Foucault's Laugh

     In The Order of Things, which is Michel Foucault's first major work to bring him celebrity philosopher status in France, he tells us the origin of his book:

"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other" (Introduction).

The Borges passage he refers to is from "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," in which Jorge Luis Borges makes reference to a pseudo-text purportedly by Franz Kuhn.  There, Borges compares Wilkins' attempt to categorize and order the world by the invention of an analytical language to the chaotic and wild categories found in a Chinese encyclopedia.  The encyclopedia categorizes animals as:

"(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) domesticated, (d) piglets, (e) sirens, (f) mythological, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in this classification, (i) crazily agitated, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a fine camel-hair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the jar, (n) appearing like flies from afar."

     Foucault reacts to this heterogeneous categorization of animals with a fit of laughter.  Now, his laughter is not like the prophet Elijah's laughter when he witnessed the priests of Baal cutting and slicing themselves in order to call down fire from heaven (1 Kings 18:27).  Elijah's laugh was the laugh of an old man complacently secure in his knowledge.  Foucault's, on the other hand, was a "shattering" laughter, one that kept him "laughing a long time," as he tells us, "though not without a certain uneasiness that I found hard to shake off" (emphasis mine).

     Foucault's laugh not only indicates the humor he found in reading Borges (and there is plenty of humor in Borges' writings, even if this is hardly mentioned or written about), but it also signifies the anxiety and disequilibrium he felt at having discovered the limits of his thinking and the limits of his imagination.  "In the wonderment of this taxonomy," he continues, "the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

     What Foucault is writing about is how Western societies have given order to the universe and to things and thus trapped themselves in a certain type of thinking.  Western thinking becomes calcified in categories that it considers scientific, logical, operational, and based on a priori foundations, while demeaning other kinds of thinking as irrational, illogical, fallacious—as if only individuals from Western societies can think and everyone else has magical thinking.  Foucault will go on to uncover and question these a priori foundations of Western thinking in The Order of Things.

     Foucault, then, launches his critique of Western epistemology by laughing a laugh that is at once pleasurable and disconcerting, hysterical and hearty, affective and diabolical.  His laugh may be described with a Nietzschean concept that describes a state of creative destruction and destructive creativity, a state that (to use Foucault's language) shatters and breaks and disturbs and threatens all foundations, leaving a primal vision of chaos and misrule—dyonisian.  And yet there is something therapeutic among these ruins: there is an impulse to create anew.
But only if there is first a willingness to destroy.