Abstract

This dissertation gives a comprehensive presentation of Michel Foucault's archaeological thought. The study focuses on Foucault's articulation of archaeology as a method for historical thinking and traces the method's refinement according to its chronological order of development. The introductory chapter places Foucault's critique of humanism within its French context and identifies major areas of common concern between Foucault's work and contemporary Anglo-American thought. Chapter 2, "From Man Psychology to the Experience of Thought," is an account of Foucault's earliest writings and of that psychological interrogation of man which harbored his first intellectual production. These writings also exhibit the collapse of his original anthropological project and the emergence of an experience of thinking that is specifically archaeological. ;Chapter 3, "Cathartic Thinking," examines his work in the important years from 1966 to 1968. In this period archaeology discloses itself as essentially cathartic, a purgation not only of an anthropological project that was personally Foucault's but also of the fundamental assumptions upon which alternative modes of contemporary reflection are founded . Chapter 4, "Dissonant Thinking," considers the work of 1969 to 1971 and the first major formulation of archaeology as method . Archaeology defines itself as a thinking which aims at the emancipation of dissonance, at the exposure of thought to reality as a multiplicity of events which need new, non-dialectical orderings. In this chapter there is consideration of archaeological method's own foundations: the debt it owes to specific thinkers, to an epistemological mutation in contemporary historical analysis, to Foucault's own earlier studies. Chapter 5, "Dissident Thinking," takes stock of those writings which run from 1972 to 1979, the time during which archaeology defined itself as political thinking. Through its analysis of the foundations for out contemporary politics, it dissents from the forms of power's distribution and practice in the modern world and from the types of understanding that hide the grounds for these forms. ;Departing from the developmental viewpoint, the concluding chapter takes a synoptic view on Foucault's achievement. The chapter presents a schema of the two complementary dimensions which comprise archaeological method and which are directed to an analysis of the historical reality constituted by "practices," that is, networks of specific relations within and among formations of knowledge and exercises of power. Discursive archaeology analyzes the rationality of the discourses within which programs for historical action become reasonable and with which they are allied. Genealogical archaeology discloses the strategic rationality of a discourse's actual operation in the historical field of heterogeneous practices and discourses. Finally, there is a brief discussion of the problematic which Foucault's current archaeological work is addressing: government