3 - Works: the death of man

Summary

Experience has shown that the human sciences, in their development, led to the disappearance of man rather than to his apotheosis.

Michel Foucault

Implementing and refining the critical-historical method termed ‘archaeology’, developed in his work on medicine, Foucault turns in 1966 to a consideration of the underlying intellectual conditions that produced the modern disciplines known as the human sciences. Having studied the rupture ‘that every society finds itself obliged to make’ between reason and madness, Foucault now claimed that he wished ‘to write a history of order’ (EW ii, p. 261), elsewhere formulated as a ‘history of resemblances’ (OT, p. ⅹⅹⅵ). This history of order and resemblances came in two parts: Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences), published in 1966, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, published three years later.

In an interview about The Order of Things, Foucault defines his refined archaeological method in the following terms:

By ‘archaeology’, I would like to designate not exactly a discipline, but a domain of research, which would be the following: in a society, different bodies of learning, philosophical ideas, everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices and police activities, mores – all refer to a certain implicit knowledge [savoir] special to this society. This knowledge is profoundly different from the bodies of learning [des connaissances] that one can find in scientific books, philosophical theories, and religious justifications, but it is what makes possible, at a given moment, the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a practice.

(EW ii, p. 261)