FoucauIl Besponds/2

Souvce Biacvilics, VoI. 1, No. 2 |Winlev, 1971), p. 60

FuIIisIed I The Johns Hopkins University Press
SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/465086
Accessed 10/10/2010 1225
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Diacritics.
http://www.jstor.org
60
Mr. Steiner deserves our
sympathy.
Whether he
is
trying
to understand or
respond,
he is
unfailingly
luckless: inaccuracies
keep dogging
him. For the
sake of
expediency,
I would like to
respond
to
only
four such errors in his
"reply."
1. He asserts that he is not unfamiliar with the
meaning
of the word
"archaeology"
as Kant uses
it. He
goes
so far as to
display
this
knowledge.
Bad
luck: he
picks
the
wrong word,
text or
meaning.
Let
him read "Fortschritte der
Metaphysik";
he will find
the
word,
the text and the
meaning
to which I refer;
there is
absolutely
no
question,
as he believes,
of "a
priori conditionings
of
perception."
2. He finds that I have a
poor memory
and worse
manners since I
deny having
written several mono-
graphs
on the
diagnosis
and treatment of mental
diseases from the seventeenth to the nineteenth cen-
turies. With his
good memory
and
manners,
Mr.
Steiner makes bold to cite two of these
monographs
-Histoire de la
folie
and Naissance de la
clinique.
Bad luck
again:
there is
absolutely nothing
in L'His-
toire de la
clinique
which bears on mental diseases
or
psychiatry.
3. Mr. Steiner believes that I borrowed from
Levi-Strauss the notion of connections between
grammar,
economic structures and
"kinship
rela-
tions." Bad luck once more: I
spoke
neither of eco-
nomic structures
(but
of
currency theory-something
quite different),
nor of
grammatical
structures
(but
of
language theory-something quite different),
nor
especially
of
kinship
relations or rules of
marriage;
could Mr. Steiner have confused these with the
taxinomic
proximity
of
vegetable
and animal
species?
Strange
...
4. Mr. Steiner believes that I should have cited
Kuhn. It is true that I hold Kuhn's work to be ad-
mirable and definitive. But bad luck
again (for
me
as well as for Mr.
Steiner).
When I read Kuhn's
book
during
the winter of 1963-64
(I
believe it was
a
year
after its
publication),
I had
just
finished writ-
ing
The Order
of Things.
I thus did not cite Kuhn,
but
quoted
instead from the historian of science who
shaped
and
inspired
his
thoughts:
G.
Canguilhem.
But, after all is said and
done,
I too made a
mistake. Not
knowing
Mr. Steiner in
any way,
I
thought,
in
good faith,
that he was a
journalist
and
that
professional requirements
had constrained him,
against
his
will,
to
depart
from his area of
special-
ization in order to write about an unfamiliar sub-
ject.
I thus read him with a
genuine
sense of amused
indulgence.
Mr. Steiner has let me know that he is
a Professor. This
greatly
increased
my
amusement.
But now, it will be necessary
for me to increase my
indulgence by
at least an
equal
factor.
DEPOSIT. NEW YORK