Abstract

The thesis is divided into four Parts, each dealing with specific texts by Foucault, with the goal of drawing out the progressive development and refinement of his reflections on, and practice of, history. His work throughout is placed within the context of contemporary French historiography, the work of the new historians. ;The first Part will deal with early histories, specifically Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic. The focus of the discussion will be on how these works challenge what I will call the dominant 'picture' of history which finds its most vivid expression in Hegel's idea of the 'cunning of reason'. In other words, those works attack the view of history as the progressive realization of reason and knowledge by viewing them from the perspective of that which such histories exclude. ;The main focus of Foucault's critique is any view of the historical process as subject-centered and progressively unfolding. He challenges this by showing, especially in The Order of Things, that the history of knowledge displays less a progressive development than it does a discontinuous series of different epistemes that govern what it makes sense to say in any particular period. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, where he discusses his own archaeological approach to the past with specific reference to contemporary developments in historiography, Foucault insists on reading history in terms of the anonymous discursive formations that structure different periods as opposed to reading the whole course of history in terms of the progressive self-realization of subjectivity. This will be discussed in Part II. ;In the third Part, we will discuss how Foucault moves away from the general view of history altogether and seeks to find its basis not in theory but in practice. In Discipline and Punish, he show how 'things said' in the past and about the past are also indicative of 'thing done' both in the past and in terms of their genealogical link to the present. Providing a genealogical link between the past and the present 'opens up' the present to its past and possible histories by showing how the present is not necessarily linked to its past developments, but is, in fact, contingently related to its present structures. In The History of Sexuality, he tries to show how most progressive, developmental views of history have the ideological function of concealing that contingency and thereby help maintain the hold current structures of power have on the present. ;The fourth and final Part deals with the latter two volumes of The History of Sexuality and in effect show how the reflection on historical practice enables us to respond to our current historical situation by producing a sense of self-wariness of the kind of historical discourse which effectively conceals the openness and possibilities that the present has vis-a-vis both the future and, more specifically, its own past