Abstract
Paratexts, especially forewords, have an unenviable task of introducing the text to follow to the readers but doing so without closing off meanings or containing the text in a limiting paradigm, preventing the readers from reaching new/alternative readings. This task is especially problematic in the case of thinkers like Foucault who was keenly aware of the disciplining, if not punishing, features of established genres and the inevitable struggles over power/knowledge they create. It is therefore especially interesting to analyze how Foucault himself deals with the need to define his own volatile ideas, for a translated edition of his work. The present paper seeks to compare the two paratexts, foreword to the English translation and attached to the English translation of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. The analysis will, first, look at the discursive features of the two texts, analyzing how the specific choices made in the paratexts define, frame and contain the work that follows. The analysis will be placed in a Foucauldian frame, comparing the discourses employed in the paratexts to the orders of discourse as defined by Foucault, primarily the author-function and the contradictory role of the commentary.
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Notes
It is interesting to note that a quick research on a database of French news media, one of the recent articles dedicated to prefaces that was not a review of some work, was a discussion, from a legal point of view, of the relative authorial authorities of the author of the work prefaced and the author of the preface (see Wekstein 2006).
One of the random cases that comes to mind is Primary Colors, by Anonymous (Joe Klein). New York: Random House, 1996.
It famously sold out in 90 days when it first came out in French.
This is strikingly different in Estonia, for example, where every translation of Foucault has had an afterword either by the translator or some local academic luminary to flesh out Foucault’s position in the international academic discourse and position them for the local one.
Interestingly, the translator of the work is not mentioned in the first edition or in later reprints—a fact that is mentioned as a curiosity in France (2000, p. 298) and which still seems to persist even in the expanses of the Internet.
Interestingly, the paratexts do use generic masculine pronouns all through the text, which strikes the eye of the English-language reader more in year 2009 than in 1970, the date of the original edition of the translation.
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Poldsaar, R. Foucault framing Foucault: the role of paratexts in the English translation of The Order of Things . Neohelicon 37, 263–273 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-010-0047-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-010-0047-8