The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

449 Pages·2005·1.28 MB·English

by  Michel Foucault

The Order of Things
‘The Order of Things sold out within a month after it first
appeared – or so goes the advertising legend. The work num-
bers among those outward signs of culture the trained eye
should find on prominent display in every private library. Have
you read it? One’s social and intellectual standing depends on
the response ... Foucault is brilliant (a little too brilliant). His
writing sparkles with incisive formulations. He is amusing.
Stimulating. Dazzling. His erudition confounds us; his skill
compels assent; his art seduces.’
Michel de Certeau
‘Foucault’s most important work.’
Hayden V. White
‘One is left with a sense of real and original force.’
George Steiner
‘The Order of Things studies the ways in which people accept
the taxonomies of an epoch without questioning their arbitrari-
ness ... Even scholars who are in a position to scold Foucault
... admit his brilliant ingenuity and scholarly resource.’
Frank Kermode
‘In The Order of Things, Foucault investigates the modern
forms of knowledge (or epistemes) that establish for the
sciences their unsurpassable horizons of basic concepts.’
Jürgen Habermas
Velasquez: Las Meninas, reproduced by courtesy of the Museo del Prado.
Michel
Foucault
The Order of Things
An archaeology of the human sciences
London and New York
Les mots et les choses first published 1966
by Editions Gallimard, Paris
English edition first published in the United Kingdom 1970
by Tavistock Publications
First published by Routledge 1989
First published in Routledge Classics 2002
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 1966 Editions Gallimard
English translation © 1970 Tavistock/Routledge
Foreword to the English edition © 1970 Michel Foucault
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-203-99664-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0–415–26736–6 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–26737–4 (pbk)
CONTENTS
Publisher’s Note viii
Foreword to the English Edition ix
Preface xvi
PART I
1 Las Meninas 3
2 The Prose of the World 19
I The Four Similitudes 19
II Signatures 28
III The Limits of the World 33
IV The Writing of Things 38
V The Being of Language 46
3 Representing 51
I Don Quixote 51
II Order 55
III The Representation of the Sign 64
IV Duplicated Representation 70
V The Imagination of Resemblance 74
VI Mathesis and ‘Taxinomia’ 79
vi contents
4 Speaking 86
I Criticism and Commentary 86
II General Grammar 90
III The Theory of the Verb 101
IV Articulation 106
V Designation 114
VI Derivation 121
VII The Quadrilateral of Language 127
5 Classifying 136
I What the Historians Say 136
II Natural History 139
III Structure 144
IV Character 150
V Continuity and Catastrophe 158
VI Monsters and Fossils 164
VII The Discourse of Nature 171
6 Exchanging 180
I The Analysis of Wealth 180
II Money and Prices 183
III Mercantilism 189
IV The Pledge and the Price 196
V The Creation of Value 206
VI Utility 213
VII General Table 218
VIII Desire and Representation 226
PART II
7 The Limits of Representation 235
I The Age of History 235
II The Measure of Labour 240
III The Organic Structure of Beings 245
IV Word Inflection 252
V Ideology and Criticism 257
VI Objective Syntheses 264
contents vii
8 Labour, Life, Language 272
I The New Empiricities 272
II Ricardo 275
III Cuvier 287
IV Bopp 305
V Language Become Object 321
9 Man and His Doubles 330
I The Return of Language 330
II The Place of the King 335
III The Analytic of Finitude 340
IV The Empirical and the Transcendental 347
V The ‘Cogito’ and the Unthought 351
VI The Retreat and Return of the Origin 358
VII Discourse and Man’s Being 366
VIII The Anthropological Sleep 371
10 The Human Sciences 375
I The Three Faces of Knowledge 375
II The Form of the Human Sciences 380
III The Three Models 387
IV History 400
V Psychoanalysis and Ethnology 407
VI In Conclusion 421
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
A literal translation of the title of the French edition of this work (Les
Mots et les choses) would have given rise to confusion with two other
books that have already appeared under the title Words and things. The
publisher therefore agreed with the author on the alternative title The
order of things, which was, in fact, M. Foucault’s original preference.
In view of the range of literature referred to in the text, it has not
proved feasible in every case to undertake the bibliographical task of
tracing English translations of works originating in other languages
and locating the passages quoted by M. Foucault. The publisher has
accordingly retained the author’s references to French works and to
French translations of Latin and German works, for example, but has, as
far as possible, cited English editions of works originally written in that
language.
FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
This foreword should perhaps be headed ‘Directions for Use’. Not
because I feel that the reader cannot be trusted – he is, of course, free to
make what he will of the book he has been kind enough to read. What
right have I, then, to suggest that it should be used in one way rather
than another? When I was writing it there were many things that were
not clear to me: some of these seemed too obvious, others too obscure.
So I said to myself: this is how my ideal reader would have approached
my book, if my intentions had been clearer and my project more ready
to take form.
1. He would recognize that it was a study of a relatively neglected
field. In France at least, the history of science and thought gives pride
of place to mathematics, cosmology, and physics – noble sciences,
rigorous sciences, sciences of the necessary, all close to philosophy:
one can observe in their history the almost uninterrupted emergence
of truth and pure reason. The other disciplines, however – those, for
example, that concern living beings, languages, or economic facts – are
considered too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the
vagaries of chance or imagery, to age-old traditions and external
events, for it to be supposed that their history could be anything other
than irregular. At most, they are expected to provide evidence of a state
of mind, an intellectual fashion, a mixture of archaism and bold