From: "Stuart Elden" <stuart.elden-AT-clara.co.uk>
Subject: RE: L'enonce /German influenced French guys..
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 19:24:22 -0000


I have been, and continue to be, extremely busy, so apologies both for my
silence and the limited nature of this response.

First thing to say is that I haven't written a whole book about AK, but a
discussion of it is part of the Mapping the Present book which does now, at
last, seem to be available from amazon.co.uk, if not amazon.com yet.

I don't say a great deal about enonce there, but the general gist of what I
say about AK can be found in the discussion I had with Ali this summer.

A few thoughts then -

Enonce, translated as statement in AK is, I think, a much less grand thing
than being is for Heidegger. Enonces would only ever be ontic, not
ontological. An enonce would be something like a formula, or a statement in
a biology book, or a list of verb forms. Enonces work within a general
discourse. Understandings of being, in the Heideggerian sense, would perhaps
be found if we looked not just at the limited discourse, but at the much
wider framework which conditioned these (i.e. was their generalised
condition of possibility). A historical inquiry - perhaps look at The Order
of Things, and on enonce as well as AK, The Order of Discourse. Gary
Gutting's Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason is one of the
best books on this period of Foucault's work.

The non-personal, anonymous aspect might be better thought through in
relation to Heidegger by looking at his analysis of das Man in Being and
Time. Das Man - the they, the one. How does das Man speak? How must 'one'
speak? Cf Being and Time, Div I, section IV - pages 114 and following in the
German pagination.

This is brief and just a suggestion. Do post further thoughts to the list -
I may have more time soon.

Back to Lefebvre

Best wishes

Stuart