From: "Ali Rizvi" <ali_m_rizvi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Foucult and System
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 13:21:05 +0000


Q. What were Sartre’s interest as a philosopher?

A. Roughly, faced with a historical world that bourgeois tradition, no 
longer able to keep its bearings, wanted to consider as absurd. Sartre 
wanted to demonstrate that, on the contrary, there was meaning [sens] 
everywhere…

Q. When did you stop believing in “meaning”?

A. The break came the day that Lévi-Strauss demonstrated-about societies-and 
Lacan demonstrated-about the unconscious-that the “meaning” was probably 
only a sort of surface effect, a shimmer, a foam, and that what ran through 
us, underlay us, and was before us, what sustained us in time and space, was 
the system.

. . . Lacan’s importance comes from the fact that he showed how it is the 
structures, the very system of language, that speak through the patient’s 
discourse and the symptoms of his neurosis-not the subject . . . Before any 
human existence, there would already be a discursive knowledge, a system 
that we will rediscover.

Q. But then, who secretes this system?

A. What is this anonymous system without a subject, what thinks? The “I” has 
exploded-we see this in modern literature-this is the discovery of “there 
is”. There is one. In some ways, one comes back to the seventeenth-century 
point of view, with this difference: not setting man, but anonymous thought, 
knowledge without a subject, theory with no identity, in God’s place. 
(quoted in, Eribon,Michel Foucualt p. 161, emphasis added).



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