How do you reconnect these discourses to anything called underlying reality if all that exists are discourses?

Well, I mean, that is the struggle, Andrew.

You've put your finger on it.

I mean, that's why universalist ideas that we've inherited from the Enlightenment, ideas about sort of justice and equality, are constantly being contested, right? We can't, as a species, seem to agree on what these concepts mean.

And the...

The takeaway of these French thinkers is really to understand why these concepts should be contested, why they are, because, right, we have no objective foundation on which to erect a single truth.

I think we...

You know, it's all discourse.

And then what about Michel Foucault? What would you say his major contribution was to philosophy? So we've talked

about his structuralist book about the epistemes.

And then after that book was translated into English – He got upset that people called him a structuralist, despite his emphasis on structure.

And he moved on.

And in the 70s, he became partly under the influence of his partner, who was a Maoist, Daniel Deferre.

He became a real social activist, kind of inheriting the mantle of Sartre, and started looking at prisons.

One of his most famous books is Discipline and Punish.

Maybe you could just kind of say a little bit about some of the more public falls from grace of the theory moment.

You begin the book on a very personal note.

Absolutely.

So I, too, like you, Andrew, was deeply enmeshed in the milieu of the French philosophers, as improbable as it seems in the late 80s and early 90s.

And I think I was primed to be seduced by these thinkers, partly because I grew up in a family of Francophiles.

My father is now a retired professor of American literature, but he was a Francophile.

And every time he had a sabbatical, he would take the family to Europe.

And we lived in Paris in the early 70s at what was really the sort of tail end of the structuralist wave.

Do you really think that Foucault saw it all, from AI to the deep state, this post-structuralist disappearance of the author that you write about? I mean, he did seem to get it, although one could also argue, and I've argued this in some of my work, that the guy who invented the internet and post-structuralism was the Argentine writer Borges.