ABSTRACT
In serious, critical intellectual work, there are no absolute beginnings and few unbroken continuities [. . .]. What we find instead is an untidy but characteristic unevenness of development. What is important are the significant breaks – where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes. . . . Such shifts in perspectives reflect not only the results of an internal intellectual labour but the manner in which real historical developments and transformations are appropriated in thought, and provide Thought, not with a guarantee of correctness but with its fundamental orientations, its conditions of existence. It is because of this complex articulation between thinking and historical reality, reflected in the social categories of thought, and the continuous dialectic between knowledge and power, that the breaks are worth recording.
