In 1965 I translated Foucault's earlier book Madness & Civilization, a work which presented me, my editor, and the reviewers … a great many problems of diction, phrasing and even, ultimately, sense. The Order of Things, which is an echo of Foucault's undertaking to write a history of madness in the Classical age, might be said not only to present but to absent (since no names are mentioned) a great many more such problems, for whereas in the history of madness Foucault was investigating the way in which a culture can determine the difference that limits it, he is concerned here to observe how a culture experiences the propinquity of things, how it establishes the tabula of their relationships and the order by which they must be considered. He is concerned, in short, with a history of resemblance….
In his archeology of labor, language and the science of life which was not yet called biology, Foucault dramatizes man's existence, or rather man's invention, between two modes of discourse; that of the Classical period (post-Renaissance to Romantic) and that of our own…. I believe it is possible to read these many difficult pages to great advantage, though I do not want to pass over the difficulties without a sample, for … the difficulties are part of the way Foucault has found to free his mind of what is not difficult, of what is in fact easy and therefore, merely, known. A mind released from facility will produce, then, a prose like this:
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