been said. The question, then, is how such a relation can simultaneously generate further discourse and regulate its production.
2. What Is Commentary?
Foucault's commentary should not be understood simply as a particular literary or philosophical genre. The tradition of commenting on authoritative texts provides familiar examples, like philosophical commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, but Foucault is identifying a broader discursive function. Commentary occurs wherever certain texts acquire a status that allows them to generate further speech while the legitimacy of that speech remains tied to the text from which it proceeds.
He distinguishes, in this connection, between statements that disappear once they have been uttered and discourses that “remain said, and are to be said again.” The latter include religious and juridical texts, literary works, and, to some extent, scientific texts. Their distinctive status does not mean that they are literally repeated word for word. Rather, they become the source of an indefinite series of further speech-acts that take them up, transform them, explain them, or speak about them.
Such texts acquire this capacity because they are treated as possessing a particular kind of permanence and richness. They are assumed to contain meanings that can be recovered, clarified, developed, or brought into a new context. A primary discourse can therefore remain available for renewed interpretation precisely because it is regarded as containing more than any single reading has exhausted.
This creates a recurring structure: primary discourse → commentary → further discourse
The important point is that the second term does not simply replace the first. Commentary depends upon the continued authority of the primary discourse. The text remains the point of reference that gives subsequent statements their status as commentaries rather than merely unrelated assertions.
Foucault's examples make the breadth of this mechanism clear. A religious text may generate an indefinite history of exegesis; a juridical text may become the object of successive interpretations; a literary work may produce translations, critical readings, and new works that transform its significance. In each case, an established discourse becomes productive beyond its original formulation.
Commentary therefore appears to solve one problem while creating another. It allows discourse to multiply, but the multiplication remains organized around a privileged point of return. Why does a procedure that apparently generates more discourse count as a mechanism of control?
3. The Paradox of Commentary
The answer begins with the peculiar kind of novelty that commentary makes possible. Foucault says that commentary “allows us to say something other than the text itself.” A commentary can explain a passage, propose an interpretation, establish a connection, translate a formulation, or bring a text into a new context. It therefore seems to expand the field of what can be said. The primary discourse becomes the occasion for an indefinite production of further statements.
Yet the commentator cannot simply produce anything and retain the status of commentary. The authority of the intervention depends upon its relation to the established text. What is said must be presented as an interpretation, clarification, development, or recovery of something that the text itself makes available. The commentator speaks in a new voice, but the legitimacy of that voice depends upon its ability to return to an already established discourse.
Foucault captures this relation in a striking formulation: “the commentary must say for the first time what had, nonetheless, already been said.” The apparent contradiction is essential. The commentator says something that has not previously been formulated in this particular way, yet the statement must also count as something that was already present in the primary text. Its novelty is therefore inseparable from a claim of prior existence.
The inverse formulation makes the paradox even sharper. Commentary “must tirelessly repeat what had, however, never been said.” What is repeated has never literally been said in the form now given to it. The commentary produces a new statement while presenting that statement as a repetition of an earlier one. The earlier discourse makes the new formulation possible, while the new formulation gives renewed articulation to what is supposed to have been there from the beginning.
The commentary consequently produces novelty under the authority of repetition. Its capacity to say something further is conditional upon establishing continuity with an authoritative text. This is why Foucault can treat commentary as a procedure for controlling discourse even though it generates an apparently unlimited number of statements. The control does not consist in stopping production. It operates through the relation that new production must maintain with what has already been said.
This recurrent movement allows the process to continue indefinitely. A commentator may claim to have uncovered a meaning that earlier readers overlooked, but the claim remains intelligible as commentary only if that meaning can somehow be traced back to the established work. Another reader can then return to the same source and articulate something further.
Foucault's phrase “the infinite rippling of commentaries” captures this peculiar form of proliferation. Each intervention can open another possibility for interpretation, while the source remains the point around which those interventions are organized. This raises a deeper question: why can the primary text continue to sustain such returns? What must be attributed to it for an apparently completed discourse to remain capable of generating further speech?
4. A Text That Is Never Complete
For commentary to continue indefinitely, the primary text must possess a peculiar status. It must be permanent enough to remain available for repeated return, rich enough to sustain different interpretations, and open enough to allow meanings to be recovered that have not yet been made explicit. Foucault refers to the “multiple or hidden meaning” attributed to such texts, as well as to their “essential reticence and richness.” Their capacity to generate further discourse rests, in other words, on the assumption that something remains to be said.
This gives the primary text a double status. It functions as an authoritative source precisely because it is treated as something already established, yet its authority is sustained through the possibility of further articulation. The text must therefore appear complete enough to ground interpretation without being exhausted by any particular interpretation.
The relation can be represented as follows:
primary text → authorizes commentary
commentary → reactivates primary text
The first movement gives the commentator a point of reference. An interpretation derives its legitimacy from its claim to illuminate, explain, translate, or otherwise engage with the established work. The second gives the work renewed life. Each new reading presents the text once again as something that remains relevant, intelligible, and capable of yielding further meaning.
Foucault's example of the Odyssey makes this structure particularly clear. The work can be translated, subjected to successive explications de texte, or transformed into Joyce's Ulysses. These forms differ substantially from one another, yet each remains connected to the earlier work. The point is not that every subsequent work simply reproduces the Odyssey. Rather, the established text continues to function as a privileged source from which different forms of discourse can emerge.
The resulting tension can be put in simple terms. The primary text seems to say, “Everything necessary is already here.” The commentary responds, “There is still something to say.” Yet for the response to retain its status as commentary, what has been newly articulated must somehow be presented as belonging to the earlier discourse—as something implicit, overlooked, recoverable, or capable of being reactivated.
The primary text therefore remains authoritative through the possibility of further interpretation. Each reading can renew the status of the work as a source, while its continuing status as a source gives subsequent readings a recognizable basis. The distinction between primary and secondary discourse consequently remains essential to the mechanism Foucault describes: the source must retain its privileged position for commentary to exist as commentary, while commentary demonstrates that the source can still generate something further.
The text is thus never simply exhausted. Its apparent completeness is part of what makes continued interpretation possible. It must remain sufficiently closed to provide authority and sufficiently open to sustain an indefinite series of returns.
5. The Control of the New
We can now return to the problem posed at the beginning: how can commentary function as a form of control if it produces more discourse?
The answer lies in the conditions attached to that production. Commentary does not control discourse by preventing new statements from appearing. It regulates the relation through which they can enter an established field and acquire legitimacy within it. The commentator may interpret, explain, translate, criticize, or reformulate, but the intervention must remain connected to the discourse that gives it its status as commentary.
This preserves the possibility of saying more while maintaining the terms under which further statements can be recognized as legitimate continuations. A new formulation enters the field through a return to something already established, so that its novelty remains tied to a prior discourse.
Foucault's final formulation brings this mechanism into focus: “The new thing here lies not in what is said but in the event of its return.” What returns may appear in another context, through another speaker, in another form, or with another interpretation. The repetition is never merely mechanical, since commentary depends upon transformation. What matters is that the transformation occurs as a return to an established discourse.
The internal procedures Foucault discusses therefore do not simply reduce the amount of discourse. They organize its proliferation. In the case of commentary, further statements can multiply because they remain oriented toward a privileged source, whose continued authority provides the framework within which they can be recognized.
Seen from this perspective, commentary reveals a form of control that is easy to overlook precisely because it is productive. Discourse is not silenced; it continues to expand, but according to a particular rule of return. Novelty acquires legitimacy through repetition and transformation.
This connects the procedure to the broader architecture of The Order of Discourse. The external procedures examined earlier restrict discourse by determining what may be said, who may speak, and which forms of speech can be admitted or rejected. Commentary reveals a different mode of regulation: once discourse is in circulation, its further production can itself be organized according to rules governing how the new must relate to what has already been said.
Commentary therefore combines proliferation with constraint. It keeps discourse alive by allowing an established text to generate further speech, while preserving the relation that makes that speech recognizable as legitimate. The new thing lies in the return. What appears to be an opening of discourse is also a way of organizing what may come next.
References
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1978). The order of discourse. In R. Young (Ed.), Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (pp. 48–78). Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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