Foucault and Derrida for dummies

Foucault

Introduction

Themes: continuity, discontinuity, paradox

The establishment of the differences between two branches of historical method: the history of ideas and history proper.

"The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favour of stable structures."

Questioning the document traditionally perceived as a "language of a voice [...] reduced to silence" has led to a shift of approach in both studies; old concerns of the historical field have moved from creating links between disparate events and constructing continuity to identifying and isolating strata as well as forming systems of relations. The history of ideas, on the other hand, has turned its attention from the unity and gradual development of theoretical activity to the cracks in its foundation, the disruptions that allow the free movement of ideological achievements.

The above mentioned interruptions are of varying nature: -epistemological acts and thresholds -displacements and transformations of concepts -microscopic and macroscopic scales

While it is tempting to see the changes in opposition to each other, Foucault warns that this is an illusory impression. The origins of the newly formulated problems lie in history's altered position towards the document. Instead of ascribing interpretative and expressive value to a document, we now use it as a way of organising information within itself and revealing relations. History is now "that which transforms documents into monuments." The repercussions of this are manifold: new series need to be established, with their own laws and constitutions, discontinuity becomes one of the basic elements of historical analysis, the belief in a total history has been replaced with general history ("a total description draws all phenomena around a single centre - a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of a dispersion") and methodological problems.

An interesting factor to retain from this section of the introduction is the influence of the historian on the material. The historian is responsible for providing systems of analysis, together with the methods proper to each and a suitable periodization. It is a result of his/her description. This also brings about a the paradox of dicontinuity: both an investigative instrument and an object of research.

KNOWLEDGE AS POLITICAL POWER

Problems pertaining to STRUCTURALISM, but not only; "it is a long time now since historians uncovered, described and analysed structures, without ever having to wonder whether they were not allowing the LIVING, PULSATING 'history' to slip through their fingers".

Traditional analytical methods presume the human consciousness to be at the origin of historical developments. Foucault explains the epistemological mutation in terms of the decentrings of the sovereignty of consciousness that have been brought about by thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Marx has done so through "the historical analysis of the relations of production, economic determinations and the class struggles", Nietzsche by substituting rationality as the telos of mankind, and Freud has made his contribution by submitting the subject to the "laws of his desire, the forms of his language, the rules of his action, or the games of this mythical or fabulous discourse." By revealing our hopelessness in front of sexuality and the unconscious, Freud is bringing forth the ideas of DYNAMISM and VIVACITY of thought.

=>a living, open history, not following a constant continuing logical thread

The Historical a priori and the Archive

Establishing the positivity of discourse.

-"positivity defines a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical interchanges may be deployed" -"positivity plays the role of what might be called the historical a priori" -"a matter of freeing the conditions of emergence of statements, the law of their coexistence with others, the specific form of their mode of being, the principles according to which they survive, become transofrmed and disappear" -"discourse has not only a meaning of a truth, but a history, and a specific history that does not refer it back to the laws of an alien development"

Foucault definition of the archive as "systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use)".

The archival paradox: "it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is taht which gives to what we say - and to itself, the object of our discourse - its modes of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity and disappearance"

Time as catalyser: "it emerges in fragments, regions, and levels, more fully, no doubt, and with greater sharpness, the greater the time that separates us from it"

"It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make"