M G Hamner, The Order of Things: The difference of the Analysis of Wealth, affecognitive ~ religion, film, affect, academia blog, 10 July 2025
In chapter six of The Order of Things/Les mots et les choses, Michel Foucault marks, twice, a difference between the analysis of wealth and both general grammar and natural history (the three intellectual pursuits that shift in the 19th century, with the rise of the human sciences, to political economy, linguistics, and biology). The first marking of difference notes that the analysis of wealth is attached to “a practice and to institutions” (English text 168). The second differentiation seems rather to emphasize the different–that is, slower–temporality involved in the “emergence of a domain of ‘wealth’ than that involved in the emergence of natural history and general grammar, a slowness that yields “a much higher degree of historic viscosity” (English text 180).
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