According to Foucault, language's fall from the happy, intimate condition of being continuous with the world-in what he calls language's demotion to the mere status of an object-leads to three types of compensation, in three main areas of knowledge production. Offering the semblance of positivity and universality, the graphic is simultaneously cryptic and enigmatic, its readily visible forms impen etrable even to sophisticated readers, who are typically at a loss as to what it means without detailed explanations, without the help of words.2 The coexistence of these polar aspects suggests that scientific graphicity needs to be rethought as a special epistemic setting, one in which the ongoing modern sense of a crisis in language continues to play itself out in the form of a fantasy.