Foucault, an introduction.

There are many things that can be said about Michel Foucault. One that stands out for me is his hairstyle.
It was great! Another, no less important, is that the experience of reading it profoundly changes your way of seeing.
the world. Whether you agree with it or not, it becomes very difficult to calmly return to your usual way of being.
understand things.

An index of the importance and richness of Foucault's thought is that in a bookstore his books are
they can be found not only in the philosophy section but also in history, psychology, sociology, linguistics and
gender studies. And the books one finds there may at first glance be surprising, as to a greater extent
part seem to be stories: The story of madness, Surveillance and Punishment (which tells the birth and development of
the prisons), The history of sexuality, among others. So, is he a historian or a philosopher, or a historian of the
philosophy, or perhaps psychology since it speaks a lot about madness and the abnormal? What is clear is that
Foucault never gives us the answer. In his book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, he says: "Do not ask me who I am and do not
ask that it remain the same. Let our bureaucrats and our police see that our papers are
in order.

That statement sounds like what many would label as postmodern, that is, something that sounds profound but in the...
a darkening time and that in the end says nothing. I think it would be quite shortsighted and irresponsible to portray it
That's it. It's just that not asking who is symbolic of their project in general. When asking who they are
We ask about your identity, about your essence. What is the truth of Michel Foucault? If there is something that Foucault
it doesn't promise, it means telling us the truth. But that, or something similar, is what we expect when we read an author.
No? Let him tell us what he thinks. At the end of an interview that Foucault was given, he says: 'What I have said here
It's not 'what I think' but rather what I wonder if it's possible to think of oneself.
It's fascinated me. It's just that if Foucault had written his books in a way like 'this is what I think', then that
the same attitude would imply that there is a truth out there, and that what is proposed leans more towards it than towards the
falsehood. Someone who thought this way would understand truth as an epistemological category, necessary for
let's have knowledge. For Foucault, truth is rather a category of power. This does not imply, as
Many think that Foucault is a postmodern relativist for whom anything goes. To distinguish between truth and the
Falsehood is something we have to do every day. When Foucault says 'Do not ask who I am' this
saying "I am not going to tell you how to distinguish between truth and falsehood." Instead, he talks in his books about
the procedures that have been historically used to make such distinctions and details the effects that
they have had.

The truth then, and in general the nature of the phenomena we study, is not discovered but
it is constructed; they are not eternal but historical. Now, the general phenomenon that interests Foucault is the
human sciences, all the discourses with scientific pretension that have developed around the phenomenon
of the human being in all its aspects: sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, politics,
economy, etc. What Foucault argues is that the objects of study of these fields, for example madness
in psychology, they are not natural. Madness does not have a historical nature that could be discovered but rather
is built or produced by mechanisms that we will analyze at one point.

Now I believe we can better understand why his books are stories. To understand the object, one must
understand its history, the historical conditions of its emergence. Foucault was greatly influenced by Nietzsche in
in this sense, specifically because of its genealogical method. How does genealogical history differ from the most
Traditional? Well, history always seems to be a mess of events, inevitably.
Entangled. What the traditional historian tries to do is to untangle it, to seek throughout all this
confusion of events a single thread that runs through and connects all. In the words of Nietzsche and
Foucault is to seek an Origin with a capital "O", not so much a temporal origin but an architectural principle.
Tell the story of the female pig and I ordered it. There are many examples of this, be it the hand of God, the spirit
Hegel's absolute, or the class conflict of Marx.
But Foucault rejects this way of seeing history, he rejects the idea of essences that can be discerned.
behind historical developments. Instead of looking for a common thread, Foucault is interested in the way in
What different eras have interpreted these events, how they have woven them into a thread that ends up being woven.
a certain image, like a tapestry. The tapestries here are metaphors for concepts, such as madness or the
sexuality, which have been historically created. The point is that these images are not discoveries that
they reflect something essential about a phenomenon but are rather contingent creations that occurred at a certain time
given and under very particular circumstances.

In very broad terms, genealogy in Foucault and Nietzsche can be understood when compared to the
dynamics of natural selection proposed by Darwin in the field of biology. Instead of phenomena such as
madness or morality, Darwin focused on biological phenomena, such as the eye for example. Prior to
Darwin proposed a capitalized 'O' origin, like God, to explain something as complex as the
eye and its functionality. Darwin showed that this is not necessary. With random variation in the information
genetics and environmental pressures, natural selection operates unintentionally and contingently
to produce the incredibly varied morphology that we see today.

The basic idea is the same in Foucault but the mechanisms are somewhat different. There are two concepts
basics handled in the analysis of various phenomena: the discourse and social practices of exclusion.

A speech for Foucault is not what someone simply says nor is it what we hear in a
conference is not an extensive and articulated body of knowledge that structures how we experience and
we understand various phenomena. For example, the discourse of political economy or the medical discourse on
health.

A very superficial way to illustrate his notion of discourse can be found in the words of his
compatriot, Jean Jacques Rousseau. In the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences he says, 'The spirit, like the
body has its needs. These (the body's) are the foundations of society, those (the ones of the
spirit) establish pleasure and satisfaction. While the government and the laws provide security and to the
well-being of men, the sciences, the letters and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful,
they spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are loaded, drowning them in them
the feeling of that original freedom for which they seemed to have been born makes them love their slavery and they form
of them what is called civilized people.
It ends by saying, 'Need has elevated thrones, sciences and the arts have consolidated them.'

These words of Rousseau have always seemed very apt to me, and although Foucault would not agree with...
agreement with an original freedom, I believe that the spirit of what it says reflects very well the concerns of
Foucault. Rousseau begins by speaking of the spirit and the body. Each has its needs. Those of the
body, that is survival, drives the development of societies and governments. But humans want
more than merely survive. They seek pleasure, fun, beauty, spiritual needs that the sciences and
the arts provide. Governments, through laws, seek the well-being of the people, and enforce the
laws with the threat of force: a police force, tanks, prisons, etc. This threat is directed at the
body. It is very easy to think that the degree of our well-being or the extent of our freedom depends on
what a government, some authority with physical power, can carry out. The power that others exercise over
we and what limits us conceive it this way.

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 But then it says something curious. "The sciences, the letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful,
they extend garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are loaded. For sciences, letters, and arts
Rousseau wants to say culture in general, everything that is appreciated by the spirit, not the body.
Culture in this sense is not as despotic as a tank, but perhaps it is more powerful. Foucault would say that
it is definitely more powerful. The point I am comparing between the two is the discourse in Foucault and
The arts and the sciences in Rousseau. They generally play the same role. A discourse is a system of
thought articulated by beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that defines the possibilities of a given phenomenon,
like madness or sexuality. It defines the limits of what can be said meaningfully, and by establishing these
limits produce, in effect, the same object that it studies. An example is medical discourse which, through
concepts of normality and abnormality produce (instead of discovering) what seems to be a natural class of
mental illness.

What both Rousseau and Foucault argue is that power is exercised much more effectively when
level of the spirit, that is, of the ideas, norms, and expectations that we adopt and that govern us, which at the level of
body. In Rousseau's quote, it says that the sciences and the arts extend garlands of flowers over the
chains, but for Foucault the flowers themselves, that is, the Rousseauian discourse or culture, are the chains
same! Express this idea in an inversion of a concept by Plato. Plato says that the body is the
prison of the soul. The immortal soul is born in a body that limits its full expression. The process of living is
really the process of dying and freeing the soul. Foucault, on the other hand, says, "The soul is the prison of the
body.” How great! The soul, understood as the handling of ideas and beliefs in the psyche, affects
directly the lived experience of the body. Look at this image of self-flagellation. Religious discourse
it has produced a subject who thinks he is bad, a sinner, and to redeem himself he must suffer. This is a
a very simple and somewhat crude example of how discourse operates, but it illustrates it in its generalities.

The other mechanism I had mentioned, besides discourse, was social practices of exclusion. It is not
something totally different from the speech, the truth is that both go hand in hand in their exercise. Basically
consists of the spatial separation of people and the temporal compartmentalization of their activities:
separate the lepers in the Middle Ages, put the 'crazy' in asylums, the wards of the sick, the confinement of
the criminals and the temporary management of their activities, the hierarchies of the army, etc. These practices that
details throughout their work fit with scientific discourses to form a very powerful device of
production and control of subjectivity. In my opinion, no other philosopher has clarified with such precision.
the confinements that imprison human life and thought: the confinement of the mad in the Era
of reason, the confinement of thought in the human sciences, the incarceration of people in prisons, and
the confinement of human identity in the cell of a sexual self.

At first, I said that truth for Foucault is not an epistemological category but a category of
power. This means that the truth of what we are is a function of the exercise of power, both discursive
How I practice. This relationship between knowledge and power is a very important theme in Foucault and we have
touched here only on the surface. And there are other topics that I have not mentioned, for example the notion of episteme that
introduces the words and things and their review of the morality of the ancient Greeks and their idea of self-care
and the technologies of the self in the last volumes of The History of Sexuality. I will make more videos about Foucault
to discuss in more detail the topics we have seen here. For now, I appreciate that you have
accompanied. Until next time and enjoy your meal.

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 The Words and Things I.

In the preface of his book, Foucault, as usual, synthesizes the theme of his interest in a wonderful
Image taken from a story by Borges. Borges recounts that in a certain Chinese encyclopedia, there is a classification
of animals that divides them into:

i) Belonging to the Emperor and

Foucault says that this glorious taxonomy made him laugh out loud, not because of the funny nature of the classes of
animals listed there, not for their strangeness, but for the 'exotic charm of another system of thought.'
the experience of reading it shattered all the reference points, the classification system, of its own
thought.

Why do I think the way I think; why do I use these categories and not others; what is, after all, what
determines my way of understanding the world. Is it the world itself – just a matter of opening my eyes and
passively follow the guidelines of perception? No, naive empiricism is not the answer. If it is not for the
side of the object, perhaps the subject. That has been the trajectory of modern philosophy, starting with Descartes,
passing through Kant and Hegel and ending with the phenomenologists of the twentieth century, such as Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-
Ponty. Phenomenology sought that principle that determines our way of seeing the world in the
formal structures of the subject and intentionality. For reasons that I will not discuss here, it was found at
mid-century with problems of history and temporality that had no satisfactory resolution. Instead of
Following that line, Foucault joined the then novel current of structuralism.

As in the broadest trend of the so-called 'linguistic turn', the emphasis shifted from the mind of the subject
the speech. Not the speech like what I am saying now, but language as a system or structure. This of
Ferdinand de Saussure proposed this many decades ago in his work on linguistics. Let's take the
example of 'cat' and 'duck' here. The meaning of these words does not come from a relationship between the
concepts and things in the world but of language as a system and the structure of differences that composes it.
There is a slight phonetic difference between cat and duck that allows them to mean different things. What makes
that the words I say now are meaningful to you is not an intention that I imprint but the
the way each word is distinguished from the others in the complex network that is language. The meaning of
Our speech (which each person expresses) is determined by the structure of language as a whole.
that surpasses the control and dominance of individuals.

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 Remember that what interests Foucault in this book is what determines how we see and
we experience reality. It does not reside in the activity of a subject but in the nature and dynamics of a
system, a structure like language. Claude Levi-Strauss was the first to take up Saussure's ideas,
doing a structuralist analysis of tribal rites, and Jacques Lacan, the famous French psychoanalyst, did
the same with the psyche and its unconscious drives. Foucault's object of study is broader: the
human sciences in general, specifically those that deal with language, life, and work. Nowadays,
we call those fields linguistics, biology, and economics, studies that are familiar to us. If you start reading a
linguistics book, it may be difficult for you to fully understand everything it says, but it will make sense
approach. The way in which the author organizes the relationship between the words he writes and the things to which they refer.
they refer to us will be clear and evident. Now, the object of their analysis is not really the discipline in
particular, such as linguistics, but the discourse that makes it possible, the conceptual framework, so to speak, that
link words with things.

Let's talk more about this notion of discourse, but for now I want to point out that what is truly
What is interesting about this book is the historical excavation that Foucault does. Those themes of language, life, and the
Foucault will analyze them in three different eras: the Renaissance, the Classical, and the Modern.
Traditionally, historians have a mindset that we could call 'vertical'. That is,
they identify several centuries ago a discussion in the making about some topic, such as language, and show, with the
the passage of time, as it is polished to reach the clearest science we have today. Foucault, in
this book does not play vertically but horizontally. In fact, the historical excavation it performs is called a
Archaeology. What does an archaeologist do? Well, they excavate the ground, discovering different layers.
strata are horizontal and the objects found there give us, as a whole, an idea of ideas and
values of the culture that they deposited. In the central zone of Mexico City, they have found many
treasures of pre-Hispanic culture, among which is the famous Aztec calendar. At higher strata goes
a boy walking with an iPhone in hand checking his appointment for tomorrow. Now, the vertical mindset
I would compare the Aztec calendar to the iPhone. But how ridiculous, right? The iPhone calendar does not constitute
a truer understanding of time rather than simply a different organization. The interesting part, more
Well, it is to see how the features of various objects in the pre-Hispanic layer speak of a single cosmovision.
That is the horizontal mentality.

This is precisely what Foucault does with the various human sciences in their respective eras.
It is just that the sciences of a given era, linguistics, biology, and economics of the modern era, because
example, they reflect not a worldview but what Foucault calls an episteme. The episteme is the structure of
excellence for Foucault; it is the conceptual framework not of a single science, as is discourse, but of the whole
an era. One of the most striking consequences of this study by Foucault is that it breaks with our
ideas of progress and continuity in our research on human nature. Among different
epistemes, such as the modern, classical, and Renaissance, there is nothing to compare. They are epistemically
isolated from each other and it is precisely that epistemic gap that made Foucault laugh out loud when he read
about the Chinese encyclopedia in that Borges story.

Well, let's begin our analysis in the Renaissance. The episteme that governs it is similarity.
This means that discourse, the relationship between words and things, makes sense when the word is
it seems in some way like the thing it means. How strange does that sound, right? For us, language is
as Saussure said – it is a system of arbitrary differences, the most extreme example of which is the system
binary of 1 and 0 of today's computers. But in the Renaissance, there were four forms.
main ways in which things might seem similar: convenience, emulation, analogy, and sympathy.

1. Convenience – describes the juxtaposition of everything with everything else in a great chain of being, as we see
in this ancient illustration. Thus, the lowest shares at least a bit of the highest through this network of
connections.

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2. Emulation - describes the way in which separate things in space can reflect one another, by
example, the human intellect and that of God.

3. Analogy – refers to a similarity in the structure of two things – for example, the rivers of the earth and the
veins of the body.

4. Sympathy - this generally describes the attraction that things have towards each other, for example, fire towards the
sky, the stones towards the earth. In general, it encompasses the first three forms of similarity.

A good example of the operation of these forms is the comment made by the astronomer Francesco Sizi.
When Galileo claimed that he had seen satellites orbiting around Jupiter. He said, 'There are seven windows in the
head, two nostrils, two ears, two eyes, and a mouth; thus in the heavens there are two favorable stars, two
which are not favorable, two lights, and Mercury, the only one who does not decide and remains indifferent. Of which,
as well as many other similar natural phenomena – the seven metals, etc. – which would be tedious
to enumerate, we infer that the number of planets is necessarily seven... Moreover, the satellites are
invisible to the naked eye, and therefore cannot have influence on the Earth, and thus would be useless, and
therefore they do not exist.

Nowadays we say, 'If I don't see it, I don't believe it.' Well, Galileo saw the satellites and invited others to take a look.
glimpse through the telescope. But no, the episteme did not allow it. If what Galileo saw truly existed,
it would break with the entire scheme that kept the world and the knowledge of it united and coherent.

His analysis of the Renaissance episteme is found in a section titled 'The Prose of the World.' This
the phrase makes us think of the idea that the world is a great book that one can read. It could be said that
We nowadays 'read' the world, but what we take from the reading is simply information, data.
what we process in formulas. But what the Renaissance thinkers read was prose. Just as a writer designs his
novel so that the different elements are linked to produce a narrative, the world itself is
like a novel of God. The difference is that the prose of the world, unlike the novel, never finishes
to read. One thing always leads to another by similarity ad infinitum.

Now, the prose that constitutes this world is not just plants, rocks, and animals, that is, physical things and
natural, but also language. We all know how language was in the Garden of Eden. By naming
to the animals, Adam spoke a divine, transparent language. His words were a perfect manifestation.
of the things that meant. But then comes the story of the Tower of Babel. The divine language fragments.
in many different ways. Language continues to signify by resemblance, but imperfectly. As it is lost...
simple transparency, language becomes a matter of infinite interpretation. I see that event
from Babel like breaking a very large glass. It falls into thousands of fragments and speaking now is like the
infinite process of reconstituting the whole glass. The subsequent infinite interpretation of the world is
as the attempt to achieve again the transparency of the original language. That is why we find a
proliferation of comments. This is an example from the Talmud. The main text is in the center and then, like
In a spiral come comments, then comments about those comments, ad infinitum. This reflects very
well this intimate relationship between language and the world in the Renaissance. It's not that there is an original text,
sacred, and then comments that represent it, but rather the very proliferation of comments constitutes
an integral part of the same text that keeps growing and growing. In the Renaissance episteme, there is no
distinction between the world and the words that represent it, rather the words themselves are part of what
they describe. The words and the things here form a single fabric in which each part reflects or implies the
totality.

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Words and Things II.

In the last video, we said that Foucault is going to analyze how the phenomena of life, language, and
work in three different eras. In the Renaissance, we saw that the notion of similarity is what linked
the words with the things, but I really did not have any sciences regarding the mentioned phenomena. In the
classical epoch, starting in the 17th century, we can already identify sciences that correspond to those topics, which
Foucault calls natural history, the analysis of wealth, and general grammar. Remember that he will not...
analyze in a vertical plan to see how the analysis of wealth, for example, contains the seeds of the study
not in today's economy, but in a horizontal plan. What interests him is the conceptual scaffold that connects and
these sciences enable something, as we have already seen, that is called an episteme. In the Renaissance, the episteme was the
similarity. In classical times it is 'the representation'. Here, words no longer resemble things but
they represent them. The words cease to have the opacity that made them just one more thing in the great chain of being and
they become, in the classical era, transparent, an invisible medium that serves to organize and categorize the
things. Where resemblance united things, representation discriminated them. Instead of finding links
analogs between things, the classical mind analyzes and discriminates, hierarchical separation instead of union
nice.

This episteme of representation is illustrated by Foucault with a table or network. We see an example here of the
classification of minerals. They are arranged according to a system of identities and differences in terms
from a hierarchy of increasingly encompassing categories, like those developed by Carlos Linnaeus, the famous
Swedish scientist. In this scheme, things become visible, they can be known, by distinguishing themselves from the others.
things in a hierarchical arrangement. Let's see how this science of order is reflected in the studies of the
epoch.

The study of language was called general grammar. In the same way that logic organizes the
thinking so that it makes valid judgments, grammar arranges the signs of language so that it can
to represent. Language is not thought but a representation of it. What it represents is the
order of thought that in turn reflects the order of things in the world. In classical times, the emphasis was not
it is in the meaning but in the sense, and this, according to its episteme, is a function of ordering, of the
grammatical structure.

Let's move on to natural history. This drawing is from a Renaissance encyclopedia that contains many
animals we would recognize but also unicorns and sea monsters. The description of this elephant
It speaks of its great dimensions but also of moral qualities that were associated with it, legends,
myths, your astrological sign, etc. In classical times that wouldn't make sense because it doesn't represent anything for him
knowledge. Instead, in this illustration from the 18th century, we see not creatures but distinguished specimens in
a table according to visible variables such as shape, position, and magnitude. It is this combination of differences
the identities elaborated in the table which turn them into objects of knowledge.

As a final point, we have the study on work. Foucault calls it the analysis of wealth because it was focused on
in the nature of wealth. What does it consist of? Before, a coin like this was valuable, it meant wealth,
because it was wealth in itself. Something could only be money if the material it was made of had value
intrinsic, in this case, gold. Just like language, as it operated according to some intrinsic property. But in the
In the classical era, this changes. Language is a mere medium, transparent and functional, and so is money. No
It does not matter the physical properties of money but only its ability to function as a medium of exchange.
Words and money are simply conventional signs. There are many ways to represent the

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concept of money and many ways to represent wealth. Its power lies in its ability to represent
the order or circulation of things in the world.

Now, this sounds quite reasonable to us. In fact, this period is also known as the Enlightenment,
Century of lights. It is easy to think that the people of that time discovered how to use reason well and with its light.
I eliminate all kinds of superstition and magic. What we want to identify in this time is the beginning of the
science, with its mechanistic and mathematical method. Foucault does not fall into this temptation. He does not deny the phenomenon of
science in this era, but their archaeological mindset makes them understand their way of thinking in
terms of its epistemology, which in this case has to do with representation, with how things are ordered.
This is not so much mathematical as it is linguistic. That is to say, in classical times, knowing consisted of organizing.
representations to reflect the order of the world, an order that was represented in the table, but what
that sorting in the table is the sign.

This has a very interesting consequence for Foucault that relates to the role of man in
all this. When ordering the signs, try to reflect the order of things in the world, but that order already existed,
The man did not believe it. He clarified the language so that it could mean something, but its meaning did not depend on him.
We have not yet reached Kant where man is indeed the active epistemological center of knowledge. For...
moment, man like the signs he orders, is a transparent link in which representation and being
coincide and produces knowledge. As Foucault says, "Classical language as the common discourse of the
representations and things, like the place where nature and human nature intersect, completely
it excludes the possibility of a 'science of man'. It was not possible to call into question human existence,
since it contained the link between representation and being.

The man as a physical being was on the table but what proved impossible to represent there was his
own activity of organizing and building the table. Unlike the physical man, the epistemological man,
As a subject, he is not part of the organization because he himself is a condition of that organization. The man.
in this sense it is like the eye that can see and organize everything but cannot see itself. Now, this
Curious consequence of the classical era that Foucault illustrates with a fascinating analysis of a painting - The
Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez, painted in 1656.

We see several characters in the painting: the infanta, surrounded by the meninas; behind them a chaperone and
a bodyguard; in the background a man standing on stairs; next to him two people reflected in a mirror;
and to the left a painter, Velázquez himself. He has stepped away from the canvas for a moment and looks towards what is
it is supposed to be the object or model of the painting. If I were painting, I would disappear behind the canvas, and not it
We would see it in the painting. It is visible to us, the spectators, due to this pause in the activity of painting.
The painter, Velasquez, is represented here, but his activity of representing is not.

You have noticed that the position you occupy as a spectator of the painting is the same as that of the
model that the painter paints. In this way, a curious reciprocity of gazes is created. In your position as
The spectator observes but is also observed (by the painter). This sets in motion an oscillation of
looks that never settle. If you were not in the position of the model and if you could see the model being
painted, the gazes would fix and the oscillation would end. But just as this picture has been painted, the painter
looking straight ahead, your model, and you as a spectator find yourselves in this curious relationship made possible by the
unstable organization of the frame.

Then we have the light that comes in through the window. It illuminates everything we see in this room and thus serves as
the common element of representation. Foucault interprets this as the light of the Enlightenment. Notice that the
the source of light is not seen but only the fact of illumination, or rather the representation that makes it possible as
if the objects were arranged in a table. Neither language nor light are objects but rather the condition
of what objects are intelligible or visible.

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 Now, at the bottom of the painting, we see several dark paintings, except for one that seems to shine. But it is not
a painting but a mirror. The mirror reflects or represents something, but curiously, as Foucault says, 'Of
All the representations in the painting, this is the only one visible, but no one is looking at it. What it reflects is
the models that the painter is painting, King Philip IV and his wife Mariana.

The last detail is the man standing on the stairs in the background. It is not known whether he is arriving or
starting but he is the only character, says Foucault, who observes the entirety of the scene and therefore says that
It is a representation of the viewer. Due to their position, that activity or function of the viewer to look.
It can be represented. But Foucault speaks of a hidden space that is outside the framework where that
the function of the viewer is carried out by three overlapping figures: the gaze of the model, yours as
spectator, and that of Velasquez himself painting his painting Las Meninas. The theme of this wonderful painting does not
it is none of these characters. If the subject were the real couple, for example, then the painting we would have
it would look like this. Here the viewpoint of the painting changes because the model is included in the
representation. The game of invisibility that the looks indicate disappears. The point is that what is
The figures represented in this painting are not characters but the representation itself. Yes, we see figures here, but they are...
distributed in a table and what this order manifests, what it represents, are the functions of the
representation. What cannot be represented is a unified subject that unites or poses these
Representations. Think again of the eye that cannot see or represent itself.

Now, the vast majority of the paintings from this period are very traditional, portraits, battle scenes or
things like that. So, why did Velasquez do something so sophisticated and philosophically dense? He was a great painter
but he was not a philosopher, he did not have all this that Foucault comments on in mind. Rather, what he wanted to do was
much more mundane; he wanted to climb the social ladder. Back then, painters were mere
artisans, of more or less low class. Velazquez thought that if he appeared in a painting alongside the couple
Real, then by association it would have more social importance. But it couldn't stand by, as if they were
great friends; it had to be more subtle, and that is why it appears with their reflection.

Well, that plan of Velasquez together with the limitations of the episteme of his time is what makes that
What is represented in this picture is the representation itself. To be more specific, we see it elaborated.
the production of the representation (the painter)
represented (the models and their perspective); and 3) the observation of the representation (the man on the stairs).
In all this, what is not represented in the table, what cannot be represented, is the activity itself of
represent. Returning to the three points: 1) the painter cannot be represented in the act of painting since
would disappear behind the canvas; 2) the image of the royal couple is simply a reflection and not a
direct representation of their modeling act - if it were direct, the couple would have to interfere in the
foreground, which would break the perspective and thus the internal tensions of the painting would collapse; and 3) your
As a spectator, you obviously cannot be represented. We said that the man on the stairs is a
representation of the viewer. Imagine you were on the stairs. By being included in the painting, you would already leave
to observe it and you would become a painted object.

Given the internal logic of the painting, which reflects the episteme of the time, those three figures indicate a point.
where the artist, the model, and the viewer should be. The problem is that it is a point that cannot
to represent oneself - this is necessarily outside the picture. What is most essential for us has not been
represented. But it's not that Velasquez failed in his attempt. What he achieved is magnificent because it shows
clearly the limits of the possible in the classical era

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 Words and Things II.

The episteme of the classical era was representation, that science of order that classified everything in tables of
identities and differences. In the modern era, this does not disappear; scientists continue to classify the
things, but what is epistemically relevant now is not so much the order as a temporal and historical factor, which
it is introduced into the discourse. How is that evident in our sciences?

Remember that in classical times the study of life was called 'natural history'. The representation
Classification is what allowed knowledge about living beings. In the modern era, it is biology. How
You will know, biology for Foucault is not the product of a simple scientific development that started from the time.
previous. The condition for the possibility of biology was not microscopes and better experiments but a
epistemic change. The transition occurs when it comes to theorizing life itself. The physical structure or
The mechanics of beings are susceptible to classification due to the visibility of their differences, but the source
not the same as life. Instead of a mechanical structure, it is an organic structure, something internal to the organism.
the same and not reducible to the visible. If it is not visible, it is not representable. As Foucault says, 'What is for the eye
classical were merely juxtaposed differences with identities now had to be organized and conceived
on the basis of a functional homogeneity that is its hidden foundation.” This hidden foundation is life.
same, and thus it moves from structure to function, a thing that cannot be perceived nor, therefore, represented.

We now turn to the study of labor. It was previously called the analysis of wealth; now, political economy.
What's new here? Well, remember that the emphasis on temporality in modern times allowed
that organic life appeared as a phenomenon, and therefore we have biological science. In the classical era,
life in this sense could not be considered due to its episteme. In the same way, something new, that does not
could be raised in the previous era, now appears in political economy, namely, the phenomenon of the
production, specifically, work as a temporary process. The episteme of the classical era allowed for
the value will be indicated, it will be represented, but it could not account for its genesis, for why something was worth so much and
no more. Marx's political economy is a perfect example. His theory of value as labor does explain his
origin, namely, in a work process, but that process does not have a visible structure that can
represented in a table. Instead of being a sign of wealth, value is understood as a product of
work, so its emergence as a research topic had to await a change of episteme.

And as a last point, the general grammar of the previous era changes to philology in the modern one. Remember.
that in the classical era the language was a sequence of transparent signs that functioned to
represent the order of things in the world. In modern times, language remains representative in
this sense but it does become much more complex. Previously, the grammar of the language, the order of its
elements simply reflected the order of things in the world. That order was its foundation. But in the
modernity, that basis, which determines both the syntax and the meaning of language, is the inflection. This
it involves changes made to words, such as conjugations or declensions, to indicate tense,
quantity, gender, etc. This characteristic is internal to the language and due to its historical development makes it so that the
The grammar that structures it is a totality that cannot be represented in a simple table of differences.

Well, it is very interesting to see these differences between the classical and modern eras, but surely you
you have asked, "Why do people suddenly start thinking like this? What explains the change of an era to
another?” Foucault does not provide any answer as such an answer would be “vertical,” it would have to be made
from a specific theoretical framework or episteme, something that the archaeological mindset does not allow. Foucault
Simply describe what at an epistemic level unites the knowledge of a given era.

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 But what is clear is that with the collapse of the classical episteme, man emerges as an object of
study. What we can call the human sciences appear. Man as a physical being, a being among the
other beings, yes appeared in the tables of the classical era. It was an object capable of handling representations,
but the order of what it represented was already given by God. Once that order and its
origin, man, who was previously an object among objects, becomes a subject among objects, even with
regarding its own physical existence. In modern times, what the subject tries to understand is not the order of
the objects but the nature of itself as a computer. Man becomes both the subject and in
the object of its own understanding.

Now, this does not mean that language stops representing, it is just that the problem it addresses
knowledge is different. In modern times, the problem of knowledge is not the nature of things
but the condition for knowledge to exist is that there are things. Before, the existence of things was natural,
given by God. Now man is the source, not ontologically but epistemologically. Therefore,
Although the representation of objects continues to be made, what is analyzed is not the objects but the foundation.
of its representation, to what extent are they possible and legitimate. This concern arises deeply and
sustained in Kant's thought. In his Copernican revolution, man stops conforming to the world
and the world conforms to its way of knowing. The fascinating thing is that in Kant's hands, the place of God is
take for man, a little and limited being. His limitations could be seen as a disadvantage, but Kant
find a way to use them as the foundation for knowledge. In the rest of the words and the
Foucault, in what he calls the analytics of finitude, analyzes the way in which the new status
The epistemological aspect of man presents irresolvable tensions in modern thought.

The basic tension consists in that man in modernity is the foundation of knowledge but
finished at the same time. This duality is expressed in three concrete binomials, or what Foucault calls doubles: the double
empirical-transcendental; the unthought and the cogito; and the retreat and the return to the origin. The qualities of this
sides are what makes man divine, capable of serving as a foundation for knowledge. Those of the other
The sides are what characterize sufficiency. Let's move on to the first double.

Now, if the word 'transcendental' throws you off, don't worry, it's not that big of a deal. A philosophy
transcendental, like that of Kant, simply seeks to find the conditions of possibility of something, like for
For example, the universality of scientific or moral judgments. That cannot be found in the empirical field.
for reasons that Hume clearly pointed out, but in the nature of the human mind. Its structure is what
it makes a priori judgments possible.

Now, we have said that the episteme of the modern era has to do with temporality. The world already
it is not a series of static objects that can be ordered but a changing and contingent flow. Despite
thus, Kant assures the fixedness of knowledge by distinguishing the transcendental and the empirical, the form of knowing
of its historically contingent content.

As we know, the history after Kant questions the purity of the transcendental. For Kant, the form
in which the mind thinks was natural and valid for everyone, but many, like Hegel and Marx, argued that the
categories we use to organize experience are historically determined. Empirical experience
plays a much stronger role in them. And what came to be positivism rejected the transcendental and
I develop an empirical theory of perception as the basis for knowledge. In these examples we see that
the transcendental is reduced to naturalistic and historical planes and the pendulum moves more towards the empirical. But
These approaches produced problems that certain phenomenologists and existentialists of the 20th century
they would resolve by returning to the transcendental side. Merleau-Ponty, for example, sought what Foucault calls a 'a
concrete a priori" in the lived experience of the body, in the fixed ways that the body has of experiencing the
world. Thus the pendulum returns.

The joke for Foucault is that the modern era is characterized by this oscillation between the two sides of
double. The relationship between the sides is unstable and can never be definitively resolved until, it says

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Foucault, abandon the anthropological discourse. The well-known 'death of the subject' was announced by Nietzsche.
in the 19th century but it didn't take off strongly until the 70s with post-structuralist thinking and more
generally postmodern.

Well, let's move on to the next duality, that of the cogito and the unthought. In general, the center of the
modern thought is the subject, the cogito. It is what lights up the world and makes knowledge possible. But
the cogito is not a ghost floating around. It exists in an organic body, surrounded by desires and employs a
language. The point is that the cogito does not penetrate or fully control these things. It does not dominate the entirety of
language that speaks; the materiality of the body resists being penetrated by thought; and desires, for they do not
they can be completely controlled. These things are necessary for there to be thought, they form its base
let's say, paradoxically, they have to remain in the dark, the cogito cannot illuminate them. It is
like a light in the room that casts a shadow of your body. You want to illuminate the shadow, so you change.
the position of the light but of course the shadow fades, changes position. This oscillation between the cogito
And the unthinkable is constant and also characteristic of the modern era.

The last double is the retracement and the return to the origin, and it is somewhat difficult to understand. What needs to
remember that the analysis of these double Foucault calls it the analytics of finitude, and that is why
modern episteme seeks to make, namely, to ensure that human finitude, the limitations of man, serve
as a basis for knowledge. In the case of this latter double, it is about knowledge of history.
and its remote origins, from the fact that there was a temporal beginning of everything. Now, as far as we know, the
Animals have no awareness of the past or the future, but live, happily, in the present. It is only with the
man that a temporal field opens and history and its objects and events become determined and
visible. The social practices of man are the source of the objectivity of history. The problem or tension
It lies in the fact that he cannot use those practices to identify his historical origin; that origin goes back like a
mirage in the desert, not susceptible to empirical investigation.

All this is similar to our use of language. Man uses language but cannot use it to
give an objective explanation of it. To do that, I would have to step outside of language, which obviously cannot be done.
do. But such an explanation is unnecessary because the very act of using it implies that in some way it already
understands. One uses their mother tongue without knowing how to use it.

As in the other doubles, the retraction of the origin causes the pendulum to oscillate between the two sides.
endlessly. This oscillation is ultimately the logic of the analytics of finitude. Ontologically,
man is not the source of the world, his body, language, etc., but epistemologically yes, he is the source of
knowledge of them. The instability of the modern episteme is not related to objects in the world
but with their strange relationship in the epistemological configuration in which they exist.

At the end of the book, Foucault talks about different strategies that have been used to connect the sides of these.
doubles: positivism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The failure of these movements to resolve the
the tensions of the modern episteme gradually led to the abandonment of its guiding image, man as subject. If
Read something about the so-called 'death of the subject', that's what it's about. Foucault says that this archaeological analysis
has shown that man is a recent invention, one that perhaps approaches its end. In one of the images
more striking from the book, it says that man will soon be erased, like a face drawn in the sand in the
seaside.

Before I finish, I want to say that these three videos I have made about Words and Things is a
exam very superficially. We have covered the important topics but there are many very interesting details.
what I have left out. I hope that what we have seen here has encouraged you to read the book with
detention. It is worth it.

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