The Phenomenological Allegory

Although after 1969 Michel Foucault sharply distinguishes his work from phenomenology, this essay argues for a more complex relation in his early work between a philosophy oriented toward consciousness and life and one committed to and structure. It uses a Deleuzian figure to suggest that in the work before The Archaeology of Knowledge phenomenology and each other, so that each is at once the inside and the outside of the other, its condition of possibility and the limit against which it is tested. Arguing that literature for Foucault is the hiding-place of a cryptic phenomenology, the essay begins with Death and the Labyrinth, Foucault's study of the way Raymond Roussel's textual machines enfold his unreadable life. Not only is Roussel an uncanny double for Foucault himself; the book's publication on the same day as the more overtly structuralist Birth of the Clinic also discloses the methodological and disciplinary doubleness of Foucault's corpus. The remainder of the essay traces this doubleness in The Order of Things, considered both as a network of ideas and as a literary text. It explores how Foucault uses the space between Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Blanchot, and Bataille to develop a uniquely deconstructive anthropology, a counterhistory of rationality. If Foucault's work is nevertheless an ordering of the knowledge (Geisteswissenschaften), it is also an allegory of the place of phenomenology in contemporary theory: a phenomenology of theoretical styles in which the Renaissance is associated through the title of the first section with Merleau-Ponty's The Prose of the World, and in which structuralism is figured as classicism. Moving from the Renaissance through classicism to the dark underside of the modern, and from language through discourse to the return Poetics oday 19:3 (Fall 1998). Copyright ? 1998 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.115 on Sat, 08 Oct 2016 05:08:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 440 Poetics Today 19:3 of in the negative mode of literature, Foucault thus rethinks phenomenology as deconstruction through a dialectical encounter with structuralism

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