What Makes an Object Intelligible? Saussure, Foucault, and the Archaeological Gesture
« On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. » “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince Introduction: The Immediately Given Is Not Yet the Intelligible Object What makes an object intelligible? The question may seem to come too late. Objects appear to be there before we begin to know them: things can be observed, named, classified, compared, and described. Yet the history of knowledge suggests that this apparent immediacy is deceptive. What counts as an object, which things can be grouped together, what differences matter, and what relations can be established between them depend upon conditions that are rarely visible at the moment they are being used. The object presented to knowledge is therefore not necessarily the same as the object that knowledge makes possible. This problem appears in very different forms in Ferdinand de Saussure and Michel ...