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The Glove and the Text: Foucault, Derrida, and the Problem of the Outside

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il n'y a pas de hors-texte. AI image   Part I — The Glove and the Problem of Exteriority 1. The Glove In a 1966 interview about The Order of Things , Michel Foucault describes the position from which he approaches his own culture in an unusual way. He wants to look at it as an ethnologist might look at a foreign culture: to make familiar forms of thought appear strange, and to investigate the rules that organize them without simply taking those rules for granted. But this immediately creates a problem. The ethnologist can imagine herself as an observer of another culture. Foucault cannot occupy the same position with respect to his own culture. He is investigating the very field that makes his investigation possible. The categories, distinctions, and forms of intelligibility through which he approaches his object belong to the historical formation he is trying to understand. This is where the image of the glove becomes significant. Foucault suggests that thought would have ...
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The Glove Turned Inside Out: Foucault, Ethnology, and the Problem of Reflexivity

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The Logic of the Glove. AI image   Part I — Foucault and the Ethnology of Our Own Culture 1. The Idea of an Ethnology of Our Own Culture In a 1966 television interview about Les Mots et les choses , Michel Foucault described his project in an unexpectedly anthropological way. He said that he wanted to consider our own culture as an ethnologist might consider a foreign one: as something strange, unfamiliar, and in need of interpretation. The remark is striking because the object of investigation is not a distant society but the very culture within which the investigation takes place. This does not mean simply applying anthropology to our customs, institutions, or social practices. What Foucault wants to estrange is more fundamental: the ways in which we organize knowledge, the categories through which we distinguish things, the principles by which we classify them, and the forms that make certain objects available to thought at all. The ethnological gesture provides the distan...
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Matrix, Act, Circulation: Foucault and the Problem of the Individual

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Part I — Foucault: From Man to System In June 1966, shortly after the publication of Les Mots et les choses , Michel Foucault was interviewed by Pierre Dumayet for the French television programme Lectures pour tous . The interview is valuable not simply because Foucault explains the argument of his recently published book, but because he states with unusual directness what is at stake in his approach. The question is not what human beings are in themselves, nor how an already constituted subject comes to know the world. It is how the figure of the human being itself became historically available as an object of knowledge. Foucault begins by challenging the assumption that the human sciences uncover a pre-existing human reality. Their development, he argues, has not brought us closer to some positive, concrete essence of the human. Rather, it has revealed the historical systems within which particular forms of human individuality become possible: “L’Homme a été […] une figure très...
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