Description
Recently L’Université de Lausanne devoted its annual doctoral school to ‘The history of the language sciences through the prism of problems of a political order’. My talk focussed on Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and the link between his discussion of changes of episteme in the discourse on language between the 18th and 19th centuries and his work on knowledge as power. This provoked an objection from my long-time friend and intellectual hero Patrick Sériot, who dismisses Foucault (along with Thomas S. Kuhn) for having created a false picture of everyone’s ideas changing all at once within a science. The present talk is my reply to the objection, centred on an exploration of Foucault’s concept of the archive in his Archéologie du savoir (1969, translated as The Archaeology of Knowledge). Foucault uses ‘archive’ both in its usual sense, and in a special sense having to do with ‘systems’ which,'in the density of discursive practices ... establish statements as events (...) and things (...). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive.' (p. 128)
'[I]f there are things said – and those only – one should seek the immediate reason for them in the things that were said not in them, nor in the men that said them, but in the system of discursivity, in the enunciative possibilities and impossibilities that it lays down... The archive is ... that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability.' (p. 129, italics in original)
Besides explaining why I think this contradicts Sériot’s view, I shall consider how it applies to our archival research in the usual sense, drawing on my experiences with the archives of various linguists. In a triple mise en abyme, this includes recent work I have done on the origins of enunciation theory, in which the important role of Foucault (1969) has been forgotten; the curious case of Derrida’s Mal d’archive (1995, Archive Fever), in which Foucault’s name never appears; and the archival significance of Foucault’s centenary.
| Period | 16 Feb 2026 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, United States |
| Degree of Recognition | International |