History and Theory, Theme Issue 54 (December 2016), 66-81 © Wesleyan University 2016 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10829

The Sixth Annual History and Theory Lecture

THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WHAT?

VINCENT DESCOMBES

ABSTRACT

Foucault’s Les mots et les choses has been translated as The Order of Things. The title
of the book, both in French and in English, would remain enigmatic without the subtitle:
An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. But which disciplines are the human sciences to
be accounted for by the archaeologist? To this question, there seem to be three possible
answers. According to Foucault, such sciences as biology, political economy, and linguis-
tics are indeed scientific disciplines that study human beings, but they are not human sci-
ences. On the other hand, psychology and sociology do count as human sciences, although
they are not really genuine sciences. As to structural disciplines (Lacanian psychoanalysis,
Lévi-Straussian anthropology, structural linguistics), Foucault does not see them as suc-
cessful human sciences, since he calls them “counter-human sciences.” In other words, the
situation of the human sciences seems to be messy from the point of view of a philosopher
defending the possibility of radical reflection against psychologism and more generally
anthropologism.
Foucault rejects Merleau-Ponty’s claim to have found a way out of anthropologism
through the so-called phenomenological reduction. One can read Foucault’s archaeology
of the human sciences as an attempt to offer an alternative way for radical thinking. His
archaeology turns out to be an archaeology of ourselves insofar as it applies to archaeolo-
gists themselves, whatever knowledge they have gained of their object, the discontinuous
“systems of thought” succeeding one another in history.
The success of such an archaeology of ourselves will rest on the interpretation of what
Foucault has rightly called the “return of language” at the center of our intellectual con-
cerns.

Keywords: Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, structuralism, poststructuralism, human sciences,

linguistic turn

WAS FOUCAULT A STRUCTURALIST PHILOSOPHER?

I will begin with a remark about the reception of Michel Foucault in the United
States. In the Preface to their book on Foucault,1 Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow
explain that they undertook to write their essay together because they had a discus-
sion on the question whether Foucault had or had not been a structuralist author
at the time he wrote Les mots et les choses, 2 translated as The Order of Things.3
1. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneu-
tics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
2. M. Foucault, Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard,
1966), hereafter “MC.”
3. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, transl. Alan Sheri-
dan (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973).
 THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WHAT? 67
If you had asked a French intellectual at that time, he would have answered
without hesitation that Foucault was not only a major authority on the structural-
ist avant-garde in philosophy, but that he had written Les mots et les choses to
explain how the philosophy of structure had displaced the dominant philosophy
of consciousness. Actually, Georges Canguilhem, in a influential and penetrating
review of the book,4 made clear that, according to him, Foucault was putting for-
ward both a philosophy of structural analysis (as practiced above all by Georges
Dumézil) and a successful alternative to Sartre’s philosophy of the cogito. That
was a momentous statement at the time, especially if you think that Sartre and
Canguilhem belong to the same generation of normaliens.
On that particular point, I entirely agree with Dreyfus and Rabinow. Indeed,
although Les mots et les choses was received in Paris as a kind of structuralist
manifesto, and although Foucault did nothing at the time to correct that general
perception, it is true that the book did not come up with a philosophy of struc-
turalism, much less a structuralist philosophy. As to Canguilhem, although he
was setting up in his review a dramatic confrontation between the decline of the
cogito and the rise of structural disciplines, he did not say what a philosophy of
structural analysis would look like.
Foucault’s position in the Order of Things is best described as already post-
structuralist. I will try to substantiate this qualification in what follows. But it is
important to keep in mind that the label “poststructuralist” is an American inven-
tion that was devised precisely to capture a family resemblance between various
French philosophers and writers who could not be said to practice any kind of
structural analysis, but who nevertheless were drawing ideas and perspectives
from the structural disciplines.

ARCHAEOLOGY

In his review, Canguilhem wrote that most people had missed the point of the
book. They had not paid enough attention to the subtitle: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. This subtitle is made of two slippery terms: “archaeology” and
“human sciences.”
As to “archaeology,” Canguilhem pointed out that many reviewers had read
that word as if it said the same as “geology,” a matter of digging into the ground
rather than trying to make sense of the past. Archaeology, writes Canguilhem, is
not geology: it is not a natural science of sediments, rather it is a historical science
of monuments. In other words, an archaeology is a kind of historiography in which
you have to pay attention to the discontinuities between cultural formations. The
point of an archaeology is to assign a cultural item—a building, a statue, a piece
of furniture, a spoon, and so on—to the age to which it belongs, which is a task
that requires working out a periodization of the past. So Foucault was doing
archaeology insofar as he was trying to divide the past into distinct periods, each
of them having its own intellectual order. As to these orders, Canguilhem quietly
dropped the misleading Greek term “episteme” that Foucault had been using and
4. G. Canguilhem, “Mort de l’homme ou épuisement du Cogito?,” Critique, no. 242 (July 1967),
599-618.
68 VINCENT DESCOMBES

renamed them “systems of thought.”5 So the project of an “archaeology” can be

spelled out as the program of offering a discontinuist account of various intel-
lectual schemes that have shaped ideas in the West—above all in France—since
the Renaissance.

THE HUMAN SCIENCES

The most difficult term in the subtitle is “the human sciences.” Foucault
announces an archaeology of the human sciences, but what will count as a human
science in his book? This is far from clear. First, we need to remind ourselves
of the meaning of the term “human science” in a French context. “Human sci-
ences” cannot be translated in English as “the humanities.” And they are not
exactly Geisteswissenschaften either, that is to say, they are not our good old
“moral sciences” in the sense of the Ideologues, or in the sense of John Stuart
Mill and Wilhelm Dilthey. Disciplines called in French sciences humaines in the
1960s had to be defined in terms of their complex relation to philosophy. As we
know, Foucault began his academic carrier by teaching psychology, which was
also the case with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Until 1968, the first degree in phi-
losophy—called licence de philosophie—consisted of four components: the most
prestigious one, “history of philosophy,” then “general philosophy6 and logic,”
“moral philosophy and sociology,” “general psychology.” So any French student
in philosophy before 1968 would have been acquainted, if only in an introductory
way, with the two disciplines of psychology and sociology.7
The French academic world underwent an important mutation in the years
after 1945, another one after 1958, and still another one after 1968. Before 1958,
a French Faculté des Lettres was organized around three major disciplines:
literature (mainly ancient), philosophy, and history. In the great transformation
of 1958, on the occasion of the shift from the IVth Republic to the Vth, the old
Facultés des Lettres became Facultés des Lettres et Sciences Humaines. Already
in 1946, a distinct licence de psychologie had been created. As to sociology, it
was only in 1958 that an independent curriculum was established. So, from an
academic point of view, the rise of the human sciences amounted to the fact that
philosophy as a discipline was losing ground against younger, promising new
challengers, namely psychology and sociology.
Then, in an academic classification, the human sciences as an object of archae-
ology are made up of just psychology and sociology with the possible addition of
history, provided it is worked out in the style of the Annales school, which means
precisely the taking into account of sociological elements such as mentalités and
long-term economic cycles.
But we get quite a different picture if we look at the human sciences not from
the academic point of view of the Sorbonne, but from the perspective of the literary

5. Ibid., 604. Jules Vuillemin would do the same when defending Foucault’s candidacy at the
Collège de France.
6. “General philosophy” was just a deflationary name for metaphysics.
7. However, political economy was never part of the picture, since it was taught in the Faculté de
Droit, not in the Faculté des Lettres.
 THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WHAT? 69
and publishing world—that is to say, in the case of Les mots et les choses, from the
point of view of its editor at the publishing house Gallimard, namely the historian
Pierre Nora.
Foucault’s book was first published in a new series called Bibliothèque des
sciences humaines (“A Library of Human Sciences”), inaugurated in 1966, the
editor of which was Pierre Nora. As one could learn from an advertisement at
the end of the book, three titles were already available in the series. Two were
translations of anthropological studies (one by Ernesto de Martino, the other by
Elias Canetti). The third was an important collection of papers by the linguist
Émile Benveniste published under the title Problèmes de linguistique générale.
In addition to these three titles, two more books were announced, both by the
anthropologist Geneviève Calame-Griaule.
On the back of the jacket of Les mots et les choses—what we call in French le
quatrième de couverture—was a brief statement of purpose for the whole series.
It said that we were experiencing a rise of “the sciences of man” both in “our
culture” and “our life.” Therefore, a place was needed where the disciplines of
the human sciences could meet. These human sciences were listed in this order:
linguistics, political economy, ethnology, psychology, sociology, history.
As we can see from Nora’s presentation, the editorial classification of the
human sciences at the end of the 1960s does not coincide with the academic
one. It is much larger and more comprehensive. Nora’s presentation of the series
went on, saying that these rising sciences of man were undergoing a “full revolu-
tion” and that this was the main motivation for gathering together these differ-
ent contributions to a renewal of “our image of human beings” (notre image de
l’humanité). You might have thought that disciplines renewing our “image of
man” would find their meeting point in philosophy. But this was precisely the
main message of Nora’s advertising: the discipline of philosophy is not even
mentioned among the disciplines dealing with our “image of human beings.”
How did Foucault’s book fit into the projected series? It seems clear that Fou-
cault could have agreed with the idea that the sciences of man were undergoing
at that time a deep change or even a “revolution,” but that he would not have
celebrated their role as renewing our self-understanding. He might even have
diagnosed in such praise of the human sciences an effect of what he has called
our “anthropological sleep.”
Somehow, Les mots et les choses is a book that questions the rationale of
publishing a series called Bibliothèque des sciences humaines. But it does not
question it in the usual way that a mainstream philosopher would have questioned
it, by dismissing the cognitive claims of the newcomers and trying to regain a
central position for pure philosophy. What Foucault did in order to confront the
human sciences was, to put it in terms used by General de Gaulle in the title of
one of his books, to try to take advantage of la discorde chez l’ennemi, in other
words, to stress the intrinsic disunity of the rising disciplines.
What was Foucault’s own classification of the disciplines within the field of
“moral sciences”? Foucault considers successively three kinds of disciplines.
First, he mentions in chapter 8 three disciplines dealing with human beings; they
70 VINCENT DESCOMBES

are, in this order: political economy, biology,8 historical linguistics (or philol-
ogy). According to him, these are genuine sciences, even if they do not belong
to the elite group of “deductive sciences” (mathematics, physics). They are what
we could call special natural sciences, since their aim is to come up with natural
laws: laws of life, laws of material production, laws of linguistic change.
So biology, political economy, and philology are, in his view, positive sci-
ences. But are they, properly speaking, human sciences? Foucault thinks they are
not, since they do not provide any answer to the fourth Kantian question: Was
ist der Mensch? (“What are human beings?”). It is not that they try to find an
answer and fail—as will be the case with psychology. Rather, they don’t even try
to answer the question since they do not claim to be reflective.
In order to get a list of the human sciences, we should turn to chapter 10.
But what we find there is disturbing, since we find not just one inventory of the
human sciences, but two. The first list includes the two disciplines that have
emancipated themselves from philosophy, namely psychology and sociology,
plus the venerable discipline of historiography. As to psychology and sociology,
Foucault has not much to say about their content. He does not disguise the fact
that he finds them rather boring and unpromising.
But later in the same chapter, Foucault offers another list, including once
again two disciplines plus one, namely psychoanalysis, ethnology, plus linguis-
tics. More precisely: Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis, Lévi-Straussian social
anthropology, structural linguistics. This is where Foucault comes to terms with
structuralism. As we know from Dreyfus and Rabinow’s account of a personal
conversation with Foucault, the subtitle of the book could or even should have
been: An Archaeology of Structuralism.9 With such a subtitle, the book would
have been presented to the public as aiming to discover the historical conditions
that made it possible for structural theories of the unconscious—or maybe theo-
ries of the “structural unconscious mind”—to emerge and challenge dominant
humanistic philosophy.
The three disciplines of ethnology, psychoanalysis, and linguistics were obvi-
ously at the very center of Nora’s project in creating a Bibliothèque des sciences
humaines, although he did not publish any book dealing with psychoanalysis.10
But Foucault does not count them as “sciences of man”; on the contrary, his name
for them is “counter-human sciences.” This is certainly an unlikely label, which
nobody has picked up since Foucault invented it.
In fact, although structural disciplines are called “structural” by reference to
their use of structural analysis, Foucault did think they had more in common than
a methodology. His reason for classifying them as “counter-human sciences” is
their common opposition to the program of a general “anthropology” under the
authority and hegemony of a “philosophy of consciousness.” This was, of course,
Canguilhem’s point in his review in Critique.

8. François Jacob published his important book La logique du vivant in Nora’s series in 1970.
9. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, xi and 17.
10. The reason might have been that there was already a distinct series for psychoanalysis at Gal-
limard, also created in 1966, with J-B. Pontalis as its editor, under the general title Connaissance de
l’inconscient.
 THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WHAT? 71
Let’s recapitulate. According to Foucault, an archaeological inquiry into the
emergence of such disciplines as biology, political economy, and linguistics
shows that it would be anachronistic to situate them before the modern age. But
they don’t count as human sciences. However, psychology and sociology do
count as human sciences, although they are not really genuine sciences. Now,
why not say with Nora that they acquire a higher epistemological status with the
alleged success of the linguistic structural paradigm in all fields of knowledge
about man? This is where we must come to the philosophical point of Foucault’s
whole book, namely: how does a criticism of the prevailing “philosophy of the
cogito” follow from the discontinuist account of the “human sciences”? More
generally, what is the philosophical problem with the program of the human sci-
ences, when it is understood as an attempt to address Kant’s question “Was ist der
Mensch?” by means of an empirical investigation of human behavior?
Foucault’s philosophical strategy in chapter 10 is indeed a complex one. In
fact, Foucault is conducting two discussions at the same time. On the one hand,
he is following Merleau-Ponty’s lead in addressing the philosophical problem of
what to expect from a science of man. In order to see what Foucault is talking
about in his book, we should read it as a reaction to Merleau-Ponty’s influential
lectures given at the Sorbonne in 1952–53, and published under the title “Sci-
ences of Man and Phenomenology.”11
On the other hand, Foucault is trying to assess the philosophical import of the
structuralist movement in the human sciences: is it the apotheosis of the general
program of a science of man in terms of scientific respectability? Or is it an indi-
cation that we are no longer thinking within the modern system of thought, that is
to say the system in which the proper object of a thinker is no longer the objective
order of things, as was the case with classical thinking, but in which that object is
the special situation of man in the world, both object and subject of knowledge?
So one can say that Foucault is fighting on two fronts. Let’s look first at his
response to Merleau-Ponty’s picture of the relation between the human sciences
and philosophy, then at his account of structuralism.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION AS RADICAL REFLECTION

Merleau-Ponty’s goal in his lectures at the Sorbonne was to put forward a phi-
losophy of the human sciences, dealing above all with psychology and history,
but also taking into account sociology and linguistics. He begins his lectures by
setting the stage for a presentation of phenomenology as the right answer to the
predicament in which philosophy and Geisteswissenschaften found themselves
at the end of the nineteenth century. According to his narrative, the rise of the
human sciences at that time was the source of a general crisis: not just a crisis
of philosophy, but also a crisis of these human sciences themselves and more
generally a crisis of what Husserl used to call “the European sciences,” in other
words, a crisis of the very idea of science and rationality. The reason for this is

11. M. Merleau-Ponty, “Les sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie” (mimeograph, Paris:

Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1953, 1962), reprinted in M. Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux
1951–1961 (Lagrasse: Éditions Verdier, 2000), 49-128.
72 VINCENT DESCOMBES

that the psychological perspective on human beings as thinking subjects gives

birth to psychologism. And, in a similar way, the sociological perspective on
them generates sociologism, whereas the historical approach to ideas is the source
of a historicism.
Now what is “psychologism”? As explained by Frege in the Preface to the Basic
Laws of Arithmetic or by Husserl in the Logical Investigations, psychologism is
a thesis about logic. It is a philosophy of logic according to which the object of
logic is to discover the laws of our thinking processes. Psychologism holds the
view that we think as we do, in conformity with logical principles, because of
the very nature of our minds. We cannot think contradictory propositions: this
“cannot” is a fact about the way our minds happen to be working, which means
that the impossibility is merely empirical. Now, if it is an empirical fact that we
cannot think otherwise, then it is not impossible to imagine other thinking crea-
tures—let’s say Martians, angels, or supermen—reasoning in conformity with
another logic, a logic that, of course, would escape our understanding.
Merleau-Ponty himself does not explain psychologism in terms of a philoso-
phy of logic, as Frege and Husserl did. Rather, drawing from Husserl’s Philoso-
phy as a Rigorous Science, he defines it as a naturalistic image of human beings
stemming from the objectifying attitude of modern science. If we consider that
our thinking is just one kind of natural process among other processes in a world
of causes, then we have to concede that our thoughts are entirely determined in
their content by causal laws governing all natural processes. Hence the conflict
between naturalistic human sciences and philosophy.12 The human sciences claim
they can explain why people hold particular opinions about the world by draw-
ing on psychological, sociological, and historical factors, that is to say, external
factors. However, if you ask people why they hold their views, they will give
you their reasons—in other words, justifications in the form of other beliefs and
general views. According to the (new) human sciences, these reasons are not the
real explanation for their beliefs. The real answer to the question why? has to be
a causal explanation in terms of psychological, sociological, or historical laws.
Therefore, what is wrong with a naturalistic science of man is that its very
program is self-defeating. In effect, argues Merleau-Ponty, it is incoherent for
a science to assume a total objectifying attitude toward human history and exis-
tence, since it would have to include itself in the object to be explained in causal
terms. The psychologist should consider his own research as a psychological
phenomenon, to be explained by psychological laws. The historian should look
at his own work as a mere cultural phenomenon, nothing more than a product of
the particular circumstances. And so on.
But this amounts to saying that the human sciences cannot escape being reflec-
tive. These disciplines must acknowledge that they need to come to terms with
the reflective question, that is to say, with the philosophical question about how
to apply to themselves their descriptions of humans as a part of the natural world.
Then, says Merleau-Ponty, the task of philosophy with respect to the human
sciences is to show how they could find a way out of objectivism. “We have to

12. Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 50.

 THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WHAT? 73
show that science is possible, that the science of man is possible, and that all the
same philosophy is possible.”13 Merleau-Ponty then argues that phenomenology
is the answer we are looking for because it provides us with a philosophical
tool to resist the objectifying outlook of the naturalistic sciences. That tool is,
of course, the phenomenological reduction. As we know, the phenomenological
reduction comes in two versions: the eidetic reduction, turning a particular case
of something into an exemplification of an essence (eidos), and the transcenden-
tal reduction, disclosing the active presence of a subject behind any assertion
about the objective world.
Merleau-Ponty presents the transcendental reduction as a reflective operation.
Husserl, he says, is asking us to perform a “radical reflection,”14 which means a
reflection that makes it possible for us to become aware of our preconceptions
and presuppositions, which are “established in us by the environment and the
external conditions.” By means of the épochè, we emancipate ourselves from the
various conditionings to which we are subjected as passive beings.
How does that work? How does phenomenological reduction make us free?
Merleau-Ponty describes the operation as follows. As a philosopher, I can con-
sider my own life in its individual and temporal character, but look at it “as one
possible life among many others.” By doing so, as a philosopher, I will step back
from myself—from my own actual being—and perceive my empirical persona
(personnage empirique) as “one of the many possibilities of a much larger uni-
verse that is to be explored.”15 In our present situation, we are conditioned by
many causal factors, so that we cannot fail to hold our particular beliefs and
principles, but there is no logical necessity here since we can become aware that
there are other situations and beliefs possible.
But here one would like to ask: How could I find myself emancipated from
external constraints just by becoming aware of these constraints? It seems that
all I can imagine in terms of other possibilities is my living in another time or
another cultural environment, therefore being determined to have other beliefs
than the ones I cannot help holding in my current empirical situation. Even if I
can indeed step back from my current “situation” and become able to look at it
as one possible case among others, I am not thus turned into a context-free sub-
ject, unless I can remain in a world of mere possibilities without deciding yet to
actualize one of them. That seems to have been Husserl’s solution: the reduction
produces a division of the ego into an empirical self seen as a part of the world
and a transcendental self defined as the origin of all meaning.16 But, in that case,
the ego-split would leave my empirical incarnation subject to external factors in
its opinions about the world.
As we know, this was not the way Merleau-Ponty wanted to read Husserl. In
Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology, the phenomenological reduction is

13. Ibid., 51, as translated by H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), II, 527.
14. Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 58.
15. Ibid., 59.
16. E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1963), §15, 73.
74 VINCENT DESCOMBES

no longer the shift from our natural belief in an existing world into an idealistic
stance toward the world. Rather, it is the experience of being unable to perform
entirely, through the épochè, the bracketing of all presuppositions. Merleau-Pon-
ty writes in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Perception: “the great lesson
of reduction is the impossibility of complete reduction.”17 As one commentator
(Herbert Spiegelberg) has put it, “in Merleau-Ponty’s hands the phenomenologi-
cal reduction becomes the means of refuting constitutive or phenomenological
idealism.”18 But without idealism, there cannot be an ego-split (Ich-spaltung)
between oneself as conditioned by Hippolyte Taine’s triad of factors—la race, le
milieu, le moment—and oneself as emancipated by the épochè.
In The Order of Things, Foucault draws from Merleau-Ponty’s version of the
phenomenological reduction the conclusion that the whole project of turning the
objectifying human sciences into reflective allies of phenomenology was doomed
to fail. Instead of producing the emancipating distance between an empirical
self and a philosophical self, the phenomenological reduction understood as an
attempt at radical reflection yields nothing but an empty reduplication, which
Foucault calls ironically a “empirico-transcendental doublet.”

INVESTIGATING EIDETIC NECESSITIES

The same conclusion can be reached if one considers Merleau-Ponty’s version

of the other sort of reduction, the eidetic one. Roughly speaking, we practice the
so-called eidetic reduction when we look at some empirical item—be it an indi-
vidual object, a particular event, a current situation—as being nothing else than
a particular instance of its type (or eidos). We then shift our attention from what
belongs to this particular exemplar of some type to what belongs necessarily to
any exemplar of that type.
According to Husserl, all empirical disciplines need eidetic phenomenology
in order to get from it a definition of their respective domains of study. Without
an eidetic determination of what is to count as consciousness, perception, an
emotion, and so on, the psychologist could not even begin to set up experimental
ways to study such topics.
Again, as Merleau-Ponty explains,19 linguistics needs an eidetic phenomenol-
ogy of language. Before doing any historical linguistics, we should lay down
the conditions of possibility of language, that is to say, the conditions anything
should conform to in order to count as language. But laying down such eidetic
legislation, says Merleau-Ponty, amounts to emancipating ourselves from the
constraints of the particular tongue we happen to be speaking, since we are
formulating the laws of all languages, of any possible language. By doing so,
we recover the distinction between logical eidetic necessities and mere causal
constraints, which means that eidetic reduction provides us with a way out of
relativism and subjectivism.

17. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), viii.

18. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 534.
19. Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 103-104.
 THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WHAT? 75
However, the question should be raised: is it really possible to practice the
eidetic reduction without engaging in some empirical inquiry? Merleau-Ponty
did not think so. Here also he departs from Husserl’s own doctrine. At the bot-
tom of the eidetic reduction as explained by Husserl, there was a strict dichotomy
between two kinds of description. On the one hand, we can give empirical, factual
descriptions of objects and situations as they happen to be with their particular
features: most of these features, we think, could have been otherwise. On the
other hand, the eidetic description of something tells us what it has to be in order
to exist at all: it is impossible to change one of the attributes without destroying
its very possibility. But Merleau-Ponty argues that the distinction between facts
and essences should not be thought of as a strict dichotomy. On the empirical
side, scientists have to rely on eidetic intuitions in order to formulate generaliza-
tions and to state laws. On the phenomenological side, one needs to have some
empirical acquaintance with the domain of facts in order to be able to see the
essences belonging to it. Therefore, concludes Merleau-Ponty, essences are on
the same level as the facts: an essence is as contingent as the fact from which it
has been extracted by means of eidetic reduction.20
Merleau-Ponty even says that Husserl’s eidetic intuition is an “eidetic finding”
(une constatation eidétique), an act of taking notice. But if an essence is some-
thing to be acknowledged in experience, it has the same epistemological status as
a fact. Now, if the opposition between eidos and fact is redefined as the distinc-
tion between two kinds of facts, it seems that the point of the opposition gets lost.
Merleau-Ponty himself detected a form of “phenomenological positivism”21 in
Husserl’s position. At the end of the day, we are to rely on a basic fact, namely
the fact of experiencing a necessity. The difference between sense and nonsense
boils down to a fact, the fact that I cannot think otherwise. But saying that in
fact I cannot think otherwise points to a mere empirical necessity rather than to
a logical one. It seems then that we have traveled full circle and that we are back
to our initial predicament of psychologism.
In The Order of Things, Foucault said there was a positivistic streak in phe-
nomenology. Some of his readers found that observation surprising, or even
outrageous. But here, obviously, Foucault was following a line of thought that
Merleau-Ponty had already explored.

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF OURSELVES

Seen as a response to Merleau-Ponty’s lectures, Foucault’s book can be read as

an interrogation of the very possibility of performing radical reflection. Foucault
judges that the phenomenological reduction was a false move. Does that mean
that he has given up any claim to engage in radical thinking? Or is there, accord-
ing to him, a way to become aware of our own system of presuppositions and, in
this respect, to overcome historicism?
Canguilhem addresses precisely that problem in his review. He raises the ques-
tion of incommensurability between systems of thought. If these systems were
20. Ibid., 87.
21. Ibid., 61.
76 VINCENT DESCOMBES

entirely discontinuous, each age would be self-enclosed. It would be impossible

for us, thinking within the modern framework, to make sense (for example)
of classical ideas. Foucault does not say that understanding another system of
thought is by definition impossible. Canguilhem quotes at this point an impor-
tant remark Foucault made about classical philosophy: “It is difficult for us to
acknowledge the obvious fact that classical philosophy, from Malebranche up
to the Ideologues, has been a philosophy of the sign.”22 Obvious for whom, asks
Canguilhem? Obvious, of course, from the point of view of the archaeologist,
but difficult for the rest of us. This means that the archaeologist has found a way
to explain in a language that we understand the terms used by the inhabitants of
the classical age.
It is certainly no coincidence that the access we have to classical thinking goes
through semantics. Foucault is well aware that his account of the classical age in
terms of a semiotics—a “general theory of signs and representation” (MC, 90)—
is made possible by looking at the seventeenth century from our point of view and
with a question in mind that the classical thinkers did not raise. In effect, Foucault
hints that we are defined by the fact that we are questioning language, whereas
in the nineteenth century, thinkers were more concerned with life and work than
with language, which was for them just one object of inquiry among others, not
the general title for their intellectual concerns. From an archaeological point of
view, the “return of language” is what defines our intellectual situation: the ques-
tion of language is the leading interrogation embracing all our questions (MC,
317-318). Here is, of course, the justification for the French title of the book: Les
mots et les choses, words and things, that is to say, semantics.
We begin to understand that an “archaeology of the human sciences” is not
really a chapter of intellectual history dealing with a special department of the
history of sciences. It gets its seriousness from being an archaeology of ourselves.
And this might explain the complex relation Foucault had with structuralism. It
is interesting to note what Foucault had to say at that time in an interview with a
Tunisian inquirer.23 Asked whether he was himself a structuralist thinker, Foucault
answered by distinguishing two varieties of structuralism. As defined by the meth-
od of structural analysis, structuralism was not a philosophy, but the way some
human sciences studied their objects. To be a structuralist in that methodological
sense would imply being engaged in one of the sciences of man, like linguistics,
ethnology, or history of religions. But there was, according to Foucault, another
kind of structuralism that he called a “generalized structuralism,” meaning that the
study to be performed would not be confined to a particular domain, but would
take as its object the various aspects of our whole culture. He went on to say that
such a study could be described as “structuralist philosophy.” He then defined it
as “the activity that allows us to offer a diagnosis of what is today.”24 What he

22. MC, 80, quoted by Canguilhem, “Mort de l’homme ou épuisement du Cogito?,” 606.
23. M. Foucault, “La philosophie structuraliste permet de distinguer ce qu’est ‘aujourd’hui’”
(1967), in M. Foucault, Dits et Écrits I, 1954–1975, n° 47 (Paris: Gallimard, Quarto, 2001), 608.
24. “What is today?” is to be understood here as a question about the quiddity of what we call
“today,” on the model of “What is man?” or “What is language?,” not as a question about what is
there today (as opposed as what was there yesterday).
 THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WHAT? 77
seemed to have had in mind at that time looks very much like what he would later
call an “ontology of ourselves.”
In other words, Foucault acknowledged the obvious fact that philosophers
could not claim to be applying in philosophy the method of structural analysis.
Why then call their philosophy “structuralist”? It can only be because this diagno-
sis, this assessment of “what is today”—in the 1960s—must include at its center
an assessment of structuralism, which is the modern consciousness of our knowl-
edge, as Foucault says in a cryptic pronouncement: “Structuralism is not a new
method, it is the consciousness, both awake and uneasy, of modern knowledge”
(MC, 221). One could say that structuralism as a new method is a matter of con-
cern for scientists, whereas philosophers will see it as a form of consciousness,
in the sense in which Hegel in his Phenomenology of Mind presents stoicism and
skepticism as so many “figures of consciousness.”
The problem is then to define “ourselves.” Does Foucault’s “we” include
nineteenth-century thinkers? Or just twentieth-century ones? Or are we already in
our way beyond the modern age? In other words, can archaeology give an answer
to the question of our location in history? If only it could come up with such an
answer, it would deserve the qualification of being radical, since it would provide
us with a way to describe ourselves in our situation with respect to other possible
systems of thought, which is, after all, exactly what Merleau-Ponty was asking
for from the Husserlian reduction.

ARCHAEOLOGY AS RADICAL REFLECTION

Where does the archaeologist stand in history? Can archaeology account for its
own existence within the succession of systems of thought? Foucault answers
these questions as follows. Our present situation (in 1967) is defined by a phe-
nomenon he describes as “the return of language” (after its apparent disappear-
ance due to its reduction to representation during the classical age). Once again,
we are asking: “What is language?” (MC, 317). But for us, language exists in a
state of “dispersion” or fragmentation (MC, 315). Language matters for the lin-
guist, for the logician, for the modernist writer, but not in the same way and for
the same reasons. In a word, we lack a unified view of language.
But this can only mean that, for Foucault, structuralism is not the answer.
Although the structuralist movement was supposed to promote a linguistic
paradigm in all the sciences of man, it did not come up with a unified view of
language. It is interesting in this respect to consider what Foucault has to say
about Ferdinand de Saussure. Where does Saussure stand in Foucault’s narra-
tive? Foucault mentions him on three occasions. First, while indicating that the
definition of a sign in the Port-Royal Logic was binary rather than triadic (MC,
81), Foucault points out that Saussure had rediscovered the classical program
of a general semiotics, and that is why he had to come back to a psychological
notion of the sign as a connection between two representations. Saussure is again
mentioned twice to the same effect in the section dealing with modern historical
philology (MC, 299, 307).
78 VINCENT DESCOMBES

Actually, these remarks do not square easily with the idea that there is no conti-
nuity between the semantics of classical thinkers and our own views. Is Saussure
on our side of the divide or on the side of the Grammaire générale et raisonnée?
Let’s have a look at the classical, binary definition of a sign in the Port-Royal
Logic. Here is how Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole put it:
When we consider an object in itself, and in its own nature, without extending the view of
the mind to that which it may represent, the idea we have of it is the idea of a thing, as of
the earth, of the sun; but when we regard a certain object only as representing another, the
idea which we have of it is the idea of a sign. It is in this way that we commonly regard
maps and pictures. Thus the sign contains two ideas, one of the thing which represents,
another of the thing represented, and its nature consists in exciting the second by means
of the first.25

The question is then: where do we stand today with respect to such a defini-
tion of the sign? Foucault points out rightly that the Port-Royal logicians, when
they define the sign by the association of two ideas, are replacing the traditional
conception of the sign, which was triadic, with a dyadic one. Instead of distin-
guishing the material sign itself, the signified, and the extra-linguistic referent,
as has been commonly the case since the Stoics, they define a sign by the mere
association of two ideas, the idea of the representing thing and the idea of the
represented one.
Foucault also makes the remark that ideas are taken to be representative. They
are like portraits or maps. That is to say, Arnauld and Nicole follow Descartes in
comparing ideas with pictures, which means that ideas are signs, although non-
linguistic ones. Why does such a definition constitute an important break in the
history of linguistic philosophy? Here, it is illuminating to compare Foucault’s
discontinuist account to another discontinuist overview of the history of seman-
tics, the one provided by the medievalist Norman Kretzmann in his piece on the
history of semantics in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.26 Kretzmann’s division
of the history of semantics into periods sometimes agrees with Foucault’s, and
sometimes is at odds with it. Both the similarities and the differences are signifi-
cant. Let’s begin with the points of agreement.
First, both philosophers agree on the fact that the history of semantics is
indeed a discontinuous one, so that it cries out for an “archaeological” treatment.
They also agree on the fact that there was a classical age delimited by two major
breaks. Again, they agree on the nature of the first break at the beginning of
modern times. According to both Foucault and Kretzmann, we enter into a new
semantic age when signs are defined through a comparison with nonlinguistic
signs such as maps and pictures. During the classical age, to be a sign was to
represent something: words represented ideas, ideas represented things.
However, Kretzmann and Foucault don’t agree on the date of the break inau-
gurating the semantics of the classical age. Kretzmann sees the major mutation
taking place around 1450 because he can put forward a contextual explanation for

25. A. Arnauld and P. Nicole, Logic, or, the Art of Thinking, transl. Thomas Spencer Baynes
(Edinburgh, 1850), I.4.
26. N. Kretzmann, “Semantics (History of),” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards
(New York: Macmillan, 1967), VII, 358-406.
 THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WHAT? 79
it. According to him, the mutation in semantics had to do with the philosophical
status of logic. During the Middle Ages, logic was defined as a study of language,
scientia sermocinalis, so that semantics was worked out as a theory of linguistic
signs. However, from the Renaissance up until the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury, philosophers were no longer interested in logic as an inquiry into language.
“What little there was in the way of logical inquiry from about 1450 to 1850 was
carried on under the view of logic as the art of reason. . . .”27 As a paradigmatic
example of such a turn, one can refer precisely to the Port-Royal logic, both to
its title Logic, or, the Art of Thinking and to its inclusion of a Fourth Part dealing
with methodology in sciences. The result, explains Kretzmann, is that semantics
was developed “in the context of discussions of non-linguistic signs, such as rep-
resentative ideas.”28 So, with respect to its philosophy of language, the classical
age is indeed the age of representation.
But if this is how the first mutation took place at the beginning of modern
times, then one can expect another mutation of the same magnitude to take place
as soon as logic were defined once again as a science of language. And this is in
fact what has happened with the linguistic turn in logic, a change that, surpris-
ingly, Foucault fails to register in his section on “the return of language.” From
Kretzmann’s perspective, the important break separating the age of Enlighten-
ment from us took place around the middle of the nineteenth century. Already,
writes Kretzmann, with Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and, of course, later
with Peirce and Frege, there has been a “return to a view of the interrelations of
logic and language more like that prevailing in the later Middle Ages than that of
the eighteenth century.”29
Once again, the paradigm of a sign is taken to be the proposition.30 Therefore
the semantic unit is the sentence, not the word. Propositions are the “units of
signification”31 because they are saying something. In order to account for the
semantic functions of words, one needs to determine their respective contribu-
tions to the meaning of the proposition in which they are used: this dogma will
be known as Frege’s “Context Principle.”32
As soon as the primacy of the semantics of propositions over the semantics
of words is reestablished, semantics will be able to make room for the idea
that each part of speech in the sentence has its own modus significandi. From a
logical point of view, a propositional sign is necessarily complex. As Plato said
in The Sophist, you cannot get a sentence if all your signs belong to the same
syntactical category: you need to be able to pick them up in different categories
such as nouns and verbs. “Theaetetus walks” is a sentence, whereas a succession

27. Ibid., 375.

28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 391.
30. Quine once described the shift of center from the word to the sentence as a kind of Copernican
revolution (see “Five Milestones of Empiricism” [1975], in W. V. Quine, Theories and Things [Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981], 69).
31. Kretzmann, “Semantics,” 390.
32. Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Con-
cept of Number [1884], transl. John L. Austin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), x.
80 VINCENT DESCOMBES

of proper names such as “Theaetetus Theodorus” is not a sentence and does not
convey any thought.
So the project of a “science of signs” will no longer rest upon a definition of
the sign in general, since there is no unique or basic modus significandi. There is
no interesting definition of a sign in general, as opposed to a definition of nouns,
verbs, particles, and so on.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM

Foucault mentioned only briefly the return of semantics to logico-linguistic mat-

ters under the label of “formalization.” He does not seem to have given it much
attention, which may explain why he made nothing of Saussure’s distinction
between speech and language (parole and langue). Foucault was trying at that
time to work out a general theory of discourse in order to clarify his own posi-
tion as an archaeologist claiming to be able to achieve radical reflection without
leaving the world of historicity and cultural relativity. As we know, he would try
later to work out such a theory in his Archaeology of Knowledge—without suc-
cess, as he admitted himself.
It is worth mentioning that Saussure’s distinction was made available to the
English-speaking public by the linguist Alan Gardiner in his book The Theory of
Language and Speech.33 Gilbert Ryle picked up the distinction from Gardiner and
explained it nicely:
We are tempted to treat the relation between sentences and words as akin to the relation
between faggots and sticks. But this is entirely wrong. Words, constructions, etc., are the
atoms of a Language; sentences are the units of Speech. Words, constructions, etc., are
what we have to learn in mastering a language; sentences are what we produce when we
say things. Words have history, sentences do not, though their authors do.34

This very distinction between language and speech is crucial, since it is the
condition for resisting psychologism in logic and semantics. Without such a
distinction, we could not ask whether a speaker did say what she meant to say.
We could not distinguish between the speaker’s meaning—what the speaker has
in mind, what she intends to say—and the sentence’s meaning—which is imper-
sonal and anonymous. In order to understand what the sentence says, we need to
know the language and something of the context of utterance, but we don’t have
to enter into the mind of the speaker. Normally, we learn about what the speaker
has in mind by paying attention to what she says. Only on special occasions do
we go the other way around, interpreting what she says not by her own words,
but by what we judge she would have said if she had expressed herself correctly
or with a better mastery of the tongue.
Since Foucault made nothing of Saussure’s distinction of the two linguistics,
he had to fall back on the idea that speakers of a language are not really speak-
ing, that what they say is not really their own discourse: in other words, that the

33. A. Gardiner, The Theory of Language and Speech [1932] (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1951).
34. G. Ryle, “Use, Usage and Meaning” (1961), in The Theory of Meaning, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 110.
 THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WHAT? 81
linguistic system is speaking through them. Hence the great pronouncements
about the death of man and the disappearance of the author. These are already
poststructuralist conclusions.
Alasdair Macintyre once wrote that existentialist philosophers were disap-
pointed, extreme rationalists. According to them, if there is not a sufficient reason
for everything that happens in this world, then there is no reason whatever for
anything that happens. If one cannot explain everything, then nothing has ever
really been explained.
We could say that poststructuralist thinkers are disappointed existentialists
who got from structural anthropology the idea that there is no thinking possible
in the absence of a preexistent system of forms of expression. But an existentialist
holds the view that in order to express myself fully, I would need to invent my
own forms of expression, instead of relying on our common institutions of mean-
ing. Hence the extraordinary poststructuralist conclusion: if the words I am using
do not belong to me, the sentences I am producing are not really mine.
Such a conclusion is, of course, a complete reversal of a truly structuralist view
of language. As we know, the structuralist thesis is that the system of signifying
forms makes it possible for us to make sense within that system. It makes it pos-
sible for us to do things within the system, things such as expressing thoughts,
understanding what people say, inventing stories, classifying objects, asking
questions, answering them, giving orders, and so on. It even makes it possible for
people to create new signs and new linguistic constructions, provided they do so
by using the resources made available to them by their system.
Poststructuralist philosophers will say the opposite: the system makes it impos-
sible for me to say “I think,” since it constrains me to say it within an anonymous
system, a system without an individual author. Since the forms of expression I
must use are not my own forms, since I did not produce them, then my sentences
are not my own sentences either. As long as I cannot use my own idiolect to
express myself, I cannot claim to be the author of the discourse apparently com-
ing from my mouth or from my pen.
This might be the sense in which, according to Foucault, structural disciplines
are the “consciousness of modern knowledge.” Death of the subject, death of
man, death of the author: these obituaries are poststructuralist insofar as they
draw dramatic existential consequences about our power of speech from a com-
bination of structuralist premises about the need for a system in order to produce
anything meaningful, with existentialist dogmas about our individual freedom of
choice.

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales