foucault archaeology of knowledge summary pdf

At every turn, it denounces any possible confusion.

The latter three disciplines are part of what came to be called in French les sciences humaines, or “the human sciences.”. Of humankind?

As if, in that field where we had become used to seeking origins, to pushing back further and further the line of antecedents, to reconstituting traditions, to following evolutive curves, to projecting teleologies, and to having constant recourse to metaphors of life, we felt a particular repugnance to conceiving of difference, to describing separations and dispersions, to dissociating the reassuring form of the identical. What series of series may be established? Routledge, 1972. This epistemological mutation of history is not yet complete. One is led therefore to anthropologise Marx, to make of him a historian of totalities, and to rediscover in him the message of humanism; one is led therefore to interpret Nietzsche in the terms of transcendental philosophy, and to reduce his genealogy to the level of a search for origins; lastly, one is led to leave to one side, as if it had never arisen, that whole field of methodological problems that the new history is now presenting.- For, if it is asserted that the question of discontinuities, systems and transformations, series and thresholds, arises in all the historical disciplines (and in those concerned with ideas or the sciences no less than those concerned with economics and society), how could one oppose with any semblance of legitimacy “development” and “system”, movement and circular regulations, or, as it is sometimes put crudely and unthinkingly, “history” and “structure”? What is their essence? The document is not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory; history is one way in which a society recognises and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked. Michel Foucault , History of Madness , translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London/New York: Routledge, 2006)

Foucault The Order of Things An archaeology of the human sciences London and New York. Of attributions of causality? Generally speaking, Madness and Civilisation accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I called an “experiment”, thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history; in Naissance de la clinique, the frequent recourse to structural analysis threatened to bypass the specificity of the problem presented, and the level proper to archaeology; lastly, in The Order of Things, the absence of methodological signposting may have given the impression that my analyses were being conducted in terms of cultural totality.