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I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to the bureaucrats to see that our papers are in order.

Here, Foucault confronts the most disturbing aspects of his analysis in terms of his own authorship. With subjectivity and the author removed from the analysis of discourse, statements become “anonymous,” to survive or disappear according to impersonal discursive transformations. In order for Foucault to answer critics who say that he sets his own discourse on a different plane from those he studies, he must embrace his own disappearance as an author. To do otherwise is to risk the forms of blinded power that Foucault's method critiques; authorship is a matter for “bureaucrats.”

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