Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things is an enormously influential theory of how the West has constructed its own “ways of knowing” by obscuring the contingencies of certain knowledge and projecting a fantasy of a pure, objective knowledge. Foucault borrows heavily from Nietzsche in his distinctive “genealogical” method of narrating history. We can see some of the influence of Nietzsche’s work here in ways that anticipate much of what we’ll talk about in the future. Foucault’s book begins with a riff on a passage from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Here is the first page more or less in full:

The point, of course, is not the obvious and chauvenistic one: what a zany people those Chinese are!? The point, rather, is more like “what must our Encyclopedias look like to the Other? How are our regimes that make “data” and its analysis seem so transparent and objective equally absurd and humorous and continent when looking in from the outside?