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Human Nature, History, and Structure: Foucault’s Challenge to Chomsky Through Saussure

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Introduction The 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault stages a fundamental confrontation about human nature, political critique, and the grounds of emancipation. Chomsky defends the need for a concept of human essence to orient moral judgment and guide social transformation. Foucault, by contrast, warns that such a move risks projecting historically specific norms under the guise of universality. This disagreement is not merely ideological; it reflects a deeper methodological divide concerning whether “the human” precedes social and historical formations or is produced within them. When read alongside Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics—and his rejection of a panchronic perspective—Foucault’s challenge appears less ad hoc than structurally grounded in a broader theoretical logic. Saussure’s theory of language helps clarify why Foucault is suspicious of transhistorical claims about human nature and why Chomsky’s searc...
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Concept or Condition? Human Nature and the Politics of Foundations in the Chomsky–Foucault Debate

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Freedom Without Foundations. Expressionism (AI Image) Introduction Political disagreements often appear to revolve around competing visions of justice, authority, or social organization. Yet some disputes unfold at a deeper level, before programs or principles enter the scene. The 1971 conversation between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault offers such a case. What emerges over the course of their exchange is not merely a conflict between libertarian socialism and genealogical critique, but a more fundamental divergence concerning the status of the concepts through which political thought becomes possible. At stake is a prior question: must political reflection begin with an account of what human beings are, or should it instead examine the historical conditions that make such accounts intelligible? The debate reveals less a disagreement about society than a tension regarding whether politics requires foundations at all. The Search for Ground Chomsky’s interventions display a pe...
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“What Is a Woman?”—From Inherited Sign to Legal Operator

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Introduction: When Inherited Meaning Is No Longer Enough The question “What is a woman?” rarely causes difficulty in ordinary language. Speakers acquire the term early, use it fluently, and navigate its meaning without conscious reflection. In everyday contexts, it functions smoothly, without hesitation or demand for explicit definition. Yet in academic, legal, or political settings, the same question often produces silence, deferral, or visible unease. This contrast does not indicate ignorance or breakdown in understanding. Rather, it signals a shift in the semiotic conditions under which the question operates. The problem lies not in the word itself, but in the system that requires it to perform a different function. Language as an Inherited System Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language provides a critical starting point. For Saussure, language is not a tool invented or modified at will by individual speakers, but a social institution transmitted across generations. ...
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Clarity as a Revolutionary Gesture: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Exhaustion of Poststructuralism

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Mucha’s Lyrical Ballads . AI-generated image Introduction For much of the twentieth century, suspicion toward language was not only legitimate but necessary. Structuralism, and later poststructuralism, made it unmistakably clear that meaning is not immediate, that it does not rest on a transcendental foundation, and that every act of expression is entangled with history, power, and difference. Yet when a critique outlives its historical urgency, it risks hardening into style, and eventually into habit. At that point, what began as a dismantling of illusion can congeal into rhetoric. This article advances a simple but, in the current intellectual climate, somewhat uncomfortable thesis: after decades of sustained critique of meaning, clarity has become a genuinely contemporary, and indeed provocative, modern gesture. Far from being naïve or regressive, clarity understood as responsible legibility can be fruitfully compared to the reaction articulated by Wordsworth and Coleridge aga...
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Reason at the Limit: A Lesson in Deconstructive Reading

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Roy´s  Derrida  &  Foucault. AI image Introduction: Beyond a Philosophical Dispute Jacques Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963) is often remembered primarily as a polemical intervention in Michel Foucault’s History of Madness . Read in that way, the essay appears to revolve around a disagreement concerning Descartes, historical method, and the possibility of giving voice to madness. Yet such a framing risks obscuring what is philosophically most instructive in Derrida’s text. Rather than functioning merely as a rebuttal, Cogito and the History of Madness operates as a demonstration of deconstructive reading itself. Derrida shows how a foundational philosophical opposition— reason versus madness —depends on language, unsettles its own hierarchy, and ultimately reveals that reason can only constitute itself by passing through what it seeks to exclude. The essay is less concerned with adjudicating historical claims than with exposing how a conceptu...
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Grids, Supports, and the Conditions of Intelligibility

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A Tale of Grids and Supports , in the Style of Rauschenberg (AI-Generated Image) Introduction: Thinking Through Metaphors How should creativity and truth be explained? Do they arise from the insight of individual subjects, or do they depend on impersonal conditions that precede and exceed those subjects? Rather than treating knowledge as the achievement of exceptional minds, much twentieth-century theory turned its attention toward the frameworks that make thought possible in the first place. This article does not propose a synthesis of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, it examines, instead, a shared methodological gesture: both thinkers rely on tangible or schematic figures—such as grids, wooden forms, frames, canvases, subjectiles—to render non-subjective conditions of thought graspable. This gesture belongs to a long philosophical tradition. Plato resorted to the divided line, Kant to schemata that mediate concept and intuition, Freud to the mystic writing-pad. In each case, ...
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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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