Week 2 Sociology 225: Week Two: Readings
Foucault on Discourse
• Primary historical problems are “discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series,
and transformation’
• The notion of tradition – which means sameness, permanence, and origin
• In order to begin we must replace history as it is structured by these ready made
syntheses with a mere population of dispersed events
• Asserts that categories which are based on history like politics philosophy and
literature are contingent facts of discourse
• Two of the most important categories to dismantle is those of the book and the
oeuvre.
• The book is a false unity because its boundaries are unstandable and permeable –
books are always referencing other books they are caught up in a network of book
• The oeuvre (the totality of texts by a given author) is subject to even greater
instability and complexity. The name of the author is a sign attached to each of the
texts, but it signifies in different ways if the text is his , should others
interpretations of another’s work be considered an oeuvre?
• Avoid the tendency to avoid the ‘irruption of the real event’ by implying or
asserting a vague, fundamental, secret origin that precedes it, and ever receding
point that is never itself present in history’
• Must to look to actual statements as when they occur
• These forms of continuity are not simply to be thrown out as such, but to be
interrogated as effects within 'the totality of all effective statements…in their
dispersion as events.' This field of statementevents is the field of Foucault's
investigation.
• Foucault seeks to 'grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence,' to
account for the reasons why a given statement had to be that precise statement and
no other.
• We will have made atleast three important steps: (1) we will have advanced the
understanding of what a statement is, showing how it is linked to writing and
speech, to its own repetitions and transformations in future statements, and to a
wide range of other st
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