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DO WE REALLY NEED ANOTHER BOOK ABOUT FOUCAULT?
what he sees as the three foundational disciplines of the human sciences, linguistics (man speaks), biology (man lives) and economics (man labours). The epochs he identifies are the renaissance, the classical, beginning in roughly the midseventeenth century and the modern, beginning in lateeighteenth or early-nineteenth century. As far as we are concerned here it is useful to note at least the conditions of thought, methods and practices and rules for new knowledge that Foucault identifies as underpinning the modern, and specifically bringing into being the possibilities of man, indeed the necessity of man, with whom we will be primarily concerned. Humanity he declared was barely a century old. The attention in The Order of Things to scientific practices again highlights the materiality of discourse; that is not just as a form of representation, but as methods and social institutions. Modern man is constituted from what he calls an “empiricotranscendental doublet”. Man as a reflexive and transcendental knower is autonomous and rational, but also the product of unconscious forces and cultural practices—which are the stuff of the human sciences. Man is both a source of meaning and a social product, we know ourselves only within the possibilities provided to us by the human sciences as “enslaved sovereign, observed spectator” (1970, p. 323). The limits of knowledge are also the possibilities of knowing. Again this creates great discomforts for many modern scholars who find it difficult to conceive that man is a finite, historical and empirical being that is dated and enfolded in the “discourses” of each epoch, rather a transcendental one. Most “users” of Foucault avoid or ignore epistemes. Many commentaries exclude them; in a way they are too big, too deep and too hard. The Order of Things, a best seller when