Order and Archive: A Foucault Abecedary

Abstract

This essay reviews the first and last volumes of Stuart Elden's four-volume intellectual biography of Michel Foucault, The Early Foucault (2021) and Foucault's Last Decade (2016). It borrows from Roland Barthes an abecedarian method to experiment with the play between order and archive that subtends Elden's Foucault series. Like Foucault, Elden deploys an explicitly archival method for thinking philosophically. That method brings both historiographical and conceptual clarity to our understanding of Foucault within the chronological frame of his life. As a poetic order, the acrostic experimentation of abecedarian writing brings into view the nonchronological archival murmur that both shapes and exceeds Elden's ordering of fragments in dossiers and the gaps between them.