^* Foucault leaves no ambiguity on this point, either : the “thin surface” of origin he speaks of, which never deserts us, “not even, indeed especially not, at the moment of death, when, on the contrary, it reveals itself, as it were, naked” (Order of Things, 331).

^† Jean Starobinski criticizes the urge to seek authenticity in roots, in reservoirs of atavism, in the archaeological depth model; but he also cautions against another, equally invasive model—subjective interiority : “the image of the past preserved internally is alluring, so much so that it still holds us in thrall” (“Inside and the Outside,” 333). When the two models are combined—the arche of history with the telos of biology—the self is misconstrued as a “nuclear stronghold … where origins persist and endure” (334)—“as if we recalld the nature of the deep,” Duncan concurs, “out of what we were.” “Making the most remote past coefficient to our most intimate depth is a way of refusing loss and separation, of preserving, in the crammed plenum we imagine history to be, every moment spent along the way. The very image of a ‘way’ assumes that the past is productive and efficacious, its efficacy corroborated not only by the forward distance traveled, but by the traveler whose nature is fraught with the sum total of antecedent experience. To say that the individual constructed himself through his history is to say that the latter is cumulatively present in him and that even as it was elapsing, it was becoming internal structure. From this idea one cannot but draw an inference and its corollary, the inference being that self-knowledge is anamnesis or rememoration, and the corollary that anamnesis is the recognition of deep layers (often compared to geological strata) of the present-day person. When such a theory, far from limiting itself to the individual’s history, redounds upon the entire history of the species in that of the person, it begets an extraordinarily reassuring system : there is nothing of the human past not mine, there is no word in the depths of time that does not concern and shed light upon me. Nothing is outside, nothing may be considered foreign (Nihil humani …). All history sets a mirror before us” (Starobinski, 334). In contrast to the sanguine narcissism of the cogito, Foucault labored over a more austere yet fertile prospect. “To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive insight,” writes Deleuze, summarizing Foucault. Consequently, “every inside-space is topologically in contact with the outside-space, independent of distance and on the limits of a ‘living’; and this carnal or vital topology, far from showing up in space, frees a sense of time that fits the past into the inside, brings about the future in the outside, and brings the two into confrontation at the limit of the living present” (Foucault, 118–19).