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Creativity Without a Subject: Foucault’s Grid of Intelligibility

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La Grille , Roy’s Foucault. AI image Introduction How should creativity and truth be explained? Do they originate in the capacities of individual subjects, or do they emerge from historically specific conditions that render certain forms of thought possible while excluding others? These questions come into sharp focus in the 1971 exchange between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, though they extend well beyond the circumstances of that encounter. They also run throughout Foucault’s broader work, including his inaugural lecture, The Order of Discourse . One of Foucault’s most distinctive responses to this problem takes the form of what he calls la grille d’intelligibilité —a grid of intelligibility through which knowledge becomes thinkable and articulable. The Subject and the Myth of Discovery Traditional histories of knowledge tend to organize intellectual change around exceptional individuals. Discoveries are attributed to inventors, theories to authors, and breakthroughs to mom...
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Creativity, Truth, and Their Conditions: Chomsky, Foucault, and the Grid of Discourse

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Introduction: Where Does Creativity Come From? In 1971, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault took part in a public debate at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Moderated by the philosopher Fons Elders, the discussion focused on fundamental philosophical questions: how should creativity and truth be explained? Are they grounded in the capacities of individual subjects, or do they emerge from historically specific systems that precede and shape those subjects? These questions are not only at the heart of the debate itself, but also central to Foucault’s inaugural lecture, The Order of Discourse . Read together, these texts reveal two opposing strategies for accounting for novelty: Chomsky’s restoration of the speaking subject and Foucault’s displacement of the knowing subject in favor of what may be called a " grid of intelligibility. " Chomsky: Creativity and the Speaking Subject Chomsky’s intervention in linguistics responds to a specific theore...
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What Can Be Said: Foucault and the Silent Architecture of Discourse

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Aim and thesis The article will argue that, in L’ordre du discours , Foucault does not merely describe censorship or repression but uncovers a prior and more decisive level of control: the set of procedures that determine what can enter discourse at all. These mechanisms operate across institutions, disciplines, and cultural practices, and remain highly operative in contemporary society. Introduction: The Illusion of Free Speech Modern societies often present themselves as arenas of open debate, where ideas circulate freely and disagreement is resolved through argument rather than exclusion. Speech appears, at least in principle, unrestricted. Against this reassuring image, Michel Foucault advances a far more unsettling claim. In his 1970 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, later published as L’ordre du discours ( The Order of Discourse ), he insists that discourse is never simply free. Long before ideas are exchanged or contested, societies establish procedures that det...
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Creativity Without Essence: Chomsky, Foucault, and the Constitution of the Object

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Introduction The 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault is often recalled as a confrontation between two incompatible views of human nature. One of the most persistent points of tension concerns the notion of creativity . Chomsky insists on creativity as a defining feature of language and of the human mind, whereas Foucault appears reluctant to grant it a central explanatory role in the history of knowledge. At first sight, this contrast suggests a substantive disagreement about what creativity is. A closer examination, however, indicates that the divergence runs deeper: it concerns not a shared object viewed from different angles, but the constitution of different objects under the same term. Ferdinand de Saussure’s methodological reflections provide a precise framework for understanding how this divergence arises and why it resists resolution. Saussure and the Non-Givenness of the Object In the Course in General Linguistics , Saussure invites the reader to conside...
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From Author to Scriptor: Education After the End of Scarcity

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AI image Introduction: A Moral Drama and a Misdiagnosis The current debate around artificial intelligence in education often unfolds as a moral drama. Students who use AI are accused of bypassing effort, outsourcing thought, or hollowing out learning itself. Universities respond by tightening rules, redesigning exams, or banning tools outright. Beneath these reactions lies a deeper problem: intelligence is still being measured according to a model shaped by scarcity, even though students now operate within an environment defined by informational excess. For centuries, education developed around limited access to texts and slow circulation of knowledge. Mastery meant internalization. Writing an essay demonstrated that information had been absorbed, retained, and reproduced by an autonomous mind. This model assumed a Cartesian subject: bounded, self-sufficient, and fully present to itself. Under those conditions, authorship functioned as proof of understanding. The End of the Scarc...
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From Inherited Meaning to Legal Category: Language and Law

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SCOTUS. AI image Introduction Recent debates before the United States Supreme Court concerning sex-segregated sports have revived a question that appears, at first glance, almost self-evident: what is a woman? The persistence of this question, however, suggests that the difficulty does not arise from everyday language suddenly failing to function. Speakers of English continue to use the term without hesitation in ordinary contexts. The problem emerges instead when an inherited word from natural language is transferred into a legal system that depends on explicit, operational categories in order to adjudicate rights and obligations. This article approaches the controversy not from a legal or ethical standpoint, but from a linguistic and semiotic one. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language as an inherited social institution, together with Roland Barthes’s distinction between first-order and second-order semiotic systems, it argues that the current impasse reflects ...
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