الكلمات والأشياء

by Michel Foucault, ميشيل فوكو

يشكل كتاب فوكو هذا (الكلمات والأشياء) في تحولات الفكر الغربي الراهنة مرجعاً أساسياً لفلسفة الحداثة وعقلنة قطائعها التاريخية الرئيسية، وصولاً إلى ما يتجاوزها هي بالذات نحو ما يسمى اليوم بالحداثة البعدية، أو بما بعد الحداثة.
إن ترجمة هذا الكتاب إلى العربية في حدّ ذاته يمدُّ الثقافة العربية بمفاتيح لكشف أسرار العقل الغربي. ودراسة العقل لوسائله المعرفية، وتقييمها، فضلاً عن كونها امتياز الحضارة الأعلى وشاهدها الأمثل على حيويتها وقدرتها على الاحتفاظ بقدرات النهوض وتجديدها، فإنها في الوقت ذاته تجعل من الحداثة ليس مجرد حالة تاريخية طارئة، بقدر ما هي كينونة مستمرة، ومفاجئة لوعودها بالذات.

ويعتبر هذا الكتاب ليس أهم ما كتب ميشيل فوكو وعبر عن فلسفته فحسب، ولكنه كذلك أفضل شاهد على قدرة العقل في إعادة اكتشاف أنظمته المعرفية ومراجعتها لأول مرة في تاريخ الفلسفة الحديثة، خارج الأطر الايديولوجية التي اعتادت أن تقنعها وتستخدمها.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Theory, Science, Sociology, France

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archaeology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner Daniel Defert founded the AIDES charity in his memory.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn't expected this book to be nearly as interesting as it turned out to be. Unfortunately, I've only just finished it and I suspect I'm going to need to think about it for a while yet before I really understand some of the arguments here - but this is a stunningly interesting book. I've a feeling that if you looked up 'erudite' in the dictionary ...

This book was written on the basis of a joke by Borges - where in a short story Borges gives a definition of animals from a supposed Chinese encyclopaedia. The definition divides animals into a dozen or so categories: animals belonging to the Emperor, animals that look like ants when seen from a distance being but two of my favourite 'non-mutually exclusive' categories. But while Foucault was laughing at this joke he realised that how we categorise the world says remarkable things about us.

The other work of art described in this book, also right at the start, is Velasquez's Las Meninas - I'll wait while you search for this on google images if you like. His interpretation of this art work is stunning, but it takes most of the book to really understand his point in including it.

This is a book that tracks three general areas of human enquiry - natural history on its path to biology, value and exchange on their way to economics and general grammar on its way to linguistics. We start with each in the Renaissance and make our way to the present. The main turning points come about a century apart - from Renaissance to Classical, from Classical to Romantic and from Romantic to Modern.

His point is that the revolutions that each of these subjects experienced were remarkably consistent over all three - even though these subject seek to explain quite different subject-matters, the way people have gone about structuring these subjects displays an order that says fascinating things about the underlying categories we use to structure our knowledge in particular epochs. In the Renaissance, for example, one of the underlying ideas structuring the way we approached the world was a rather literal interpretation of the Bible. In relation to animals that means two stories from the Bible are of particular interest - Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel. Why Babel? Well, prior to Babel we all spoke the original language God gave us, presumably somewhat similar to Hebrew, and that was the language used by Adam to name the animals. In this sense animals were 'marked' by this original categorisation and so if we could only re-create these marks - these essentially linguistic features - we would know something worth knowing of the mind of God, of the mind of the creator and therefore something very important about how to order the animal kingdom.

With the Classical period there was a fundamental shift away from seeking this kind of representational identity between words and animals - now the task of natural history was pretty much to create a huge grid and for that grid to be filled with animals according to some or other organising principle. For example, you might classify plants by the number of petals their flowers have or the shapes of their leaves. You wouldn't classify them according to how bitter they taste - taste isn't a highly quantifiable sense - or the colour of the plants - colours change - so you end up with a very limited number of criteria that you can classify plants (a point that has Foucault commenting on how we classified as if the only sense we had was colour-blind sight) - and using these you end up with a huge table with rows and columns - and if you have done your job properly, one day you might even be able to mathematically determine which plants are 'missing' from this great grid of life because you will have the mathematical underpinning of the table of life before you.

The shift to the Romantic period is generally assumed to be an understanding, however naive, of evolution. One of my favourite little things to say is that Darwin's grandfather had already understood evolution was a fact, all Darwin did was show how it worked. Now, while this is more or less true, there was a much more interesting revolution going on in Natural History - one that would finally transform it into Biology. And that is to move away from categorising animals and plants as 'things', as collections of features, and to finally see them as living creatures in a dynamic relationship with their environment (relationships always being more interesting than things) - that is, the features they have are only interesting on the basis of what they have to say about the objective life tasks that the animal confronts. These reduce down to seven - I would need to look this up, but basically: digestion, reproduction, locomotion (bugger, not even half, how hopeless is that?but you get the idea). Now, the interesting thing here is that these processes are all essential to life, but they are abstract - you don't see digestion or reproduction directly - two dogs shagging is not reproduction - and so we have moved one level up from the kind of 'concrete' reality the previous organising systems employed, counting stuff. Also, how animals achieve these general and essential processes differs from animal and species to species, even if the end result is 'abstractly' the same. The insect that breathes through its skin, the fish that breathes through its gills, the human that breathes with its lungs, all breathe. We now have biology because we now have life - there was a real sense in which all of the plants and animals previously could have been dead and 'God's plan' could still have been manifest to us - now that life is central to our way of building our system to classify life, that is no longer the case.

What is fascinating here is that Darwin is not the fulcrum on which the revolution turns, but rather this move to the new science is about fifty years prior to Darwin and not even on the basis of evolution. I think there is much to this - it is a fascinating idea even if it doesn't prove to be right.

The book presents equally interesting histories of economics and linguistics - the point being to show that the fundamental organising schemes in each of these eras and each of these subjects is much the same. With economics, for example, the process moves from a fascination with exchange as the organising principle and creator of value, as defined as simple barter and therefore demand and supply as being the origin of value, through to Smith's understanding that value is essentially a quantification of the labour contained in goods through to more abstract notions of production. Yet again the process is from seemingly concrete exchanges to an abstract understanding of the underlying organising principle.

And then things get really interesting. There is a bit where he talks about modern understandings that I pretty much didn't understand - he mentions Nietzsche a lot here, and just about every time he mentioned Nietzsche I stopped being able to follow him. But what he does say that I finally could follow again was that the reason he has picked biology, economics and linguistics is because these are quintessentially the most basic of the Human Sciences. If you talk about psychology, sociology or any of the human sciences, basically you are talking about either humanity as an animal, humanity as an economically engaged member of society or humanity as linguistically aware. Draw those three circles on your Venn Diagram and the overlapping sections allow you to more or less define all of the other human sciences.

This makes a very interesting response to Marx - where Marx sees economics as the basis for human progress and as the underpinning of revolutions in thought, Foucault is saying that our understanding of these big three: economics, linguistics and biology, are the key defining and interrelated modes of progress in our understanding of the world. The move towards more abstract organising criteria with the dawn of Romanticism in all three of these subjects, he links, more or less, to Kant's critical philosophy, or Kant's transcendental philosophy, rather.

I can't really review this book without saying something more about Nietzsche - Foucault sees the death of God, and therefore the simultaneous (or thereabouts) death of man (the myth of the last man and of the superman being the same as the death of man), and of the myth of the eternal return of the same as being the key 'projects' facing modern humanity. The removal of all absolute criteria for organising the world presents us with a remarkable task - how do we go about grounding our science, our world view, without such an absolute perspective? Foucault's view is that our human sciences will move more towards psychoanalysis, ethnography and linguistics - how people understand their personal identity, how they understand their cultural identity and how they use language to make these transparent to themselves therefore are the central projects of human sciences.

He ends by discussing literature - and how literature has moved so far from the Renaissance view of language as being about attempting to parallel the notion of language from the start of John's gospel - God as the word that issues forth and creates the universe. Now, literature seeks to press language to its limits and to create emotional responses we are incapable of achieving elsewhere. A kind of return in the Nietzscean sense.

Like I said, a fascinating book, and one I will need to spend more time thinking about.

[د.سيد (نصر برشومي) · Rating 4 out of 5]

تنقيب في جيولوجيا التفكير الأوروبي لتحديد محطات الانتقال المنتجة لسياقات النهضة والكلاسيكية والحداثة وما بعدها. يرسم فوكوه ثلاث دوائر محورية متداخلة تشغل مركز خريطة الثقافة هي البيولوجيا والاقتصاد واللغة.
إن التصنيف للكائنات متصل بَمفهوم القيمة الناتجة عن معادل العمل بأدواته وغاياته والأيديولوجيا المحيطة به. والخطاب أو الموقف اللغوي مشارك في هذه الفاعلية.
إن ركام ستة قرون يعقد عمليات التنقيب برغم النزعة النقدية لفوكوه، واختيار نقطة بعينها ينتقل السياق عندها من حالة لأخرى أمر غير مسلم به.
نحتاج في الثقافة العربية لقراءات جيولوجية تحاور ما قام به عبد الحميد إبراهيم في مشروعه الفكري عن الوسطية أو منجز حسن حنفي الجدلي لثنائية التراث والتجديد.
الأقرب إلى رؤية فوكوه ومنهجيته عندنا هو نص محمد عابد الجابري تكوين العقل العربي.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have now devoted nearly three months to doing close readings of nearly every book by Michel Foucault. I can die happy :) Except, I'm more confused! I know less now than I did before. And that's precisely the point. We are still living with Philosophical ideas from the Classical Period (i.e. humanism, Neo-Classical Liberalism, Capitalism, etc.). Yet Foucault shows, time and time again, that the institutions established during the Classical Period have taken on a life of their own, often times violently. Yet we are all still trapped within the inertia of History.
A professor of mine explained everything I ever needed to know about Post-Modern Subjectivity. He said, "Have you ever watched Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines?" "No," I said. He replied disgruntled, "Where's your education? Ok, so contemporary society is like the end of that movie. John Conner goes to the Central Command center to avoid the Judgment Day, where the machines overthrow the humans. And he finds out that there is no central command. The machines are ruling themselves, there is no center, and nothing the hero can do will stop the inevitable destruction on Judgment Day. No human actor can stop the inevitable downfall of the human race. The machines represent the subjectivity of the coming revolution, the people are humanists, and Judgment Day means we are all basically fucked."

He's right. Global Warming, Boom and Bust Cycles of Capitalism, the growing alienation of disaffected youth populations, all point to a coming crisis, collapse, or total revolution. But this does not mean that we're going to be better off!

In my opinion, Birth of the Clinic, History of Sexuality vol. 2, and History of Madness are my favorite books by Foucault. As they say in Sideways... Quaffable, but far from transcendent. My favorite part of this book is the bit on Ricardo, which turns into a digression on Marx and Nietzsche, and the charts that are sprinkled throughout the text.

[Khawla Al jafari · Rating 5 out of 5]

لنتفق أنّ قراءة فوكو مرهقة لأنّهُ يستقرئ المعرفة بطريقة أفقية ؛ فخطابه من أوله لآخره تاريخي وفي الآن ذاته يحفر بعمق العمق .
حاولت فهم منهجه وآلية تفكيره لكنني لم أصل حتّى الآن لتصوّر واضح وعلمي ومتكامل لكن سأحاول إيجاز ما خلصت به من هذا الكتاب على هيئة نقاط .

- الأشياء تتغيّر ليس وفقًا لحاجات البشر وإنَّما لخدمة سلطة ما .

-فوكو أراد الشّك في كلّ شيء.

- لماذا يصرّ فوكو على إدخال الأدب في كتابته ؟ أو لماذا يبدأ من منطلق أدبي ؟ لأنّ المعرفة دون الأدب حتمًا منقوصة .

-الإصرار على لغة الاستعارة والمجاز والفن التشكيلي لأن الفنانين أنصاف فلاسفة لكنّهم أكثر بكثير من الفلاسفة ، أو كما قال نيتشه : كل الحقيقة استعارات.

- مشكلة فوكو ليست ميتافيزيقية هو يرى قابلية الفكرة بالعصر وحيثيات المجتمع .

-المعرفة تثبُتُ بالأسماء والصّفات ، وسيل الأفعال يسحق الأنا.

-الكتاب مهم جدًا وفي كثير من فصوله ستجدهُ ماتعًا :)

[Daniel Bastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Between language and the theory of nature there exists therefore a relation that is of a critical type; to know nature is, in fact, to build upon the basis of language a true language, one that will reveal the conditions in which all language is possible and the limits within which it can have a domain of validity." (p. 161)

There's no need to beat around the bush: The Order of Things is, bar none, the densest read on my shelf to date. Philosophy tyros steer clear; an entry-level text this is not. To say that this was as difficult to read as it was to understand would be a heavy understatement. Snippets patterned after the one above would frequently invite two- and three-peat readings to absorb before moving on to the next, equally demanding line of Foucaultian esoterica.

Michel Foucault, writing in the French philosophy tradition, is touted as a librarian of ideas, and his works demonstrate such canonical breadth that they are surely not intended to be consumed in isolation. Indeed, you had better have a working understanding of the systems of knowledge throughout Western history if you stand any chance of deconstructing this significant opus.

Foucault's acumen and seemingly bottomless knack for depth are on full display in this, his most ambitious and the one that propelled him to stardom, work. However, even with a solid grasp of philosophy and the pivotal shifts in Western thought, you must then also place these insights within the tramlines of the baroque prose Foucault has prepared. 'Similitudes,' 'resemblances,' 'representation,' 'significations,' 'character,' 'the analytic of finitude,' 'empirico-transcendental': familiarity with this repetition of terminology will be critical if one is to grok the landscape Foucault has delicately painted.

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) is nothing less than a genealogy of ideas, an intellectual ancestry of the Western mind. Along the way, Foucault somehow manages to retrace the entire development of science, restricting his analysis to a specific slice of spacetime: European culture since the 16th century. It is a work so daunting in scope, and so winged in its execution, that it seems to relish in keeping the mind in a perpetual state of entanglement, sputtering, caroming as you eagerly await for a resting point to collect your wits and proceed further into the well. He blinds you with brilliance, and insists that you see. Foucault ricochets between the intellectual giants of the Western world in rapid-fire fashion, traipsing from Spinoza to Descartes to Kant to Marx, Freud, and Adam Smith to Nietzsche, seemingly all while assuming on the part of the reader a dissertation-level of intimacy with each. Come prepared.

As I understand it—and I am most emphatically not claiming that I do—Foucault is demonstrating that there do exist traceable patterns in the great developments of Western thought in terms of limits, possibilities, and approaches to new and old knowledge, but also discontinuities and breaks from old ways of thinking. How "clean" these breaks were is of course a matter of debate. He focuses in on three domains—linguistics and philology (language), biology (life), and economics (labor)—emphasizing how the intellectual boundaries present in each historical era shaped how man thought about these venues and how we approached and reflected on new developments and discoveries that pervaded our consciousness. Whether we were categorizing or taxonomizing, articulating or deconstructing, we operated in the epistemes confined to our period of history, but also turned toward new modes of discourse as ideas emerged out of the Western world's interminable, civilizational march.

There is also the niggling question of "man" and how and where s/he figures into the whole grandiose state of affairs. Foucault seems to be arguing that man, like everything else, is a historical construct, and its relation to the order of nature pivots according to developments in each area of inquiry, including but not limited to, the human sciences. That is, man's interpretation of 'man' is a product of the historical development of the spaces that have most dominated the human intellect, viz the human sciences of (proto-)biology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, the social sciences of economics and labor, and, most intricately, the all-enveloping force of language, which is coextensive with every sphere with which we make contact. Certainly, man's shifting coordinates within the grid of knowledge and human inquiry is of special emphasis here in Foucault's sweeping manifesto.

In the closing sections, Foucault hints toward a new episteme, something that is ill-defined, turbid, hazy, but which carries all the signs of a break from what came before. He doesn't specify with any precision what this branching episteme consists of, or which domain(s) has largely catalyzed its brachiation, but he seems to think it is imminent as a reflection of the mid-20th century region Foucault occupied.

Closing Thoughts

A work like this is one which eludes classification, much like how the centerpiece of the book itself—man—resists arrangement within its relation to human knowledge. The Order of Things is simply, and not so simply, sui generis, transcending the common boundaries of empirical disciplines and even philosophy. Foucault's writing is ornate, painstakingly precise in places yet frustratingly ambiguous in others (so much so that, like me, you might desire the opportunity to stop every now and again and ask questions). I wish I could say that I grasped the book in its overarching messages as well as its more subtle analyses, but this will require subsequent readings, likely several more. If you've previously been introduced to Foucault or his French antecedents, you may be in a better position to follow along. But if you're like me, this will be a humbling read, an intellectual tour de force that incessantly reminds you how much more there is yet to learn.

For a more informed and capable post-book analysis, I recommend this page for a good starting point.

"History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that does not yet exist." (p. 372)

Note: This review is republished from my official website.

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last time I read this (back in 2016) I wrote: "It is quite possible that there was a lot more to this book than I got out of it, and that Foucault's thinking might have been extremely exciting if only I could have decoded it."

Yep. Turns out I was just too dumb to understand it first time around. That's OK. Reading group helped and I now know that sometimes things take longer for me to understand them. I'd still argue with some parts of this, but even the "man" bits which are problematic are useful (maybe sometimes more useful if read non-inclusively).

Glad I stuck around in academic spaces long enough to learn something, albeit slowly :D

[Xander · Rating 4 out of 5]

After publishing Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1963) in which Michel Foucault dug into the historical layers to find out how each historical era is guided by its own substratum. In The Order of Things (1966) Foucault does the exact same thing, covering the exact same historical time-frame (roughly 1500-1900 A.D.), but now in a more complete and systematic fashion.

The gist is the same: the period from the late Middle Ages up to the Renaissance had its own grid that it laid over the world and which determined its knowledge, ethics, social structure, etc. This grid was broken up around 1600 when a new grid developed which made old ways of looking at and being in the world break up and opened up a formation of a new substratum on which to build a superstructure of knowledge, ethics, social institutions, etc. This period ended around the end of the eighteenth century, when a new grid was formed and the whole process begun again. We are currently still in this latter historical period, although we can already see, according to Foucault, the first cracks developing, hinting at the breakdown of our current time.

This is, basically, the underlying theme of The Order of Things. It is important to keep this in underlying theme in mind when reading this book, since Foucault never explicitly works this out. What he does is explain first what the episteme of a historical era was, and then proceed to flesh the implications of this particular episteme for (mostly) matters of knowledge were. He does this three times, for the three historical phases mentioned above.

It is important to stress that Foucault is not attempting to offer a historical sketch of how thought developed over time – he explicitly rejects the approach of historians of science. What he does is analyze the manifestations (as scientific theory) of the underlying episteme within a defined historical period. In doing so, he is able to sketch how an a priori structure leads to human thought, behavior and feeling that is contained within that historical period.

How one episteme follows upon another – in other words: how history proceeds – if causality and chronology are both rejected, is unclear to me. Or rather, after finishing the book it is rather unclear to me what the mechanism is that ends one episteme and builds another. Foucault’s analyses of particular sciences and theories of knowledge leave this (important) question unanswered, at least as far as I can tell – please correct me if I’m wrong.

Without going into all the intricate detail of each historical period (at the end of this review I’ll explain why), this is the general overview of the book.

In the Renaissance, the episteme was founded on resemblance. The world was perceived specifically in four forms of resemblance: convenience, emulation, analogy, and sympathy/antipathy. Knowledge consisted of reading the world as a text: the scientist would unearth and decipher all the signs that he read in the world. Signs were interpreted in terms of resemblance. In this epistemological framework, knowledge is never knowledge of a thing, but knowledge of the relationship of a thing to all other things. In short: the worlds was perceived in its totality, knowledge being empty and infinite. Foucault calls this mode of perceiving the world Commentary, in the sense that knowledge consists in (endless) commentary on things. A scientific book would consist of a huge collection of all the available descriptions of a thing by others. In a sense, written text was the foundation of the (known) world.

This episteme broke down around 1600 and was replaced by a new one. The episteme of the Classic Era was founded on representation. Descartes immediately comes to mind as the archetype of this new worldview: he divided the world up into matter and mind. The world was nothing but matter in motion, to be grasped mathematically and mechanically. The question now became how this knowledge of the world is possible: all the elements of our scientific theories originate in ideas, which themselves originate in impressions of external stimuli on our mind.

For the Classical Era knowledge was knowledge of our ideas and their relations. In short: the ordering of our mind of all the worldly things. The grid that was laid over the world was one of order: general grammar ordered our ideas as (spoken) words in propositions – discourse; natural history ordered all worldly things in (hierarchies of) classes based on structure and character – taxonomy; and the analysis of wealth ordered all money in terms of distribution through exchange, which originated in the endless productivity of nature (cultivated land). Underlying these three domains of knowledge were key concepts such as representation, identity and differentiation, and order.

In natural history, all natural objects (from minerals to human beings) were seen as finite manifestations of an infinite natural order. What we see and what we subsequently speak about are our own artificially created tables of classes of things. In the science of wealth, all wealth was seen as money, which signified value that itself derived from (endless) exchange of naturally produced goods. This episteme is able to relate the physiocrats (who viewed land as the summum bonum of wealth) to Adam Smith (who viewed division of labor and free trade as the summum bonum of wealth). Lastly, general grammar was the overarching theory that explained how words designated and articulated things, how words are crucial in the ontological transformation of things into ideas (through the verb), and how words are derived from prior words and gain meaning. In sum, the Classical Era was preoccupied with finding order in the world and signifying this order through discourse.

This episteme broke down around the end of the eighteenth century and was replaced by the episteme of Modernity. Representation was substituted by Man himself. To understand this, the concept of organisztion is crucial. During Modernity natural history was replaced by the science of living beings – biology; the science of wealth was replaced by the science of production through labor – economics; and general grammar (discourse) was broken up into the science of language (philology), the study of the language of thought (symbolic logic) and language as language (literature). Setting aside the last (literature), all of these new sciences had in common that they were firmly rooted in organization. A living being is an organized totality of organs; the capitalist mode of production is an organized structure of capital, labour, means of production, etc.; and language is an intricate system of words, inflections, etc. organized by grammatical rules peculiar to that language.


Biology, economics and philology have in common that they are positive sciences, in the sense that they empirically study objects in the world. But, unlike the Classical Era which ordered everything according to visible qualities of things, the Modern Era studies visible objectivities of things according to deeper, invisible principles. Life, production, and grammatical rules are transcendental origins on which all the positivist theories are based.

Another thing these three sciences have in common is their historicity. They are founded in temporality: whether it is the accumulation of capital, the growth and decay of living beings or the change and relativity of languages, we are dealing with historical developments.

A third commonality between biology, economics and philology is that they have man as their object of knowledge. We study man as a living being, as a productive and consuming being, and as a speaking being. But here is a problem that forms the pivot of Foucault’s whole project: not only do these positivistic sciences have man as an object of knowledge, man himself is equally the subject of this knowledge. That is, it is man who studies man, and in so doing forms an intrinsic element of this knowledge. According to Foucault, this subjectivity is a radical break with earlier epistemes: in Modernity Man has been invented.

The problem is, Man is a double. We already saw he plays both the role of object of his knowledge as well as the subject of his knowledge. This duality is rooted in the finitude of man – in his Being Man is finite, i.e. temporality (a rather Heideggerian echo, more or less). The problems that Man poses for himself as knowing being leads to a critical study of this concept of Man . And through this philosophical criticism Man discovers four dualities:

1. The analysis of finitude shows us the duality finitude-infinity. Man himself, as a living being, is finite, yet life is infinite. Man’s life is nothing but the progress towards death.

2. The analysis of Man also shows us the empirical-transcendental duality. Positivism (the study of Man being) and eschatology (the destruction of Man) conflict. Phenomenology is a rather imperfect solution to this problem: it seeks to return to actual experience yet is never able to overcome the intrinsic duality of empirical-transcendentality.

3. The analysis of the Unthought: Man thinks, implying there is the Unthought. In reflection, man is able to view his Being in a dimension in which thought speaks to the Unthought and articulates itself in terms of this. Basically, Foucault is – rather obscurely – pointing to e.g. Hegel’s unknown, Marx’s alienated man, Freud’s unconscious man, etc. In general terms: the Unthought as positivistic object of knowledge.

4. Lastly, the analysis of the retreat and return of Origins. Man, as a living being, is not his origin; the origin retreats in man. Through philosophical reflection, Man is able to view his origin – outside himself – and this notion makes him realize the fact that his existence is temporality.

I mentioned these four critical analyses of Man because they serve a two-fold purpose. First, they show how tedious and obscure Foucault can be when he isn’t analysing historical data and theories. Second, and more importantly, they point to Foucault’s main thesis: the study of Man – Anthropology – is the foundation of the Modern episteme. Through this critical study, particularly the resulting four unsolvable dualities – they are the epistemological origin of fields like phenomenology, psychology, history, sociology, psychoanalysis, etc. – Man is dissolving himself. Before the nineteenth century Man didn’t exist; with the invention of Man, as the episteme of the modern world, this changed. But the result is that Man is, through himself, dissolving himself into a nothingness.

(The death of Man, after the Death of God – they both are a strong echo of Nietzsche, and throughout the book Foucault seems obsessed with this Nietzschean analysis. Man has destroyed God and is now busy self-destructing. What comes after him is still unclear, just as Nietzsche was rather unclear about how his Superman of the future would look like.)
According to Foucault, this anthropology – so central in the modern (western) world – is destroying its own foundation and in this sense is the heralding of the destruction of the Modern episteme and the heralding of a new episteme. The book was published in 1966, yet even though I read it in 2020, we still seem to be in the age of Man. Perhaps even more so than ever before. Which makes one wonder about the value of a book as this (see the end of this review).

A last important point of this book is the general scheme of things. Foucault agrees that events at the historical level can be causes of the retreat or emergence of fields of knowledge. During the nineteenth century, industrial production can be seen as a force in the development of psychology, just like the revolutions and social unrest can be seen as a force in the development of sociology. But these new sciences couldn’t have originated without a radical change on the underlying, archaeological level: the order of knowledge changed and with this the foundation underlying the total superstructure of knowledge. Organization replaced Order, and Man was invented. This is the condition that made these historical changes possible and not the other way around.

Tangentially, Foucault presages his later works when he deals with the retreat and emergence of certain epistemological concepts. He claims the nineteenth century saw the gradual retreat of function, conflict and signification, and at the same time the gradual emergence of norms, rules and systems. Of course, readers vaguely familiar with Foucault can recognize the concepts of normalization and discipline (both in Discipline and Punish [1975]), and repression (in The History of Sexuality [1984]) from his later works.

Anyway, let me close this review by return to an earlier remark of mine. I have left out all the particular analyses of Foucault. They are very interesting in their own right – for example his treatment of Adam Smith as the breaking point in the science of wealth and David Riccardo as the first economist. But my problem with his analyses of historical sources, which is more than three quarters of the whole book, is that they are not only very selective (Why these sources? Why not others?) but, more importantly, Foucault is interpreting them in a way that suits his purposes. For example, it is easy to find another scholar who offers us a totally different interpretation of Smith and Riccardo.

This is not meant to belittle Foucault’s ambitious project – I do admire his attempt and I find his originality and creativity highly rewarding. But it does beg the question of how his main theory (of change of epistemes at the archaeological level) holds up after the historical interpretations are left out. This leaves us with a fascinating hypothesis of how historical changes in our knowledge and theories are rooted in more fundamental and more radical shifts in the epistemes we employ. And how these epistemes not only shape the world we perceive and act upon, but also form us from our earliest days of youth.

This, in and of itself, is a very interesting hypothesis. Yet the main problem I have with Foucault’s approach is that he confounds epistemology with ontology. Even if we grant his his grid, this seems to imply that it is just one way for us of relating to the world. But how is the world in its fundamental state of being? In an old television debate with Noam Chomsky (still accessible on Youtube – highly recommended!) he explains how the succession of grids continuously makes certain things appear in the world and makes certain other things disappear. But what does that say about the world – the world underlying all of these grids – in its original state? Is it impossible for us to know this world in its original Being? Is its original Being the collection of the manifestations within all these grids?

-----------------------------------
FINAL PARAGRAPH IN COMMENTS

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

All Foucault books seem to me as elaborations of themes from Nietzsche; and this book is no exception. Here Foucault focuses on 3 domains (biology, economics, and linguistics) and tries to show the underlying assumptions (episteme), and how these changed from Renaissance, to Classical and finally in the Modern age of the Western Culture. Foucault calls this archeology and one is surprised how flexible and rather random these fundamental assumptions can be - like in the Borges Chinese story that classifies all animals in some unexpected and wild categories (i.e., those belonging to the Emperor, imaginary ones, stray dogs, those that from the distance look like a fly, sirens, those included in this classification, those painted with a fine brush, and so on). Language and words were at the center of this episteme in the beginning and everything moved at the level of similitudes, resemblances, literal interpretations, and hidden meanings. Later this episteme moved into representations. Eventually this moved into things themselves (functional organs, labor, grammar structures), at an ontological level, and finally back into language itself. The main objective here is to excavate the nature of science and more fundamentally to understand what it means to be human; human nature which disappears more and more as this process moves forward. 

[Angel 一匹狼 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Michel Foucault is doing something with words in this book, which is actually trying to make something that should be easy to understand (and explain) quite complicated to follow, as he creates "awesome" sentences that last for ages and paragraphs that defy the laws of mathematics and understanding of the way words can be put in order one after the other. Our friend Foucault has decided that explaining something in an easy to follow way is for people that don't really care about language, philosophy and the understanding of how the Western world has created itself as the time has advanced, with stops on how the people have explained to themselves and others different concepts, starting with the depiction of a picture from a Spanish painter which paints himself or maybe he doesn't or maybe he is painting the viewer to the most present obsession with man while touching on economy, the description of nature or animals, and some nice moments talking about paper money or Nietzsche. Some of his ideas get lost in his love for making extra-long sentences where he can congratulate himself with how smart he is and get the reader lost because it may necessary to stop once or twice to follow what he was saying two pages ago where he started a course of thought that maybe is not as clear as it should be, but, hey, this is an awesome book that plays beautifully with language and all these things we humans use when trying to understand each other and the world we live in. That doesn't mean to say that the reader won't learn anything from this book, but probably many will find themselves quite lost in it, while many others will be patting their backs as they think that following Foucault's ideas means they are very smart, which they may be, but this really doesn't matter, because whatever they understand of Foucault's ideas depends on constructions on language and things of the society they live in, and on the power relations, and the bio-power and all beautiful things we may pass hours talking about (again, they are actually quite interesting, but unnecessary to make them over-complicated when the idea behind them would be way easier to follow with a clearer explanation, which may or may not be forthcoming, but it is possible, as language, words and the construction of sentences depend on the writer, or the one that is saying the words, making it not as complicated for the reader to follow the sentences that have been written on paper ("paper" being just a way in which symbols explain a thing, constructs that we humans try to create to explain the world that surrounds us, because without language, which may be something we kind of are born with, as an organ, helps us to communicate with each other, some kind of evolution organ which explains why we learn how to talk with each other (or could just be that I'm trying to make this sentence extra long (which may have to do with the order of these brackets)))).

Oh, yeah, and the way people (or men, as the books keeps saying) have understood things in Europe has changed a lot with the pass of time. And we are determined by the constructs (or deconstructs) all around us.

You know, the order of things.

Or words and things.

3.5/10

[Billie Pritchett]

UPDATED REVIEW: Sunday, April 28, 2024 (no rating)

Michel Foucault conducts what he calls an "archaeology of knowledge." The question posed is, How did the human sciences come to have the order they do now?

According to Foucault, our understanding of human labor, life, and language was transmogrified in the nineteenth century, albeit it's best said the transmogrification got kicked off with Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), where he defined the human being as both an empirical and transcendental subject. Kant's conception forever divided, Foucault believes, our understanding of humans insofar as they could be studied continuous with the hard sciences on the one hand and on the other hand how the human sciences had to give way to more critical-interpretive understandings.

In other words, to the extent that it was possible, from the nineteenth century onward, there was an effort to mathematize the human sciences, rendering the understanding of humans in mathematical equations a la physics and chemistry and the natural sciences. (Think, for instance, of putative economic laws like supply and demand.) To the extent that the mathematical reduction could not work because humans are also transcendental subjects, the goal of the human sciences is to critically interpret the conditions in which humans live.

On Foucault's reading, this idea of humans as both empirical and transcendental subjects is what gave way to the modern systems of knowledge, centered around, he argues, the "regions" of economics, biology, and philology. In the back-half of the book, you'll see Foucault really struggling to make all the sciences conform to this tripartite division. Sociology, for instance, is really about economic relations, he writes, and psychology is really biology. Any working scientists in these fields, however, will tell you that Foucault's taxonomies here are not even wrong. I doubt they even captured the trends he thought he was observing at the time.

One important observation I believe he makes concerns the privileged place psychoanalysis was enjoying at the time he was writing this book, at least in the French/European intellectual milieus. Foucault argues that psychoanalysis enjoys the vogue because it is our tacit way of recognizing that the human being cannot as a subject conform to the fields to which we subject him or her, so through psychoanalysis we can revel in the mystification posed by the unconscious and the efforts to translate unconscious processes into conscious ones. Definitely there is something to this mystification claim. One might even say the love of psychoanalysis displaced religion, at least for some people.

But regardless, that particular claim of Foucault's about psychoanalysis was of its time. So what forms of mystification do people revel in now? The pseudoscience of podcasting gurus, for one.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: April 3, 2016 (one star)

I don't really know what to make of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. Some things appear to be true in it, and other things new. The things that are true aren't new, and the things that are new aren't true. Foucault argues that there was a turning point in understanding and inquiry which occurred during the 18th century, perhaps near the tail end. All fine so far, and that is surely one way to divide up intellectual history. Foucault is right that the Age of Enlightenment brought about new ways of thinking about human beings and the world, but the rest I don't claim to understand.

Foucault has this complicated idea that language's role in knowledge changed into the 18th century. How does he determine this? Through philological analysis, looking at how the use of certain key terms changed over time. That's at least a main way he goes about the studies. But this philological or semantic analysis hardly renders the kind of evidence needed to justify such tall claims as Foucault as making.

Maybe someone out there smarter than I am can explain the views to me and give me Foucault's evidence for the claims. I can't understand it from Foucault himself. Could just be my problem.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Foucault is hard to categorize. Some see him as a post-structuralist, others argue that he is a new historicist. I think he sees himself as a descendant of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The first part of this book is great simply on the level of entertainment. Foucault's analysis of Velazquez's Las Meninas stands out as an essay that can be read on its own. I also enjoyed the discussion of Don Quixote.

The latter part of the book is much more of a historical study. Foucault has an interesting theory about the changes in the dominant epistemes--the ways we organize knowledge--and he employs an analysis of Enlightenment texts to substantiate his argument.

As an English major, I enjoyed Foucault's discussion of language; the sections on biology and on economics were somewhat more work for me, as I am not as knowledgeable about these subjects, so there are probably points Foucault makes that I have missed.

Although his argument is dense and theoretical, and he makes references to things that may be obscure to the general reader, yet Foucault writes in a straightforward way that is generally free of the jargon and convoluted grammar one finds in some other contemporary theorists (*ahem* Jacques La-*cough*)

Acquired 1995
The Word, Montreal, Quebec

[Miguel Rodríguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Las Palabras y las Cosas es un libro monumental y ambicioso. Su meta no es otra que estudiar, desde un punto de vista "arqueológico", el modo de pensar predominante en tres épocas distintas, Renacimiento, Clásica y Moderna, que permite que ciertas ramas del saber existan, se articulen y den lugar a un saber concreto.

Foucault hace un estudio exhaustivo de dichas épocas analizando las obras de economistas, filólogos, filósofos y científicos que pertenecen a cada una de ellas. Se fija especialmente en cómo se piensan las relaciones de intercambio, cómo se piensa la gramática, y cómo se piensan las ciencias naturales. La tesis principal es que cada época tuvo una manera propia de crear símbolos, asignar significados y ordenar el saber (el título del libro iba a ser El orden de las cosas, que le hace mucha más justicia). Normalmente pensamos en término de "progreso" o de sucesiones lineales o continuas. Nos imaginamos que las ciencias naturales evolucionaron y se refinaron desde Newton hasta Einstein llegando a la actualidad, a base de apilar conocimiento paulatinamente, y que lo mismo ocurrió con la economía y todos los diferentes campos del saber. Sin embargo, en la misma línea que Kuhn y su libro La estructura de las revoluciones científicas, Foucault afirma (y demuestra con numerosos ejemplos) que hay discontinuidades claras en la creación del saber, y que en cada época analizada surgen "ciencias" o ramas de conocimiento que no podrían haber existido anteriormente y que otras que se mantienen hoy en día sufren un cambio cualitativo drástico en la manera de funcionar.

Cada época tiene su propia coherencia interna y sistema de significados, y entre ellas hay un vacío insalvable, una ruptura que, desgraciadamente, carece de explicación en esta obra (aunque creo que se intenta dar una respuesta en su libro posterior La arqueología del saber).

El libro es denso y abarca infinidad de temas, pero además es innecesariamente oscuro (por eso las 4 estrellas). Afirmaciones sencillas se expresan de manera rebuscada, y cae en los errores del estilo filosófico francés de su época. Esto causó que, aunque el contenido es muy interesante y tiene gran valor, se me hiciera bastante pesado a ratos. Vigilar y castigar (y espero que el resto de sus libros, que algún día me leeré) al ser en cierta medida una aplicación práctica del método "arqueológico" es mucho más ameno y tangible, estando bien sustentado en datos históricos concretos, y despojado de floritura.

[Louise Garner · Rating 1 out of 5]

The most pretentious load of drivel I have ever come across.

[Omar Abu samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

"لم تعد اللغة مرتبطة بمعرفة الأشياء، بل بحرِّية الإنسان؛ اللغة من صنع البشر، فأصلها وتقدمها نابعان من ملء حريتنا، إنها تاريخنا وإرثنا. عندما نحدد قواعد النحو الداخلية، نوثق بذلك عُرى القرابة بين اللغة ومصير الإنسان الحر"


مراجعة مطولة لاحقاً

[OvercommuniKate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do not waste your time, do not read this or any of Foucault's work unless you're being paid gobs of money. He's a narcissistic French man who thinks he's invented literary criticism and anthropology, and it quickly gets old.

-----

I like pop culture criticism and I like the idea of literary / artistic / political criticism through an anthropology lens, but Foucault does it poorly and too broadly.

He throws out assertions about the Renaissance without considering anything beyond his 1960s French, white, male perspective of the Renaissance. A lot was happening during that time-period, all-around the globe. Foucault makes broad sweeping generalizations about historical time-periods and their societal norms and beliefs, with almost no evidence. If you're going to make assertions about specific art being a turning-point of norms, I need evidence about this time-period and its norms.

Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists have all written about societal norms for different slices of history, but no one makes such blanket assertions with such little evidence like Foucault. His lack of evidence is the exact reason many people think philosophy is a joke.

-----

Foucault didn't come up with the concept of "paradigm shift" and fails to adequately explain it. Thomas Khun's book, which explains how norms can change, was published 4 years before Foucault's book. Foucault applies Khun's work to all of European history by doing as little analysis as possible, reducing history to tiny monocultures.

I wish I remembered why this book was on my shelf, as I'd like to ask the person who suggested this book to me: WHY. Because if it's for pop culture criticism or structuralism theory, this is so vague it's unusable, and if it's for the origin of paradigm shift or other philosophical ideas, well that's all stolen from better philosophers.

-----

After finishing the book and writing this review, I researched the author and EWWW. He is pro-pedophilia and signed a petition for consent laws to be withdrawn. Since Foucault is commonly considered a left-wing philosopher, and is a sex creep, he's a popular boogeyman for right-wing pundits. However, after reading this book, I can say there's nothing here that's useful to anyone of any political spectrum.

Foucault later took back most of what he wrote in this book, saying he doesn't believe in structuralism anymore. Instead of applying social science to culture, Foucault turned to writing weird theories about sexual dominance. Gross.

This book and this man should be left to fade into obscurity.

[Adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

On one hand, I think you have to give some credit to Foucault. The ideas in this book are almost trivial now, and we have a lot of conceptual tools to describe it in relatively straightforward terms. He was, somewhat ironically, ushering in a new episteme in which humans are self-conscious of their status as episteme-makers, without the aid of the episteme in which that idea makes sense. It's recursive in a way that none of the previous epistemic revolutions really had to contend with.

On the other hand, it's hard to see how there's any value in this book for a modern audience except as a historical artifact. It sets out to do two things, and barely does either comprehensibly at all. First, it's a statement of the idea of epistemes. But Foucault spares no time to actually explain that idea, or orient us to how his examples demonstrate it. Second, it's an intellectual history. But it's an extremely unsatisfying one. Again, he gives no orientation whatsoever on the lives, cultures, problems, or any kind of context or background whatsoever on the thinkers he references. It's just not very informative, but it's also not very readable. The really bad part is that he makes no effort to organize the text in a way that clarifies when he's paraphrasing ideas people held in the past, commenting on those ideas, or giving his own ideas. There's no structure at all beyond the section headings themselves. What it feels like more than anything is a kind of stream of consciousness diary for a philosopher taking notes that make sense in the context of premises he has become too used to to bother stating, but also which he lacks the words to clearly articulate. It's quite frustrating and I'm sooooooooo glad modern science and philosophy have both essentially made this book (if not the fairly indubitable central idea) obsolete.

[Talie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"انسان چهره‌ای در میان دو شیوه‌ی وجود زبان بود، یا بهتر است بگوییم وقتی شکل گرفت که زبان، که درون بازنمایی جای داشت و گویی در آن مستحیل شده بود، تکه تکه شد و فقط این چنین بود که توانست خود را از قید بازنمایی آزاد کند. انسان چهره‌ی خود را در شکاف‌های زبانی پاره پاره شکل داد."
"انسان ابداعی است که باستان‌شناسی تفکر ما به راحتی متاخر بودن آن نشان می‌دهد، و شاید پایان نزدیک آن را."

الفاظ و اشیا تمام شد و من متاثر و الکن برای فوکوی معظم کف زدم.

[Abdullah · Rating 5 out of 5]

كان أول معرفتي بأفكار فوكو من تيموني ميتشيل إستعمار مصر الذي تأثر فيه ميتشيل بأفكار فوكو عن شكل وبنية الثقافة وراقت لي طريقة نظره للأشياء من حوله وفي العالم كيف يرى ويحدد بالظبط ما شكل ثقافة عصر ما من خلال النظر ليس فقط في المجسم المادي العمران كما عند ابن خلدون ولكن كان يراه أيضا في المؤسسات والممارسات
تاريخ فوكو ليس كأي تاريخ فهو تاريخ تركيب وتفكيك مستمر على طول اعماله يربط بالتماثل في عصر قرن السادس عشر والإختلاف و التطابق في عصر قرن السابع عشر كل قطعة منثورة في العالم مع بعضها مكونا شكل الثقافة في حقبة زمنية معينة موضحا بنية سلطاتها في مراحل تكونها ومراحل تدهورها
بالطبع كان عليه أن يكون متحسسا لوجود كل شئ من حوله ومتشككا في الوقت نفسه حتى في اللغه نفسها التي يقول عنها بأنها انتهي دورها في كونها الوسيلة الشفافة لظهور الأشياء وبدأت تلعب دورها هي الأخرى كعنصر أساسي وجوهري في العالم وعليه يجب أن ترتد اللغة إلى العالم كشئ نسج منه وبداخله
فأدوات اللغه ومفاهيمها الجديدة كانت طريقه في الكلام و الإثبات وهي في ذات الوقت لاعبة دور أساسي في توصيفه
عندما كتب تاريخ الأشياء كان يكتب تاريخ خطاب الناس عن ذلك الشئ وموضحا لما كان عليهم أن يرو العالم بهذة الطريقة دونا عن الطرق الأخرى فهو يري عالم ما بعد تحطم بابل وانتشار اللغات بداية تركيب العالم والأشياء وموضعة الإنسان فيه كمركز، كيف يفكر؟ كيف يرتب ما يفكر فيه؟ كيف يشعر؟ وفي النهاية كيف يرسم خطابه عن ذلك المفكر فيه في ضوء لغة منسوجة أيضا لأجل ذلك الخط��ب؟ فهو لا يغفل دور اللغة في ترتيب العالم بل يضعها في قلب التصور وعنصر فاعل في التمثيل والتصور
ومن بعد الخطاب تظهر المؤسسات والسلوكيات أو بالأحرى يرى صورة الخطاب في المؤسسات والممارسات التي تتثمل تارة في الفرد (علم النفس) وتارة في المجتمع و السياسة و الإقتصاد والبيولوجيا والتي أخرجت لنا في النهاية العلوم الإنسانية وأجهزة الدولة ك المؤسسات السلوكية كالسجن والمشفى والأكاديمية والمشفى العقلي
والتي ستدخل تلك القوة الحيوية- الإنسان- في خطاب جديد وهو خطاب الموت والحياة والجنس والعقاب والذنب والخطيئة وهنا تتوقف مسيرته ليصبح سيرة خطاب آيل للنهاية
وفي انتظار خطاب جديد بعصر جديد يكون الإنسان فيه أثرا من الماضي ويحضر كشبح قديم في تاريخ سلسة قديمة من الفكر
فهو لا يرى مثل نيتشه إنسانا أعلى قادرا على إنجاز وعود البشرية لأنه عندها لم يعد موجود الإ كفكرة ومدار الفكرة في النهاية هي الموت على أعتاب فكرة جديدة في طريقها للصعود
قد تأثر فوكو بنزعة هيدجر في الوجود على حد قول أحد أصدقائه فيه وأقره فوكو بنفسه ولكن بدل طريق هيدجر في الكتابة والنظر انتهج طريق نيتشه الأركيولوجي العتيق
فهو هيدجري النزعة نيتشوي الطريقة

[Alex Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this impressive book, Foucault takes on the basic organizational episteme of our current epoch. He highlights the contemporary modality of our post-modern world by tracing the development of our episteme from the 16th century to the present day.

While this may seem to be a simple tale of historical causation Foucault says explicitly on several occasions that he cannot account for the break between the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century. What he is referring to has several possible angles to it, which strongly emphasizes that in our current era we have not processed this break fully, that we are still within this logic and therefore unable to account for it.

One way to speak of this break is to note that in the Classical era, knowledge was mediated through a reference to the infinite. This had the happy consequence of making language transparent. If there was a limit to our knowledge it lay in the fact that human beings were finite and unable to extend to the fullest reaches of knowing, which would otherwise be available. When one contrasts this with the current epoch, we have the condition of knowing being mediated by man. As Zizek might say, a subject-hood is self-realized selfhood, that all conditions of knowing pass through the self.

While it may be tempting to digress into philosophical contemplation with this idealist twist, Foucault is quick to add that this subjectivity is only made possible because the inherent formalization of various fields have fragmented into their own logic (for him, biology, economics and philology are the ones he looks at, but by no means are these positions foundational). What I mean by immanent logic is that the formalization, which is expressed as the adoptation of mathesis as a neutral symbology by which to express immanent logic, forces each of these fields to define the conditions of their knowledge by an appeal to a central agency that is both immanent to the field and conditioned beyond it. What ends up happening is that we chase our own shadow. Human beings created these fields of knowledge to solve specific tasks relating to how we valuate our situation. We want to know certain things and value knowing those things in the way that we do; thus these fields come to reflect our basis premises as to who we are and how we are.

To say this in another way, these different fragmented sciences are created from and simultaneously inform the cultural biases which outlines these various fields of study. In these areas (biology, economics, language and so on) ultimately reflect back how we create knowing, so that when we attempt to know these fields completely we end up chasing our own reflection. Foucault uses the Diego's painting Las Meninas as the metaphor for this knowing. The various figures in the field become stabilized in our attempt to see what is going on, and in that moment we catch a faint glimpse of our own reflection in the distance. For this reason, man and subjecthood, as Foucault notes, are in fact recent authorizations which did not exist previous to this break.

You can find many ideas that he skims here as echoing positions by other thinkers, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Meillasoux, Baudrillard... they all arrange our situation differently but their arrangement of our situation isn't a genuine stepping out of it. In much the same way, writers like Kafka and Beckett are only made possible because of the epoch; they are already expressing the confusion of the order which refers back to us, they are not creating the order nor are they recording its transition.

One of the most telling features that Foucault writes about, telling in the sense that this is an Event, is how he recasts time as a matter of epistemological entrapment. Our inability to decide for ourselves an origin for consciousness is a sign that consciousness exists outside our ability to know because it is the condition of how we know. This strongly matches Badious writing on the Event, signaling that our criteria for knowing remains invisible to us. Consciousness like the figure of Man remains the limit to our knowledge because we are the figure by which we can come to know everything else around us.

Foucault would like to realize the historical causality in the rising of this event but he can't explain it. There can be no causality because our methods of understanding will not be able to account for itself. In fact, I am expressing this episteme right now, as the current trace of philosophy and knowledge today (sciences included) wish to think the unthinking, to bring about consciousness to the real conditions of knowing. This of course is a problem because if our human parameters for what matters isn't objective enough for us, and in fact can only bring about the cultural biases which are expressed in how we decide what is, worthy of knowing and how we should know something (what terms are relevant) then what should be the basis for the creation of a new knowledge?

Foucault offers Nietzche's superman as a possible condition of the new. The Eternal Return marks a horrifically new epoch for which we can have new conditions. (The Nazi trauma as it were, was not it, because it was not enough to mark a difference-- that false event was too conditioned already by recent and ancient histories, its baggage signaled an allegiance to the current epoch in much the same way Mao or Stalinism did the same.) Of course, a new condition also means a new history, also means the end of philosophy... or the start of a new one, but I digress.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Order of Things is Foucault at his most Foucauldian, a grand tour through the history of orderings, discourses, scientific methods, and ultimately Man Himself from the 16th century through the 19th century. He's at his best when he's making the incommensurable theological commentaries of the 16th century readable and relateable for modern eyes. His discussion of the rise of Classical era human sciences of difference, biology, economics, and philology, is deeply read and insightful. The conclusion is the radical claim that prior to the 19th century, Man did not exist as an element of analysis, and that modern (and post-modern) ways of knowing are in fact highly divergent from their predecessors.

My problem is one of style. Clarity is not Foucault's thing, and I get that, but The Order of Things felt noticeably less clear than Discipline and Punish , The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization, or The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. The theory is thick here, the strands of argument tangled, and often for no apparent reason. My most common experience reading this was seeing a long series of negative statements ("The science of economics is not this, or this, or this...") that would take pages to resolve into an affirmative of what the thing is. The sentences are amazing: I took to reading them out loud like a Shakespearean soliloquy, and just admiring the rollicking flow of clauses and phrases. But at the end of one of these titanic discursive flows I'd be left with very little, just a philosophical laugh of "Lol wut?"

Some ideas demand density in argumentation, and a lot of intelligent commentators have read very smart things into The Order of Things. But if every reader finds a different meaning, is there a text? Is there actually an order to things?

[Akbar Madan · Rating 5 out of 5]

الكلمات والاشياء
لا يكف فوكو عن فضح مكاشفاته اللغوية والمعرفية بالتجلي الحقيقي عبر الكتابة ، وعبر كتابه الكلمات والاشياء الذي وصفه مطاع صفدي بالمشروع الذي يفصل حقبة الفكر الاوروبي العقلاني والحداثي عن المرحلة الجديدة المتشكلة من فكر فوكو ما بعد بعد الحداثي ، ففي خضم الكلمات والاشياء تتبعثر منطقية العقل والعلم وتعلن البراءة من تحقق النهاية العلمية والمعرفية ، ولأن جميع الثقافات بما فيها الأوروبية تدّعي النهايات المعرفية بإكمالها وإتمامها وربط حلقاتها وتعبئة المناطق الفاصلة بينها ، جاء مشروع فوكو ليقرع هذا الوهم بطرقه وتشتيته من الانتظام وإعادة تموضع المعرفة خارج السياق الذي تم تحديده من قبل واضعي ومحققي العلوم .
يقحم فوكو نفسه في تفاصيل التفاصيل لزلزل القواعد والمسلمات المنطقية والعلمية ، ممارسا حفره المعرفي بمعول التفكيك والتحليل لا ليصل الى نهاية معينة بل ليكشف عن نهاية النهايات في العلم والمعرفة ، نظرته لحركة العلوم في التاريخ تتخللها التركيز على التشابهات والتماثلات بين هذه العلوم ، هناك تكمن نظرته لسلسلة الأحداث المعرفية منذ القرن ١٦ وحتى القرن ٢٠ ، هذه التشابهات والتماثلات في الكون ومن ثم في ثنايا العلوم تحتاج الى روابط تكون بمثابة حلقة الوصل ليكتمل عقد المعرفة ويستمر في أنتجت الثقافة ، مناطق الفراغ هذه لا زال العلم يوغل فيها بكل ثقله ليتمكن من الربط ، أنها المهمة التي كلّف الانسان الحديث نفسه بالقيام بها على أدق وجه أنها بمثابة الحلم الذي راود الانسان قبل الكشف عن سلسلة الحمض النووي ، انه يبحث عن العلاقات الداخلية بين الأشياء .

[Darran Mclaughlin]

I'm finished in the sense that I know I'm not going to pick it up and continue again any time soon. I made it to page 273, but I have found it a bit too boring and difficult to find the discipline to continue.



What Foucault has to say is fairly interesting, but after getting the gist of the idea from the introduction, and (to be honest) a synopsis of the contents I don't think there's much to be gained from actually reading the book. I understand the idea of paradigm shift's in our body of knowledge and I believe they happen and that culture affects everything, including supposedly objective practices such as science. However, Foucault's attempt to demonstrate this is narrow, unconvicing, full of unquestioned assumptions that what has taken place in Western Europe can be said to demonstrate universal principles, and written in an extremely boring fashion, which I wasn't expecting. Nietsche railed against German thinkers for writing such a dull, heavy, ugly prose and envied the French for their light, witty writing tradition. Unfortunately the French seem to have bought into the idea of Germanic profundity in their writing style these days.

[Lance · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with most of Foucault's work, this book oscillates between barely discernible prose, discussion of obscure texts, and moments of clear profundity that will blow your mind. Foucault's overall argument is fairly simple, at least in today's context, where many of Foucault's ideas and methods are often taken as a priori. Basically, shifts in epistemes created a space where "man" appeared as an object of study. The human sciences didn't appear because of new enlightened ideas, but because the discursive organizations changed. Since Foucault is working with a new paradigm and new method, he really takes the reader literally step by step. In fact, I'm not sure I entirely buy his argument, but I'm not willing to read all the books he read to double-check :-). The thing about much of Foucault's work is that he lives in a pretty narrow world -- the canonical male thinkers in European philosophy.

I also highly recommend reading "The Archaeology of Knowledge," where Foucault describes his methodological apparatus with more detail. In a way, I think these too books are more useful today as methodologies, rather than philosophical or theoretical treatises.

[Alan Johnson]

I started reading this book on the premise that it would tell me something concrete and explicit about postmodernism. It turned out to be an extremely dense and convoluted analysis of history, culture, aesthetics, etc. that would have required probably 100 hours of my time to understand. I looked ahead in the book to see whether I was perhaps missing something and also checked summaries of the book elsewhere, but the work doesn't seem to contain a clear statement of postmodernist principles. It is possible that somehow all the meanderings of this book implicitly support some early version of postmodernism, but, frankly, I just don't have the kind of time it would take to figure it all out—if, indeed, that would be possible in any event.

[DoctorM · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books that I keep coming back to again and again. "The Order of Things" (the French title, "Words and Things" is probably more precise) is one of those key books that re-orders the way you think. It begins with a classic and bravura passage--- an analysis of Velasquez's "Las Meninas" ---that should be required reading for anyone interested in exegesis or hermeneutics. The book goes on to discuss how we categorise and valorise knowledge--- how we choose to draw the boundaries of the objects in the world, how we prioritise kinds of knowledge. Not an easy read, but a powerful one. A key work--- highly recommended.

[Niousha mokhtari · Rating 5 out of 5]

این اثر دومین اثر فوکو براساس سیر تاریخی آثارش بود که انتخاب کردم، فوکو خود در این اثر به درستی به باستان شناسی علوم انسانی می‌پردازد،
بررسی دقیق سیر تغییر ابژه در علوم انسانی، از تاکیید بر انسان و بررسی سوژه انسانی در دوران کلاسیک تا ویرانی انسان در دوران مدرن
خواندن متن به هیچ عنوان راحت نبود، تا فلسفه کانت و ایده آلیسم آلمانی فهمیده نشه درک متن به سختی صورت می‌گیره، پیش نیاز این متن به قطع و یقین مطالعه تاریخ فلسفه است و صد البته ساختارگرایی، حتی شاید فرمالیسم

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about how we're all just an empirico-transcendental doublet strapped to the back of a tiger. Now that I've read it the only thing I know is that Foucault is totally gay for Nietzsche—"he was so wise, he knew so much, he wrote such good books." Nietzsche!

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

damn, this was a fantastic book

[Thomas J. Hubschman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading Foucault—again. Rereading. Unless you are as quick and clever as he is, you don't just "read" Michel Foucault as if he were a mystery novel or an office memo. He frequently requires the kind of concentration you bring to the solution of a geometry theorem or the translation of an ancient text.

I was never very good at either of those activities—mathematics or translation—with a few significant exceptions, significant because what I achieved in each case not only gave me confidence in the power of my abilities but opened up a brief but enduring view into the rich worlds of mathematical logic and Latin poetry. Had I been assigned Michel Foucault to read back then, I never would have made it through any of his books, never mind read them serially and with an eagerness that is more typical of the consumption of a fast-moving thriller.

But that's exactly what happened when I was looking for a book about the prison system and a neighbor offered me the copy of Discipline and Punish on his bookshelf left over from his graduate school days. I devoured it, then went on to Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things & The Archaeology of Knowledge, Psychiatric Power, was put off by the turgid prose of Birth of the Clinic, but soon discovered Foucault's three volumes on sexuality, his final effort, half of the projected six volumes he had planned for the topic before he died in 1984.

It wasn't all easy reading, of course. Very little of Foucault is. But I always find him engaging, stimulating and manage to stay with him, the reward being exciting insights into how the world we live in has come about, especially what it owes to the intellectual world of the Enlightenment and the one that preceded it—the Renaissance—their "epistemes," to use Foucault's word, the way they saw the world and the systems of knowledge they devised to explain and control it. They were worlds as alien and exotic to our own as anything that might walk off a spaceship ship from another galaxy, and yet also familiar by their cultural residues if only (but certainly not only) in our popular art and common assumptions—what we call "magic," e.g., actually the science of the pre-Enlightenment episteme.

This was why as late as the mid-1600s a mind liked Newton's (if there ever has been such a thing as a mind "like" his) could occupy itself most of the time with alchemy and the study of ancient Hebrew. It was probably never clear to Newton that the revolution he was effecting was a contradiction of the thousands of years of "science" that preceded him. He believed that all he was doing was rediscovering truths that the ancient Greeks had postulated that had been lost, just as Aristotle's works were lost for more than a thousand years before being rediscovered at the end of the Middle Ages.

Intellectual history was Foucault's bailiwick, specifically 18th-century France, what we have come to know as the Enlightenment. In school we were taught it was a period much akin to our own, a kind of proto-modern way of thinking, when real science got started and notions of democracy and economics came into being. All of which is true, but, as Foucault shows, not in the way we think, and different in ways that are very important. The Enlightenment had its own assumptions and prejudices and models that are almost as alien to what was to come later as were the assumptions of the models that preceded it for two thousand years.

I should probably point out that I delight in finding that the received truth is, if not exactly the opposite of what we think, very different from it, whether it's the current unmasking of the vaporous frauds on which the world financial markets have operated for so many years or the exposure of common medical practices that cost so much and do so little for our health. Such unmaskings, slow at first, a few lone voices crying out that the accepted ideas or paradigms are really just conventions with no clothes on, only gradually become acceptable and even then only after the renegades have been roundly criticized or even persecuted: there really were no WMD despite the propaganda in the New York Times and the impassioned testimony at the UN of America's most respected public figure; Credit Default Swaps are no better than last month's lottery tickets; the sun does not revolve around the earth.

By unearthing (he calls it archaeology) the origins and developments of the prison system, psychiatry and medicine generally and the other so-called social sciences, Foucault implicitly questions other precepts upon which our contemporary disciplines are founded. He reminds us of absurd notions we like to believe are peculiar to the unenlightened thinking of the past, even the not-so-distant past, such as the medical establishment's "discovery" of masturbation at the start of the 19th century, thanks to new observational practices developed as a means of controlling populations in prisons, schools and hospitals. Freud himself was under the influence of this medical witch hunt which lasted well into the 20th century. It was as if, as Foucault remarks, an epidemic of self-abuse had broken out across Europe at the close of the 18th century.

Modern medicine would also rather not recall some of the silly—"silly" if they didn't ruin so many lives—other tenets and practices, such as bleeding for almost any condition, female clitorectomies (practiced mostly on white middle-class women, the class which has always been most medicalized), promoting the use of infant formula over mother's milk, etc. There are plenty of contemporary equivalents to these useless or harmful nostrums, but we accept them as good medical science, physicians and patients alike. We cooperate with them every time we pay a visit to the doctor.

But for me Foucault's most fascinating subject is the pre-Enlightenment model of reality, the one that prevailed virtually unchallenged since the time of the Stoics, as meticulously constructed and rigorously practiced as anything that takes place in our own science labs. In this model the Creator passed on to Adam and Eve the language in which He himself thinks. It's not language in the narrow sense we understand that word, because every word in it embodies the reality, the essential truth, of the object it designates and, as it were, incorporates, so that to know the word is to know the very being of the thing—or person.

The consequences for scholarship and knowledge generally to such a concept are profound. Because we no longer have access to the primal master language (thanks to the Tower of Babel) we are reduced to approaching the truth via the watered-down derivative tongues we now speak. Even classical Greek and Latin are pale substitutions. Our job—the job of intellectuals from antiquity to the mid-17th century—was to "divine" the lost meanings and forgotten truths—what today we would call scientific data—we knew once simply by knowing the original language of creation.

This was what magic was about. Today the word means skillful allusion, a pretense for entertainment, turning handkerchiefs into doves and cutting pretty girls in half only to put them back together again. But, in the old days, two, three, five thousand years ago, great minds could piece together the lost remnants of the true language of God as well as read the "marks" he has embedded in his creation for our understanding. As a result, they believed they could manipulate reality the way we do chemicals in a test tube—turn not just handkerchiefs but people into birds, transform lead into gold, read the future in the stars, cure the sick, even raise the dead. More practically, they could curse their enemies in a way that went beyond mere vilification. If you knew someone's name, their real name, the word that contained their very being, you could—with the right verbal formula—kill them or at least make them very ill, a practice that goes back to the very beginnings of language, certainly written language, when the latter was the purview of a select elite.

But the Creator did more than give man (and it was almost always "man," wasn't it) the true language. He also imbedded in his creation "characters" and "signs" that enabled the scientific whizzes of their day to understand how everything, literally every thing, in the universe was related to everything else and therefore how it could be manipulated, altered, transformed.

We have our own received wisdoms and shibboleths that we accept as uncritically as did anyone in previous centuries, believing them to be based on good scientific evidence. To this day many of us seem to harbor a belief in the intrinsic value of gold, as the recent flight to that metal out of stocks and other less substantial financial instruments demonstrates. Is this so different from the Renaissance assumption that gold was inherently precious because God had created just enough of it to equal all the goods and services mankind would ever create? Is our current faith in more and more testing and aggressive treatment of patients (originally the word used for someone undergoing torture for the sake of discovering criminal truth), regardless of demonstrated risk and benefit, any better grounded than was the practice of bleeding and purging? Meanwhile, we still can't get doctors to wash their hands before examining patients in the hospital, a lack of hygiene that costs thousands of lives each year.

The beauty of reading a scholar as astute as Foucault is not that he poses any of these questions himself. As I say, he pretty much sticks to his professional last. But, his "archaeology" of the development of intellectual thought from the early 17th century into the 19th, allows us to hold up a mirror to our own time. We, like the people of other centuries, think we pretty much have figured out what it's all about, apart from some tinkering around the edges—nailing down that pesky Unified Field Theory that has annoyed scientists ever since Einstein got a bee in his bonnet about it. The idea that our own science one day might be seen as flawed as that of the 17th century seems to us absurd. We are building, we believe, on hard-won truths, scientifically demonstrable truths, leaving nothing to speculation or faith. But Ptolemaic cosmology had seemed just as unshakably scientific, an elegant explanation for how the heavens revolve around the earth, cleverly explaining the odd backward and forward motion of the planets that seemed to contradict this hypothesis. It was such a rigorous piece of work that it lasted well over a thousand years and was discarded only with much reluctance and only after a good deal of persecution of those who contested it.

Who are our own Ptolemies? Are they the scientific "studies" promising eternal life out of fish oil and statins? Are they those who affirm or those who deny global warming? Those who tell us our lives will be extended by their medicines and their machines or those who can demonstrate that longevity ultimately depends upon our socio-economic status and general satisfaction with life? Our own misguided scientists are operating within what we think of as the heart of orthodoxy. Which of them is actually telling us that the heavens revolve around the earth or that the cure for what ails us is a good bleeding?

There are other kinds of anxieties and questions that reading Foucault or any other great scholar excites. But, if you're like me, you thrill at the prospect of unmasking an accepted falsehood and seeing the way toward a new truth—with the proviso that truth is "a hypothesis that has not yet been disproven." You not only weather the threat to the received orthodoxy but relish the intellectual vistas that take its place.

[Luisa Fernanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Se busca la lengua lo más cerca de lo que ella es: en la palabra, ésta palabra que la escritura deseca y congela en un lugar. Está a punto de nacer toda una mística: la del verbo, del puro estallido poético que pasa sin huella y no deja tras de sí sino una vibración suspendida por un instante. En su sonoridad pasajera y profunda, la palabra se convierte en soberana.”

Considero la lectura de este libro como un ejercicio altamente retador, teniendo en cuenta que era mi primera vez enfrentándome al autor y también a un texto teórico de esta magnitud. Sin embargo, creo no exagerar al afirmar que es un recorrido estupendo por las diversas miradas del lenguaje, en el que Foucault, lo expone en contraste con la biología, la gramática, las ciencias económicas e incluso las ciencias humanas.

Claramente, si bien todos reconocemos el lenguaje como una actividad trasversal al ser humano y el lugar que ocupa en el mundo, debemos tener cuidado pues hablar o escribir no es solo expresar una idea o decir algo, no es exactamente un juego del lenguaje. Es encaminarse en el acto soberano de la denominación, es ir con el lenguaje y llegar hasta el lugar en el que los objetos y las palabras se encuentran en una esencia común que les permite ser nombradas. Se sugiere una conciencia evolutiva desde lo ontogenético y lo filogenético donde las ciencias y las disciplinas no se encuentran aisladas la una de la otra, donde no existe una escala jerárquica, sino, una relación simbiótica en la que se necesitan entre sí para configurar las diferentes esferas de este todo que compone la humanidad.  

Por último, comparto una de mis reflexiones favoritas del libro, que pertenece al apartado de la evolución de la biología y la composición de las estructuras del cuerpo humano en órganos, sistemas etc. Allí se diferencia entre los órganos primarios y secundarios: donde, los primarios son aquellos órganos esenciales, aquellos que están protegidos por los órganos secundarios que les sirven de “envoltura” y solo es posible llegar a ellos por medio de la disección. ¿A caso no es el mismo modo en el que funciona la palabra dentro de un ejercicio poético, literario, o simplemente dentro del análisis del discurso?, la palabra no es solo esa envoltura que allí se pone, las letras que se juntan y nos cuentan algo. Quizás eso sería solo su recubrimiento secundario, lo más valioso que puede salir de las palabras se encuentra sujeto a esa posibilidad de disección de las mismas, encontrarle nuevos significados y asociaciones que nos sumerjan y nos permitan redescubrir las posibilidades del nombrar.