Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
The Order of Things
Epistemes – and man as a face drawn in sand.
Introduction
The book appeared in Paris in 1966, subtitled “An Archaeology of the Human Sciences”, and became an unexpected bestseller. It opens with a list from a “Chinese encyclopedia” invented by Borges and with an analysis of Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas. Foucault compares three epistemes: the Renaissance, which ordered knowledge by resemblance; the classical age, with general grammar, natural history and the analysis of wealth based on representation; and the modern age since about 1800, in which philology, biology and economics make “man” both the object and the subject of knowledge. Sartre attacked the book as a last bulwark of the bourgeoisie against Marx.
Connections
Criticizes
- Critique of Pure Reason1781 · Immanuel Kant
Taken up in
- For a Critique of Islamic Reason1984 · Mohammed Arkoun
- The Invention of Africa1988 · V. Y. Mudimbe
More works by Michel Foucault
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