is thereby displaced onto an asemantic level that can no longer be that of propo-
sitions. In truth, to take seriously the statement “I speak” is no longer to consider
language as the communication of a meaning or a truth that originates in a
responsible Subject. It is, rather, to conceive of discourse in its pure taking place
and of the subject as “a nonexistence in whose emptiness the unending outpour-
ing of language uninterruptedly continues” (Foucault 1998: 148). In language,
enunciation marks a threshold between an inside and an outside, its taking place
as pure exteriority; and once the principal referent of study becomes statements,
the subject is stripped of all substance, becoming a pure function or pure posi-
tion. The subject, Foucault writes, “is a particular, vacant place that may in fact
be filled by different individuals. . . . If a proposition, a sentence, a group of signs
can be called ‘statement,’ it is not therefore because, one day, someone happened
to speak them or put them into some concrete form of writing; it is because the
position of the subject can be assigned. To describe a formulation qua statement
does not consist in analyzing the relations between the author and what he says
(or wanted to say, or said without wanting to); but in determining what position
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can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it” (Fou-
cault 1972: 95–6).
In the same year, Foucault undertakes his critique of the notion of the au-
thor following these very same principles. His interest is not so much to note the
author’s eclipse or to certify his death as to define the concept of the author as a
simple specification of the subject-function whose necessity is anything but given:
“We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any
need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form or value, and regardless
of our manner of handling them, would unfold in the anonymity of a murmur”
(Foucault 1998: 222, translation emended).
4.3. In his understandable concern to define archeology’s terrain with respect
to other knowledges and domains, Foucault appears to have neglected—at least to
a certain point—to consider the ethical implications of his theory of statements.
Only in his last works, after having effaced and depsychologized the author, after
having identified something like an ethics immanent to writing already in the
bracketing of the question “Who is speaking?,” did Foucault begin to reflect on the
consequences that his desubjectification and decomposition of the author implied
for the subject. It is thus possible to say, in Benveniste’s terms, that the metaseman-
tics of disciplinary discourses ended by concealing the semantics of enunciation
that had made it possible, and that the constitution of the system of statements
as a positivity and historical a priori made it necessary to forget the erasure of the
subject that was its presupposition. In this way, the just concern to do away with
the false question “Who is speaking?” hindered the formulation of an entirely
different and inevitable question: What happens in the living individual when he
occupies the ‘vacant place’ of the subject, when he enters into a process of enunci-
ation and discovers that “our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the
difference of times, ourselves the difference of masks?” (Foucault 1972: 131). That
is, once again, what does it mean to be subject to desubjectification? How can a
subject give an account of its own ruin?
This omission—if it is an omission—obviously does not correspond to a
forgetfulness or an incapacity on Foucault’s part; it involves a difficulty implicit
in the very concept of a semantics of enunciation. Insofar as it inheres not in the
text of the statement, but rather in its taking place—insofar as it concerns not
something said, but a pure saying—a semantics of enunciation cannot constitute
either a text or a discipline. The subject of enunciation, whose dispersion founds
the possibility of a metasemantics of knowledges and constitutes statements in
a positive system, maintains itself not in a content of meaning but in an event
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of language; this is why it cannot take itself as an object, stating itself. There can
thus be no archaeology of the subject in the sense in which there is an archaeol-
ogy of knowledges.
Does this mean that the one who occupies the vacant place of the subject
is destined to be forever obscured and that the author must lose himself fully
in the anonymous murmur of “What does it matter who is speaking”? In Fou-
cault’s work, there is perhaps only one text in which this difficulty thematically
comes to light, in which the darkness of the subject momentarily appears in all
its splendor. This text is “The Life of Infamous Men,” which was originally con-
ceived as a preface to an anthology of archival documents, registers of internment
or lettres de cachet. In the very moment in which it marks them with infamy, the
encounter with power reveals human existences that would otherwise have left
no traces of themselves. What momentarily shines through these laconic state-
ments are not the biographical events of personal histories, as suggested by the
pathos-laden emphasis of a certain oral history, but rather the luminous trail
of a different history. What suddenly comes to light is not the memory of an
oppressed existence, but the silent flame of an immemorable ēthos— not the sub-
ject’s face, but rather the disjunction between the living being and the speaking
being that marks its empty place. Here life subsists only in the infamy in which
it existed; here a name lives solely in the disgrace that covered it. And something
in this disgrace bears witness to life beyond all biography.
4.4. Foucault gives the name “archive” to the positive dimension that cor-
responds to the plane of enunciation, “the general system of the formation and
transformation of statements” (Foucault 1972: 130). How are we to conceive of
this dimension, if it corresponds neither to the archive in the strict sense—that
is, the storehouse that catalogs the traces of what has been said, to consign them
to future memory—nor to the Babelic library that gathers the dust of statements
and allows for their resurrection under the historian’s gaze?
As the set of rules that define the events of discourse, the archive is situ-
ated between langue, as the system of construction of possible sentences—that is, of possibilities of speaking—and the corpus that unites the set of what has
been said, the things actually uttered or written. The archive is thus the mass of
the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of its
enunciation; it is the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act of
speech. Between the obsessive memory of tradition, which knows only what has
been said, and the exaggerated thoughtlessness of oblivion, which cares only for
what was never said, the archive is the unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything
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said by virtue of being enunciated; it is the fragment of memory that is always
forgotten in the act of saying “I.” It is in this “historical a priori,” suspended
between langue and parole, that Foucault establishes his construction site and founds archaeology as “the general theme of a description that questions the
already-said at the level of its existence” (ibid.: 131)—that is, as the system of
relations between the unsaid and the said in every act of speech, between the
enunciative function and the discourse in which it exerts itself, between the
outside and the inside of language.
Let us now attempt to repeat Foucault’s operation, sliding it toward lan-
guage ( langue), thus displacing the site that he had established between langue and the acts of speech, to relocate it in the difference between language ( langue)
and archive: that is, not between discourse and its taking place, between what
is said and the enunciation that exerts itself in it, but rather between langue
and its taking place, between a pure possibility of speaking and its existence as
such. If enunciation in some way lies suspended between langue and parole, it will then be a matter of considering statements not from the point of view of
actual discourse, but rather from that of language ( langue); it will be a question of looking from the site of enunciation not toward an act of speech, but toward
langue as such: that is, of articulating an inside and an outside not only in the plane of language and actual discourse, but also in the plane of language as
potentiality of speech.
In opposition to the archive, which designates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said, we give the name testimony to the system of re-
lations between the inside and the outside of langue, between the sayable and the unsayable in every language—that is, between a potentiality of speech and
its existence, between a possibility and an impossibility of speech. To think a
potentiality in act as potentiality, to think enunciation on the plane of langue is to inscribe a caesura in possibility, a caesura that divides it into a possibility and
an impossibility, into a potentiality and an impotentiality; and it is to situate a
subject in this very caesura. The archive’s constitution presupposed the bracket-
ing of the subject, who was reduced to a simple function or an empty position;
it was founded on the subject’s disappearance into the anonymous murmur of
statements. In testimony, by contrast, the empty place of the subject becomes the
decisive question. It is not a question, of course, of returning to the old problem
that Foucault had sought to eliminate, namely, “How can a subject’s freedom
be inserted into the rules of a language?” Rather, it is a matter of situating the
subject in the disjunction between a possibility and an impossibility of speech,
asking, “How can something like a statement exist in the site of langue? In what
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way can a possibility of speech realize itself as such?” Precisely because testimony
is the relation between a possibility of speech and its taking place, it can exist only
through a relation to an impossibility of speech—that is, only as contingency, as a capacity not to be. This contingency, this occurrence of language in a subject, is
different from actual discourse’s utterance or non- utterance, its speaking or not
speaking, its production or non-production as a statement. It concerns the sub-
ject’s capacity to have or not to have language. The subject is thus the possibility
that language does not exist, does not take place—or, better, that it takes place
only through its possibility of not being there, its contingency. The human being
is the speaking being, the living being who has language, because the human
being is capable of not having language, because it is capable of its own in-fancy.
Contingency is not one modality among others, alongside possibility, impossi-
bility, and necessity: it is the actual giving of a possibility, the way in which a po-
tentiality exists as such. It is an event ( contingit) of a potentiality as the giving of a caesura between a capacity to be and a capacity not to be. In language, this giving
has the form of subjectivity. Contingency is possibility put to the test of a subject.
In the relation between what is said and its taking place, it was possible to
bracket the subject of enunciation, since speech had already taken place. But the
relation between language and its existence, between langue and the archive, de-
mands subjectivity as that which, in its very possibility of speech, bears witness
to an impossibility of speech. This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak. Testimony is a potentiality that
becomes actual through an impotentiality of speech; it is, moreover, an impos-
sibility that gives itself existence through a possibility of speaking. These two
movements cannot be identified either with a subject or with a consciousness;
yet they cannot be divided into two incommunicable substances. Their insepa-
rable intimacy is testimony.
4.5. It is time to attempt to redefine the categories of modality from the per-
spective that interests us. The modal categories—possibility, impossibility, con-
tingency, necessity—are not innocuous logical or epistemological categories that
concern the structure of propositions or the relation of something to our faculty
of knowledge. They are ontological operators, that is, the devastating weapons
used in the biopolitical struggle for Being, in which a decision is made each time
on the human and the inhuman, on “making live” or “letting die.” The field of
this battle is subjectivity. The fact that Being gives itself in modalities means
that “for living beings, Being is life” ( to de zēn tois zōsi einai estin) (Aristotle, De anima: 413b13); it implies a living subject. The categories of modality are not
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founded on the subject, as Kant maintains, nor are they derived from it; rather,
the subject is what is at stake in the processes in which they interact. They divide
and separate, in the subject, what is possible and what is impossible, the living
being and the speaking being, the Muselmann and the witness—and in this way
they decide on the subject.
Possibility (to be able to be) and contingency (to be able not to be) are the
operators of subjectification, the point in which something possible passes into
existence, giving itself through a relation to an impossibility. Impossibility, as ne-
gation of possibility (not [to be able]), and necessity, as negation of contingency
(not [to be able not to be]) are the operators of desubjectification, of the destruc-
tion and destitution of the subject—that is, processes that, in subjectivity, divide
potentiality and impotentiality, the possible and the impossible. The first two
constitute Being in its subjectivity, that is, in the final analysis as a world that
is always my world, since it is in my world that impossibility exists and touches ( contingit) the real. Necessity and possibility, instead, define Being in its whole-ness and solidity, pure substantiality without subject—that is, at the limit, a world
that is never my world since possibility does not exist in it. Yet modal categories, as operators of Being, never stand be
fore the subject as something he can choose or
reject; and they do not confront him as a task that he can decide to assume or not
to assume in a privileged moment. The subject, rather, is a field of forces always
already traversed by the incandescent and historically determined currents of po-
tentiality and impotentiality, of being able not to be and not being able not to be.
From this perspective, Auschwitz represents the historical point in which
these processes collapse, the devastating experience in which the impossible is
forced into the real. Auschwitz is the existence of the impossible, the most rad-
ical negation of contingency; it is, therefore, absolute necessity. The Muselmann
produced by Auschwitz is the catastrophe of the subject that then follows, the
subject’s effacement as the place of contingency and its maintenance as existence
of the impossible. Here Goebbel’s definition of politics—“the art of making
what seems impossible possible”—acquires its full weight. It defines a biopolit-
ical experiment on the operators of Being, an experiment that transforms and
disarticulates the subject to a limit point in which the link between subjectifica-
tion and desubjectification seems to break apart.
4.6. The modern meaning of the term “author” appears relatively late. In
Latin, auctor originally designates the person who intervenes in the case of a
minor (or the person who, for whatever reason, does not have the capacity to posit
a legally valid act), in order to grant him the valid title that he requires. Thus the
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tutor, uttering the formula auctor fio, furnishes the pupil with the “authority” he lacks (one then says that the pupil acts tutore auctore) . In the same way, auctoritas patrum is the ratification that the senators—thus called patres auctores— bring to a popular resolution to make it valid and obligatory in all cases.
The oldest meanings of the term also include “vendor” in the act of trans-
ferring property, “he who advises or persuades” and, finally, “witness.” In what
way can a term that expressed the idea of the completion of an imperfect act also
signify seller, adviser, and witness? What is the common character that lies at the
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