Introduction
As if we were afraid to conceive the Other in the time of our thought. By recognition I mean the relationship of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it.
The Discursive Regularities
The Unities of Discourse
But the unities that must be suspended above all are those that appear in the most immediate way: those of the book and the work. And this network of references is not the same in the case of a mathematical treatise, a textual one.
Discursive Formations
These two possibilities included in the economic theory and in the rules of its set of concepts, resulted, on the basis of the same elements, in two different options. Shouldn't more be sought in the distribution of choice points that discourse leaves free?
The Formation of Objects
The relationship between family, sexual and criminal norms of the behavior of individuals and a table of pathological symptoms and diseases of which they are signs. In the descriptions for which I have tried to provide a theory, there can be no question of interpreting the discourse with the aim of writing the history of the referent.
The Formation of Enunciative Modalities
Noting the disparity of pronunciation types in clinical discourse, I have not tried. Earlier I showed that it was neither with 'words' nor with 'things' that the proper arrangement of objects for a discursive7.
The Formation of Concepts
Take, for example, the case of Natural History in the Classical period: it does not use the same concepts as in the sixteenth century; certain of the older concepts (genus, species, signs) are used in different ways; new concepts (such as that of structure) appear; and others (such as that of organism) are formed later. The most one can do is to make a systematic comparison from one region to another of the rules for the formation of concepts: it is in this way that I have tried to identify the identities and differences shared by these groups. of rules in the General Grammar, the Natural History and the Analysis of Wealth of the Classical period.
The Formation of Strategies
Thus, the Analysis of Wealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is characterized by the system that could form both Colbert's mercantilism and Cantillon's "neo-mercantilism"; All these groups of discourses to be described are not the expression of a worldview made up in the form of words, nor are they hypocritical.
Remarks and Consequences
But for the moment I have to answer a question that is primary in relation to these later analyzes and final in relation to the earlier ones: on the question of the discursive formations I have tried to define, can one really speak of unity. It is not the theoretical choice that governs the formation of the concept; but the choice has produced the concept through the mediation of the specific rules for the formation of concepts and through the totality of the relations it maintains with this level. First at the level of elements that relate to each other: these can actually be subjected to a number.
Moreover, these relations cannot be the fabric of the text itself - they are by nature not alien to the discourse.
The Statement and the Archive
Defining the Statement
So this is the task I now face: to take the definition of a statement at its very root. Therefore, it seems that the statement could not be defined by the grammatical features of the sentence. In all three cases, it is found that the proposed criteria are too numerous and too difficult, that they limit the scope of the declaration and that although the declaration.
This is not the place to answer the general question of the statement, but the problem can be clarified: the statement is not the same kind of unit as the sentence, the.
The Enunciative Function
In fact, we should not reduce the subject of the statement to the first person. It is easy to see that this relation is not the same in a statement of the type "Night is falling" and. It is one of the proper characteristics for the pronunciation function and enables its description.
It is constitutive of the statement itself: a statement must have a substance, a support, a place and a date.
The Description of Statements
It has this almost invisibility of 'having', which is hidden in the very thing about which it can be said: 'there is this or that thing'. The last reason for this almost invisible statement: it is implied, but never made clear, in all other analyzes of the language. In short, if I have been able to show that they are indeed the proper dimensions of assertion that are at work in the mapping of discursive formations.
And if discursive formations are free in relation to large rhetorical units of a text or book, if they are not.
Rarity, Exteriority, Accumulation
Another characteristic feature: the analysis of propositions treats them in the systematic form of externality. Statements should no longer be situated in relation to a sovereign subjectivity, but in the different forms of the speaking subjectivity effects specific to the enunciative field should be recognized. This analysis assumes that propositions are considered in the remanence (remanence) which is proper to them, and which is not that of an always realizable reference back to the previous event of the formulation.
This analysis also assumes that propositions are treated in the form of additivity that is peculiar to them.
The Historical A Priori and the Archive
The archive is not one that preserves the event despite its immediate escape. Nor is the archive that collects the dust of statements that have become inert again and that can enable the miracle of their resurrection; it is what defines the way the statement-thing appears; is the system of its operation. Describing the archive expands its possibilities (and the mastery of its possibilities) on the basis of precisely those discourses that are just no longer ours; its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say and from what is outside our discursive practice; it begins with the exterior of one's own language (langage); its locus is the gap between our own discursive practices.
The right of the word - which is not that of the philologists - therefore allows the use of the term.
Archaeological Description
Archaeology and the History of Ideas
Not the history of science, but the history of incomplete, ill-founded knowledge, which could never in its long, persistent life attain the form of scientificity (the history of alchemy instead of chemistry, of animal spirits or phrenology instead of physiology, the history of atomistic subjects instead of physics). It is clear how these two roles of the history of ideas articulate with each other. Genesis, continuity, totalization: these are the great themes of the history of ideas and what attaches it to a certain, now traditional, form of historical analysis.
It is not a return to the deepest mystery of origin; is a systematic description of the discourse object.
The Original and the Regular
Is Saus probably 'preceded' by Peirce and his semiotics, by Arnauld and Lancelot with the Classical analysis of the sign, and by the Stoics and the theory of the 'signifier', in the same series and in accordance with the same manner of . Maillet and Darwin, the same formulation of the principle of evolution, one cannot take into account that in each case one is dealing with the same discursive event, which has been subjected to a series of repetitions at different times. And, conversely, one could say that the word 'organization' has the same meaning in the work of Daubenton, Blumenbach and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
A practice that is in effect in the same way in the work of their predecessors; a practice that in their work not only takes into account the most original confirmations (those that no one else dreamed of before them), but also those that they borrowed from their predecessors, even copied.
Contradictions
In any case, it is important not to confuse these different orders, not to seek in an 'initial' discovery or in the originality of a formulation the principle from which everything can be deduced and deduced; not to seek in a general principle the law of proclamation. Some contradictions are located only at the level of propositions and assertions, without affecting at all the body of declarative rules that make them possible: thus in the eighteenth century the thesis of the animal character of fossils was contradicted by their more traditional thesis. mineral nature; the consequences that can be drawn from these two theses are. In any case, it is not enough to look for the cause of any of them in them.
Some of them bring an additional evolution of the declaration field: they open strings.
The Comparative Facts
When comparing General Grammar, the Analysis of Wealth, and Natural History in the Classical period, it is not in order to regroup the three. History as it was practiced at the time, with biblical criticism, with rhetoric, with the theory of the fine arts. If archeology brings medical discourse closer to a number of practices, it is to discover far less 'immediate' connections than expression, but far more direct connections than that of a causality communicated through the consciousness of the speaking subjects.
If, in this analysis, archeology suspends the theme of expression and reflection, if it refuses to see in discourse the surface of the symbolic projection of events or processes located elsewhere, it is not to rediscover causality.
Change and Transformations
He does not challenge, for example, the relationship between wealth analysis and large monetary fluctuations. In fact, it is paradoxical only in relation to the practice of historians of ideas. And to those who might be tempted to criticize archeology because it deals primarily with analysis.
Natural History, General Grammar, and Analysis of Wealth were composed in a similar manner, and all three in the seventeenth century.
Science and Knowledge
Similarly, scientific discourse (or scientific pretense) does not fulfill the same function in the economic knowledge of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But the analysis of this effect must be done at the level of positivity and of the relations between the rules of formation and the structures of scientificity. In the conundrum of scientific discourse, what calls into question the analysis of the episteme is not its right to be a science, but the fact that it exists.
It is also possible to question the science, or at least the opinions of the period, and try to recognize the extent to which it appears in the painter's work.
Conclusion
But it was not intended to extend, beyond the domain of the language (language), concepts and methods tested in it. For it is now - and we are determined never to abandon it - that we will now raise the question of the origin, the first constitution, the teleological horizon, temporal continuity. Have you not deprived individuals of the right to personally intervene in the positives in which their discourses are situated.
He could perhaps better if you had a clearer consciousness of the conditions under which you speak, and a greater confidence in the real action of men and in their possibilities.
