Michel Foucault and Beginnings
"I would like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture,
as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead.
I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible
beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a
nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in
it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking,
in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon
to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed
from me, while I stood in its path--a slender gap--the point of its possible
disappearance . . . A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire
to be freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves,
right from the outside, on the other side of discourse, without having to
stand outside it, pondering its particular, fearsome, and even devilish
features" (Michel Foucault The Discourse on Language 215).
Beginnings
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