Preface

The frontiers of a book are never clear cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. (Foucault 1989: 23) Michel Foucault’s thoughts on the disparate sources for any text—part of a larger discussion on the often unseen complexities of those presumed unities that go by the name of tradition or the so-called oeuvre of an author, let alone the very idea of such a supposedly unified thing as an author itself—prompt a misleadingly simple question: From where did this book come? Can we trace its path and find its origin? It’s a challenge made all the more demanding, given that this is a second edition where hindsight can be drawn into the mix as if a thought today, once included in this edition, had always been there? (I presume that no textual specialist, with skills honed in the study of different fragments of some early Christian gospel, e.g., will one day be carefully comparing editions line by line, but who knows.) Foucault helps us to answer such questions, but only a little, for such things as books seem to arise from such a vast network of associations, both intentional and accidental, material and immaterial, as to make their origins and development virtually impossible to trace with any accuracy—which is indeed always the problem with origins discourses: present efforts to tame the unwieldy past. For that activity of tracing is always done from the vantage point of some present situation, necessarily looking backward, having by now long forgotten so many of what were merely chance meetings and conversations as to never be able to fully or accurately recount the steps that led from there (e.g., a study cubicle in Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, affectionately known back then as Fort Book, for its brutalist architecture, where some senior doctoral students might be lucky enough to gain access to a locked carrel for the year) to here (e.g., the office in which I’m now rewriting portions of this old text, over thirty years later, at the University of Alabama, a place toward which I then had no idea my future might be pointing [after a few other unanticipated stops along the way]). But this should not lead us to conclude that there are not at least a few well-trodden paths that we might be able to discern when we look back. They are not the whole, that’s most certain—totalized rhetorics are, as we will soon see, so terribly problematic coming from scholars—but they still strike me as important trails nonetheless. What follows, then, are just some of the avenues that I stillsee to have conspired to lead me to the position that I argue again in the following pages.