ABSTRACT
Foucault wrote two books during his “archaeological” phase. The first, The Order of Things, published in 1966, is a history of discourse since the Renaissance; the second, The Archaeology of Knowledge, published three years later, is a re-theorization of the first. “Re-theorization” is the appropriate word because The Archaeology of Knowledge does not provide a full and accurate account of The Order of Things’ aims and achievements: it pushes them in a new direction. Both are self-consciously revolutionary works. Between them they posit a new “discipline,” if not a “positive science” as Derrida described his rival to archaeology-grammatology-in 1967. Indeed, the word “archaeology” had long had a somewhat subversive and heightened sense in the French avant-garde. As far back as 1926, Georges Henri Rivière, a curator at the Trocadéro, had published what Rosalind Krauss calls a “panegyric” to an archaeology which he regarded as the “parricidal daughter of humanism” (Krauss 1985, 49). More immediately, the ambitiousness of both Derrida’s and Foucault’s claims belong to that “trembling” of French society during the sixties, mentioned at the end of my introduction.
