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.