Q. What were Sartre?s interest as a philosopher?
A. Roughly, faced with a historical world that bourgeois tradition, no
longer able to keep its bearings, wanted to consider as absurd. Sartre
wanted to demonstrate that, on the contrary, there was meaning [sens]
everywhere?
Q. When did you stop believing in ?meaning??
A. The break came the day that Lévi-Strauss demonstrated-about societies-and
Lacan demonstrated-about the unconscious-that the ?meaning? was probably
only a sort of surface effect, a shimmer, a foam, and that what ran through
us, underlay us, and was before us, what sustained us in time and space, was
the system.
. . . Lacan?s importance comes from the fact that he showed how it is the
structures, the very system of language, that speak through the patient?s
discourse and the symptoms of his neurosis-not the subject . . . Before any
human existence, there would already be a discursive knowledge, a system
that we will rediscover.
Q. But then, who secretes this system?
A. What is this anonymous system without a subject, what thinks? The ?I? has
exploded-we see this in modern literature-this is the discovery of ?there
is?. There is one. In some ways, one comes back to the seventeenth-century
point of view, with this difference: not setting man, but anonymous thought,
knowledge without a subject, theory with no identity, in God?s place.
(quoted in, Eribon,Michel Foucualt p. 161, emphasis added).
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