Foucault's "History of the Present"

Abstract

A pastime of growing popularity in recent years has been that of observing often furious activity of French intellectual scene. Fascinated by apparently revolutionary implications of approaching unconscious, text, primitives, superstructure/base, and in latest way, American scholars from Baltimore to Santa Cruz have been avidly following (often just a few steps behind) many twists and turns of their colleagues across sea. This following often takes form of a redefinition of what French are in terms that slide more easily through our own vocabularies than terms in which French themselves choose to define their projects. This paper will join growing tradition in attempting a redefinition of some of implications of Michel Foucault's historical works. It will attempt to answer question What is Foucault really doing? by examining relationship between the past and the in The Birth of Clinic, The Order of Things, and Discipline and Punish. I shall try to make sense of what Foucault means by writing a history of by showing connections between archaeology and criticism in these three works. Foucault himself tried to tell his readers, in part, what he had really been doing in his methodological work, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), and I shall make some use of his explanations in this paper. However, The Archaeology of Knowledge did not answer some major questions about Foucault's work; questions that have been raised generally in philosophy of history. The relationship between inquirer's present with which he is examining is placed in foreground by Foucault's archaeological project; I shall attempt to explicate this relationship as well as briefly to distinguish it from other approaches to writing of history.