going to leave all that. What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matters who’s speaking” (Beckett 1967, 85). As many will know, Foucault exploits the citation to question the traditional importance assigned by literary criticism to the author as the presumed guarantor of a text’s meaning. His point is not to dismiss the author as a sociohistorical being, but to challenge the way this being is abstracted and made to function as an interpretive device. Now, even at this rudimentary level of analysis it is not hard to hear how this line of inquiry converges with the one inaugurating the inaugural lecture. In both cases, the boundaries, the lips of discourse—particularly as these might be conceived in relation to the agency of its enunciation—are not only raised as issues, but they are figured into the contours of Foucault’s texts (the beginning of the lecture and the end of the essay) at their own boundaries, as if to execute formally, almost anatomically, the interplay of voices wished for in the inaugural lecture. Once we sense this, it becomes difficult to treat these references to Beckett as mere citations or allusions. They are reaching for more. In addition, if we continue to treat these references as though they were motivated by nothing more than Foucault’s perception of a certain analogy or symmetry between his immediate situation as an inductee at the Collège de France, and Beckett’s quintessentially modernist experience of writing, then I think we risk missing something decisive about the gestures being carried out by—not simply in, but by—the inaugural lecture. We miss our encounter with Theory in its reading.
Let us then return to the lecture and detail its rhythm more carefully. It is divided into eight segments (parts of which were suppressed, on the evening of its delivery, for reasons of time), the last of these reiterating and giving concrete expression to the theme of locating or losing one’s voice in the voice of another. Thus, the suspension opened in the first segment is provided with closure in the eighth. Aside from the fact that the final segment testifies to Foucault’s ability to master the rigors of organic form, it is striking because this segment takes the lecture in the most traditional of directions, as if the space of the occasion were writing itself into the lecture. In effect, it converts it into an homage. Specifically, Foucault discusses his debt (and the economic vocabulary is not coincidental) to three men: George Dumézil, a comparative historian of religion (later credited by Foucault with solving the riddle of Socrates’ debt to Asclepius), George Canquilhem, a historian of science and persistent benefactor, and, most importantly, Jean Hyppolite, then probably the most significant French interpreter of Hegel after Alexandre Kojève. In fact, it is precisely the impact of Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel that Foucault cites as the motivation for his homage, though one ought not forget that it was Hyppolite’s death that created an opening for Foucault in the Collège, thus rendering the homage simultaneously an epitaph. To those unfamiliar with the philosophical issues at stake here this may seem peculiar, but Stanley Aronowitz, among others, has argued that Foucault’s restless repudiation of the dialectical tradition embodied in the work of Hegel is what gave his own philosophical project its specificity (Aronowitz 1981, 306). Obviously, and Foucault says as much, Hyppolite is worthy of homage because his reading provided Foucault with a model for recognizing “what is still Hegelian in that which allows us to think against Hegel” (Foucault 1981, 74). Before we tease out how such a formulation resonates with the slippery drama of the voice staged at the opening of the lecture, let us make some effort to read the rich complexity of Foucault’s relation to Hyppolite.
The book that launched Foucault’s career, The History of Madness, was also one of the two “theses” that permitted Foucault to receive his doctorat d’ état in philosophy. Though we might be inclined to think that this is the very least one ought to be given for writing such a book, the fact that it read like a history of institutional practices nevertheless made its strictly philosophical credentials suspect. The man who Foucault first contacted to shepherd this text through the French academic bureaucracy was his old teacher, Jean Hyppolite. Though Hyppolite felt unqualified to present the main thesis (Madness), his piston helped Foucault secure the crucial support of Georges Canguilhem. To this extent, Hyppolite did not only provide Foucault with the intellectual means to think the specificity of his own philosophical project, he quite literally facilitated Foucault’s access—both pedagogic and professional—to the discourse of philosophy. Shortly after Foucault was given his first chair as the director of the philosophy department at the University of Paris at Vincennes, Hyppolite died.
In the wake of Hyppolite’s death two official “homages” appeared. Foucault was involved in both of them. The first of these, the special issue of the French philosophic journal Revue de métaphysique et de morale, contains a remarkable tribute to Hyppolite by Foucault. The second homage appeared in book form as Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, where Foucault published “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”—the paper that grew out of the courses offered at Vincennes. What makes the journal essay so evocative is the insistent attention Foucault devotes to Hyppolites’s voice. Consider the opening paragraph of the essay.
Those who took the preparatory courses for entry into the Ecole Normale Supérior after the war remember the course offered by M. Hyppolite on The Phenomenology of Mind: in that voice which never ceased taking stock of itself as if it were meditating on its own movement, we not only perceived the voice of a professor; we heard something of the voice of Hegel, and perhaps as well the voice of philosophy itself. (Foucault 1969, 76)
The focus here reminds one immediately of the inaugural moves of the inaugural lecture. In fact, the resemblance is so strong one is tempted to read the entire lecture as little more than a disguised homage that seeks to deflect attention to this by locating the homage proper in the explicit and plainly generic language of the final segment. To justify such a temptation one’s reading must follow out the voice’s relation to homage.
Homage, as a literary gesture, is a ritualistic vestige of feudalism. In the feudal context, at least within Europe, homage (from Medieval Latin, hominaticum) designated the ceremony through which vassals publicly recognized and affirmed their responsibility to the Lord. Interestingly, this recognition was a two-way street: the vassal agreed to serve as the Lord’s delegate and tenant, and the Lord assumed responsibility for the vassal’s protection.3 With the slow dispersion of feudalism this ritualized ceremony spread beyond the religioeconomic sphere into the cultural sphere, where, despite this displacement the distinctive Hegelian logic of recognition remained intact. Accompanying this logic was the entire rhetoric of debt, but as homage became increasingly important to the reproduction of intellectual kin(g)ship systems, this irreducibly economic rhetoric had to alter in order to map itself onto the peculiar commodity of the voice. The reciprocity of homage was thus reconstituted as a dialogic exchange where “the subject’s entry into language” was restaged as an economic and ultimately political relation. This aspect of homage is intensified when, as is often the case today, the fecundity of the voice being celebrated has been silenced by death. Under these circumstances, the voice of homage draws attention to its derivation from a voice whose authority derives solely from the homage’s own projective power. Literary homage is thus almost always a form of self-enlargement, a swelling up.
Perhaps more importantly though, homage is also a site for the cultural construction of masculinity. As the term implies, homage is all about ritualizing the recognition of a man, not simply as the subject of a particular ceremony, but as a particular entity within the social division of gender—ecce homo.4 Although feminist scholars have urged us to be deeply suspicious of rituals wherein the feigned reproductive power of men is being affirmed, it is important not to confuse affirmation with the sort of deliberate complication introduced within the ritual of homage by Foucault. Specifically, by focusing on the interplay of voices Foucault presents masculinity not merely as an effect of speech, or discourse more generally, but as a construct that, while remaining indissociable from the field of sexuality, nevertheless provokes us to encounter and thus question the limits of this field. In Foucault’s hands, homage becomes a site where declaring oneself to be another’s “man” is presented less as an occasion for fantasizing one’s birth than as an occasion wherein one man discovers his own manhood in the mouth of another man.
