ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 describes Foucault’s discursive account of reality as a surface of appearances, what the book terms the mystery of things. The move from language to discourse in Foucault’s early thinking, the author shows, involves negotiation of the relation between words and things. Hence, after The Order of Things, knowledge to Foucault no longer belongs to language alone but is transmitted, or performed, by words, things, statements, and paintings alike. The author further argues that Foucault’s notion of knowledge as an expression of the surface of reality remains open to a peculiar, immanent form of spirituality, a material and performative spirituality as the one described in Foucault’s essay on Gustave Flaubert. The chapter moves through Foucault’s inspirational sources—Jorge Luis Borges, Maurice Blanchot, and Georges Bataille—and depicts how he combines the fascination with these writers with an interest in the structural ethnography of Georges Dúmezil and Claude Lévi-Strauss and thus forms his surface account of knowledge.
