What is most distinctive of Foucault as a postmodern thinker is what I have called his “spatialization of reason” as studied in his his- tories and exhibited in his writings. His implicit appeal to space, with its transformations and displacements as well as its comparativist and diacritical method, rather than to time as the model for histori- cal explanation undermines the telic nature of traditional historical accounts, even as it restores the dispersive, “Dionysian” character to time, which had been tamed by existentialists and other narrativists