biopowerįoucault argues that biopower is a technology which appeared in the late eighteenth century for managing populations. For example, the psychological entity of the author and the use of the author as a way of organising texts are two different things and need to be treated separately. The author is a category or way of organising texts which has a history and needs to be challenged. author/artistįoucault described traditional notions of the author as being restrictive. The History of Sexuality: Volume Two. Tr. the arts of existence (life as a work of art)įoucault defines ‘techniques of the self’ or ‘arts of existence’ as ‘those reflective and voluntary practices by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make of their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’.įoucault (1992). None of these concepts has predictive value – they are all descriptions of limited historical orders. In examining these traces one can deduce the historical a priori of the period and then if one is looking at science, one can deduce the episteme of the period. This is a technical term Foucault uses in The Archaeology of Knowledge. It designates the collection of all material traces left behind by a particular historical period and culture. Genealogy deals with precisely the same substrata of knowledge and culture, but Foucault now describes it as a level where the grounds of the true and the false come to be distinguished via mechanisms of power. But, if archaeology addresses a level at which differences and similarities are determined, a level where things are simply organized to produce manageable forms of knowledge, the stakes are much higher for genealogy. The tools Foucault uses to practice both methods are to all intents and purposes the same. archaeology versus genealogyįoucault’s remarks on the difference between archaeology and genealogy are generally rather vague and confusing. In other words archaeology is about looking at history as a way of understanding the processes that have led to what we are today. Archaeology is about examining the discursive traces and orders left by the past in order to write a ‘history of the present’. ‘Archaeology’ is the term Foucault used during the 1960s to describe his approach to writing history. The original French term dispositif is rendered variously as ‘dispositif’, ‘apparatus’ and ‘deployment’ in English translations of Foucault’s work archaeology © Clare O’Farrell 2007-2021 apparatus (dispositif)įoucault generally uses this term to indicate the various institutional, physical and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures, which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body. If there are any key concepts that are not on this list but that you would like to see here send me an email and I will see what I can do. The list below places more emphasis on definitions, whereas the list in the book provides a detailed structure of references for users of Foucault’s work. For a more complete list which also includes extensive details of where these concepts can be found in Foucault’s work please see Appendix 2: ‘Key Concepts in Foucault’s work’ in my book Michel Foucault (London: Sage, 2005). This page offers brief definitions of some of the key concepts in Foucault’s work.

Trace of notion definition