Foucault examined discursivity’s ontological status but not its historical dynamics

Evidence

Foucault’s schematization focuses on the “transition into modernity” as opposed to the “transition from pre-modernity.” Depriving Foucault of the benefit of the doubt and taking his words at face value would be all too easy an exercise, one that would leave us with a Foucault that is replete with unjustifiably attributed contradictions. For if Foucault was clear, as he was, about the historical origins of the death of the author, then a logical explanation would be to say that his concern with discursivity and discursive formations has abducted all of his attention, that he simply is not very interested in the dynamics of the rise and fall of discursivities as such but in their ontological status and modes of operation roughly between the eighteenth century and late modernity. Nonetheless, Foucault’s “schematic” exposition leaves too much between the cracks, too much that is relevant to our concerns, but not to his. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 89

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Foucault’s own work shifted from linguistic to power-focused truth games — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 335; Dialectical critique exposes ontology as disguised history — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 694