Existentialism

In a 1966 review for the journal L'Arc, Jean-Paul Sartre — who would become a pre-eminent voice of existentialism — criticized Foucault's On the Order of Things:

What do we find in The Order of Things? Certainly not an archaeology of human sciences. Archaeology … studies a style that had been designed and implemented by men. This style could thereafter present itself as a natural state, taking the allure of something given. It is nonetheless the result of a practice, the development of which the archaeologist traces. What Foucault offers is … a geology: … Each layer defines the conditions of possibility of a certain type of thought that triumphs for a certain period. But Foucault does not tell us what is most interesting: how every thought is built from these conditions, nor how people pass from one thought to another. This would require the intervention of praxis, thus history, and this is precisely what he refuses … [H]e replaces the cinema with the magic lantern, the movement with a succession of static states.

(Sartre 1966) ¹