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Discourse

Discourse

Discourse is the object of Foucault’s history. It is extremely wide-ranging and variable, tending to cross over almost every traditional historical unity (from the book to the spirit of an age); but it does so only because it has a very specific level of existence that has never before been analyzed in and of itself. This level is defined in a way similar to that of the statement (the basic element of discourse) and that of the enunciative function (the function by which discourse operates), as an aspect of language that captures its emergence and transformation in the active world. The analysis of discourse rigorously ignores any fundamental dependence on anything outside of discourse itself; discourse is never taken as a record of historical events, an articulation of meaningful content, or the expression of an individual or collective psychology. Instead, it is analyzed strictly at the level of ‘things said,’ the level at which statements have their ‘conditions of possibility’ and their conditions of relation to one another. Thus, discourse is not just a set of articulated propositions, nor is it the trace of an otherwise hidden psychology, spirit, or encompassing historical idea; it is the set of relations within which all of these other factors gain their sense (their conditions of possibility).