Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Western Culture

Toward a New Science of History

Pamela Major-Poetzl

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807897195, 9780807815175
• eBook ISBN: 9781469610184
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The author argues that Foucault's archaeology is an attempt to separate historical and philosophical analysis from the evolutionary model of nineteenth-century biology and to establish a new form of social thought based on principles similar to field theory in twentieth-century physics. She examines Foucault's view of the relationship between power and knowledge and goes on to discuss the new concepts of space, time, subject, and causality expressed in relativity theory, quantum mechanics, Saussurean linguistics, and Foucault's literary essays."

Originally published in 1983.

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NOTES

Chapter 1

1. Foucault, the son of a physician, was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926. He attended the École normale supérieure, received the Licence de Philosophie (1948) and the Licence de Psychologie (1950) from the Sorbonne and the Diplôme de Psycho-Pathologie (1952) from the University of Paris. He was a lecturer at the University of Uppsala for four years and during 1959-60 was director of the Institut Français in Hamburg. During the 1960s he was director of the Institut de Philosophie at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and then professor of philosophy at the University of Vincennes. Since 1970 he has held the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious Collège de France. He is also an editor of the literary journal Critique, one of the directors of the leftist paper Libération, and a founder of Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons.

2. Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969X translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith as The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 21-23; hereafter cited in the English translation.

3. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 47, 32, 37.

4. Ibid., pp. 93, 95.

5. Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Pion, 1961; abridged ed., 1964), translated by Richard Howard from the 1964 abridged edition as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965); Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books,1973); Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), translated by Alan Sheridan as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Histoire de la sexualité, l: La volunté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), translated by Robert Hurley as The History of Sexuality,Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978). The English translations will be referred to throughout this book.

6. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970).

7. Raymond Bellour (interviewer), “Deuxième entretien avec Michel Foucault” (1967), p. 204.

8. See Suzanne Gillet-Stern, “French Philosophy over the Last Decade,” p. 9.

9. Émile Bréhier, Contemporary Philosophy-since 1830. More recent studies of French philosophy include: Colin Smith, Contemporary French Philosophy, Joseph Chiari, Twentieth-Century French Thought’, and Jean-Luc Chalumeau, La pensée en France de Sartre à Foucault. In The Obstructed Path H. Stuart Hughes views the 1930s, the decade with which Bréhier con-eluded his work, as the beginning of a period of desperation in French social thought. For Hughes the 1930s marked the end of the French classical tradition rooted in Cartesian rationalism and the beginning of a belated attempt to come to terms with the decline of French power and prestige. Hughes thinks that French intellectuals were handicapped by the isolation of France before and during World War II. Moreover, the dominance of Bergsonian and Durkheimian ideas made it difficult for postwar French theorists to assimilate the more radical critiques of rationalism developed by Freud and Max Weber. This provincial cultural environment during Foucault’s youth may have motivated, in part, Foucault’s own attack on Cartesian rationalism and his critique of social systems. Furthermore, like Foucault himself, Hughes sees a definitive change taking place in the mid-1950s.

10. Bréhier, Contemporary Philosophy, p. 243.

11. Gaston Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, p. 48, as quoted in Bréhier, Contemporary Philosophy, p. 248.

12. Bréhier, Contemporary Philosophy, p. 249.

13. Eugène Dupréel, Esquisse d’une philosophie des valeurs, p. 239, as quoted in Bréhier, Contemporary Philosophy, p. 250.

14. Bréhier, Contemporary Philosophy, p. 253.

15. Ibid., p. 255. Although he referred briefly to Russell, Bréhier neglected analytic philosophy, which was slow to penetrate French thought and is consequently still being absorbed today. Foucault is clearly indebted to Russell and Wittgenstein in the sense that his own theories owe much to their stress on analysis, language, relational logic, description, criticism of metaphysics, and modern science.

16. See John Heckman, “Hyppolite and the Hegel Revival in France,” pp. 128-45, which discusses French philosophical developments from the 1930s to the 1970s and traces the role of Hyppolite and his influence on a whole generation of philosophers that includes Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrick. Also see Mark Poster, “The Hegel Renaissance,” pp. 109-27, as well as that author’s Existential Marxism in Postwar France, especially pp. 3-35.

17. Gillet-Stern, “French Philosophy,” p. 3.

18. Ibid., p. 5. Among the works on Husserl published in the 1960s was a translation of Husserl’s L’origine de la géométrie by the young philosopher Jacques Derrida.

19. The “groupe d’épistémologie” publishes the Cahiers pour l’analyse, a periodical Gillet-Stern describes as “in the Bachelardian line.” This group posed a number of theoretical questions to Foucault, which he answered in the important article “Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie,” pp. 9-40.

20. Gillet-Stern, “French Philosophy,” p. 6.

21. See Bernard Pingaud’s introduction to “Sartre aujourd’hui,” which begins as follows: “1945, i960: pour mesurer le chemin parcouru entre ces deux dates, il suffit d’ouvrir un journal ou une revue et de lire quelques critiques de livres. Non seulement on ne cite plus les mêmes noms, on n’invoque plus les mêmes références, mais on ne prononce plus les mêmes mots. Le langage de la réflexion a changé. . . . On ne parle plus de conscience’ ou de ‘sujet’, mais...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• One: A New Science between Philosophy and History
• Two: Foucault on Knowledge, Power, and Politics
• Three: A New Paradigm for Scientific and Social Thought
• Four: From a Critique o f Mental Illness to an Archaeology of Medical Perception
• Five: Foucault’s Archaeology of the Human Sciences
• Epilogue: Beyond Archaeology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index