If we consider that Foucault's intellectual career was an effort to produce
and establish a social history of some key Western concepts, =3D a social
history of the problematizations that account for this or that kind of
thought, =3D a social history of knowledge permitted/forbidden by these
problematizations.
If we accept that rather than dealing with the question of <WHY?>,
=46oucault preferred answering to: <HOW?>.
If we remember that the individual, the insane, the sexual, <<man>>, and
other (Western) notions and traits did not have any *necessary* existence;
that instead their temporal/arbitrary character demands a historical
approach or <de'marche> in order to trace back their representational
origin; and of course, that this historical project is of history as a
discontinuous thing.
[what is still unclear to me : could we say that this discontinuous
history is devoid of any causality/finality or engine? i feel like
answering : NO. But then -i'm afraid- i'd fall into ... determinism...gee
whiz!]
If we agree that the contingence of humans' ideas derives in reality from
their being mere problematizations; that these ways of posing particular
problems appear at a particular historical period in relation with very
specific conditions; that therefore, their disappearance is conceivable.
If we recall that sexuality, as an object of thought/knowledge has not been
constituted before the advent of discourses/practices that aimed at its
domestication, during the classic age and the 19th C;also that delinquence
has only been thinkable as soon as emprisonment was generalized as a
punitive practice;
That,in a way, one can somehow explain an object with what has been its
practice.
Then the <de'marche> that consists on the one hand in conceiving thought as
a historical fact and on the other hand in accounting for it with the
practices that witnessed to its birth, definitely places Foucault within
the MARXIST INTELLECTUAL TRADITION,
i.e. <<it is not conscience that makes the being but rather the being -->
conscience>>,
i.e. <<le roi, le fou, les figures (non eternelles) sont ce que leurs
configurations (non eternelles) sur l'=E9chiquier font d'elles>> de Paul
Veyne
cyuma