Publication Details

Abstract

The article tries to answer the question: Why the publication of The Order of Things aroused the polemics about M. Foucault’s being a structuralist? Unlike structuralism, Foucault’s archeology introduces semantic structures into history: he examines the dramatic rearrangement of words and things in history to unveil the historical background of the production of the period-related, transitory, discontinued, relative knowledge. In the author’s view, this method is contradictory in itself as it does not consider its own politics of meaning: While describing the three ways of the epistemic generating of representations Foucault nevertheless ascribes the arbitrary representation of things by words to the only épistémé, namely the „classical“ one. It is the later Foucault who reflects on the ethics of meaning, which unveils the production of representation in every politics of meaning, even in its own one, creating thus the meta-representations.