ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Foucault’s thought is best construed as a hermeneutics of not knowing who we are. Foucault’s work is construed to operate according to what Derrida calls the logic of the sans. That means that we get the best results by proceeding sans voir, sans avoir, sans savoir, without sight, without savvy, and without seizing hold of what we love. This is a bit of a perversity, turning as it does, not on uncovering the truth or illuminating us, which is the standard hope held out to us by philosophers, but on living with the untruth, with what Foucault calls very early on the ‘night of truth’. The night of truth is the truth that there is no capitalized Truth, no ‘truth of truth’. In the spirit of a certain Augustine, Foucault is read as himself engaged in a confessional practice, as making a confession in writing, confiteri in letteris, from the start, that, as Derrida says, the secret is there is no Secret, no way around the beliefs and practices in which we are steeped, by which we are shaped from time out of mind. His work may be seen as very ‘circumfessional’, confessing that we are all circumcised, cut off from the heart of unconcealed truth, but this without nostalgia, without concluding, as Rorty attributes to him,1 that we are thereby lost and have no grounds for hope at all.
