Foucault News

At root, David Webb’s Foucault’s Archaeology: Science and Transformation is an attempt to firm up ‘commonplace’ (Dews 1995, 39) claims about Michel Foucault’s association with the history of science. Webb has set out to ensure Foucault’s notion of archaeology in The Archaeology of Knowledge (AoK) is put in its proper intellectual context. He contends that Foucault should be unambiguously placed alongside thinkers in the French tradition of the history of science (or historical epistemology) such as the pioneering figure of Gaston Bachelard and the philosophers of science and mathematics, Jean Cavaillès and Michel Serres. Through a close reading, Webb propounds that AoK is a specific response to a problematic present in Bachelard, Cavaillès and Serres, and acknowledged by Foucault at the end of AoK‘s precursor The Order of Things (1966): how does one move beyond ‘the impasse in which thinking had been caught in modernity … the disappearance of man’ (7–11). How should man’s finitude affect critical inquiry?

In Foucault’s Archaeology, Webb gets right to it. Structurally, the book starts with a background section, spelling out AoK‘s link to Bachelard, Cavaillès and Serres, before Webb comments on AoK chapter by chapter. He then provides a concise closing remarks section. Foucault’s Archaeology is mainly exposition, so familiarity with AoK is somewhat expected, as well as an acquaintance with Heidegger, who pops up at regular intervals in the book. Indeed, more so than Foucault’s three compatriots, it is arguably Heidegger who is writ largest throughout Foucault’s Archaeology. There are several points of consideration of the relationship of Heidegger’s phenomenology to Foucault’s discursive account of historical experience (9 and 10, 34–37, 114–116). Webb notes the overlaps (and differences) between Heidegger’s temporal but primary ontology and Foucault’s account of the temporal but fundamentally constitutive discursive rendering up of the intelligible. Webb’s phraseology is also quite involved in Foucault’s Archaeology. It makes no concession to idioms other than those of Foucault, Bachelard, Cavaillès, Serres or Heidegger.