Word: foucaults
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...this effort, Foucault pushes off from the work of Hegel, who in his dialectic brought history as continuity to its most complete form, the unity of a single Idea of freedom, but who also delineated cultural breaks which accompanied each stage in history. Beyond Hegel, Foucault draws on two streams flowing away from him: Marx and Nietzche. From Marx, seen through the filter of the structuralists, Foucault learns the patterns of contradiction and change. From Nietzche, he adopts a "Dionysian note of interrogation" asking and then looking beyond the answers...
...complicated but often eloquent style of Foucault's prose these traditions run together. His writing is built around a core of highly systematic definition and explanation. But, aware of the difficulty in making his complex concepts understood, he continually recasts statements to shape out an idea from several sides, offers multiple, often spatial, metaphors, and highlights crucial areas by questioning himself and his reader...
This last technique reaches its high point in the most brilliantly written portion of the book, a conclusion written as a dialogue between Foucault the author and Foucault the self-critic. Here Foucault rejects the recurrent attempts to box him as a structuralist and denies any assertion that archaeology is a new "science." But the instinctive question of the partisan of traditional history, "But why do things change?" is not even raised. It would not satisfy such a critic to answer that the complexity of this question lies outside the scope of Foucault's inquiry, or that it belongs...
INCLUDED AS AN APPENDIX is "The Discourses on Language," Foucault's inaugural lecture on assuming his chair at the College de France in 1970. The title is a mistranslation of "L'ordre du discours." Appropriately, the lecture sketches out, in addition to a theory of the way in which societies regulate and suppress discourses, a number of possible projects with which we can expect to see Foucault continue his work. One such project might be an investigation of concepts of sexuality as expressed in linguistic taboos and their changes. Another, at an even more basic level, might investigate how ritual...
These are directions in which the archaeology of knowledge might be pursued further. They, like the works which have preceded The Archaeology of Knowledge, will expand, test, and redefine the usefulness of the whole inquiry. Foucault accepts the possibility that his vocabulary, style, and method may fade away, or that they may become the victims of the proven propensity of social science to make itself its own object. He knows that the full importance of a discourse can only be grasped in contrast to the changes that precede and follow it. What can be said now is that if Foucault...