The encounter between Sri Aurobindo and Michel Foucault occurs at the cusp of mans vanishing, before what Nietzsche would call his "crossing over" . The event horizon of each ones "crossing over" may be discontinuous or even displaced by centuries in its manifestation, but for all their seeming incommeasurablity in uncanny ways Sri Aurobindo and Foucault have certain styles of thinking in consonance. If Sri Aurobindo style of thinking critically has an early postmodernist flair, Foucault's thought movements - from structural to post-structural - are at times elegantly integral.    more »

It is, then, in this context that Foucault speaks of humanity as a recent invention. Only with the elaboration of specific systems of thought which could inquire not into humanity's ideal or essence, but the functioning of the foreground and the silhouette of humanity against the enabling background. "We shall say, therefore, that a 'human science' exists, not whenever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis--within the dimension proper to the unconscious--of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents." (364) The subject of humanity was constituted during a certain moment in history which "dissolved" language, that is, an era which knowingly constructed its understanding of humanity "objectively," in between the spaces of representationality which show how humanity is deployed. According to Foucault, the human sciences address humanity in so far as people live, speak, and produce (biology, philology, and economics), and create its model by isolating and questioning the functioning of humanity when the norms and rules break down, and on that basis rebuild knowledge by showing how a functional representation of humanity can come into being and be deployed (and thus, Foucault will later argue, perfect the techniques of normalization and socialized encoding of rules via totalizing methods of power).

As language is now re-coalescing at its limits, combining thought and unthought, the Other of knowledge must give itself over to the Same. Where the limits of thinking reveal its own basis as its foundational limitations, a new way of thinking is constituted which, as Levi-Strauss says, "dissolves humanity." Foucault writes, "Since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity?" (386) The "death of man" seems a relatively peaceful event, not where humanity explodes with enormous violence, but a moment where humanity withdraws into the background such that a new array of knowledge can be foregrounded. Foucault does not yet have the advantage of a fully elaborated theory of language; however, if such a unity of language is not philosophized, humanity will forever find itself in a dying state, undoing itself by its own logic without our awareness. Foucault seems to ask that humanity die gracefully so that we can direct our energy to elaborating what is not yet thought, and approach a new horizon of articulation. ...   more »