THE LETTER 23 (Autumn 2001) pages 96-108

In the extreme, life is what is capable of error. Error is at the root of what makes human thought and its history. The opposition of true and false, the values we attribute to both, the effects of power that different societies and different institutions link to this division – even all this is perhaps only the latest response to this possibility of error which is intrinsic to life. If the history of science is discontinuous, that is if it can be analyzed only as a series of ‘corrections’, as a new distribution of true and false which never finally once and for all liberates the truth, it is because there, too, ‘error’ constitutes not overlooking or delaying a truth but the dimension proper to the life of man and to the time of the species.

Almost a year ago, Cormac Gallagher took as a starting point for an overview of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality the anonymous, unattributed assertion that Foucault had cut the ground from under psychoanalysis. This assertion was not contexrualized, and was neither proven nor disproved by the article, which went on in an interesting manner to outline the central arguments of this remarkable but unfinished work. At the end of the overview, the author returns to the original, anonymous and unsubstantiated assertion and opines not unreasonably…