A commentary on Foucault’s notion of modern discourses

Abstract

The notion of the comment expressed by Foucault in his 1966 text, The Order of Things, arises during the classical period, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, as a systematization of the signs network by using similarities that reveal the hidden nature of things. System was replaced by the positive sciences resurgent during the late nineteenth century as a method to discuss texts of a new class of authors. Authors that Foucault called “transdiscursive” and are characterized by being authors of more than a book or text: a word that produces effects, reorganizes and enters a new space. The foundation introduces an alternative writing that goes beyond the repetition of rules, concepts and statements. Instead, introduces difference, breakup and dispersion from the field that opens by itself; between the founding text and what you can say of it. The return to the founding texts attempts to make missing figures perceptible, lift oblivion and produce new texts. The commentary is that what can and cannot be said about them, a way of regulating and restoring senses by repeating. However, the comment in its ambiguity and duality also produces offsets and deflections on the enigma of the author’s words, a double game between what is implicit and is explicit in the text.