'Le parole e le cose'

Author: Michel Foucault

Publisher: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli / 1978

Pages: 436

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic.

His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions.

Though often described as a post-structuralist and post-modernist, Foucault ultimately rejected these labels, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity.

The son and grandson of a physician, Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers to a solidly Bourgeois family.

He resisted what he regarded as the provincialism of his upbringing and his native country and his career was marked by frequent sojourns abroad.

A distinguished but sometimes erratic student, Foucault gained entry at the age of 20 to the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1946. There he studied psychology and philosophy, embraced and then abandoned communism, and established a reputation as a sedulous, brilliant and eccentric student.

After graduating in 1952, Foucault began a career marked by constant movement, both professional and intellectual.

He first taught at the University of Lille, then spent five years (1955-1960) as a cultural attaché in Uppsala, Sweden; Warsaw, Poland and Hamburg, Germany.

He defended his doctoral dissertation at the ENS in 1961. Circulated under the title Madness and Unreason: A History of Madness in the Classical Age, it won critical praise but a limited audience.

His other early monographs, written while he taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (1960-1966) had much the same fate.

It was not until the appearance of the book being reviewed today, Les Mots et les Choses (Words and Things) in 1966 that Foucault began to attract wide notice as one of the most original and controversial thinkers of his day. Characteristically, he chose to watch his reputation grow from a distance - at the University of Tunis - and he was still there when student riots erupted in Paris in May 1968.

In 1969 he published The Archaeology of Knowledge. In 1970 he was awarded a chair in the history of systems of thought at the College de France, France's most prestigious postsecondary institution.

Between 1971 and 1984 Foucault wrote several works including a monograph on the emergence of the modern prison, three volumes of a history of Western sexuality and numerous essays.

Foucault continued to travel widely and as his reputation grew he spent extended periods in Brazil, Japan, Italy, Canada and the United States. He became particularly attached to Berkeley California and the San Francisco Bay area.

Foucault died of a septicaemia typical of Aids in 1984, the fourth volume of his history of sexuality still incomplete.

The book being reviewed today begins by an analysis of Diego Velasquez's painting Las Meninas, pointing out the elements of the painting's design and order, noticing what elements are preferred or put into the background - all this leading into a philosophical discussion of order, particularly the order of society.

He argues that the painting is evidence that some extra invisible layer is constructing society that humans don't easily detect. That force seems to be "episteme".

He analyses this metaphysical epistemological currency in three domains - biology, economics and linguistics.

This leads Foucault to the central argument of the book, the existence of a conceptual notion, the episteme, a term he coined for the meme-like currency of epistemological beliefs.

As a currency, beliefs dictate what sort of culture will arise. Will they be great artists? Scientists? Economists?

All these are predetermined, he says, by what things a culture generally takes for granted.

He ends the work with hypothetical examples. He explains the episteme-value of the Renaissance, the classical era and the modern era, showing how the epistemes grew and morphed through time to produce radically different-seeming cultures.