مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - ‘Language’ as a Political Choice in Michel Foucault

Abstract :

Foucault never regarded “language” as a subject for study in its simple form. However, the subject of “language” has an important mission that functions under all his all main themes and shapes him. The systematic construct of knowledge and discourse in Foucault is considered as language systems overlapped with societal practice. The language systems in question appear before us with its different functionality in every single method peculiar to him. In the archaeology method in which he studied “knowledge systems”, in the genealogy method in which he examined “government models” and in his ethical studies where he investigated “the relationship with himself”, language has always played a significant role despite being diverse. In his archeological studies, Foucault, while he was trying to reveal the idiosyncratic characteristics of three great epistemic periods, he means the Renaissance, the Classical and the Modern Age, and their evolution from one to another, he noticed how influential the understanding of language was in each period. During the transition from the Classical Age to the Modern Age in particular, an important fact he discovered related to language is quite influential in his switching to a new method. In the archeological studies he carried out, Foucault, who could never observe the existence of human and language together in Western intellectual history, analyzes the results of this situation in terms of the rationality of modernity for today. While this analysis, which would shape Foucault’s genealogy method, reveals government models and the importance of societal practices, it clarifies the close relationship of language with them and also explains the mission that language undertakes as “the most significant political preference of our age”. In this context our study aims to demonstrate, due to the key concepts which he included in his studies, why Foucault located “language” as a political preference.