The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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strict sense as if what we are trying to do is reconstitute a historical ield. Foucault in fact brings into play different dimensions (philosophical, economic, scientiic, political, etc.) in order to obtain the conditions of emergence of discourses of knowledge in general in a given epoch. Instead of studying the history of ideas in its evolution, archaeology consequently concentrates on precise historical selections – in particular, the classical age and the beginning of the nineteenth century, whose a priori legitimacy we have seen is dificult to establish.

Now, if we discover in “archaeology” the idea of the arché (that is, the problem of the beginning, of the principle, of the emergence of objects of knowledge), we also ind the idea of the archive, the recording of objects. Foucault speciies the idea in this way:

I shall call an archive, not the totality of texts that have been preserved by a civilization or the set of traces that could be salvaged from its downfall, but the series of rules which determine in a culture the appearance and disappearance of statements, their mode of remaining [rémanence] and their erasure, their paradoxical existence as events and things. To analyze the facts of discourse in the general element of the archive is to consider them, not at all as documents (of a concealed signiication or a rule of construction), but as monuments; it is – leaving aside every geological metaphor, without assigning of origin, without the least gesture toward the beginnings of an arché – to do what the rules of the etymological game allow us to call something like an archaeology. (EEW2, 309–310)

From The History of Madness to The Archaeology of Knowledge, the archive represents therefore the set of discourses actually pronounced in a given epoch and that continue to exist across history. To do an archaeology of this documentary mass is to seek to understand its rules, practices, conditions, and the way it functions. That implies above all else a work of recollection of the general archive of the chosen epoch. Foucault then treats the archive as constituting series whose distribution and organization, in a given epoch, he analyzes. The proximity to the structural analysis of discourse, which, at this moment, interested Foucault enormously, is obvious. Foucault’s archaeology in the 1960s is halfway between serial history and general grammar. Certainly set up on the support of history, it is done on the basis of a historical periodization that grounds its consistency but resembles more a cartography or a diagram than a minute inquiry concerning a past time.

However, at the beginning of the 1970s, the archive changes its status. Thanks to working directly with historians (see Pierre Rivière in 1973 [EPR]; L’impossible prison in 1978, under the direction of Michelle Perrot [Perrot 1980]; or Le Désordre des familles in 1982, with Arlette Farge [FDF]), Foucault starts to assert at once the subjective dimension of his work and starts to take into account a density of

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the traces with which he is concerned that is nearly existential. It is as if in fact the archive presented past lives. As he notes in a famous text on “infamous men,” “This is not a book of history. The selection found here was guided by nothing more substantial than my taste, my pleasure, an emotion” (EEW3, 157). The reading of these fragments, which is often very literary and which he sometimes calls “strange poems,” is then in marked contrast to the serial and cartographic approach of the preceding decade. The paradox of a nonhistorian (literary, poetical, philosophical) utilization of historical sources is that Foucault is likewise criticized for this usage. Only gradually will Foucault’s interest move toward an analytic of power that is indissociable from a history of subjectivities in the confrontation with this same power. However, a history of subjectivities, a history of anonymous and everyday existences, a history of events, are all at this time at the heart of the renewal of historiography. Event-history, new history, and microhistory are nearby areas from which Foucault has drawn and to which he has contributed (see Jacques Revel 1992) – since what was at issue was to record the methodological tensions, mutations, and moves of the historians’ work. But, despite everything, this record is made from within a philosophical relection.

At the end of the 1970s, these philosophical consequences emerge in all their clarity. Foucault abandons neither archaeology nor the relation to the archive. But he reinvests what was at the beginning something simply borrowed from Nietzsche: the concept of genealogy. Foucault gives Nietzsche’s genealogy a new potency.The nerve of this displacement consists in a strategic reversal of the notion of discontinuity.

To start, genealogy is essentially, for Foucault, what allows us to put into play, in history, a principle of dissipation (of the claimed unity of our identity, of our origin), of dispersion and of singularization (of events), and of differentiation (of different historical segments brought to light by a work of periodization). Beyond the dissemination of identities and the critique of the Ursprung, the excavation of discontinuities in history nevertheless, in Foucault, takes on accents that are more those of historiography than those of philosophy. Whatever critique may have been formulated concerning the real consistency of the periodizations constructed by Foucault in his works, the selection of distinct epistemes or different “moments” nevertheless serves as the essential support for the analysis. Discontinuity is not only a concept but a historiographic practice that allows us to insert difference into the continuum of time by asserting something that is halfway between a sort of staking out of “enduring” averages as Braudel does and the selection of ields of inquiry. And, in fact, this difference plays out essentially “in the background” between what is no longer (and about which it would be necessary to make an archaeology) and what we are. It is in this sense that, if archaeology works on historical materials, at the same time and by ricochet it works toward our present – because if genealogy is in reality the perception that we are, it is always given on the basis of a background of difference. This difference fractures the history on which we think we are grounded. We are plunged

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into history, traversed by its determinations, but we can know that only through the differentiation from what we have stopped being, saying, or thinking.

In 1978, for the irst time in a penetrating way, Foucault commented on Kant’s small text “What Is Enlightenment?” In order to try to determine what the “critical attitude” is, he still puts into play the structure discontinuity/periodization/differentiation, as he had in the preceding decade. For him, the “critical attitude” in fact characterizes the beginning of the modern epoch and is opposed to the demands of the preceding epoch’s pastoral governmentality, which in contrast had claimed to direct the conduct of individuals by the truth. Periodization allows us to differentiate between the “moments” (here modernity, there the Christian pastoral). But differentiation, in turn, requires that we question ourselves about the way we belong to some such “moment” of thought. Do we not participate in the modernity inaugurated by the emergence of the critical attitude, or are we separated from it by a “difference” that we must recognize and name?

However, ive years later, Foucault twice returns to Kant’s text. The irst time is in his course at the Collège de France called “The Government of Self and Others” (the session on January 5, 1983 [ECF-GSO, 1–40; I shall be quoting an extract of the January 5, 1983, course, published in Magazine littéraire, number 207, May 1984, reprinted in FED4, 679–688]); the second time, one year later, is in a text published in the United States (“What Is Enlightenment?” [original publication in EFR, 32–50, reprinted in EEW1, 303–320; reprinted in French in FDE4, 562–578, FDE2a, 1381–1396]). In both cases, Foucault’s approach has fundamentally changed. Periodization is reduced to a secondary level because the heart of Foucault’s analysis has now become the present as such:

With this text on the Aufklärung, we see philosophy – and it is forcing things to say that this is the irst time – problematize its own discursive actuality, an actuality it interrogates as an event, as an event whose sense, value, philosophical singularity it has to say, and in which philosophy must discover at once its own raison d’être and the foundation of what it says. (FDE4, 680)

The attention given to the present is no longer only an induced effect of historical inquiry (induced by differentiation). In itself it becomes the subject matter of philosophical relection. Does that then mean that Foucault, strangely returning to philosophy, has abandoned history? Or does it mean that, in his inal years, he starts to concentrate solely on certain episodes of the history of philosophy to the detriment of this proximity with the historians who had, however, provided so strongly the model for his own work?

In fact, the “excavation of difference” in history is still going to intervene in another way. What is at issue is to make it now pass not only between what has been and what is but between what is our present and what could be tomorrow. Discontinuity is not so much what we have to recognize once it has happened

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but what we can contribute to construct within our own present. This reversal then gives rise in Foucault to two types of analyses. On the one hand, we have the analysis of the theme of revolution as the power to institute discontinuity within our actuality or present (insofar as revolution is “an event whose very content is unimportant, but whose existence testiies to a permanent and unforgettable virtuality” [FDE4, 686]), and, on the other hand, we have the insistence on the necessity of practice, within the historical determinations that make us be what we are, “the present [actuel] ield of possible experience” (FDE4, 687). As Foucault says, merging the two types of analyses, “to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over” (EEW1, 315). This “historico-practical test of the limits that we may cross over” (EEW1, 316) is immediately analyzed by Foucault as an attitude, as an ethos that characterizes philosophy understood less as a body of doctrines than as a practice. It is not possible to have a philosophical practice without being contextualized in a speciic epoch. But it also is not possible to have philosophy if one does not risk the attempt at the critique of who we are as “at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of crossing over them” (EEW1, 319). And Foucault concludes, “this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (EEW1, 315–316). From precisely within history, this critique constitutes the indeinite (or undeined) work of freedom for humans.

The way in which Foucault positions himself in relation to philosophy bears the trace of this reorientation. We recall how meticulous Foucault is, from his irst works, in his concern with historicizing his objects of inquiry. In other words, he places them back in a general economy of a system of thought connected to a precise periodization. In the two texts that we have just quoted, he seems, however, to be engaged in a procedure that goes in the opposite direction. Not only do the opening sessions of the course on January 5, 1983, concerning the Aufklärung really set up, through a chronological leap that is dizzying and to say the least surprising, an entire year devoted to ancient thought, but also the treatment of the Enlightenment seems radically different. Foucault writes,

After all, it seems to me indeed that the Aufklärung, at once as a singular event that inaugurates European modernity and as a permanent process that manifests itself in the history of reason ... is not simply for us an episode in the history of ideas.... What we’re doing is not preserving whatever remains of the Aufklärung. What is in question is its event and its meaning (the question of the historicity of the universal). This is what we have to keep present and keep in mind as what must be thought. (FDE4, 686–687)

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Some months later, Foucault makes this more speciic:

I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or less naïve or archaic pre-modernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling “postmodernity.” ... Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity as an attitude rather than as a period of history. (EEW1, 509)

We can see now that Foucault’s discourse tends to replace historical periodization with the problematization of actuality – even if the mode of relation to actuality that we establish is itself historically determined.

The last two years of Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France resonate with this tension. Just as the Kant commentary opened the 1983 course, which was, however, devoted to the study of “truth-telling” in the texts of Polybius, Euripides, and Plato, Foucault chose in 1984 to make history again leap beyond itself. In the ifth lecture (February 29, 1984), although the whole analysis had so far been devoted to parresia (and he had just introduced the example of the Cynics), he makes in effect a digression: “Coming closer to our own time, it would also be interesting to analyze another support of the Cynic mode of being, of Cynicism understood as form of life in the scandal of truth” (ECF-COT, 183). And then he presents what he calls a “history of the Cynical mode,” which takes the form of a genealogy of militant forms of life – the asceticism of the Franciscans in secret sociality, participation in an avantgarde artist organization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The historical “unhooking” (déchrochage) is obvious. In the following session, on March 7, 1984, more classically, Foucault returns to the analysis of the Cynics. Far from being something incoherent, what Foucault calls “a stroll, an excursus, an errancy” provokes the irruption of the question of the “scandal of truth” – this is the Cynical element par excellence – in other histories: those of the Christian Middle Ages, modernity, and undoubtedly our own present. It would be a mistake to consider this irruption as an anachronism. If the way in which the Cynics call forth the scandal of truth is historically determined – and as such not susceptible to being exported beyond its own time – the question is to determine whether the way in which the demand of truthtelling can explode in the public space and affect the world’s order such as it has been established at a given moment is in itself a lot more general. If the Cynical response to the problem cannot be ours today, the problem that the Cynics pose merits being posed, even in our own actuality. How is it possible to insert discontinuity without our own present? How is it possible to think of “‘today’ as difference in history” (EEW1, 309) and tomorrow as difference from today?

In response to this question, Foucault never tires of saying that one cannot shortchange history. Instead, paradoxically, we have to think of freedom within its

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determinations. Why? Because it does not exist “outside” of history, because we are the products of history. But we can and we must, from the inside of what has made us be, seek to invent different horizons and modes of life. Here we have therefore that in which the scandal of thought and its risk consist: to desire, here and now, in history, a different life; that is, also and immediately, another history. And Foucault concludes, in the last lines of the manuscript for the last session in 1984, which he did not have the time to read but of which we still have the written trace: “There is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the life that is other” (ECF-COT, 356). Metaphysics has made us used to projecting “the life that is other” in a transcendence that is opposed to history. In contrast, Foucault turns history into the density within which the investigation of difference and the disquietude of the present play out.

Judith Revel

See Also

Actuality

Archaeology

Phenomenology

Truth

Georges Canguilhem

Friedrich Nietzsche

Suggested Reading

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

Flynn, Thomas R. 1997. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2005. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Revel, Judith. 2010. Foucault, une pensée du discontinu. Paris: Fayard.

Veyne, Paul. 1984. Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

2010. Foucault: His Thought, His Character, trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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[L’a priori historique et concret] of the modern medical gaze was inally constituted”

(EBC, 192).

In the Clinic book, this “historical and concrete a priori” seems to name those discursive and institutional conditions of emergence that have to be in place for the aesthetic and political practice of the gaze to mutate into the central practice of the human sciences, and speciically as the linchpin practice of medicine. Importantly, this early formulation of the “historical and concrete a priori” also suggests the dual importance of both the empirical and diachronic dimensions involved in Foucault’s thinking about the conditions for a discourse’s emergence and transformation. One cannot, Foucault suggests, easily describe or transform one’s own concrete historical conditions (one cannot, perhaps, diagnose one’s own clinic), but one can perform a halting archaeology of how we’ve arrived at the clinical practices that dominate our present. In short, only when a new conception of a given phenomenon (a new dominant regime of treatment) has emerged can one hope to name the concrete contours of the former historical a priori.

In Foucault’s archaeological work, then, the historical a priori serves as a mechanism by which certain speciic, bounded, and concrete practices (like the gaze, which organizes aesthetics) are able to saturate and reorganize domains seemingly far removed from them (domains like medicine). And, in the process, these “historical” discourses sculpt new “a priori” objects for their disciplines: they construct (in the guise of “discovering”) new objects and new protocols that enable different engagements and new methods of investigation. The medical gaze, for example, allows clinical medicine to invent new enabling possibilities and dangers lurking within the body – a prioris that medicine can then go on to study, combat, and hopefully outlank. Speciically, new practices and understandings of health, disease, and death are reconstituted by the emergent historical a priori of the medical gaze – in the way that Foucault will later show how something like an “author-function” is historically reconstructed in and through various ways of handling texts. Like the discovery of abnormality through the medical gaze of diagnosis, the author is discursively and historically constructed precisely as a kind of a priori, a grounding mechanism supposedly outside and prior to the object being examined.

Archaeology, then, is a discourse that emphasizes the emergence of the new (the historical invention of new a prioris, and thereby new practices) rather than a discourse dedicated to the rediscovery of the a priori conditions of possibility for any discursive formation: a discourse of historical emergence rather than philosophical origin. Archaeology is a science of what Foucault calls “positivity” rather than an investigation of the inevitable lacks, gaps, or slippages that haunt any discourse from its origin. As Foucault writes, “this form of positivity ... deines a ield in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical

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interchanges may be deployed. Thus positivity plays the role of what might be called a historical a priori” (EAK, 127).

The historical a priori is native to Foucault’s self-described “archaeological” work. As we’ve seen, the phrase emerges in The Birth of the Clinic, but it is irst deployed consistently throughout 1966’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. In the introduction to The Order of Things, Foucault states outright that the book’s function is to examine the historical a priori of the human sciences:

Quite obviously, such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or of science: it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory become possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori ... ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience relected in philosophies, rationalities be formed – only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards. (EOT, xxi–xxii)

In constructing and mobilizing such a historical a priori for the emergence and transformation of the human sciences in Europe, Foucault goes on to demonstrate in The Order of Things that the nineteenth-century triumvirate of life, labor, and language –the discourses of biology, Marxism, and linguistics – all emerge in the context of the same historical a priori: the search for new practices of analysis in the wake of the epistemic breakdown of representation in the early modern period. As linguistics turns away from Adamic understandings of language (the sense that things are represented and their meaning guaranteed by their original names), so, too, does economics gradually turn away from discussions of ground rent (as natural, representational value) to discussions of money and credit, while biology abandons the plant (fully representable from root to lower) as the primary marker of life and slowly adopts the unrepresentable vitalism of animality to model this emergent object called “life” (see EOT, 287–304).

Although the énoncé historical a priori is deployed at strategic points throughout

Foucault’s work of the period, it receives its most thorough theoretical articulation in The Archaeology of Knowledge – most speciically in the chapter, “The Historical A

Priori and the Archive” (EAK, 126–131). In a fashion characteristic of that book on the whole, Foucault spends much of his time separating out his practice and conceptual apparatus from more recognizable methodological presuppositions in play in philosophy, the history of ideas, history of science, or sociology. The irst traditional concept that Foucault rejects is the formal a priori of mathematics and transcendental philosophy: “[T]here ... would be nothing more pleasant, or more inexact, than to conceive of this historical a priori as a formal a priori” (EAK, 128). He continues in the Archaeology, “this a priori does not elude historicity: it does not constitute, above events, and in an unmoving heaven, an atemporal structure: it is deined by the

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group of rules that characterize a discursive practice: but the rules are not imposed from the outside” (EAK, 127).

Following the Archaeology’s characteristic discursive move, then, Foucault’s historical a priori is deined almost exclusively negatively, in terms of what it isn’t:

not a condition of validity for judgments, but a condition of reality for statements. It is not a question of rediscovering what might legitimize an assertion, but of freeing the conditions of emergence of statements, the law of coexistence with their others ... [a]n a priori not of truths that might never be said, or really given to experience; but the a priori of a history that is given since it is that of things actually said. (EAK, 127)

So the historical a priori is far from constituting an interruption or absence at the arché of any discourse (a secret silently said or repressed at the origin); rather, it functions as the positive condition (the operating system, so to speak) of the “archive” – a “complex volume” of “different types of positivity” (EAK, 128): “irst the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (EAK, 129) and that which afterward “differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and speciies them in their own duration” (ibid.).

Following along from Foucault’s own practice of negative deinition, it may help to think about ways that the historical a priori differs from its two closest analogues in French thought of the 1960s: the Marxist discourse of ideology critique and the phenomenological emphasis on philosophical conditions of possibility. First, Foucault wishes to distinguish the historical a priori from the Marxist concept of ideology – understood as the falsely naturalizing and hegemonic “common sense” that serves to ensure the reproduction of dominant ideology by covering over the true kernel of class antagonism. Recall that for Louis Althusser ideology consists of a subject’s imaginary relation to her real conditions of existence, and ideology as such functions as a theoretical a priori that is made concrete in institutions. For the Althusserian Marxism dominant in Foucault’s archaeological period, ideology names that hidden but normalizing force of unacknowledged consensus – “what you think before you think” – which the science of ideology critique would consistently unmask as a limiting brake on new, emergent, or revolutionary thinking. As such, Althusser’s notion of ideology can seem on the surface to be very similar to Foucault’s discourse of the historical a priori.

Elsewhere, however, Foucault outlines three speciic objections to the Marxist notion of ideology critique:

The irst is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else that is supposed to count as truth.... The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order