Foucault’s power-knowledge analytic is as anti-realist as Derrida while remaining worldly.

Evidence

The nature of this pragmatics was captured by Foucault’s notion of ‘power-knowledge’: ‘There is no power-relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor at the same time any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power-relations.’ The will to truth is but one form of the will to power; the appropriate analysis of theoretical discourses belongs, as Nietzsche argued, to the genealogy of forms of domination, not to an epistemological history of the growth of knowledge. The result is an anti-realism as radical as Derrida’s in its rejection of any account of theories in terms of their ability more or less accurately to characterize independently existing states of affairs, but one imbricated in a pragmatics of discourse and power rather than implying, as do the textualists, that it is impossible to escape the bonds of discourse. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 334

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Foucault’s power-knowledge pragmatics in contrast to Derrida’s textualist anti-realism — the term that bridges discourse and social practice in Callinicos’s account.
• XREF: This is the shift the reader’s research traces: Foucault’s move to a power/war analytic rather than meaning/discourse — the frame that generates the race-struggle counter-history. — connects to: Cavell’s reading reveals deep convergence between Wittgenstein and Derrida — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 354