Foucault traces the subversion of the Cartesian subject to Modernist literature and philosophy

Evidence

Foucault’s invocation of Lautréamont dramatizes the extent to which his thought is informed by a Modernist sensibility. When, later in the same book, Foucault attempts to capture the specificity of modernity, he argues that it involves ‘the appearance of language as a multiple profusion’, as ‘an enigmatic multiplicity that must be mastered’ rather than the transparent grid of representation which it had been conceived as in the classical era (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), an event that he associates especially with the names of Nietzsche and Mallarmé. The most important consequence of this change is to subvert the subject, to undermine the central position to which it had been allocated since Descartes: ‘the question of language’, Foucault says, ‘seems to lay siege on every side to the figure of man’. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 287

Categorization

• XREF: Directly counterpoints Jameson’s association of the decentered subject with postmodernism — Foucault places this subversion in Modernity via Nietzsche and Mallarmé. — connects to: The Cartesian cogito is the only absolute truth grounding all other knowledge. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 21; Modernist interiority’s deep probing tends to dissolve the very subject it explores — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 108; Poststructuralism’s anti-subject philosophy demanded a deliberately obscure Modernist style. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 290 (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: if decentering the subject is a Modernist move for Foucault, what distinguishes poststructuralism from high Modernism itself?

Broader Connections

• Colonial order and the Cartesian mind both rest on a spectator facing a world-show #expands (0.75) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 547
• Sartre rejected Cartesian dualism by treating material givens as meaning-sedimented facticities #expands (0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 63
• High Modernist fragmentations came with terror, not celebration #qualifies (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 218
• Loss of proprioception reduces one’s self to an abstract Cartesian ghost #exemplifies (0.70) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 736