ABSTRACT

At the end of his interview with the editors of Hérodote, Foucault says:

I have enjoyed this discussion with you because I’ve changed my mind since we started … Now I can see that the problems you put to me about geography are crucial ones for me. Geography acted as the support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate. Where geography itself was concerned, I either left the question hanging or established a series of arbitrary connections … Geography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my concerns. (1980, 77; this volume, 182)

Foucault’s subsequent appeal for guidance from the geographers as to how this ‘condition of possibility’ might work focuses, it is interesting to note, more on the concept of space than it does on geography. While most geographers would accept that spatiality is one of their foundational concepts I doubt that there are many who would now argue for such a narrow conception of the subject (Harvey 2004). The further geography drifts away from the positivist grounding it assumed in the 1960s as a uniquely spatial science, the grander and more difficult to answer become the questions of its actual epistemological status. Foucault’s request for clarification deserves some answer. Interestingly, an answer of sorts can be fashioned out of Foucault’s own intellectual history.