1. French historian and philosopher who taught at the prestigious Collège de France, as professor of the history of systems of thought, until his death. Foucault is often associated with the enormously influential postwar French theoretical schools of structuralism and poststructuralism. He authored a series of philosophical historiographies, each examining the emergence of a modern discipline, system of thought, or institution. His major books include Madness and Civilization (originally published in French in 1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975), and History of Sexuality (3 vols., 1976–1984). In these studies, Foucault created an archaeology or genealogy of modern institutions, from psychiatry to the hospital and the prison, to intellectual discipline and the notion of sexuality.

2. Famously opening Foucault’s The Order of Things is a passage from “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” that presents a baffling and incomprehensible taxonomy of the dog, which, the author claims, “break[s] up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things.” [1] In other words, the taxonomy—which Foucault quoted from “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” an essay by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges—highlights the limitations of our own thought structure and points to the existence of rational systems that are entirely different and completely incommensurate. In his essay “(8) (h)” (1992; excerpted in translation in this volume), intentionally taking this fictional taxonomy at face value, Huang juxtaposes it with an actual, historical category of Chinese biography and produces a surprisingly coherent synthesis of two systems. While Foucault focused on the “Western” knowledge system of the modern period, it may be argued that Huang attempts, in his own poetic, lyrical way, a radical discursive (dis-)formation, counterchronological and crossing civilizational boundaries. See also PANOPTICON.


[1] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), xv.

Taoism

Theater of the World