Källa: Dester islands and other texts

Now we see how this book continues Foucault’s reflections on madness, in the transformation of the concept of madness from the Classical Age to Modernity. Above all, it is crystal clear that Foucault’s three major works—Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, The birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences—form a chain in a radically new project for philosophy as well as the history of sciences. Foucault himself describes his method as archeological. What should be understood by archeology is a study of the “substratum,” the “ground” on which thought operates, and into which it reaches to form its concepts. What Foucault shows us is the very different strata in this ground, even the mutations, the  topographical upheavals, the organization of new spaces: for example, the mutation that makes the classic image of thought possible, or the one which prepares the modern image of thought. To be sure, one can assign sociological or even psychological causes to this “history”; but in reality the causalities at work already unfold in spaces that presuppose an image of thought. We must try to imagine events of pure thought, radical or transcendental events that determine a space of knowledge for any one era.

Instead of an historical study of opinions (a point of view that still governs the traditional conception of the history of philosophy), we find a synchronic study of knowledge and its conditions: not conditions that make knowledge possible in general, but those that make it real and determine it at any one moment.