Abstract

In order to confirm the extent to which all discourse is locked in epistemic tropes, this study explores the degree to which Michel Foucault's arguments depend on his use of metaphor and evolve from complex, novel conceptual interactions. His process of constructing the unconscious, the subject, the "Unthought," conceptual boundaries and borders are spatial metaphors which are composed of complex interactive metaphors as are the architectural configurations of the scaffold, panopticon, and library. His later methodology of metaphoric construction is often not unlike the figures he constructs in his early phenomenological work. ;The extent to which the gaze and the body are moral, epistemic, and political figures and the ways they are constructed so as to depart from the historical processes of subject formation in order to impose a novel reading of history are explored. Because the production of metaphor helps to constitute aspects of "reality" because we impose them on "reality," how Foucault's production of metaphor reinterprets history and the discourse which constitutes it is relevant to critical studies and is this study's focus. ;Paul Ricoeur's theory of metaphor has informed my exploration of how Foucault's historical reinterpretation has involved through the creation of dispersive and transgressive metaphors which open up new dimensions of meaning. Foucault's cathectic use of the gaze and of the body connects visibility and invisibility to configurations of power and knowledge through transgressive, figurative schema fracturing the idea of conceptual certainty and a teleology progressing toward the truth