The etiology of materiality in Michel Foucault’s discursive theory

Abstract

The field of discourse analysis, especially the segment that developed in France from the foundational works of Foucault and Pêcheux, has been concerned, since the results achieved by these two authors, with the important question of the implications of materiality in discourse. In this work, we recover certain positions in the domain of science and philosophy from which some theoretical turns responsible for important changes in this regard unfolded. Our analysis indicates that the concept of matter came to offer itself, from the 18th century onwards, as a new center of reference in a context in which it was necessary to undertake a long and hard battle against the primacy of consciousness, refusing, since then, to thinking substance as a starting point for scientific analysis. What seems worthy of note, however, is that important features of metaphysical reason have been somehow preserved – in different degrees and forms – in the cases we consider here.

Submitted on: 06/25/2020
Accepted on: 07/19/2020