ABSTRACT
One of the great insights of Foucault’s work was the realization that human consciousness was not Husserl’s raw material1 and that scientific discourses were not ousiodic unities.2 On this discovery, Foucault rejected those aspects of the Enlightenment project that made ‘human reason a final authority and effective agent of change’.3 He also turned away from the ‘traditional goal of ultimate, fundamental truth’,4 precisely because ‘truth and its original reign’ lay at a place of inevitable ‘countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference’.5 The postulation of a centre, of a truth that ‘remains always the same’,6 condemned one’s thinking to a self-enclosed, sterile, hermeneutical practice of the same, and assimilated, absorbed and reduced otherness ‘to a mere instantiation of one’s categories’.7 In looking beyond a totalizing historical dialectic, so as ‘to dispense with ‘‘things’’’8 and liberate silenced and subjugated differences, Foucault restored us ‘to a consciousness of the systems of knowledge and power’.9 In such a place, the essence of God and man were not to be found, and there was no centre from which to comprehend the world.
