Thompson - Historicity and Transcendentalityé Foucault, Cavaillès, and the Phenomenality of the...

7/28/2019 Thompson - Historicity and Transcendentality Foucault, Cavaills, and the Phenomenality of the Concept

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Wesleyan University

Historicity and Transcendentality: Foucault, Cavaills, and the Phenomenology of the ConceptAuthor(s): Kevin ThompsonSource: History and Theory, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Feb., 2008), pp. 1-18Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University

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History and Theory 47 (February 2008), 1-18 ? Wesleyan University 2008 ISSN: 0018-2656

HISTORICITYAND TRANSCENDENTALITY:FOUCAULT, CAVAILLES, AND THEPHENOMENOLOGYOF THE CONCEPT

KEVIN THOMPSON

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with Foucault's historical methodology. It argues that the coherence of his project lies in its development of a set of tools for unearthing the historicalprinciples that govern thought and practice in the epochs that have shaped the present age.Foucault claimed that these principles are, at once, transcendental and historical. Accordingly, the philosophical soundness of Foucault's project depends on his having developeda satisfactory way of passage between the absolutist purism of the transcendental and the

mundane contingency of the historical. The paper shows that the key to seeing how Foucault achieved this desideratum lies in a surprising and largely unexplored methodologicaltradition that he himself explicitly acknowledged: Husserlian phenomenology as it wastaken up, modified, and practiced in the thought of the philosopher of logic and mathematics, Jean Cavailles?what I call the phenomenology of the concept.

The essay has four parts. The first sketches the two most prominent lines of interpretation of Foucault's methodology and argues that both are inadequate, not least because they

both dismiss Foucault's phenomenological heritage. The second part lays out the rudiments of the neglected strand of the phenomenological tradition inaugurated by Cavailles's

important critique and appropriation of Husserlian method. This serves, in turn, to set thestage for the third part that examines, first, Canguilhem's and then Foucault's distinct projects for grasping the transcendental within the historical, and the historical within the transcendental?their respective continuations of Cavailles's phenomenology of the concept.

The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the pathways that this way of readingFoucault opens up for understanding the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjectivationthat came to define his work.

Throughout his complex and unorthodox historical investigations, Foucault always held that he was pursuing a single philosophical project, what he ultimatelycame to call a Critical History of Thought. In the years since his death, the consistency as well as the coherence of this endeavor has been called into question.In what follows, Iwant to explore an approach to reading Foucault that not onlyseeks to substantiate the unity of his work, but also helps us to see precisely itsstakes. My contention is that the coherence of Foucault's project lies in the singularity of its aim: to unearth the stratum of experience that governs the thoughtand practice of the historical epochs that have shaped the present age. Foucault'swork was an examination of the conditions in and through which we have cometo be what we are; it thus continually poses, for us, but one central question: whatis our present?

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2 KEVINTHOMPSONAt this point, convention would dictate that we enter into the various ongo

ing debates over the periodization of Foucault's texts, the shift in method fromarchaeology to genealogy to problematization, and the change in problematicsfrom knowledge to power to subjectivation. But I believe that Foucault's consistent employment of a specific methodology in the pursuit of the question of thepresent?what I shall call a phenomenology of the concept?cuts across all thesedisputes. Indeed, it is only insofar as we situate his work within this important,and admittedly surprising, framework thatwe can begin to see its real significanceand understand the challenge that it can still set before us.

Foucault said that his histories were unconventional in that they sought to getat a dimension of experience that eludes those concerned with what has been said,what has been done, and what has been endured, the collection of facts we typically call human history; he designated this dimension with a variety of terms orphrases throughout his career: epistemes, dispositifs, problematisations, and lesjeux de verite. For the purposes of this essay, I shall be concerned with just oneof his earliest markers for this dimension: the historical a priori. Foucault definedthis concept as the historical set of rules that serve as the conditions for the emergence and interrelations of the experience of discursive and nondiscursive bodies.But what precisely did he mean by such rules?Being a priori, the principles Foucault sought were neither physical causes norempirical regularities. They did not bring about an effect nor were they simplypersistent patterns of material processes. Instead, what Foucault searched for wasthe set of requirements that various kinds of knowledge and ways of acting had tofulfill in order to be counted as valid instances of knowing and acting, and that theobjects and events involved in these forms of knowledge and action had to meetin order to be counted as existing entities and occurrences at all. In this sense,

what Foucault's historical studies tracked were the necessary structures by virtueof which thinking, doing, and being become possible. In a word, then, the rulesFoucault sought were transcendental.

Now to say that a set of structures is transcendental has historically meant thatthe conditions in question are not only necessary, but universal and timeless; thatthey are unalterable and applicable without temporal or spatial limits. Foucault'scoupling of the terms "a priori" and "historical" thus appears to produce a selfcontradictory concept. It seems to contaminate the purity of the universal withthe contingency of the particular. But Foucault held that specific sets of transcendental rules, different conditions for thought, action, and being, can be shown todefine different historical epochs. How, then, is this possible? How can a set ofconditions be at once the operative structures by virtue of which thought and action are what they are, and at the same time be mutable forms that set down theboundaries of acceptability for what isknowable and doable within a specific age?How is something to be at once transcendental and historical and how is it to begrasped as such?

This, we can say, is the core concern of Foucault's critical history of thought. Itseeks nothing less than to grasp the simultaneity of historicity and transcendentality. The philosophical soundness of Foucault's project thus depends on his having worked out a satisfactory way of passage between the Scylla of the timeless




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HISTORICITYAND TRANSCENDENTALITY 3universality of the transcendental and the Charybdis of the mundane contingencyof the historical, a pathway that integrates the necessity of the transcendentalwith the bounded specificity of the historical. The aim of what follows is to showthat this is just what Foucault's phenomenology of the concept was dedicated toachieving.

A full substantiation of this claim would require a detailed survey of the entirety of Foucault's historical investigations, along with an assessment of his repeatedcriticisms of the phenomenological tradition.1 This is obviously beyond the limitsof the present essay. Instead, the strategy I will pursue is to reconstruct a part ofthe relevant methodological tradition within which Foucault situated himself onnumerous occasions: Husserlian phenomenology as itwas taken up, modified,and practiced in the thought of the philosopher of logic and mathematics, JeanCavailles, and the tradition of the phenomenology of scientific rationality thatemerged out of his work, most prominently in the research of the historian of science, Georges Canguilhem.2 My contention is that the key to understanding howFoucault sought to think the simultaneity of the transcendental and the historicallies in this largely unexplored methodological vein.

The essay has four parts. The first sketches two of themost prominent lines ofinterpretation of Foucault's methodology. I argue that both, though fundamentallyat odds in so many ways, prove nonetheless to be ultimately unsatisfactory because they both dismiss Foucault's phenomenological heritage. The second partlays out the rudiments of the neglected strand of the phenomenological traditioninaugurated by Cavailles's important critique and appropriation of Husserlian

method. This serves, in turn, to set the stage for the third part, inwhich I examine,first, Canguilhem's and then Foucault's distinct projects for grasping the transcendental within the historical, and the historical within the transcendental?theirrespective continuations of Cavailles's phenomenology of the concept. The essayconcludes with a brief consideration of the pathways that this way of readingFoucault opens up for understanding the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjectivation that came to define his work.

1. For discussions of Foucault's various treatments of the phenomenological tradition, see GerardLebrun, "Notes on Phenomenology in Les mots et les choses," inMichel Foucault Philosopher,transl. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), 20-37; Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre,

Foucault, and Historical Reason: Volume Two: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2005), chaps. 8-9; Todd May, "Foucault's Relation to Phenomenology,"in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005), 284-311; and Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 2.

2.1 thus take issue with David Macey's claim that "[i]t would be an error to identify Foucault tooclosely with Cavailles, as the latter's work is grounded in the pure phenomenology of Husserl" {TheLives of Michel Foucault [New York: Pantheon Books, 1993], 132). For other accounts that seekto draw out the link between Foucault and Cavailles in quite different ways, see Stephen Watson,"'Between Tradition and Oblivion': Foucault, the Complications of Form, the Literatures of Reason,and the Esthetics of Existence," in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 1sted. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 262-285; and David Hyder, "Foucault,Cavailles, and Husserl on the Historical Epistemology of the Sciences," Perspectives on Science11 (2003), 107-129. Others, in addition to Canguilhem, who followed Cavailles in developing andpursuing a phenomenology of scientific rationality include Suzanne Bachelard, Jean Ladriere, andFrancois Delaporte.




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4 KEVINTHOMPSONI

Ifwhat we have said thus far is correct, if the real barometer by which to gauge thecoherence of Foucault's philosophical project is his attempt towork out a viabletheory of the historical a priori, then two lines of interpretation of this project areespecially important. According to the first, the historical a priori is nothing morethan a set of empirical patterns articulating common ways of speaking and acting;according to the second, the field of the a priori only becomes historical insofaras it is traversed, from without, by force relations. At the center of the divergencein these approaches stands the question of the status of the historical a priori. Asaway into this issue, let us consider more carefully the rudiments of the case thateach of these readings advances.

The most important advocate of the first line of interpretation is Beatrice Han.3She has sought to extend a version of the critique first developed by Dreyfus andRabinow,4 namely, that Foucault's attempt to show that a set of rules serves as theconditions for the possibility of what is sayable, or more properly of what is acceptable, within a particular discipline in a specific historical period fails becauseit is itself nothing other than a repetition of the founded-founding double that

Foucault himself had shown to constitute the analytic of finitudein the science

of man. Accordingly, a historical a priori can only be an empirical scheme, a descriptive pattern that seeks to articulate common ways of speaking, but it cannotbe the normative and efficacious principles of language itself. People may act inaccordance with these rules, but they do not actually follow them. A historical apriori, Han thus argues, is just an empirical regularity, nothing more, nothing less.But this, of course, is to say that Foucault's aspirations for a truly transcendentalfoundation for his research, a project thatwould set out and maintain the integrityof the transcendental field, are ultimately left unfulfilled. The ontology requiredfor a truly coherent account of the transcendental is missing, Han argues, and inits stead all that is left is an unacknowledged empiricism. The empirical has been

made to stand in for the transcendental.The second line of interpretation was set out by Gilles Deleuze.5 On this read

ing, the real heart of Foucault's work is its challenge to the empirical dogmathat we speak of that which we see, and that we see that of which we speak; in

other words, that words and things bear an essential referential interrelation. Fou

cault calls this assumption into question by opening up the transcendental stratumwhose rules govern both what is sayable, the conditions for the formation andusage of words, and what is visible, the conditions for the formation and employ

ment of things. Two heterogeneous but interrelated a priori forms thus constitutethis field: statements and visible objects.

3. Beatrice Han, L'ontologie manquee de Michel Foucault: Entre Vhistorique et le transcendental (Grenoble: Jerome Millon, 1998). A revised version of this text was translated into Englishas Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, transl. Edward Pile(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

4. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

5. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1986); Foucault, transl. Sean Hand(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).




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HISTORICITYAND TRANSCENDENTALITY 5Now Deleuze argues thatwith this line of interpretation comes a profound prob

lem. The conditions of the say able hold a position of priority over those of the visible. Language possesses an intrinsic spontaneity, and, as such, can play a distinctlydetermining role; light, however, the condition for what is visible, provides onlya space of receptivity: it is solely a sphere of determinability. Hence, a version oftheKantian problematic of the relation of spontaneity and receptivity, of imagination and intuition, reemerges inFoucault, and herein lies, on Deleuze's reading, itsdecisive dilemma: how can the heterogeneous conditions of language and light beadapted to each other? How can the forms of the say able, the conditions of spontaneity, be joined with the forms of the visible, the conditions of intuition?

Foucault's answer, accordingto Deleuze's analysis, is the theory of power

asa web of force relations. Conceived in terms of differentials of quantitative andqualitative elements, forces are fundamentally pathic: they affect one another andare affected by one another. As a result, forces are a third form?at once, spontaneous and receptive?and they are thus able to adapt or, better, schematize state

ments with what is visible. Force relations thus act as the requisite mediating axisbetween these disparate forms and thus make possible the joining of words tothings, reference itself.

Deleuze argues that since force relations are, by definition, unstable, variable,and constantly in a state of evolution, then themutations and shifts of rules fromone historical epoch to another are a result of their intervention in the transcendental stratum. Forces, on this reading, are thus the site of the historical, whatDeleuze calls the "non-place" of mutation. But thismeans that the play of forces,as amediating axis, necessarily remains distinct from the transcendental stratumitself. Their web intervenes on this field, infecting it from without with the flux of

becoming, but the transcendental itself is, on this analysis, held distinct from themovement of alteration, themovement of history. Access to the transcendental inFoucault, on Deleuze's reading, has thus been bought at the price of maintainingits separation, its purity, with respect to the domain of becoming. History necessarily enters the a priori only from without. History itself is not endemic to thetranscendental.

Now these disparate readings present a rather stark, and apparently irresolvable, choice: either (in the case of Deleuze) the integrity of the transcendentalmust be bought at the price of relegating the historical to the impurity of empiricalbecoming, or (in the case of Han) the transcendental must be acknowledged asnothing other than the empirical in disguise, itsmutability the consequence of theimpossibility of keeping it free from the taint of themundane. However, this is afundamentally false dilemma. It is rooted in a profound misreading of Foucault'sproject, one that these otherwise deeply divergent interpretations actually share.Both approaches assume a conventional understanding of the a priori as a dimension devoid of the capacity to change, and they thereby fail to recognize thetruly innovative conception of the a priori that Foucault was able to develop byemploying themethodological resources born in the tradition of the phenomenology of the concept. The fact that both approaches dismiss Foucault's distinctivephenomenological heritage means that they fail properly to understand his mostsignificant methodological tool. In order to interpret Foucault properly, then, we




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6 KEVIN THOMPSONmust seek to reconstruct this heritage. What, then, precisely is a phenomenologyof the concept?

II

On two separate occasions?both in 1978, one, a lecture, the other, an introduction?Foucault insisted on setting the trajectory of his work within the lineage ofphilosophical reflection that had been instigated by Cavailles. Certainly themostwell known instance of this occurs in the Introduction Foucault wrote for the English translation of Georges Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological.6

Here Foucault proposed an alternative mapping of the terrain of postwarFrench thought. Rather than the standard divisions between Marxists and nonMarxists, specialists and academics, theoreticians and politicians, Foucault argued that another, much deeper cleavage ran throughout all these streams: theseparation between a philosophy of experience, meaning, and the subject (with

which he associates principally Sartre andMerleau-Ponty), and a philosophy ofknowledge, rationality, and the concept (in which he includes Cavailles, GastonBachelard, Alexandre Koyre, and Canguilhem himself). This cleavage, he notes,was certainly much older than the postwar period, but its real import was felt, hetells us, in theway inwhich it shaped the reception of Husserlian phenomenologyduring the years just before thewar. Specifically, phenomenology, he says?referring principally to the set of lectures that Husserl delivered in Paris in 1929 andthatwere first published in French translation in 1931 under the titleMeditationscartesiennes1?"allowed of two readings."8 One sought to radicalize it in the direction of consciousness and subjectivity, while the other tried to return this new

method to its roots in questions of formalism, intuitionism, and the quest to workout a pure theory of logic. Foucault aligns his own body of work with this latter

6. Foucault presented the lecture in question, "Qu'est-ce que la critique? (Critique et Aufklarung),"on the 27th of May, 1978 before the Societe franchise de philosophic A transcript of the lecture waspublished posthumously in Bulletin de la societe francaise de philosophie 84 (1990); 35-63; "Whatis Critique," transl. Lysa Hochroth, inMichel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringerand Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 23-82. The Introduction is the text Foucault contributed for the English translation of Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological: "Introductionpar Michel Foucault" in his Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume III. 1976-1979, ed. Daniel Defert andFrancois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 429-442; "Introduction by Michel Foucault" in The Normaland the Pathological, transl. Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: D.Reidel, 1978, repr. New York: Zone Books, 1991), 7-24. Foucault revised this text inApril of 1984 forinclusion in a volume dedicated to Canguilhem, "La vie: l'experience et la science," Revue de metaphysique et de morale 90, no. 1 (1985), 3-14; reprinted in Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume IV. 19801988, ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 763-776; "Life: Experience andScience," transl. Robert Hurley inAesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault,1954-1984, Volume Two, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 465-478. Itwas,apparently, the last of his writings on which he was able to work before his death.

7. Edmund Husserl, Meditations cartesiennes: Introduction a la phenomenologie, transl. GabriellePfeiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Vrin, 1953). On the history of these lectures and the circumstances of this translation, see the editor's "Einleitung" in Cartesianische Meditationen

und PariserVortrdge, ed. Stephan Strasser, Husserliana, Band I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).

8. Michel Foucault, "Introduction par Michel Foucault," Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume III.1976-1979, 430; "Introduction by Michel Foucault," The Normal and the Pathological, 9. Cf. "Lavie: l'experience et la science," Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume IV. 1980-1988, 764; "Life:Experience and Science," in Faubion, ed., Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 466.




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HISTORICITYAND TRANSCENDENT LITY 7strand and finds in it a distinctive taking up of the central question of the Enlightenment: who are we?9

But how could a research agenda dedicatedto themost abstract of problems,

the foundations of logic and mathematics, have anything to do with the questionsthat were to become the main themes of Foucault's research: power, knowledge,and the formation of modern subjectivity? Wouldn't one think that a philosophyof subjectivity, a philosophy of meaning and responsibility, would have much

more to say about such matters as these? I shall come back to these questions atthe conclusion of this paper, but ifwe can lay out the arc along which Foucaultsought to think the simultaneity of transcendentality and historicity, and saw himself in doing so as carrying forward the tradition begun by Cavailles, then we canperhaps begin to see what itwas about this specific type of phenomenological approach that ultimately led him to grapple with the problem of the nexus of power,knowledge, and even subjectivation.

The rudiments of Cavailles's seminal essay, Sur la logique et la theorie de lascience, are fairly straightforward. Its aim is to develop a comprehensive theoryof science. His most important insight was that such a theory must not just specifylegitimate deductive forms, nor merely ground such a project in a properly conceived epistemology, but that itmust ultimately be able to account for the necessary intrinsic progress of scientific knowledge itself. That is to say, the theory

9. In the lecture inMay, Foucault employed the same distinction between a philosophy of consciousness and a philosophy of the concept in a way that is quite similar to the Introduction. Asin the Introduction, he used this cleavage to account for the disparate ways in which Husserlian

phenomenology was appropriated in postwar France. And yet in the lecture, unlike the publishedwork, the textual reference was not to the Cartesianische Meditationen, but rather to Die Krisis dereuropaischen Wissenschaften und die tranzendentale Phanomenologie [1936]. The significance ofthis seemingly inconsequential variation lies in the fact that whereas in the Introduction what is ulti

mately at issue is establishing the importance of Canguilhem's work in the history of science, in thelecture, the matter under consideration ismuch more specifically Foucault's own emerging concern:the relationship between knowledge and power. And while the Carte sianische Meditationen establishthe transcendental foundations of the phenomenological method of description, in the Krisis Husserlseeks to show how the collapse of the classical search for apodicticity and autonomy, a collapse thattakes place with the Enlightenment's privileging of the naturalistic form of explanation, is the rootelement out of which grew the barbarism that was engulfing Germany as he wrote. It is thus thisexamination of the crisis of rationality and its relationship to scientific knowledge and practice thatprovides the context within which Foucault conceives the question of Enlightenment, not primarily interms of who we are, but as the question of the relationship between the historical formation of scientific knowledge and mechanisms of power: "how is it that rationalization leads to the fury of power?"("Qu'est-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufklarung]," Bulletin de la societe francaise de philosophic,

44; "What is Critique," transl. Lysa Hochroth inMichel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, 42).10. Jean Cavailles, Sur la logique et la theorie de la science (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1947); "On Logic and the Theory of Science," transl. Theodore J. Kisiel in Phenomenologyand the Natural Sciences, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans and Theodore J. Kisiel (Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press, 1970), 357-409. All further references to this work are designated inthe text as "SLTS" followed by the appropriate page reference to the French edition and then to the

English translation. Where necessary, I have modified the translation. Cavailles composed this textin 1942 during one of several internments he suffered as a founding member of the first Resistance

movement in France. The essay was published posthumously, with Canguilhem serving as co-editor, due to Cavailles's death while imprisoned by German counterintelligence forces in 1944. Foran account of Cavailles's life, see the biography by his sister, Gabrielle Ferrieres, Jean Cavailles: APhilosopher in Time of War, 1930-1944, transl. T. N. F. Murtagh (Lewiston, MA: The Edwin MellenPress, 2000).




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8 KEVINTHOMPSONmust be able to account for the historicity of science. Cavailles rejected themostprominent candidates of his day for such a theory?Bolzano's neo-Kantianismand Carnap's logical positivism?because both, albeit for different reasons, turnout in the end to be reductionistic, each failing to preserve, at one and the sametime, the objectivity of the fundamental principles of scientific investigation andtheir historical development. Cavailles therefore turns toHusserlian phenomenology and, in particular, to the concept of intentionality as the best hope for workingout a theory of science that would meet these stringent demands.For Husserl, the key to unlocking the nature of science is its relationship to formal logic and, of this, to its being founded upon the constitutive performances ofconsciousness, a transcendental logic. Husserl argues that the purpose of formallogic is to lay down a normative framework within which scientific investigation can be carried out and its results validated. Logic is fundamentally, then,themethodology of scientific inquiry. It follows that the basic task of a phenomenology of logic is to disclose and clarify the fundamental standards of evidenceand the norms of intuitive fulfillment that undergird inference, explanation, andtruth that, in turn, properly govern the construction of propositions, theories, andtheir ultimate justifications. According to the investigations Husserl carried out,principally inFormale und transzendentale Logik [1927]?the text thatCavaillessubmits to an especially careful analysis?formal logic necessarily presupposes,and is thereby said to be founded in, pre-predicative experience, what Husserl fa

mously calls a life-world (Lebenswelt), and for this reason the discipline is properly deemed a "world-logic" (Weltlogik).11

On Husserl's analysis, then, formal logic and, by implication, the sciences thatfall under its governance, are life-world constructions?cultural formations?andtheir development is thus the work of human consciousness itself. Cavailles concludes from this that the core project of phenomenology is contained in itsmethodof regressive inquiry or questioning-back (Ruckfrage): it seeks to open up empirical history in order to expose the buried layers of sedimentation, the prior constitutive acts, that have accrued within scientific principles?what Husserl calls theirintentional sense-history, their traditionality?in order to reactivate these achievements by bringing them back, as a "polished system of acts" (SLTS, 76/408),to their originary intuitive givenness. Basic theorems of logic, mathematics, andthe natural sciences are to be returned to their origins in the activities and practices from which they emerged, thereby being renewed by being restored to theiroriginal animating sources. But what this questioning-back ultimately excavatesis the structure of historical genesis itself, what Husserl calls, in the fragmententitled "Die Frage nach dem Urspung der Geometrie als intentional-historichesProblem" [1939], the "concrete, historical a priori": "the living movement of

11. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischenVernunft [1927], ed. Paul Janssen, Husserliana, Band XVII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974);Formal and Transcendental Logic, transl. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969).Ludwig Landgrebe is the one who actually employs the term Weltlogik in his recasting of Husserl'sposition; see Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genelogie der Logik[1939], ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972), ? 9; Experience and Judgment:Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, transl. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, II:

Northwestern University Press, 1973), ? 9.




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HISTORICITYAND TRANSCENDENTALITY 9the coexistence and interweaving of original sense-formation (Sinnbildung) andsense-sedimentation (Sinnsedimentierung)."12 Phenomenology's aim, then, is touncover and renew the historically embedded accomplishments of consciousnessthat lie hidden and neglected behind the workings of scientific inquiry. In thissense, Cavailles says, Eugen Fink's description of phenomenology as a kind of"archaeology" was absolutely correct: "the return to the origin is a return to theoriginal" (SLTS, 76/408).

Cavailles shows, however, that the consequences of taking this approach arequite dire. Recall that a comprehensive theory of science must ultimately be ableto account for the kind of changes and transformations that are intrinsic to scientific knowledge itself; that is, itmust account for the unique immanent historicity ofscience. But, on Husserl's construal, scientific inquiry cannot make any advanceinknowledge that would be an advance intrinsic to itself. Change, transformation,innovation?all arise in and out of the life-world. All scientific knowledge can doismerely reflect themovements of this deeper stratum. And because, as Cavaillesargues, there can be no genuinely transcendental logic?that is, no norms governing this movement (because consciousness itself is the ground of all norms andthus is itself beyond them)?the activities of conscious life are, at best, arbitraryand capricious. Science is then but a sheer garment draped over the arbitrary, irrational processes of the life-world.13 Cavailles concludes that this move is nothing less than an "abdication of thought" (SLTS, 77/408) because here, precisely

where phenomenology finds that itmust confront history and the historicality ofscience in particular, it blinds itself to the very uniqueness of scientific change.

The empirical record shows that scientific development is a "continual revisionof contents by deepening (approfondissement) and eradication (rature)" (SLTS,

12. Edmund Husserl, "Beilage III," in his Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und dietranszendentale Phanomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phanomenologische Philosophic, ed. Walter

Biemel. Husserliana, Band VI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 380; "Appendix VI: [The Originof Geometry]," in his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: AnIntroduction to Phenomenology, transl. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,1970), 371.

13. Cavailles's critique works by examining each side of the intentional structure. He begins withthe intentional object (the noematic) and argues that Husserl's conception of the reducibility of theobjective principles of logic to lived experience undermines the delicate balance that the phenomenological project had promised. We can get at Cavailles's concern here ifwe consider the following

lineof reasoning: if the rules of sense, validity, and soundness?the norms of consistency, inference, andtruth?are ultimately founded in and thus, in some sense, are reducible to the life-world, then formallogic could be nothing other than amerely abstract way of combining the states of affairs already present in the world itself, a mere "close-fitting garment of ideas," as Husserl referred to it. But this would

mean that logic would be a set of maximally broad and, accordingly, maximally empty tautologies. Itcould have no content of its own, and thus no history of development intrinsic to itself. Cavailles thusconcludes that Husserl's account of the content of formal logic is inhabited by a deeply recalcitrantstrain of precisely the sort of naturalistic positivism that he had tirelessly sought to oppose. Second,turning now to the intentional act itself (the noetic), Cavailles argues that in tracing the rules of formallogic back to the constitutive performances of consciousness, Husserl's approach ultimately ties thenorms of scientific inquiry to a stratum of activity that, precisely because it is the foundation of allnorms, cannot itself be bound by norms. As a result, the work of constitution, the productive activityof conscious life, can be nothing more than contingent and arbitrary. The transcendental logic thatHusserl had sought to uncover as the foundation of formal logic thus could not be a logic at all. Allthat is left is the flow of temporality, the empty form of becoming.




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10 KEVIN THOMPSON78/409)14; but such movement as this is simply ruled out by recourse to the seamless flow of lived experience, "the coexistence and interweaving of sense-formation and sense-sedimentation." In Cavailles's succinct formulation, "if there isa consciousness of progress, there is not a progress of consciousness" (SLTS,78/409). Therein lies, inCavailles's judgment, the ultimate failure of Husserlianphenomenology as a foundation for a viable theory of science: it simply doesn'tappear to provide the conceptual tools needed to articulate the unique historicityof scientific progress.

But what then does Cavailles offer as an alternative? In the last few lines ofthe final paragraph of the essay, Cavailles provides what is an admittedly crypticsketch of another way of approaching the historicity of science. Its details

aremurky, but we can say that he does not here propose simply to abandon the terrainof phenomenological inquiry. Instead, what he advances is a call for amodifiedform of thismethodology, transformed precisely so as to be able to get at the profoundly eruptive historicity of science itself.15

Cavailles's approach takes its bearings from the rejection of the claim that consciousness does not itself develop. Conscious life is not a detached, seamlesslyflowing stream towhich all objectivities can ultimately be traced back, as Husserlappeared to presume. Rather, the transcendental field of consciousness is nothingother than the theories and investigations within which itdwells and, as such, it iscaught up in their continual movement of enrichment and overturning. The logicof scientific development is, then, the logic of the development of consciousness.Cavailles writes, "The progress is material or between singular essences [thatis, between historically distinct theories], and its engine (moteur) is the need tosurpass (depassement) each of these" (SLTS, 78/409). This, then, is the structureof the historicity that is endemic to scientific inquiry itself. It progresses not by alinear accumulation of knowledge, what Cavailles calls "augmentation of volumeby juxtaposition," but by a constant eruption of new insights, concepts, and gridsof intelligibility that overturn and replace what preceded them: "What comes afteris more than what existed before, not because it contains it or even because it

14. Foucault quotes this passage in the Introduction?"a continual revision of contents bydeepening and eradication"?attributing it to Cavailles, but without specifying an exact reference (see "Introduction par Michel Foucault" Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume III. 1976-1979,435; "Introduction by Michel Foucault" in The Normal and the Pathological, 14-15; and "La vie:l'experience et la science," Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume IV. 1980-1988,770; "Life: Experienceand Science," in Faubion, ed., Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 471). Canguilhem refers to thissame passage in terms of working out a proper historical methodology for scientific development inhis "Le role de l'epistemologie dans l'historiographie scientifique contemporaine," in Ideologic etrationalite dans Vhistoire des sciences de la vie (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1988), 23-24;"The Role of Epistemology in Contemporary History of Science," in Ideology and Rationality in the

History of the Life Sciences, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 13-14.15. For amore comprehensive examination of Cavailles's thought that seeks to offer an alternative

interpretation of this final paragraph to the one proposed here, see Hourya Sinaceur, Jean Cavailles:Philosophie mathematique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 110-122. See also JanSebestik's useful commentary on the entire essay in his "Postface" to Jean Cavailles, Sur la logiqueet la theorie de la science (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1997), 91-142, esp. 138-142. BothSinaceur, and following him, Sebestik, seek to show the roots of Cavailles's thinking in Spinoza andBrunschvicg, but, inmy judgment, fail to see the way inwhich what Cavailles proposes builds uponand actually furthers the methodological resources he found inHusserlian phenomenology.




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HISTORICITYAND TRANSCENDENTALITY 11prolongs it, but because it necessarily breaks out (sort) of it and carries (porte)in its content themark, each time singular, of its superiority. There is in itmoreconsciousness?and it is not the same consciousness" (SLTS, 78/409). With this,we expose the real nerve of Cavailles's analysis and themoment atwhich he decisively opens a new way of doing phenomenology, one that takes its bearings fromthe integration of the historical and the transcendental.

He argues that since the eruptive movement of historical mutation is endemicto the very nature of scientific knowledge, itmust also be inherent in the transcendental field that grounds such knowledge, for otherwise this stratum would not bethe foundation for a form of knowing that develops in this way. It follows fromthis that the transcendental must itself be alterable, changeable, and historical forit to be the condition for the possibility of scientific inquiry.

Cavailles concludes his reading by naming the new approach that would seek toremain faithful to the unique historicity of the transcendental foundations of science: "It is not a philosophy of consciousness but a philosophy of the concept thatcan provide a theory of science. The generative necessity is not that of an activity,but that of a dialectic" (SLTS, 78/409).16

We find here, then, the original formation of the distinction that Foucault wasto invoke some thirty years later. At its center was the attempt to work out atranscendental theory of the historicity of knowledge, an insistence that to dojustice to science we must think the integration of transcendentality and historicity. Cavailles therefore sets forth the basic outline of such a program, what Ipropose to call a phenomenology of the concept. At the center of its agenda is theuncovering of a conception of the transcendental that is divorced from its roots inconsciousness, a truly anonymous transcendental field.

The program for such an approach in Cavailles is clear. A phenomenology ofthe concept must forsake allegiance to the primordiality of consciousness. Thatwhich had been the last court of appeal for Husserl must now itself be seen ascaught up in the movement of historicity. All a priori structures must necessarily be conceived as historically mutable and ever-changing forms. In taking thisapproach, the genuine historicity of science can be understood and a true logicof the constitution of consciousness can be found. But in leaving the sphere ofconsciousness behind as the ultimate ground of explanation, a phenomenology ofthe concept does not thereby abandon the transcendental field itself. The promiseof Husserlian phenomenology proves to lie, then, for Cavailles, not in the conceptof intentionality conceived as a tranquil stream, but in a different form of archaeology: in the ability of phenomenology to break open the seemingly timelessdomain of science to expose themovement of transcendental historicity at workwithin it.Cavailles thus points the way to carrying out a truly immanent criticalappropriation of Husserlian phenomenology, one that carves out a way of doing

16. I leave aside here the vexing question of exactly what ismeant by a dialectic. However, it isclear from the context that it refers to a movement of surpassing that is immanent within the development of scientific theory itself. In this sense, it is a dialectic of noemata, rather than a dialecticalrelation between consciousness and its object. For an excellent examination of this originary dialectic,especially as itwas taken up in the thought of Derrida, see Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: TheBasic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), Part Two.




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12 KEVINTHOMPSONa new form of eidetic description: a phenomenology of the ruptural development,the strange "dialectic" of the concept.

But admittedly Cavailles leaves us with only a provocative and incompletesketch. We are left wanting to see what conceptual tools and theoretical strategiesare really required to employ this new form of inquiry. Itwas this question thatstood as the underlying impetus that led Canguilhem and Foucault, among others,to seek inCavailles a new way of doing the history of science. Furthermore, itwasfrom this stream that Foucault retrieved themethodological concepts of archaeology and the historical a priori from their Husserlian framework and put them towork in an importantly new way. I propose, then, that we now take Foucault athis word and consider his and Canguilhem's works as contributions and innovations within this new methodological paradigm, as interconnected streams fed bya common tributary, the phenomenology of the concept.

Ill

Ifmy argument thus far is tenable?that Canguilhem and Foucault ought to beseen as working under the rubric of a phenomenology of the concept?then it isequally important

to recognize that they pursue this project in significantly different ways. To begin to get at what separates them, and thereby shed light on both,we can say thatwhereas Canguilhem tracked the rules immanent within scientificdiscourse that govern the production of veridical statements, Foucault sought tounearth the conditions that regulate the formation and transformation of scientificdiscourses themselves. Put rather simply, and to employ Foucault's own means ofcontrasting their approaches, while Canguilhem was concerned with "true saying(dire vrai)," Foucault looked for the principles that determine what it is to be "inthe true (dans le vm*)."17For Canguilhem, the proper object of the history of science is concepts ratherthan theories, and, accordingly, its true methodology is epistemological ratherthan descriptive.18 A concept, as Canguilhem uses the term, is not, as we so oftenassume, simply a term as it is defined or interpreted within a specific theoreticalor disciplinary framework. Rather, it is the initial account of a phenomenon thatenables scientists to pose the question of how to explain it.On this rendering, aconcept is structurally polyvalent. The same concept can play amultitude of different roles in different theories and yet still retain its identity as a specific con

17. For a useful account of this distinction, see Arnold Davidson, "On Epistemology andArcheology: From Canguilhem to Foucault," in his The Emergence of Sexuality: HistoricalEpistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),192-206; and Han, Foucault's Critical Project, 79-85.

18. See Canguilhem's statement of method, "L'objet de l'histoire des sciences," in his Etudesd'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, 5th rev. ed. [1968] (Paris: Vrin, 1983), 9-23; cf. "Le rolede l'epistemologie dans l'historiographie scientifique contemporaine," in Ideologic et rationalitedans l'histoire des sciences de la vie, 11-29; "The Role of Epistemology in Contemporary Historyof Science," in Ideology and Rationality in theHistory of the Life Sciences, 1-23. For useful discussions of Canguilhem's historical method, though they fail to recognize Cavailles's important role,see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 1989), 32-52; and Guillaume Le Blanc, Canguilhem et les normes (Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France, 1998).




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HISTORICITYAND TRANSCENDENTALITY 13cept. The history of science is thus to be written as a history of concepts, and thisis just what Canguilhem's studies of health, illness, bodily reflex, and even theconcept of life itself, are. The historian's task, however, is not simply to record thevariations in the usages of concepts, but instead towork out what might be calledthe intrinsic grammar of the scientific theories in which these concepts operate.

Reversing Gaston Bachelard's important dictum, Canguilhem thus holds that ahistorian of science must be a unique kind of epistemologist. Historians of science

must find the structure of the theoretical models that have prevailed in history. Todo this they must isolate the rules internal to scientific discourse that set down theconditions for the coherence, the regularity, of a body of scientific knowledge.These rules govern the construction of concepts, their fields of application, andtheir range of usages. Borrowing from Husserl, we can say that what historiansmust uncover is thematerial a priori for specific sciences. To speak truthfully inscience, then, means to speak within the parameters established by the rules thatare endemic to a specific scientific discourse. These internal systems are the apriori conditions for producing veridical scientific statements. It is in this sensethat Canguilhem's historical epistemology seeks to identify the division of truthand falsity specific to each body of knowledge; and it is by virtue of this methodthat, in turn, it is able it tomark the transformations in these rules. The historicalepistemologist thusmoves beyond both the court of transcendental consciousness(the non-historical a priori) and the brute empiricality of the chronicler of datesand biographies (empirical history) to grasp the eidetic structures of the deeperlogic of the historicity that is inherent in scientific development: "the time of theadvent of scientific truth, the time of verification, has a liquidity or viscosity thatis different for different disciplines in the same periods of general history."19 Inthis way, historical epistemology seeks to take up and extend the project of a phenomenology of the concept.But if true speaking (dire vrai) means to speak in accordance with the a prioristandards internal to scientific discourse, then what does being in the true (dans levrai) mean? In other words, how does Foucault take up the project of a phenomenology of the concept?

Foucault argues that what Canguilhem's approach can do, and what it doesextraordinarily well, is mark out the changes in the truth conditions that are immanent within scientific disciplines. It creates a record of epistemic breaks. Whatit cannot do, however, is account for these transformations themselves. That is tosay, historical epistemology shows what rules govern truthful statements withinspecific domains of scientific inquiry, but it cannot get at the coherence and transformability of these disciplines. To do that, eidetic description would have to haverecourse to the deeper stratum of the norms that define the fields of knowledgethemselves. Canguilhem's approach thus remains, for Foucault, at the level ofconnaissance, and it thus cannot explain the regularities and shifts?the rarity,exteriority, and accumulation of disciplines?that are governed by the principlesof savoir. It follows that if a phenomenology of the concept is to get at the basis ofscientific progress, and not just mark its shifts, itmust go beyond historical epis

19. Canguilhem, "L'objet de l'histoire des sciences," in his Etudes d'histoire et de philosophicdes sciences, 19.




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14 KEVINTHOMPSONtemology's exploration of the internal conditions for the possibility of scientificclaims?what we have called, following Husserl, the material a prioris of specific disciplines?and unearth the fields by which and inwhich such knowledgeis able to arise, the historical a prioris that regulate the constitution of disciplinesas discursive formations. In a word, then, one must move from epistemology toarchaeology.

As we have seen, for Cavailles, the historical a priori and archaeology designated phenomenology's fundamental object and its ultimate methodology. Thelatter was its excavation and renewal of a science's buried layers of intentionalsense-history, while the former was the ultimate structure of temporality that governs the process of sense formation and sedimentation that is history itself. On

Cavailles's reading, as we can now see, the failure of this project lay in its presumption that these layers and such a structure as this were tied to the unchangingflow of conscious life. Consequently, if the project of a phenomenology of theconcept is to see all intentional structures as part and parcel of the historically

mutable forms of science, then Canguilhem's historical epistemology certainlyprovides access to the intentionality embedded within the eruptive flow of scientific change. But, as we have noted, his approach has also left open the questionof the a priori structures that govern the field within which science itself operates,the domain of savoir, the historical a priori, the stratum of the archaeological.Foucault's method thus does not mark a simple return to the project of Husserlianphenomenology, but rather carries out a decisive retrieval of its central methodological concepts, placing them in service to a truly comprehensive phenomenology of the concept.20

Our review of the history of this line of development lays before us, then, tworather simple questions that take us to the very heart of Foucault's philosophicalproject: (1) what is a historical a priori?, and (2) what is archaeology? My contention is that these questions must be answered together.

For Husserl, the historical a priori is the non-historical, unchanging transcendental structure of history itself: "the living movement of the coexistence andinterweaving of original sense-production (Sinnbildung) and sense-sedimentation(Sinnsedimentierung)." But to conceive of the nature of scientific change in this

way is, as Cavailles argued, just to deny it its unique form of development. Cavailles therefore pointed to the necessity of identifying the specific a priori structuresat work in science and tracing out the eruptive historicity of these conditions, thedialectic of the concept. Canguilhem's work fleshed out this project through careful historical investigations of the employments of specific scientific concepts. In

20. In an exchange with George Steiner, Foucault noted that his employment of the concept ofarchaeology derived from Kant's work on progress in metaphysics ("Monstrosities in Criticism,"

Diacritics 1 [Fall 1971], 60). Bernauer traces this reference to Kant's 1793 manuscript entitled"Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit Leibnitzens und Wolfs Zeitenin Deutschlands gemacht hat?" where he defines "philosophische Archaologie" as the investigation

of that which renders a certain form of thought necessary (James W. Bernauer, Michel Foucault'sForce of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990],202, n. 113). I believe that the intellectual lineage that I have sought to reconstruct here supports theclaim that Foucault's actual usage of the method is derived more from phenomenology than fromtranscendental idealism.




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HISTORICITYAND TRANSCENDENTALITY 15doing so, Canguilhem made themove to work within the interiority of scientificdiscourse, and, as a result, was able to uncover the various forms of intentionality embedded in concrete scientific disciplines. But what this approach fails to beable to do, precisely because it remains within the internal parameters of its object, is account for the changing nature of scientific knowledge as awhole. It cannot set out the shifting sets of rules under which some form of knowledge countsas scientific in one epoch or another. A phenomenology of the concept demands,then, that transcendentality and historicity be thought together; this is precisely

what Foucault's retrieval of the historical a priori seeks to achieve.In the dense pivotal chapter of Uarcheologie du savoir [1969] entitled "L'a

priori historique et 1'archive," Foucault argues that to examine scientific discourses as discursive formations is to take them as they stand dispersed in the fieldwithin which they may be said to communicate or fail to communicate with oneanother, the space of what Foucault calls their "positivity."21 Foucault detects herea stratum that lies between the material interiority of science, the domain of thestatement (Uenonce), within which Canguilhem worked, and the wholly formalexteriority of timeless structures that were Husserl's ultimate concern. It is thespace defined by the principles that govern the formation of (1) the delimitationand description of a specific phenomenon (objects), (2) the determinate place andstatus from which an authority speaks (subject-positions), (3) the definition of thearrangements and complexes of acceptable statements (concepts), and finally (4)the circumscription of compatible and incompatible theories and themes (strategies). These rules thus set out the "field inwhich itwould be possible to deployformal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemicalinterchanges" (AS, 167/127). These rules are then the conditions for the reality of

discourses that are, we could say, extrinsic to the scientific theories themselves.These rules are necessarily, at once, a priori and historical. They are a prioribecause they set down the conditions for being in the true. That is to say, they

govern not speaking in general, but what has actually been said. They define theparameters of truth and falsity that are operative within a specific epoch and markthe threshold that a statement must cross in order to be acceptable as a candidatefor evidential confirmation or disconfirmation. They are, then, the "conditions ofemergence of statements, the law of their coexistence with others, the specificform of theirmode of being, the principles according towhich they subsist, transform, and disappear" (AS, 167/127). These rules are normative and, as such, bearprescriptive efficacy. But they do so not in the sense of absolute standards whosebinding force derives from their being principles under which one can freely act,nor do they possess some form of physical causal determinacy. Rather, these rulesfunction at the level of the categorial. Archaeological research carries out a formof transcendental deduction: it establishes the legitimacy of the rules of discursive formation by showing, through a form of imaginative variation, that, within

21. Michel Foucault, L'archeologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 166; The Archaeologyof Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: PantheonBooks, 1972), 126. All further references to this work are designated in the text as "AS" followed bythe appropriate page reference to the French edition and then to the English translation. Where necessary, I have modified the translation.




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16 KEVIN THOMPSONa specified historical epoch, a statement can enter the domain of acceptabilityonly insofar as it accords with these conditions not just as a matter of factualhappenstance (quidfacti), but by right (quid juris). Just as in all transcendentalapproaches, archaeology takes the empirical fact of its object as a given and seeksthe conditions under which such a fact is possible. Discursive formations exist;there are complexes of existent interrelated statements whose integrity demandsthat they be treated as unique events; they are, tomake use of Foucault's formulation for this, temporally dispersed. Archaeology seeks, recursively, the categorialstructures, the principles, by virtue of which such occurrences as these are possible, and thismeans not the empirical scheme that some collection of claims mustsatisfy in order to be counted as a science, but rather the eidetic structure that aformation must possess in order to be the coherent, stable body that it is. It is thusas categorial conditions that the rules of discursive formation are a priori.

But inasmuch as these rules are categorial, the conditions for being in the trueare, at the same time, historical: "the a priori of positivities is not only the system of a temporal dispersion; it is itself a transformable complex (un ensembletransformable)" (AS, 168/127). The rules for the formation of objects, subjects,concepts, and strategies are not timeless forms, schemes, or transcendentals,whether these be considered ideal or real. Rather, it is precisely as categorial thatthey are mutable. That discursive formations change is signaled by the empirical,historical shifts in theways in which these unities are forged. But if the empiricalnature of discursive formations changes, then the rules that govern the constitution of such bodies must also shift because the categorial is a dimension thatdoes not stand outside of the discourses that it regulates. It is a plane immanentwithin discourse itself whose groups of rules are, as Foucault says, "caught upin (engagees dans) the very things that they connect" (AS, 168/127). Thus, thecategorial ismutable precisely because it is immanent in that which it governs.

Archaeology's transcendental deduction is also, then, a historical deduction: itcarries out historical-eidetic descriptions in order to lay bare the economies thatregulate the acceptability of statements. When archaeology succeeds in its workof excavating the stratum of positivity, it has thus unearthed the epochal systemthat governs not only what is say able (statements: event), but how what is saidcan be combined, that is, put to use, and this is what Foucault calls the "archive"(AS, 169/128), the epochal economy of order.

Archaeology is then a form of eidetic description that seeks to remain faithfulto the ruptural historicity of knowledge. It works not by uncovering the sensehistory, the traditionality, of the sciences with which it is concerned, but by excavating the empirical surface of words and things so as to lay bare the stratumof rules, the layer of savoir, that governs the fields within which scientific discourses operate. In doing this it also disembeds these principles and, in doing so,it opens up the immanent transcendental historicity that is at work in the develop

ment of knowledge itself. To be sure, it does not seek to offer an explanation forwhy these shifts occur. (To do that would be to seek the non-historical conditionof history itself. As we have seen, this is precisely how Husserl conceived of thehistorical a priori, and Foucault rejects this as a purely formal a priori because, inthe end, all it can do is impose an extrinsic unity on the eruptive movement of his




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HISTORICITYAND TRANSCENDENTALITY 17tory.) Thus, Foucault, building on the work of Canguilhem, takes up the projectfirst announced in Cavailles's critical appropriation of Husserlian phenomenology, and works out amethod that takes fidelity to the matters themselves in alltheir density and fractural dispersion as its fundamental obligation. Archaeologyis thereby a phenomenology of the concept?it "describes discourses as practicesspecified in the element of the archive" (AS, 173/131) ?and this means that, atits core, it thinks transcendentality and historicity together as the stratum of thepositivity of knowledge.

IVIwant to conclude by briefly considering two questions that arise out of attemptssuch as I have undertaken here to reconstruct some of the intellectual tradition

within which Foucault worked.The first question is one that Foucault himself poses: if the historical a prioriis the reigning set of conditions under which we continually labor, how is it

possible to render an account of it? Foucault is clear as to the methodologicalpresupposition under which archaeological investigation labors. The archiveunder description must be at once historically close to us, but no longer our own.That is to say, such research can take place only with the presumption of a kindof closure, that the epoch to be examined has "just ceased to be ours (viennent decesser justement d'etre les notre)" (AS, 172/130). Breaking open the historicaleidetic structures that have made us what we are thus operates in a "gap/deviation(Vecart)" (AS, 172/130). Whether it be the beginnings of our detachment fromthe identification of disease with the body, as inNaissance de la clinique (1962,rev. ed., 1972), or the withering away of man as the principle of knowledge, asin Les mots el les choses (1966), archaeology necessarily speaks from and outof the "border of time," what Foucault calls the "outside (dehors)" of our ownlanguage (AS, 172/130).

The second question is one that I earlier set aside: what was it about thespecific type of phenomenological investigation that Cavailles initiated thatultimately led Foucault to grapple not just with the historicity of knowledge butwith its relationship to power and subjectivity? Now, of course, even before hebegan to describe his work as genealogical Foucault was interested in the relations between discursive and non-discursive practices. Consider Folie et deraison (1961, rev. ed., 1972) and Naissance de la clinique. He was convinced that

knowledge is always invested in centers, techniques, and procedures of power.But why would a phenomenology of the concept of itself lead one to a concernwith these investments? Husserl and, following him, Cavailles, never took science as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. It was and is at the very centerof theWestern project of rationality to shape our world so as to be able to livefreely within it. But whereas Husserl sought the cause of the crisis that afflictedhumanity in the twentieth century in this project's going awry?hence, the callto renew the original animating intentions of the sciences?a phenomenology ofthe concept shows that the problem lies not in falling away from some teleological progression endemic to history, but rather in the specific epochal constella




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18 KEVINTHOMPSONtions, the stamps of savoir, that govern knowledge as well as the mechanismsof subjugation with which structures of reason become intertwined. Itwas whenFoucault

gainedsufficient

clarityabout this issue that he was able to see that

archaeological inquiry must not only seek out the historical a priori by whichdiscursive formations arise, but the transcendental historical rules that regulatethe entwinement of power, knowledge, and subjectivation. He thus moved fromdescribing discursive practices as they are specified in the element of the archive,to excavating the dispositif that governs discourse and power. There is perhapsno better example of this to be found in Foucault's corpus than in Parts Twoand Three of La volonte de savoir (1976) where the "discursive orthopedics" oftelling everything [discourse] are shown to be bound up with tactics that solidifyperversion in the body [power]; both of these, in turn, are shown to operate underthe rules of a specific dispositif, a determinate "will to knowledge (savoir)"'. thescientia sexualis (subjectivation).

I have argued that the coherence of Foucault's philosophical project lies in itsdevelopment of a historical methodology to unearth the stratum of experiencethat governs the thought and practice of the epochs that have shaped the presentage. I have shown that this required him to work out a way of passage betweenthe absolute purism of the transcendental and the mundane contingency of thehistorical. But this presented us with a rather stark choice. It seemed that theintegrity of the transcendental had to be bought at the price of excluding the impurity of becoming or it would be condemned to be the empirical in but anotherguise. Setting Foucault's work within the lineage of a phenomenology of theconcept has, however, demonstrated that this dilemma is rooted in an important

misreading of Foucault's project. Foucault's research is dedicated to unearthingthe transcendental-historical conditions in and through which we have come tobe what we are. It therefore stands squarely within the broader tradition of transcendental philosophy. It seeks to isolate the strictures that govern knowledgeand practice, the work of critique, so that we can clearly see where and how we

might begin to constitute ourselves otherwise, the task of enlightenment. Archaeology is thus themethod for a genuine "art of voluntary inservitude, of reflectiveindocility."22

DePaul University

22. Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ce que la critique? (Critique et Aufklarung)," Bulletin de la societefrangaise de philosophic 39; "What is Critique," The Politics of Truth, 32.

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