More doubtful is whether During’s recipe for appropriating and ‘moving past’ Foucault can do justice to that historiographical craftsmanship so admired, in its own right, by Peter Brown and hence to anything like the range of actual or possible relationships between archaeological or genealogical arguments and literary scholarship. As a foretaste, one might query the assumption that binds a ‘genealogy’ – at its best – to the radical political definitions that Foucault happened to offer in the early 1970s when, like so many French intellectuals, he was attracted to Maoism.

For all its establishment-shaking intentions, the recipe is pretty old­fashioned. Following a summary of Didier Eribon’s biography and some philosophical and political scene setting, Foucault’s writings are discussed chronologically and linked to the literary field via a series of readings. During’s determination to marry author and work ensures that none of the (at least heuristic) distinctions essential to serious ‘intellectual development’ studies – for example between the roles played by an idea or issue in a writer’s personal development and in the writings themselves – is respected. The result is a mish­mash, rich in both errors and aperçus, in which only rarely is anything developed in a sustained or helpful fashion.

Especially inappropriate to a text billed as an ‘introduction’ to its subject is the way criticism tends to peremptorily crowd out exposition or else is only tenuously relevant to literary studies. I am thinking in particular of the scattered reminiscences about the parallels and contrasts between English and French materials on the emergence of prisons, asylums, hospitals and sexual regulation, which are evoked by each of Foucault’s historical texts. Conversely, topics of such obvious interest to literary studies as the Foucault–Derrida debate or the historicisation of the category ‘author’ attract only passing attention. During’s historical divagations at most provide a contextual bridge across to literary readings which tell us, among other tendentious things, how Flaubert and Dickens ‘anticipate’ Foucault in some way. Just for the record, modern clinical perception as depicted in Birth of the Clinic is multisensorial and characterised by a certain lightness of touch which cannot therefore be captured in Flaubert’s images of surgical penetration.

In keeping with During’s reconstruction of Foucault as a transgressive thinker, The Order of Things is said to recapitulate a Heideggerian story of a ‘retreat from Being’. With its taxonomic logic, the ‘representational’ episteme attempts to deny the essential chanciness and unfixability of things. This story of ‘knowledge’s disruption of a primal absence of order’ is supplemented, During claims, by the methods of a literary history. On the evidence of a single encomium to avant-garde literature, Foucault is held to have asserted that aesthetic objects can on occasion evade epistemic ‘organisation and exclusion’. ‘More transgressive, closer to Being’, literature and painting are privileged seismometers of epistemic change.

One problem with this reading is that the company of those exemplifying epistemic tensions and shifts includes not only ‘artists’ but also grammarians, biologists and economists. It is philosophy’s claims to speak for its times which Foucault has in his sights when he chooses his sources. As for the philosophical bearings of The Order of Things, it is true that Foucault follows Heidegger’s philosophical-historical schema at certain points, notably (as During points out) in characterising Renaissance knowledges as being (solely) modelled on the figure of ‘resemblance’. Whether or not Heideggerian ontology is intrinsic to the history of the particular human sciences discussed in that book, or to later studies, is another matter. During contends that the question of Being remains a vital one, either in the form of intermittent (usually verbal) echoes in Foucault’s later writings, or as a limit to a Foucauldian historicisation of texts. A particularly crass example of this teleological form of reading is a passage in which Foucault’s interest in Heidegger (via the latter’s study of Nietzsche) is combined with Heidegger’s interest in the human implications of relations between knowledge and power to provide an instant solution to a well­nigh intractable question: how to connect up the ‘archaeological’ arguments on the human sciences in The Order of Things to Foucault’s later ‘genealogies’. In During’s account, archaeology and genealogy effortlessly merge into one another in Foucault’s ‘rejection’... from the beginning ... of what will become, in Discipline and Punish the ‘disciplinary society’.

Here, too, as throughout, is present the assumption that Foucault’s arguments on the history of the disciplines express a general attitude of rejection towards all organised forms of government, to which During assigns the blanket designation ‘statist rationalism’. From this angle, it is not surprising to find governmental concern with the health and quality of life of national populations being mistakenly identified not only with state power, but equally problematically, with techniques of ‘pastoral’ (self) care. Yet Foucault’s studies of ancient sexual ethics are clear that ascetic self-shaping arises well prior to, and may conflict with, social governmental agendas. During’s argument about the governmentalisation of life in general and literary studies in particular, with its stereotyped view of governmental norms as devoid of any serious ‘moral charge’, is a reprise on the very Leavisite, anti-modernist literary-critical crusade against the ‘technologico-Benthamites’ about which readers are warned to beware in the Introduction.

A further index of the book’s over-emphasis on Foucault’s philosophical bearing, at the expense of attention to his capacity to ask good historical questions, is the way in which The Archaeology of Knowledge is discussed as a work of epistemology rather than as a handbook for historians of knowledges. Rather than pondering whether necessary and sufficient criteria for identifying a discursive formation have been supplied, might it not have been more useful, for example, to have seized on Foucault’s attempt to rethink the concept of a ‘context’ by means of his notion of ‘collateral’ or ‘associated fields’?

All too frequently, Foucault’s substantive historical arguments fare little better than his methods. One could cite During’s characterising what in Discipline and Punish is called the ‘semiotechnical’ form of the power to punish (whose legacy includes the chain-gang) as ‘humane’, as centred on the penitentiary imprisonment, or indeed as a ‘stage’ in the history of punishments. Historical accuracy is not this book’s forte. Witness, for example, its confusing ‘natural law’ justifications in equity law with ‘natural justice’ (the rules of due process); the assertion that the company form – ever a source of fraud and debt-evasion – was crucial to the development of industrial capitalism; or its suggestion that Foucault was a long­time member of the PCF.

My remarks have concentrated on During’s ‘transgressive’ interpretation of the Foucault–Literature relationship and its consequent neglect of his historiographical ‘craftsmanship’. Without wishing to give undue weight to authorial perceptions, it is difficult to resist the temptation in this instance to give the last word to Foucault himself. In a 1977 interview for Le Monde, entitled ‘The functions of literature’, after commenting on the incidental significance of literature in his research and the role of the supposition of ‘subversion’ in its institutional ‘sacralisation’, he writes: ‘Until 1970 ... people were even able to say that the very fact of writing itself ... was in itself subversive ... As you know, such things were, unfortunately, said.’