Michel Foucault THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE (1) Table of Contents

Publication of an unpublished book manuscript by Michel Foucault: PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. Text established by Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera, under the direction of François Ewald – to be published by Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, in May 2023

The manuscript dates from 1966, it was written after THE ORDER OF THINGS, published in 1966, and before the publication of THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE in 1969.

As will be seen from the table of contents, and as the dating of the writing suggests, this book provides the perfect bridge between those two established works. Further, this posthumously published book is of far more than nostalgic value.

Foucault’s meditations are « untimely » and so may serve again today where we are confronted with a reactionary revision (Domenico Losurdo, Jan Rehmann) in Theory, trying yet again to liquidate the heritage of the great French post-Nietzschean thinkers.

What follows is my translation of the detailed Table of Contents that Daniele Lorenzini shared on his twitter feed: https://twitter.com/DanieLorenzini/status/1629959851919941633

Notice (p5)

Rules for the establishment of the text (p7)

Chapter 1 The Diagnostic (p13):

philosophy as diagnostic enterprise – to interpret and to cure – the philosopher must say what there is

Chapter 2 Now (p21):

philosophical discourse and its « today » – the « now » of everyday discourse, or the triad of « I-here-in the present » – scientific and literary discourse are freed from this now

Chapter 3 Philosophical Discourse and Scientific Discourse (p29):

the singular relation of philosophical discourse to its now – the justification of philosophical discourse – the ambiguous relation of philosophical discourse to the triad of « I-here-in the present » – two forms of philosophy since Descartes: unveiling and manifestation – the problem of the subject – the role of the cogito – the difference between philosophical discourse and scientific discourse

Chapter 4 Fiction and Philosophy (p41):

the now of philosophical discourse and of fictional discourse – their justification – their functional forms – the irreducibility of the speaking subject – the principle of closure of works – the difference between philosophical discourse and literary discourse – philosophical discourse as exegesis or interpretation

Chapter 5 Philosophy and the Everyday (p57):

the relation to « actuality » and to the « present » in philosophical discourse and in everyday discourse – the difference between philosophical discourse and everyday discourse – the critical function of Western philosophy

Chapter 6 The Birth of Philosophical Discourse (p71):

the singularity of philosophical discourse since Descartes – the general mutation in the order of discourses in the XVIIth Century – Cervantes and the new regime of discourses of fiction – Galileo and the new regime of scientific discourse – the Word of God and the new regime of religious exegesis – the emergence of Western philosophical discourse

Chapter 7 The General Disposition of Philosophical Discourse (p91):

Comparison between philosophical discourse and religious exegesis – the function of commentary – the mode of existence of philosophical discourse: four fundamental functions and four fundamental tasks – the discursive necessities of philosophy since the Classical Age – God, the soul and the world – philosophy as destruction of metaphysics – the disappearance of metaphysica specialis and the displacement of metaphysica generalis – Kant and the constitution of a new ontology

Chapter 8 The Two Models of Discourse (p109):

philosophical discourse as condition of possibility of philosophical systems appearing in history – the two series of choices authorised by philosophy since Descartes – the first model of post-Cartesian philosophical discourse: unveiling, origin, appearance, encyclopedia – the second model of post-Cartesian philosophical discourse: manifestation, sense, unconscious, memory

Chapter 9 Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ontology (p127):

two models of philosophical discourse and two types of relations between ontology and metaphysics – pre-Kantian philosophy as metaphysics of representation and ontology interior to discours – post-Kantian philosophy as anthropology and ontology exterior to discourse – the displacements operated by Kant’s critique – Fichte and Husserl

Chapter 10 Description of Philosophy (p147):

the method of functional description – philosophical systems – the four main types of history of philosophy (system, experience, ideology, deciphering) as functional moments of philosophical discourse – the irreducibility of functional description to the history of philosophy – the interstice of works and history as space of simultaneous possibilities

Chapter 11 The New Mutation (p169):

historical conditions of the possibility of philosophy – the crisis and the philosophical void of the present (distress, forgetting, beginning again, listening) – Nietzsche and the decomposition of philosophical discourse – the negative perception of the crisis and the new wealth which is emerging: philosophical acts – the « great pluralism » of Nietzsche

Chapter 12 Thinking after Nietzsche (p191):

the reorganisation of the general regime of discourses after Nietzsche – the question of philosophy posed by the discourses at the limit of philosophy: logical positivism, ontology, description of lived experience, search for structures – phenomenology and the unity of the Cartesian-Husserlian discourse: pure description and the search for the foundation

Chapter 13 The Archive (p209):

the contemporary mutation of our thought and the interrogation of language – the passage of language outside itself – the constitution of the integral archive as cultural form defining the conservation, selection, and circulation of discourses – the double-sided reality of the discourse-archive – the discourse-archive as system of constraints for language and history – archeology as discipline of the discourse-archive

Chapter 14 The History of the Discourse-Archive (p227):

the impossibility for any culture to step out of its own system of discourse-archive – the immanent ethnology of the discourse archive – the main stages of the history of the discourse archive – the historical discontinuities according to the envisaged chronological markers – the interdependence of stabilities and ruptures in the history of the archive and in the history of discourse – the unavailability to totalisation of the history of the discourse-archive: a world of rupture

Chapter 15 The Mutation Today (p241):

the emergence of an integral archive and the transformation of its functioning – the neutralisation of speech acts and their distribution in the space of proliferation of discourses – the inexhaustible exteriority of discourse: the element of discursivity – the constitution of discourse as general referential and condition of possibility of the non-discursive – the transformability into discourse as a property of discourse itself

Annex – Extracts from Notebooks 4 and 6, July – October 1966 (p251)

Situation (p261)

Index of Notions (p297)

Index of Names (p299)