The Word of God

back covers of Foucault's two last books, Care of the Self and Use ofPleasure, carry the same aphorism by Rene Char: The history of man is a long succession of synonyms for the same word. To contradict it is a By 1984, a long time had passed since Foucault had cited Char. And it had been a long time as well since he had spoken of duty. To make itself heard this imperative now borrowed the voice of a poet. That it should have done so suggests, at least obliquely, an affinity between literature and the stylistics of existence on which, according to Care of the Self, the possibility of escaping the great confinement of the synonym would depend: the possibility of suspending, of interrupting, the synonymic reign of expressiveness. This synonymic chaining, chaining together of synonyms, chaining together by means of synonymy, was present in Madness and Civilization as the description of moral incarceration with which the book closes. Will a homonymic imperative oppose this imperialism of synonymy? To such resistance to synonymy we could indeed connect Foucault's interest in the secret rhymes of Roussel and that other homonymic unchaining, the vertiginous etymologies of God's grammar he attributed to Brisset

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Word (group theory · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Philosophy

• What Is an Oeuvre? Foucault and Literature

  Jacob S Fisher•Configurations•1999

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