The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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the mathematical sense of a matrix, intentions and meanings. Human beings themselves are shaped by these discursive formations and thus not in charge or in possession of such formations. Regarding the ontological nature of things, archaeology brings to the fore a level of sense that escapes the level of things or, in Foucault’s terms, that can “dispense” with them (EAK, 47). Despite the apparent stability of things like metallic pins, the analysis of discursive formations can show that a pin manufactured in the classical age by a single worker in eighteen operations (EOT, 224) and the apparently same pin later on manufactured on an industrial scale rely on two different discursive formations. Because they have different material and historical conditions of possibility, they do not belong to the same “order” of things and thus, strictly speaking, are not the “same” thing.

The claim that archaeology reaches a level that is below subjectivity and below things, as well as the hope to escape hermeneutics, runs against the signiicant limitations of the results archaeology can show. Although Foucault clearly does not want to describe what he calls “the spirit or science of a period,” his “positivistic” attitude of description is compromised by the “hermeneutic” decisions he made in choosing his own ields of investigation in The Order of Things. He himself wholeheartedly acknowledges that, had he chosen other ields, the results may have been different. He even accepts the objection he himself raises: “Could not pre-Lavoisier chemistry, or Euler’s mathematics, or Vico’s history have invalidated all the analyses to be found in The Order of Things” (EAK, 158)? Foucault grants that his analyses are limited because he wanted to focus on “one region of interpositivity” (EAK, 159); for example, showing that the classiication of living entities in eighteenth-century natural history was made according to the same rules of representation as those enunciated by general grammar, so that natural history in fact used a grammar of classiication analogous to general grammar. To require that his limited analysis be corroborated by other ields of investigation would be, he argues, to require that he describe a Weltanschauung, precisely what he rejects: “The horizon of archaeology, therefore, is not a science, a rationality, a mentality, a culture; it is a tangle of interpositivities whose limits and points of intersection cannot be ixed in a single operation” (EAK, 159, Foucault’s italics). The goal, Foucault says, is not to offer a unity of the objects of investigation but to celebrate their diversity by identifying several conigurations. Therefore, he says that “Archaeological comparison does not have a unifying, but a diversifying, effect” (EAK, 160).

If the results of archaeology are only valid for the ields chosen by the archaeological method and cannot be extended to other ields and thus cannot be submitted to the scrutiny of other disciplines, it seems that archaeology is ill named, for the way the investigation is presented in The Order of Things, at the very least, suggests a kind of rigorous historical investigation that can respond to objections and counterexamples even if these come from ields other than those Foucault examined. If now, as Foucault acknowledges in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the results are only valid

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for the ields investigated and no generalizations should be made to other ields, we in fact have to deal more with the genealogy of a discipline, like economy, biology, or linguistics, than with a systematic study of regularities leading to discursive formations. Equally misused is the term “quasi-transcendentals,” by which Foucault characterizes “Life, Labour, and Language” and uses as an alternative to “the transcendental ield of subjectivity” (EOT, 250).

It may be this drastic limitation of the claims of archaeology that led to a change of focus in Foucault’s works toward a genealogy – and with the paradox that genealogy can better and more successfully accommodate the hermeneutic method that the archaeology rejected. Foucault uses the genealogical method on a variety of topics, like the prison system and the techniques to shape and mold the individual, but came to ind its unifying theme in what he calls the “care” or “practice of the self” and can be seen retrospectively as being already at work in the previous studies, although in an inverted form. To the outside structures and institutions rendering the self docile, there also corresponds a self that forms itself through these institutions and through the experiences made possible by such institutions. “The care of the self” was the title of the third volume of the History of Sexuality, and the term “hermeneutics” was used in the title of one of Foucault’s last courses at the Collège de France, “The Hermeneutics of the Subject.” So, we come to the third perspective we outlined.

The hermeneutics of the self is not an investigation of the essence of subjectivity or a history of the subject in Western thought. Instead of an epistemological approach that would put Socrates’ gnoti seauton in continuation with Descartes’ cogito sum, Foucault’s speciic and idiosyncratic hermeneutics focuses on the experience of the self: the self sees itself, experiences itself, and forms itself. In such a view of the self as a practice, the world and others are part of an experience within which a self comes to form itself. Foucault’s hermeneutics functions below the level of what could be a stable structure of the self, a substance or an essence of selfhood. The goal is not to “interpret” the self but to accompany its disclosure to itself, as it were, by following the experiences through which a self comes to understand itself or manifest itself. This is more a “hermeneutic attitude” than a hermeneutic method, and it allows Foucault to revisit such notions as askesis or parresia in the Stoics in order to show that they are in fact “practices of the self.” Parresia, for example, is an exercise in truth-telling or being true to oneself. This experience of the truth or this relation between subject and truth makes it clear that the self does not lie in anything that is stable or ixed under the level of experience but rather consists in a set of experiences and as such in a practice.

The hermeneutics of the subject provides a method of investigation that deals with “objects” other than in archaeology in the sense that the experience of the self is different from the discursive formation at the basis of what we call “man.” Besides disrupting the common views on the self that either the self only arose with

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modernity or that there is a continuity between Socrates and Descartes, Foucault’s hermeneutics also tempers his own pronouncements in The Order of Things that “man will return to that serene non-existence in which he was formerly maintained by the imperious unity of discourse” (EOT, 386). The notion of practice of the self thus not only offers an alternative to any traditional metaphysics of the self. It also mitigates Foucault’s own views: his apocalyptical breaks between epistemes taking place outside the experience of the self (in his archaeological period) as well as his focus on structures of power that subdue the subject outside its experience. In Foucault’s later work, hermeneutics recovers its original humility of being an adjuvant to something that shows itself or somebody who attests to his or her own self.

Pol van de Velde

See Also

Archaeology

Man

Phenomenology

Structuralism

Truth

Martin Heidegger

Suggested Reading

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990. Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. New York: Crossroads.

McGushin, Edward F. 2007. Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston,

IL: Northwestern University Press.

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corpus, will make this historiography appear essentially as if it had two faces: irst, a serial and economic history, and then, on the other hand, a microhistory or an eventhistory fundamentally connected to the minute attention given to the archive.

The third way of approaching the problem consists inally in attempting to understand the astonishing relation that the philosophy that emerges in Foucault’s work at the end of the 1970s – in particular, in the course at the Collège de France – has to history. In particular, there are two astonishing “sets” of studies that can help us relect on the relation to the history of philosophical thought that Foucault constructs when he claims at once to make philosophical thought be the object of a historical inquiry and to lay it out in the present. The irst “set” is constituted, between 1978 and 1984, by three texts devoted to Kant and to the question of the Enlightenment. The other “set,” in 1983–1984, within the frame of an inquiry into the notion of parresia, dwells for a long time irst on the igure of Socrates, then on the thought of the Cynics. In the two cases, the references – Kant in the irst case, Socrates and the Cynics in the second – are traversed by a type of questioning that poses in reality the problem of the actuality of philosophical practice and of its being anchored in the present. Likewise, the relection on what Foucault will then call a “critical ontology of ourselves” or a “critical ontology” of the present cannot fail to be concerned primarily, insofar as it is philosophy, with its own position situated in a certain place in the world and in a certain moment of history of thought, and in a type of speciic exercise (that of the type of public speech that the offering of a course implies).

In a passionate interview conducted in 1978, Foucault attempted to account for the historical conditions of possibility of his own thought (see EEW3, 239–297). In this self-analysis, the rupture with phenomenology, particularly with French Hegelianism, is perceived as foundational. The rupture is immediately related to the refusal to agree with a certain model of the history of philosophy, and to the observation that what is then perceived as the dominant university philosophy is obviously unable to match up to the drama of its own times. There, Foucault says that

Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille were the authors who enabled me to free myself from the dominant inluences in my university training in the early 1950s – Hegel and phenomenology. Doing philosophy in those days, and today as well in fact, mainly amounted to doing the history of philosophy – and the history of philosophy delimited, on the one hand, by Hegel’s theory of systems and, on the other, by the philosophy of the subject, went on in the form of phenomenology and existentialism. Essentially, it was Hegel who was the prevailing inluence. For France, this had been in a sense a recent discovery, following the work of Jean Wahl and the teaching of Jean Hyppolite. It was a Hegelianism permeated with phenomenology and existentialism, centered on the theme of the unhappy consciousness. And it was really the best thing the French university could offer as the broadest possible mode of understanding

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the contemporary world, which had barely emerged from the tragedy of World War II and the great upheavals that had preceded it – the Russian revolution, Nazism, and so on. (EEW3, 246)

It is at the intersection of these two imperatives – not becoming a historian of philosophy and yet being at the height of his own epoch – that the concern emerges to break with the representation of a rational, teleologically oriented, continuous, linear history, which is at once the history on which the idea of philosophical thought is grounded and the history, more generally, of human history. The necessity to insert in this continuum the violent discontinuity of war is foundational. It implies therefore the investigation of another representation of history that would be susceptible of accounting for the fault line that henceforth traverses the present, and, by a sort of ricochet, redeines as well the way in which we related to the history of philosophy. The name of Nietzsche then returns for good.

What is still more largely at issue is to take up the critique of the suprahistorical viewpoint that history adopts when it claims to be the reassuring and closed unity in which the ininite proliferation of the world is enclosed. The use of Nietzsche serves to deconstruct a history having for its function “to gather up the inally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself” (EEW2, 379) and having in reality always sought to cancel the multiple igures of the disparate and the divergent, of the leap and of change – in a word, it wants to cancel becoming understood as broken linearity. Returning to the singular chance of the event is, in contrast, as Nietzsche recalls for us in Daybreak, “to shake the dice-box of chance” (Nietzsche 1982, 130) against the mystiication of the unity with which “antiquarian history” is full. It is this “dice-box” that fascinates Foucault.

Foucault therefore “carves out” his own reading on the basis of an object that is at once partial (from the viewpoint of Nietzsche’s work) and fundamental (for his own relection), which is the critique of a certain type of representation of history. And it is on the basis of this object that he is going to be able to summon in the same way two other “mountain ranges” of inluence without which it is impossible to account for his work in the 1960s, from The History of Madness to The Archaeology of Knowledge. The irst inluence, decisive in many regards, is that of Georges Canguilhem. Two texts, separated by ten years, allow us to take stock of the inluence. The irst, written in 1968, responds to a certain number of questions posed by the “Epistemology Circle” (see “On the Archaeology of the Sciences” in EEW2, 297–334). The second is an introduction written in 1978 for the American edition of Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (see “Life: Experience and Science” in EEW2, 465–478). In “The Archaeology of the Sciences,” Foucault says:

Beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the massive and homogeneous manifestations of the mind, and beneath the stubborn development of a science

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struggling from its beginnings to exist and complete itself, attempts have been made to detect the occurrence of interruptions. Gaston Bachelard has charted out the epistemological thresholds that interrupt the indeinite accumulation of knowledges; Martial Geroult has described the enclosed systems, the closed conceptual architectures that partition the space of philosophical discourse; Georges Canguilhem has analyzed the mutations, displacements, and transformations in the ield of validity and the rules for the use of concepts. (EEW2, 299)

And then, ten years later, Foucault says:

First, [Georges Canguilhem] took up the theme of “discontinuity.” An old theme that emerged early on, to the point of being contemporaneous, or nearly so, with the birth of a history of the sciences.... Taking up this same theme, developed by Koyré and Bachelard, Canguilhem stresses the fact that for him identifying discontinuities does not have to do with postulates or results; it is more a “way of proceeding,” a procedure that is integral with the history of the sciences because it is called for by the very object that the latter must deal with. (EEW2, 471)

Since it is neither a postulate nor a result but a “way of proceeding,” we are therefore dealing with a genuine choice of method.

However, in Foucault, these references to the philosophy of the sciences, when he makes them, play a precise role. As he will explain at length in the 1978 Canguilhem text, what is at issue is the construction of an opposition between the “philosophies of subject” and the “philosophies of the concept,” between “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty” on the one hand and “Cavaillès, Bachelard, and Canguilhem” on the other. This is an opposition that allows Foucault to reread the history of French thought as “two strains that remained, for a time at least, rather deeply heterogeneous” (EEW2, 466). Obviously, this rereading reinforces his own attempt to undermine a igure of the subject generally understood as autoreferential, solipsistic, ahistorical, and psychologized. Foucault says quite often that this subject, from Descartes to Sartre, has traversed philosophy while rendering it sterile. However, an opposition, from the side of the “philosophies of the concept,” allows us, above all, to pose the problem of the relation between the history of sciences and epistemology; that is, at once the problem of the relation to time and of the relation to the historicity of forms of “truth-telling.” This is what Foucault says:

The history of science, Canguilhem says, citing Suzanne Bachelard, cannot construct its object anywhere but in “an ideal space-time.” And this space-time is given to it neither by the ‘realist’ time accumulated by historians’ erudition nor by the space of ideality which partitions science today in an authoritative way, but by the viewpoint of epistemology. The latter is not the general theory

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of every science and of every possible scientiic statement; it is the search for the normativity internal to the different scientiic activities, as they have actually been carried out. So, it involves an indispensable theoretical relection that enables the history of the sciences to be constituted in a different mode from history in general; and, conversely, the history of the sciences opens up a domain of analysis that is indispensable if epistemology is to be anything else but the simple reproduction of the internal schemas of a science at a given time. In the method employed by Canguilhem, the formulation of “discontinuistic” analyses and the elucidation of the relation between the history of the sciences and epistemology go hand in hand. (EEW2, 473)

What Foucault takes up from Canguilhem’s “method,” “a philosophy of error, of the concept of the living” (EEW2, 477), corresponds in reality to a stake that is twofold. It is necessary to distinguish the time of the history of the sciences at once from the abstract time of the sciences themselves, on the one hand, and, on the other, from the erudite history of the historians, because both – in different ways, of course – in fact assert the necessity of an absolute continuum. They cannot consider history in any way other than as a linear, ruptureless process. Whether what is at issue is an “idealized” temporal space that is completely freed from the material conditions of its unfolding or a “realist” time reduced to the ininite and continuous accumulation of its different moments, the discourse really does not change. In both cases (the “idealized” space and the “realist” time), one presupposes a linearity without a fault line – and the impossibility that the historian’s gaze would be able to distance himself from it, would somehow be able to write the history of this linear history, to set up the epistemology of the continuous form of time itself. Going in the opposite direction, the epistemological viewpoint therefore is going to represent for the history of the sciences the possibility of an approach to time that allows us to question this continuist presupposition. But in another sense, the risk run by epistemology is that of a reproduction of the scientiic schemas described within the description itself; that is, the risk of not being able to historicize the scientiic discourse and the epistemological grids mobilized by its own analysis. This is why the history of the sciences grants to epistemology itself the status of being something other than a metadiscourse.

The proximity of this twofold stake of Canguilhem’s “discontinuist” analyses to Foucault’s work from the 1960s is clear. Is The Order of Things anything else than the attempt to produce the history of the way in which scientiic discourse has constituted, in a given moment, its own ields, its own objects, its own methods, the very form of its knowledge (savoir) – and, of course, the form of its history? But we must also ask this question: However we must also ask this question: Isn't The Order of Things nothing but the attempt to reintroduce internal schemas into the science within a more general history, which would be that of the different – and successive – forms of “saying-the-truth”? It is within this double historicization that a critique of

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the “philosophies of the subject” – the other side of Foucault’s positive critique – is truly possible. The reason for this is that if, as Foucault correctly recalls, Cartesian philosophy has represented this great rupture of the modernity that has posed for the irst time the problem of the relations between truth and the subject, the philosophy of the sciences demands that we totally reformulate the question. This is the case not only because the Cartesian subject has no history in the strict sense – rather it grounds the possibility of history, and of course this lack of history is at the heart of the contemporary critiques of the Cartesian subject – but also because one has to deine the conditions for the possibility of a history of truth that does not take the form of a metaphysics of truth. On the contrary, the conditions amount to an archaeology of the way in which the true and the false, truth and error, enter into a relation and mutually deine one another on the basis of norms and limits that are constantly being redeined, rearticulated, and readjusted. These norms, moreover, are thinkable only on the basis of the historicization of the episteme to which they belong.

The other great contaminating foundation during the same period of Foucault’s thinking – and this time it is one outside of philosophy – is a certain French historiography that poses, in particular, the problems of historical causality and linearity, of the selection that the choice of a periodization implies, and it raises the question of the relation to the materiality of the traces that one examines. This allows us to understand at once the way in which Foucault has constructed his own concepts of archaeology and archive, the relations that he has woven with historians – and the collaborations to which the latter have at times produced. This also allows us to understand how Foucault has rejected, thanks to what he borrows from historiography, the generally philosophical ways in which history has been modeled.

In 1967, Foucault granted Raymond Bellour an interview that is entitled “On the Ways of Writing History” (EEW2, 279–296). In fact, Foucault had already agreed to respond at an earlier time to questions from Bellour, just when The Order of Things had come out (FDE1, 498–504). At this time, the nearly complete absence of the theme of history was truly astonishing. The problem in fact seemed moreover that of understanding the relation between the analyses in The History of Madness and those of The Order of Things, or the problem was to explain by way of recourse to the notion of archaeology the way in which one had been able to constitute a sort of homogeneous domain of inquiry. This homogeneous domain is that of an epoch’s episteme, which traverses all the disciplinary borders in order to constitute the very density of the space in which the different kinds of knowledge are distributed. However, the episteme looked to be identical to a historical selection, which was deining the limits of the episteme. Foucault seems not to want to open this very problem of periodization. We recall of course the end of The Order of Things. There we ind the hypothesis of erasure “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” (EOT, 387) of the epistemic coniguration that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, whose archaeology Foucault was composing. But in 1966, nothing or nearly

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nothing that was said indicated the, so to speak, “upstream” of this coniguration; that is, moment of its emergence. Therefore, if the themes of transition and transformation, of shifting and discontinuity in history, were considered “in advance” and projected as a possible future hypothesis, they seemed to be evaded as soon as what was at issue was to think what was “behind”; that is, their value as a starting point.

Is it necessary to think, moreover, that these are the organizing moves, the moves of hierarchizations and of distribution on the basis of homogeneity (episteme) that have, at this time, interested Foucault? The problem, however, was obvious: either the chosen periodization assured in advance the epistemic homogeneity of the chosen moment or on the contrary it is the staking out of a certain number of isomorphisms that ground the possibility of periodization. In either case, Foucault is commanded to respond to the question that he seems to want to avoid, that of the legitimacy of historical selection for which the episteme is – according to the possible ways of reading it – the foundation or the product. And we recall Sartre’s very severe critique of Foucault when The Order of Things was published: “Of course, his [that is, Foucault’s] perspective remains historical. He distinguishes epochs, a before and an after. But, he replaces cinema with a slide show, movement with a succession of immobile structures” (Sartre 1966, 87).

Now we come to the second interview with Bellour, one year after the publication of The Order of Things. Here the tone is absolutely different. The problem of Foucault’s relation to history and historians is posed there immediately, in particular because, as Bellour recalls in his irst question, the reserved welcome the book received has been at once “enthusiastic and reticent.” Foucault’s answers are extremely precise. On the one hand, the “professional historians” have recognized the book as a book of history. On the other, a very profound mutation of historical knowledge has been at work for the last twenty years; a new generation of historians (Foucault mentioned the names of Fernand Braudel, François Furet, Denis Richet, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and also the Cambridge school of history and the Soviet school) have undertaken “a new adventure.” Now, history has for a long time been the last refuge of the dialectical order, the sacred place in which the relations between individuals and totality have played out. History has often been reduced to the universal relation of causality. Consequently, against this totalizing and untouchable history, what is at issue now is to formulate “the very dificult problem of periodization” and at the same time a genuine “logic of mutation.” Therefore, in order to turn history into a philosophy, we have to be interested, above all else, in transformation. Thereby we have returned to the old problem of discontinuity.

It is in this context that we must understand Foucault’s archaeology. The term appears three times in the titles of his works: The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963); The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

(1966); and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Up until the beginning of the 1970s, the term characterizes his research method. Archaeology is not a “history” in the