Das condições de possibilidade da teoria discursiva de Michel Foucault: uma investigação em três etapas

Abstract

The present study investigates a set of three debates which took place in the broad domain of social sciences throughout the 20th century and without which, it is believed, the text The Archeology of Knowledge by the philosopher M. Foucault would not have come to reality in the way we know and study it today. To fulfill its objective, this work also establishes the following supplementary goals: (i) to examine the features of sociological rationality which were incorporated by French historians in the beginning of the 20th century, as a result of an important debate established between history and sociology which brought into discussion the research premises used in the historical analysis; (ii) to analyze the degree and way of use in Foucault's discursive theory of the structural analysis method as Lévi-Strauss imagined it for the work of ethnological science in the middle of the last century, considering also the effects which the notion of structure recommended by him ended up producing in the way historians thought about social duration; (iii) to study the transformations undergone by the concept of matter in the field of social sciences, going back, in this case and exceptionally, to Marx in the 19th century, to finally indicate the conditions under which this principle could be recovered in the foucauldian texts which address the notion of discourse. The methodological approach used in the investigation considers the presence of foundational texts which, it is supposed, served as a condition of possibility for the production of the text The Archeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault. As a result of its second place in relation to certain previous texts, it is assumed Foucault's work owes an important part of its constitution to the dialogue it maintains with the texts it recovers. It can thus be said that the previous texts, which can also be considered as intertexts, given their primary position in the intertextual space, serve as a condition of possibility for the later texts which comment on them. For this reason, it seems convenient to adjust the aforementioned condition of possibility, reducing its scope to what could be more strictly indicated as a textual condition of possibility – a category which was used in the present study to support the work of analysis. As a result, the comparison between the related texts indicates the presence of important traces of sociological reasoning in the approach adopted by the Archeology towards discursive phenomenon, as well as in its work of historical analysis, besides a certain displacement of structural reasoning for thinking about a system of formation which serves as a condition of existence for the statements.