ABSTRACT
In this chapter I shall examine from the deconstructive perspective Foucault’s contribution to the study of the past, which has been to question the very nature of history as a distinctive epistemology by replacing its empiricist-inspired inductive/deductive method with narrative interpretation as the primary form of knowing and telling. Foucault’s anti-logocentric stance maintains that there is no unmediated access for the human mind to a genuinely knowable original and truthful reality.1 Our only door to experience (past, present or future) is through the primary medium of language as a signifying process normally constituted within a framework for the exercise of power, legitimacy and illegitimacy. Derived from Nietzsche, this is a fundamental shift from empiricism, because it entertains the impossibility of knowing anything objectively, given that objectivity itself is a historical and cultural construct.
