ABSTRACT

In a 1976 lecture at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault outlined how in the post-1960s world “all-encompassing and global theories” – from Marxism to psychoanalysis – have come under attack due to the emergence of “discontinuous, particular and local critiques” based on the (re)emergence of “subjugated knowledges” which he defines as:

a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity . . . it is a reappearance of what people know at a local level, of these disqualified knowledges, that make the critique possible.