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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...

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...

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, ...

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...

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...

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...

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...