ABSTRACT
It is in the work of Michel Foucault that we find the most unrelenting offensive against historicist theories of history. But Foucault at least can hardly be accused of neglecting history as such. The demise of Althusserianism has meant that the extent to which subsequent writers, such as Foucault or even Derrida, continued to work within the problematic that his work had established, has tended to be overlooked. It was Althusser who, after Sartre, problematized the very concept of history and laid the basis for much subsequent theoretical investigation. In the post-Althusserian context of today it is nevertheless somewhat startling to find the Althusser of Reading Capital citing his debt to Foucault (along with Bachelard, Cavaillès, and Canguilhem) as one of ‘our masters in reading learned works’. Perhaps even more unexpected, in the light of the fact that a popular British Marxist position on Althusser is that he simply turned history into theory, is the choice of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (‘that great work’) and The Birth of the Clinic as examples of the kind of history, focused on the necessity of the production of a concept, that he was advocating.1 In certain respects Foucault always remained close to the general positions from which Althusser worked, particularly in relation to the influence of Bachelard and his scepticism towards progressivist and homogeneous histories.2 All were concerned to establish the possibility of discontinuity in a history, as Althusser described it, no longer ‘steeped in the ideology of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, i.e. in a teleological and therefore idealist rationalism’.3
