Word: foucaults
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...Foucault once characterized his work, perhaps too broadly and easily, as a search for the "cultural unconscious." The Archaeology of Knowledge is intended to establish the basis of that search more specifically, to as Foucault says, "define this blank space from which I speak, and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse that I still feel to be so precarious and so unsure." "Archaeology," as Foucault calls it, is a discourse about discourses, how they are patterned, how they change, and what they embody...
...FOUCAULT'S MOST THEORETICAL book to date. The Archaeology of Knowledge could not accomplish its task without the case studies of his earlier works. Madness and Civilization, which appeared in this country in 1965, studies changing concepts of insanity in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and how they relate to changing concepts of knowledge and of the mind. The Order of Things (1971), subtitled "An Archaeology of the Human Sciences," traces a particular pattern of discourse uniting changes in the areas of inquiry which in the early nineteenth century became the new sciences philology, biology, and political economy...
Only reference to these works can flesh out the sharp edges and obvious joints of the theoretical skeleton which Foucault articulates in The Archaeology of Knowledge. From them he derives and illustrates the basis of the methodology contained in the new book while at the same time playing off against them, shifting emphasis and reshuffling concepts...
This reference is all the more important because Foucault introduces a full set of new terms and new meanings for older terms. It is characteristic of his method that he should call it by the name "archaeology," adopting an old term and giving it a new meaning. His writing--archaeology itself--is about how concepts grow and change within the forms of knowledge, and in turn, changes those forms, how certain conditions make mutations possible in the ways men think and speak...
This abundance of neologisms, in a time when they are so frequent and so transient, is bound to draw criticism. But Foucault, in reply, would accuse his critic on this point of placing an illusory trust in language. He understands that men speak in language which is not fully theirs, which is constantly changing as they use it, and which betrays trays their meaning by existing in all sorts of unknown internal and external relations. This is why he focuses on discourse as separate from thought: men say both more and less than they think. The subject, in objectifying himself...