The discontinuity in the continuity. Michel Foucault and the archaeological period. The issue 23 of the journal Topologik - Italia, 2018 (original) (raw)
Related papers
"A Strong Reading of Discontinuity in Foucault's Historical Method" (SPEP 58 Handout)
My Aim is to challenge the tendency to quietly ignore, weaken, or apologize for the firm epistemological limits Foucault places on historical knowledge. My strategy is to argue for the strongest possible interpretation of the role of discontinuity in Foucault's approach to history. (I refuse to "pull any punches" so to speak.) My claim here is that once we see one of the key philosophical problems to which Foucault's methodological considerations must respond, his historical approach -- and the role of discontinuity within it -- starts to make sense.
SYSTEMS OF FORMATION IN FOUCAULT'S ARCHAEOLOGY: INCURSION TO THE SUB-LEVELS OF DISCOURSE (Atena Editora), 2021
Figurando entre as obras fundacionais sobre as quais a escola francesa da análise do discurso pôde se erguer, A Arqueologia do Saber, de Michel Foucault, constitui seu lugar teórico de modo positivamente afastado da análise linguística e da dimensão textual do discurso. Para aproximar dos linguistas os desenvolvimentos teóricos que o autor realiza no texto, talvez seja conveniente que sejam recuperadas algumas das discussões que parecem ter servido como condição para que a obra viesse a público na forma como hoje a conhecemos. Neste artigo, analisamos o grau e o modo de aproveitamento na teoria discursiva foucaultiana do método de análise estrutural tal como Lévi-Strauss o imaginou para a ciência etnológica em meados do século passado, considerando ainda os efeitos que a noção de estrutura por ele recomendada acabou por produzir no modo como os historiadores pensavam a duração social. Do ponto de vista da aproximação metodológica, utilizamos um conjunto de textos referentes ao debate estabelecido entre história e antropologia na França do século passado que supomos terem servido como condição de possibilidade à produção da Arqueologia do Saber. Confrontando-os com a obra de Foucault, exploramos as relações intertextuais existentes entre a Arqueologia e esses trabalhos cuja existência prévia parece ter viabilizado seu aparecimento. Nessa direção, ajustamos a condição de possibilidade a qual nos referimos, reduzindo seu alcance ao que decidimos tomar estritamente como condição (textual) de possibilidade – categoria que admitimos como ponto de apoio em nosso trabalho de análise. Os resultados nos mostram que certos traços da razão estruturalista parecem ter sido transferidos para um aspecto teórico da Arqueologia definido como sistema de formação – uma camada na qual os mais diversos elementos da realidade social estabelecem entre si relações cuja complexa sistematicidade serve como condição de existência aos elementos do discurso.
Archaeological Methodology: Foucault and the History of Systems of Thought POSTPRINT
Theory, Culture & Society, 2021
Existing accounts of Foucault's archaeological methodology have not (a) contextualized the concept properly within the intellectual field of its emergence and (b) explained why it is called 'archaeology' and not simply 'history'. Foucault contributed to the field of 'history of systems of thought' in France around 1960 by broadening its scope from the study of scientific and philosophical systems into systems of 'knowledge' in a wider sense. For Foucault, the term 'archaeology' provided a response to new methodological questions arising from this initiative. Archaeological methodology had already been developed into a distinct comparative approach for the study of linguistic and cultural systems, notably by Dumézil. Foucault redevised archaeological methodology for the post-Hegelian tradition of studying 'problems' prevalent in the history of systems of thought. The article thus furnishes the groundwork for a 'sociological archaeology' or 'problem analysis' that is not particularly dependent on Foucault as a social theorist of power.
Systems of Formation in Foucault's Archaeology: Incursion to the Sub-Levels of Discourse
Arts, Linguistics, Literature and Language Research Journal, 2021
Foucault’s text The Archeology of Knowledge, which can be considered as a founding work regarding the French school of discourse analysis, constitutes its theoretical place positively apart from linguistic analysis and from the textual dimension of discourse. To approximate to linguists the theoretical developments Foucault carries out in the Archeology of Knowledge, it seems convenient to recover some of the discussions which might have served as conditions for this text to be presented the way we know it today. In this paper, we analyze the degree and the way of use in Foucault’s discursive theory of the structural analysis method as Lévi- Strauss envisioned it to ethnological science in the middle of the last century, considering moreover the effects produced by the notion of structure he recommended in the way historians thought of social duration. Concerning the methodological approach, we use a set of texts related to the debate established between history and anthropology in France in the last century which we suppose served as condition of possibility for the production of the Archeology of Knowledge. Confronting these texts with Foucault’s work, we explore the existing intertextual relations between the Archeology and this material whose previous existence seems to have enabled its appearance. In this direction, we adjust the condition of possibility to which we refer, reducing its scope to what we have decided to take strictly as a textual condition of possibility – a category we assume as theoretical support in our analytical work. The results show us that certain traits of structuralist reason seem to have been transferred to a theoretical aspect of Archeology defined as a system of formation – an underlayer in which multiple elements of social reality establish reciprocal relationships whose systematic complexity serves as a condition of existence to the elements of discourse.
Archaeological Methodology: Foucault and the History of Systems of Thought
Theory, Culture & Society, 2021
Existing accounts of Foucault’s archaeological methodology have not (a) contextualized the concept properly within the intellectual field of its emergence and (b) explained why it is called ‘archaeology’ and not simply ‘history’. Foucault contributed to the field of ‘history of systems of thought’ in France around 1960 by broadening its scope from the study of scientific and philosophical systems into systems of ‘knowledge’ in a wider sense. For Foucault, the term ‘archaeology’ provided a response to new methodological questions arising from this initiative. Archaeological methodology had already been developed into a distinct comparative approach for the study of linguistic and cultural systems, notably by Dumézil. Foucault redevised archaeological methodology for the post-Hegelian tradition of studying ‘problems’ prevalent in the history of systems of thought. The article thus furnishes the groundwork for a ‘sociological archaeology’ or ‘problem analysis’ that is not particularly ...
Foucault, Archaeology, Transgression
In this paper, I examine Rabinow and Dreyfus' critique of Foucalt's archaeology. I argue that their stance on his archeological methodology is insightful, but overlooks that if archaeology is, as they hold, indeed 'but' a modern human science in the Foucaldian sense, then its doubling, an "archaeology of archaeology" must (be able to) exist, too. This however I argue not to be impossible. Thus I bring forward a different understanding of the archaeological enterprise: One of a fundamentally transgressive undertaking, accounting for its unique insights through, or in spite of, all its vaguenesses and epistemological precarities.
The Episteme and the Historical A Priori: On Foucault's Archaeological Method
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy (JFFP), 2021
Interpreters of Michel Foucault's 1966 Les mots et les choses have often conflated the terms 'episteme' and 'historical a priori'. This article suggests that the two terms are entirely separate: while 'episteme' refers to the configuration of thought in a given historical period, 'historical a priori' refers to the conditions of unity for a certain field of science within a given period. In his use of the term 'historical a priori', Foucault is thus much closer to Husserl than has hitherto been appreciated. Keeping the two terms separated also sheds new light on the archaeological method that Foucault uses, showing that there is a procedure to get from an archive of texts to the reconstruction of an episteme.