The Banana Peel Project

On this month-and-a-day anniversary of my hiatus from peeling bananas, I’d like to reinject some life into this space by reproducing a relatively well-known–and honestly reflective–passage from Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (an extended treatise on methodology, historical ontology, and postmodernism whose secrets have the mischievous tendency to slide in and out of the shadows).

What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently in my task, if I were not preparing–with a rather shaky hand–a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

Radical claim of the day: Foucault’s AoK (archaeology of knowledge) is intertwined with Deleuze and Guattari’s BwO (body without organs) and Quine’s WoB (web of belief). More to follow?