Foucault News

1) INTRODUCTION

I am providing a translation of the incipit as reproduced at the end of a pre-publication review of Michel Foucault’s forthcoming book PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. The review was published online by Philosophy Magazine and discusses the ideas expressed therein chiefly in structuralist-demarcationist terms, given that the book focuses on enouncing the demarcations between philosophy, science, and literature.

This orienting perspective is perfectly normal, but it leaves out Foucault’s struggle with “structuralism” at that time (the manuscript was written between July and October 1966). In his interviews from that period Foucault moves rapidly from endorsing the claim that THE ORDER OF THINGS is structuralist to vehemently denying it. These hesitations exhibit a tension that is implicit not only in Foucault’s texts but in their reception, the tension between structuralism and post-structuralism.

We can see a further tension, closely tied to the first, between articulating the demarcations separating the different types…