Robert S. Leib, Of other histories: philosophical archaeology, historiology, and paradigmatology, Parrhesia 37 · 2023 · 91-120
Open access
This article contributes to the discussion of philosophical archaeology in Foucault’s early works by reexamining its influences and recent developments using two concepts that appear in The Order of Things —a history of the Same and a history of the Other. Foucault viewed his work in The Order of Things as a departure from his earlier archival research into madness because madness is the object for a history of the Other, while order is the object for a history of the Same. A history of the Other, he says, is: “that which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded (so as to exorcize the interior danger) but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness).” Eventually, Foucault would pursue this in his “Lives of Infamous Men” essay and Parallel Lives project. A history of the Same, by contrast, is “that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities.” It is the history of a culture that does the Othering, deployed as a means of preserving that culture against the encroachment of “foreign” influences. I will use this distinction throughout the paper to figure various archaeological projects in relation to one another. I will reexamine philosophical archaeology through these two categories and the permutations that result when they are brought to bear on one another.
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