Summary of Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge

By IRB Media

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#1 The tools of history analysis are partly inherited and partly of their own making: models of economic growth, quantitative analysis of market movements, accounts of demographic expansion and contraction, the study of climate and its long-term changes, and so on.

#2 The history of thought, the history of science, the history of philosophy, and the history of literature have all turned to the study of interruption. They have begun to examine the incidence of ruptures and discontinuities beneath the great continuities of thought.

#3 The history of thought, of knowledge, and of philosophy seems to be moving toward more and more discontinuities, while history itself is moving away from events and toward stable structures. But we must not be fooled by these appearances.

#4 The same problems are being posed in either case, but they have provoked opposite effects on the surface. History has altered its position in relation to the document: it has taken as its primary task not the interpretation of the document, nor the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what its expressive value is, but to work on it from within and to develop it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822510296

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Insights on Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The tools of history analysis are partly inherited and partly of their own making: models of economic growth, quantitative analysis of market movements, accounts of demographic expansion and contraction, the study of climate and its long-term changes, and so on.

#2

The history of thought, the history of science, the history of philosophy, and the history of literature have all turned to the study of interruption. They have begun to examine the incidence of ruptures and discontinuities beneath the great continuities of thought.

#3

The history of thought, of knowledge, and of philosophy seems to be moving toward more and more discontinuities, while history itself is moving away from events and toward stable structures. But we must not be fooled by these appearances.

#4

The same problems are being posed in either case, but they have provoked opposite effects on the surface. History has altered its position in relation to the document: it has taken as its primary task not the interpretation of the document, nor the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what its expressive value is, but to work on it from within and to develop it.

#5

In the past, history attempted to memorize the monuments of the past and turn them into documents. In our time, history has become what transforms documents into monuments.

#6

The history of ideas, thought, and the sciences has been disrupted by the methodically developed proliferation of series. In place of the continuous chronology of reason, which was always traced back to some inaccessible origin, there have appeared scales that are sometimes very brief, distinct from one another, and irreducible to a single law.

#7

The notion of discontinuity is an important aspect of the historical disciplines. It is both an instrument and an object of research. It is the result of the historian’s description, and it is the concept that determines the limits of a process.

#8

The project of a total history is one that seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle material or spiritual of a society, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period, and the law that accounts for their cohesion.

#9

The new history is confronted with several methodological problems, many of which existed long before the emergence of the new history. These include the building up of coherent and homogeneous corpora of documents, the establishment of a principle of choice, the definition of the level of analysis and relevant elements, and the delimitation of groups and sub-groups that articulate the material.

#10

The history of thought has been the first field to be affected by the new epistemological mutation of history. It has been difficult for historians to formulate a general theory of discontinuity, series, and limits, unities, specific orders, and differentiated autonomies and dependences.

#11

The history of thought is the locus of uninterrupted continuities, and it is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him, and the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring