ABSTRACT
This chapter, in contrast, is to be precise about the distinctive features of Foucault’s work in which such ready-made syntheses are placed in question. Such precision can help us elucidate the specific reasons why his work is unable to be effectively absorbed within the immediate intellectual context of French epistemology. The chapter closely examines the evidence for the connections between Foucault’s approach to history and specific precepts in Gaston Bachelard’s and Georges Canguilhem’s epistemology. It focuses on the points of connection between the epistemological approach to the history of various sciences and the status of historical knowledge in Foucault’s writing. The concepts that allow Canguilhem to question knowledge from the perspective of life, namely normativity and error, are also those that define, according to him, the manner of the existence of the living. To the extent that the archaeological approach seems more compatible with Bachelard’s mode of approach, the different contexts of Foucault’s interest alter what is signified by “epistemology.”.
