Wesleyan University

Historicity and Transcendentality: Foucault, Cavaillès, and the Phenomenology of the

Concept
Author(s): Kevin Thompson
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Feb., 2008), pp. 1-18
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History and Theory 47 (February 2008), 1-18 ? Wesleyan University 2008 ISSN: 0018-2656

HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENTALITY:

FOUCAULT, CAVAILLES, AND THE
PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE CONCEPT

KEVIN THOMPSON

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with Foucault's historical methodology. It argues that the coher
ence of his project lies in its development of a set of tools for unearthing the historical
principles that govern thought and practice in the epochs that have shaped the present age.
Foucault claimed that these principles are, at once, transcendental and historical. Accord
ingly, the philosophical soundness of Foucault's project depends on his having developed
a satisfactory way of passage between the absolutist purism of the transcendental and the
mundane contingency of the historical. The paper shows that the key to seeing how Fou
cault achieved this desideratum lies in a surprising and largely unexplored methodological
tradition that he himself explicitly acknowledged: Husserlian phenomenology as it was
taken up, modified, and practiced in the thought of the philosopher of logic and mathemat
ics, Jean Cavailles?what I call the phenomenology of the concept.
The essay has four parts. The first sketches the two most prominent lines of interpreta
tion of Foucault's methodology and argues that both are inadequate, not least because they
both dismiss Foucault's phenomenological heritage. The second part lays out the rudi
ments of the neglected strand of the phenomenological tradition inaugurated by Cavailles's
important critique and appropriation of Husserlian method. This serves, in turn, to set the
stage for the third part that examines, first, Canguilhem's and then Foucault's distinct proj
ects for grasping the transcendental within the historical, and the historical within the tran
scendental?their respective continuations of Cavailles's phenomenology of the concept.
The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the pathways that this way of reading
Foucault opens up for understanding the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjectivation
that came to define his work.

Throughout his complex and unorthodox historical investigations, Foucault al

ways held that he was pursuing a single philosophical project, what he ultimately
came to call a Critical History of Thought. In the years since his death, the con
sistency as well as the coherence of this endeavor has been called into question.
In what follows, I want to explore an approach to reading Foucault that not only
seeks to substantiate the unity of his work, but also helps us to see precisely its
stakes. My contention is that the coherence of Foucault's project lies in the sin
gularity of its aim: to unearth the stratum of experience that governs the thought
and practice of the historical epochs that have shaped the present age. Foucault's
work was an examination of the conditions in and through which we have come
to be what we are; it thus continually poses, for us, but one central question: what
is our present?

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 2 KEVIN THOMPSON

At this point, convention would dictate that we enter into the various ongo
ing debates over the periodization of Foucault's texts, the shift in method from
archaeology to genealogy to problematization, and the change in problematics
from knowledge to power to subjectivation. But I believe that Foucault's consis
tent employment of a specific methodology in the pursuit of the question of the
present?what I shall call a phenomenology of the concept?cuts across all these
disputes. Indeed, it is only insofar as we situate his work within this important,
and admittedly surprising, framework that we can begin to see its real significance
and understand the challenge that it can still set before us.
Foucault said that his histories were unconventional in that they sought to get
at a dimension of experience that eludes those concerned with what has been said,
what has been done, and what has been endured, the collection of facts we typi
cally call human history; he designated this dimension with a variety of terms or
phrases throughout his career: epistemes, dispositifs, problematisations, and les
jeux de verite. For the purposes of this essay, I shall be concerned with just one
of his earliest markers for this dimension: the historical a priori. Foucault defined
this concept as the historical set of rules that serve as the conditions for the emer
gence and interrelations of the experience of discursive and nondiscursive bodies.
But what precisely did he mean by such rules?
Being a priori, the principles Foucault sought were neither physical causes nor
empirical regularities. They did not bring about an effect nor were they simply
persistent patterns of material processes. Instead, what Foucault searched for was
the set of requirements that various kinds of knowledge and ways of acting had to
fulfill in order to be counted as valid instances of knowing and acting, and that the
objects and events involved in these forms of knowledge and action had to meet
in order to be counted as existing entities and occurrences at all. In this sense,
what Foucault's historical studies tracked were the necessary structures by virtue
of which thinking, doing, and being become possible. In a word, then, the rules
Foucault sought were transcendental.
Now to say that a set of structures is transcendental has historically meant that
the conditions in question are not only necessary, but universal and timeless; that
they are unalterable and applicable without temporal or spatial limits. Foucault's
coupling of the terms "a priori" and "historical" thus appears to produce a self
contradictory concept. It seems to contaminate the purity of the universal with
the contingency of the particular. But Foucault held that specific sets of transcen
dental rules, different conditions for thought, action, and being, can be shown to
define different historical epochs. How, then, is this possible? How can a set of
conditions be at once the operative structures by virtue of which thought and ac
tion are what they are, and at the same time be mutable forms that set down the
boundaries of acceptability for what is knowable and doable within a specific age?
How is something to be at once transcendental and historical and how is it to be
grasped as such?
This, we can say, is the core concern of Foucault's critical history of thought. It
seeks nothing less than to grasp the simultaneity of historicity and transcendental
ity. The philosophical soundness of Foucault's project thus depends on his hav
ing worked out a satisfactory way of passage between the Scylla of the timeless

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 HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENTALITY 3

universality of the transcendental and the Charybdis of the mundane contingency

of the historical, a pathway that integrates the necessity of the transcendental
with the bounded specificity of the historical. The aim of what follows is to show
that this is just what Foucault's phenomenology of the concept was dedicated to
achieving.
A full substantiation of this claim would require a detailed survey of the entire
ty of Foucault's historical investigations, along with an assessment of his repeated
criticisms of the phenomenological tradition.1 This is obviously beyond the limits
of the present essay. Instead, the strategy I will pursue is to reconstruct a part of
the relevant methodological tradition within which Foucault situated himself on
numerous occasions: Husserlian phenomenology as it was taken up, modified,
and practiced in the thought of the philosopher of logic and mathematics, Jean
Cavailles, and the tradition of the phenomenology of scientific rationality that
emerged out of his work, most prominently in the research of the historian of sci
ence, Georges Canguilhem.2 My contention is that the key to understanding how
Foucault sought to think the simultaneity of the transcendental and the historical
lies in this largely unexplored methodological vein.
The essay has four parts. The first sketches two of the most prominent lines of
interpretation of Foucault's methodology. I argue that both, though fundamentally
at odds in so many ways, prove nonetheless to be ultimately unsatisfactory be
cause they both dismiss Foucault's phenomenological heritage. The second part
lays out the rudiments of the neglected strand of the phenomenological tradition
inaugurated by Cavailles's important critique and appropriation of Husserlian
method. This serves, in turn, to set the stage for the third part, in which I examine,
first, Canguilhem's and then Foucault's distinct projects for grasping the transcen
dental within the historical, and the historical within the transcendental?their
respective continuations of Cavailles's phenomenology of the concept. The essay
concludes with a brief consideration of the pathways that this way of reading
Foucault opens up for understanding the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjec
tivation that came to define his work.

1. For discussions of Foucault's various treatments of the phenomenological tradition, see Gerard
Lebrun, "Notes on Phenomenology in Les mots et les choses," in Michel Foucault Philosopher,
transl. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), 20-37; Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre,
Foucault, and Historical Reason: Volume Two: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), chaps. 8-9; Todd May, "Foucault's Relation to Phenomenology,"
in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 284-311; and Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 2.
2.1 thus take issue with David Macey's claim that "[i]t would be an error to identify Foucault too
closely with Cavailles, as the latter's work is grounded in the pure phenomenology of Husserl" {The
Lives of Michel Foucault [New York: Pantheon Books, 1993], 132). For other accounts that seek
to draw out the link between Foucault and Cavailles in quite different ways, see Stephen Watson,
"'Between Tradition and Oblivion': Foucault, the Complications of Form, the Literatures of Reason,
and the Esthetics of Existence," in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 1 st
ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 262-285; and David Hyder, "Foucault,
Cavailles, and Husserl on the Historical Epistemology of the Sciences," Perspectives on Science
11 (2003), 107-129. Others, in addition to Canguilhem, who followed Cavailles in developing and
pursuing a phenomenology of scientific rationality include Suzanne Bachelard, Jean Ladriere, and
Francois Delaporte.

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 4 KEVIN THOMPSON
I

If what we have said thus far is correct, if the real barometer by which to gauge the
coherence of Foucault's philosophical project is his attempt to work out a viable
theory of the historical a priori, then two lines of interpretation of this project are
especially important. According to the first, the historical a priori is nothing more
than a set of empirical patterns articulating common ways of speaking and acting;
according to the second, the field of the a priori only becomes historical insofar
as it is traversed, from without, by force relations. At the center of the divergence
in these approaches stands the question of the status of the historical a priori. As
a way into this issue, let us consider more carefully the rudiments of the case that
each of these readings advances.
The most important advocate of the first line of interpretation is Beatrice Han.3
She has sought to extend a version of the critique first developed by Dreyfus and
Rabinow,4 namely, that Foucault's attempt to show that a set of rules serves as the
conditions for the possibility of what is sayable, or more properly of what is ac
ceptable, within a particular discipline in a specific historical period fails because
it is itself nothing other than a repetition of the founded-founding double that
Foucault himself had shown to constitute the analytic of finitude in the science
of man. Accordingly, a historical a priori can only be an empirical scheme, a de
scriptive pattern that seeks to articulate common ways of speaking, but it cannot
be the normative and efficacious principles of language itself. People may act in
accordance with these rules, but they do not actually follow them. A historical a
priori, Han thus argues, is just an empirical regularity, nothing more, nothing less.
But this, of course, is to say that Foucault's aspirations for a truly transcendental
foundation for his research, a project that would set out and maintain the integrity
of the transcendental field, are ultimately left unfulfilled. The ontology required
for a truly coherent account of the transcendental is missing, Han argues, and in
its stead all that is left is an unacknowledged empiricism. The empirical has been
made to stand in for the transcendental.
The second line of interpretation was set out by Gilles Deleuze.5 On this read
ing, the real heart of Foucault's work is its challenge to the empirical dogma
that we speak of that which we see, and that we see that of which we speak; in
other words, that words and things bear an essential referential interrelation. Fou
cault calls this assumption into question by opening up the transcendental stratum
whose rules govern both what is sayable, the conditions for the formation and
usage of words, and what is visible, the conditions for the formation and employ
ment of things. Two heterogeneous but interrelated a priori forms thus constitute
this field: statements and visible objects.

3. Beatrice Han, L'ontologie manquee de Michel Foucault: Entre Vhistorique et le transcen

dental (Grenoble: Jerome Millon, 1998). A revised version of this text was translated into English
as Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, transl. Edward Pile
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
4. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
5. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1986); Foucault, transl. Sean Hand
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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 HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENTALITY 5

Now Deleuze argues that with this line of interpretation comes a profound prob
lem. The conditions of the say able hold a position of priority over those of the visi
ble. Language possesses an intrinsic spontaneity, and, as such, can play a distinctly
determining role; light, however, the condition for what is visible, provides only
a space of receptivity: it is solely a sphere of determinability. Hence, a version of
the Kantian problematic of the relation of spontaneity and receptivity, of imagina
tion and intuition, reemerges in Foucault, and herein lies, on Deleuze's reading, its
decisive dilemma: how can the heterogeneous conditions of language and light be
adapted to each other? How can the forms of the say able, the conditions of sponta
neity, be joined with the forms of the visible, the conditions of intuition?
Foucault's answer, according to Deleuze's analysis, is the theory of power as
a web of force relations. Conceived in terms of differentials of quantitative and
qualitative elements, forces are fundamentally pathic: they affect one another and
are affected by one another. As a result, forces are a third form?at once, sponta
neous and receptive?and they are thus able to adapt or, better, schematize state
ments with what is visible. Force relations thus act as the requisite mediating axis
between these disparate forms and thus make possible the joining of words to
things, reference itself.
Deleuze argues that since force relations are, by definition, unstable, variable,
and constantly in a state of evolution, then the mutations and shifts of rules from
one historical epoch to another are a result of their intervention in the transcen
dental stratum. Forces, on this reading, are thus the site of the historical, what
Deleuze calls the "non-place" of mutation. But this means that the play of forces,
as a mediating axis, necessarily remains distinct from the transcendental stratum
itself. Their web intervenes on this field, infecting it from without with the flux of
becoming, but the transcendental itself is, on this analysis, held distinct from the
movement of alteration, the movement of history. Access to the transcendental in
Foucault, on Deleuze's reading, has thus been bought at the price of maintaining
its separation, its purity, with respect to the domain of becoming. History neces
sarily enters the a priori only from without. History itself is not endemic to the
transcendental.
Now these disparate readings present a rather stark, and apparently irresolv
able, choice: either (in the case of Deleuze) the integrity of the transcendental
must be bought at the price of relegating the historical to the impurity of empirical
becoming, or (in the case of Han) the transcendental must be acknowledged as
nothing other than the empirical in disguise, its mutability the consequence of the
impossibility of keeping it free from the taint of the mundane. However, this is a
fundamentally false dilemma. It is rooted in a profound misreading of Foucault's
project, one that these otherwise deeply divergent interpretations actually share.
Both approaches assume a conventional understanding of the a priori as a di
mension devoid of the capacity to change, and they thereby fail to recognize the
truly innovative conception of the a priori that Foucault was able to develop by
employing the methodological resources born in the tradition of the phenomenol
ogy of the concept. The fact that both approaches dismiss Foucault's distinctive
phenomenological heritage means that they fail properly to understand his most
significant methodological tool. In order to interpret Foucault properly, then, we

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 6 KEVIN THOMPSON

must seek to reconstruct this heritage. What, then, precisely is a phenomenology

of the concept?

II

On two separate occasions?both in 1978, one, a lecture, the other, an introduc

tion?Foucault insisted on setting the trajectory of his work within the lineage of
philosophical reflection that had been instigated by Cavailles. Certainly the most
well known instance of this occurs in the Introduction Foucault wrote for the Eng
lish translation of Georges Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological.6
Here Foucault proposed an alternative mapping of the terrain of postwar
French thought. Rather than the standard divisions between Marxists and non
Marxists, specialists and academics, theoreticians and politicians, Foucault ar
gued that another, much deeper cleavage ran throughout all these streams: the
separation between a philosophy of experience, meaning, and the subject (with
which he associates principally Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), and a philosophy of
knowledge, rationality, and the concept (in which he includes Cavailles, Gaston
Bachelard, Alexandre Koyre, and Canguilhem himself). This cleavage, he notes,
was certainly much older than the postwar period, but its real import was felt, he
tells us, in the way in which it shaped the reception of Husserlian phenomenology
during the years just before the war. Specifically, phenomenology, he says?refer
ring principally to the set of lectures that Husserl delivered in Paris in 1929 and
that were first published in French translation in 1931 under the title Meditations
cartesiennes1?"allowed of two readings."8 One sought to radicalize it in the di
rection of consciousness and subjectivity, while the other tried to return this new
method to its roots in questions of formalism, intuitionism, and the quest to work
out a pure theory of logic. Foucault aligns his own body of work with this latter

6. Foucault presented the lecture in question, "Qu'est-ce que la critique? (Critique et Aufklarung),"
on the 27th of May, 1978 before the Societe franchise de philosophic A transcript of the lecture was
published posthumously in Bulletin de la societe francaise de philosophie 84 (1990); 35-63; "What
is Critique," transl. Lysa Hochroth, in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer
and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 23-82. The Introduction is the text Foucault con
tributed for the English translation of Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological: "Introduction
par Michel Foucault" in his Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume III. 1976-1979, ed. Daniel Defert and
Francois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 429-442; "Introduction by Michel Foucault" in The Normal
and the Pathological, transl. Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: D.
Reidel, 1978, repr. New York: Zone Books, 1991), 7-24. Foucault revised this text in April of 1984 for
inclusion in a volume dedicated to Canguilhem, "La vie: l'experience et la science," Revue de metaphy
sique et de morale 90, no. 1 (1985), 3-14; reprinted in Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume IV. 1980
1988, ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 763-776; "Life: Experience and
Science," transl. Robert Hurley in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault,
1954-1984, Volume Two, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 465-478. It was,
apparently, the last of his writings on which he was able to work before his death.
7. Edmund Husserl, Meditations cartesiennes: Introduction a la phenomenologie, transl. Gabrielle
Pfeiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Vrin, 1953). On the history of these lectures and the circum
stances of this translation, see the editor's "Einleitung" in Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser
Vortrdge, ed. Stephan Strasser, Husserliana, Band I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
8. Michel Foucault, "Introduction par Michel Foucault," Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume III.
1976-1979, 430; "Introduction by Michel Foucault," The Normal and the Pathological, 9. Cf. "La
vie: l'experience et la science," Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume IV. 1980-1988, 764; "Life:
Experience and Science," in Faubion, ed., Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 466.

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 HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENT ALITY 7

strand and finds in it a distinctive taking up of the central question of the Enlight
enment: who are we?9
But how could a research agenda dedicated to the most abstract of problems,
the foundations of logic and mathematics, have anything to do with the questions
that were to become the main themes of Foucault's research: power, knowledge,
and the formation of modern subjectivity? Wouldn't one think that a philosophy
of subjectivity, a philosophy of meaning and responsibility, would have much
more to say about such matters as these? I shall come back to these questions at
the conclusion of this paper, but if we can lay out the arc along which Foucault
sought to think the simultaneity of transcendentality and historicity, and saw him
self in doing so as carrying forward the tradition begun by Cavailles, then we can
perhaps begin to see what it was about this specific type of phenomenological ap
proach that ultimately led him to grapple with the problem of the nexus of power,
knowledge, and even subjectivation.
The rudiments of Cavailles's seminal essay, Sur la logique et la theorie de la
science, are fairly straightforward. Its aim is to develop a comprehensive theory
of science. His most important insight was that such a theory must not just specify
legitimate deductive forms, nor merely ground such a project in a properly con
ceived epistemology, but that it must ultimately be able to account for the neces
sary intrinsic progress of scientific knowledge itself. That is to say, the theory

9. In the lecture in May, Foucault employed the same distinction between a philosophy of con
sciousness and a philosophy of the concept in a way that is quite similar to the Introduction. As
in the Introduction, he used this cleavage to account for the disparate ways in which Husserlian
phenomenology was appropriated in postwar France. And yet in the lecture, unlike the published
work, the textual reference was not to the Cartesianische Meditationen, but rather to Die Krisis der
europaischen Wissenschaften und die tranzendentale Phanomenologie [1936]. The significance of
this seemingly inconsequential variation lies in the fact that whereas in the Introduction what is ulti
mately at issue is establishing the importance of Canguilhem's work in the history of science, in the
lecture, the matter under consideration is much more specifically Foucault's own emerging concern:
the relationship between knowledge and power. And while the Carte sianische Meditationen establish
the transcendental foundations of the phenomenological method of description, in the Krisis Husserl
seeks to show how the collapse of the classical search for apodicticity and autonomy, a collapse that
takes place with the Enlightenment's privileging of the naturalistic form of explanation, is the root
element out of which grew the barbarism that was engulfing Germany as he wrote. It is thus this
examination of the crisis of rationality and its relationship to scientific knowledge and practice that
provides the context within which Foucault conceives the question of Enlightenment, not primarily in
terms of who we are, but as the question of the relationship between the historical formation of scien
tific knowledge and mechanisms of power: "how is it that rationalization leads to the fury of power?"
("Qu'est-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufklarung]," Bulletin de la societe francaise de philosophic,
44; "What is Critique," transl. Lysa Hochroth in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, 42).
10. Jean Cavailles, Sur la logique et la theorie de la science (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1947); "On Logic and the Theory of Science," transl. Theodore J. Kisiel in Phenomenology
and the Natural Sciences, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans and Theodore J. Kisiel (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), 357-409. All further references to this work are designated in
the text as "SLTS" followed by the appropriate page reference to the French edition and then to the
English translation. Where necessary, I have modified the translation. Cavailles composed this text
in 1942 during one of several internments he suffered as a founding member of the first Resistance
movement in France. The essay was published posthumously, with Canguilhem serving as co-edi
tor, due to Cavailles's death while imprisoned by German counterintelligence forces in 1944. For
an account of Cavailles's life, see the biography by his sister, Gabrielle Ferrieres, Jean Cavailles: A
Philosopher in Time of War, 1930-1944, transl. T. N. F. Murtagh (Lewiston, MA: The Edwin Mellen
Press, 2000).

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 8 KEVIN THOMPSON

must be able to account for the historicity of science. Cavailles rejected the most
prominent candidates of his day for such a theory?Bolzano's neo-Kantianism
and Carnap's logical positivism?because both, albeit for different reasons, turn
out in the end to be reductionistic, each failing to preserve, at one and the same
time, the objectivity of the fundamental principles of scientific investigation and
their historical development. Cavailles therefore turns to Husserlian phenomenol
ogy and, in particular, to the concept of intentionality as the best hope for working
out a theory of science that would meet these stringent demands.
For Husserl, the key to unlocking the nature of science is its relationship to for
mal logic and, of this, to its being founded upon the constitutive performances of
consciousness, a transcendental logic. Husserl argues that the purpose of formal
logic is to lay down a normative framework within which scientific investiga
tion can be carried out and its results validated. Logic is fundamentally, then,
the methodology of scientific inquiry. It follows that the basic task of a phenom
enology of logic is to disclose and clarify the fundamental standards of evidence
and the norms of intuitive fulfillment that undergird inference, explanation, and
truth that, in turn, properly govern the construction of propositions, theories, and
their ultimate justifications. According to the investigations Husserl carried out,
principally in Formale und transzendentale Logik [1927]?the text that Cavailles
submits to an especially careful analysis?formal logic necessarily presupposes,
and is thereby said to be founded in, pre-predicative experience, what Husserl fa
mously calls a life-world (Lebenswelt), and for this reason the discipline is prop
erly deemed a "world-logic" (Weltlogik).11
On Husserl's analysis, then, formal logic and, by implication, the sciences that
fall under its governance, are life-world constructions?cultural formations?and
their development is thus the work of human consciousness itself. Cavailles con
cludes from this that the core project of phenomenology is contained in its method
of regressive inquiry or questioning-back (Ruckfrage): it seeks to open up empiri
cal history in order to expose the buried layers of sedimentation, the prior consti
tutive acts, that have accrued within scientific principles?what Husserl calls their
intentional sense-history, their traditionality?in order to reactivate these achieve
ments by bringing them back, as a "polished system of acts" (SLTS, 76/408),
to their originary intuitive givenness. Basic theorems of logic, mathematics, and
the natural sciences are to be returned to their origins in the activities and prac
tices from which they emerged, thereby being renewed by being restored to their
original animating sources. But what this questioning-back ultimately excavates
is the structure of historical genesis itself, what Husserl calls, in the fragment
entitled "Die Frage nach dem Urspung der Geometrie als intentional-historiches
Problem" [1939], the "concrete, historical a priori": "the living movement of

11. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen
Vernunft [1927], ed. Paul Janssen, Husserliana, Band XVII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974);
Formal and Transcendental Logic, transl. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969).
Ludwig Landgrebe is the one who actually employs the term Weltlogik in his recasting of Husserl's
position; see Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genelogie der Logik
[1939], ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972), ? 9; Experience and Judgment:
Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, transl. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, II:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), ? 9.

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 HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENTALITY 9

the coexistence and interweaving of original sense-formation (Sinnbildung) and

sense-sedimentation (Sinnsedimentierung)."12 Phenomenology's aim, then, is to
uncover and renew the historically embedded accomplishments of consciousness
that lie hidden and neglected behind the workings of scientific inquiry. In this
sense, Cavailles says, Eugen Fink's description of phenomenology as a kind of
"archaeology" was absolutely correct: "the return to the origin is a return to the
original" (SLTS, 76/408).
Cavailles shows, however, that the consequences of taking this approach are
quite dire. Recall that a comprehensive theory of science must ultimately be able
to account for the kind of changes and transformations that are intrinsic to scientif
ic knowledge itself; that is, it must account for the unique immanent historicity of
science. But, on Husserl's construal, scientific inquiry cannot make any advance
in knowledge that would be an advance intrinsic to itself. Change, transformation,
innovation?all arise in and out of the life-world. All scientific knowledge can do
is merely reflect the movements of this deeper stratum. And because, as Cavailles
argues, there can be no genuinely transcendental logic?that is, no norms govern
ing this movement (because consciousness itself is the ground of all norms and
thus is itself beyond them)?the activities of conscious life are, at best, arbitrary
and capricious. Science is then but a sheer garment draped over the arbitrary, ir
rational processes of the life-world.13 Cavailles concludes that this move is noth
ing less than an "abdication of thought" (SLTS, 77/408) because here, precisely
where phenomenology finds that it must confront history and the historicality of
science in particular, it blinds itself to the very uniqueness of scientific change.
The empirical record shows that scientific development is a "continual revision
of contents by deepening (approfondissement) and eradication (rature)" (SLTS,

12. Edmund Husserl, "Beilage III," in his Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phanomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phanomenologische Philosophic, ed. Walter
Biemel. Husserliana, Band VI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 380; "Appendix VI: [The Origin
of Geometry]," in his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An
Introduction to Phenomenology, transl. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1970), 371.
13. Cavailles's critique works by examining each side of the intentional structure. He begins with
the intentional object (the noematic) and argues that Husserl's conception of the reducibility of the
objective principles of logic to lived experience undermines the delicate balance that the phenomeno
logical project had promised. We can get at Cavailles's concern here if we consider the following line
of reasoning: if the rules of sense, validity, and soundness?the norms of consistency, inference, and
truth?are ultimately founded in and thus, in some sense, are reducible to the life-world, then formal
logic could be nothing other than a merely abstract way of combining the states of affairs already pres
ent in the world itself, a mere "close-fitting garment of ideas," as Husserl referred to it. But this would
mean that logic would be a set of maximally broad and, accordingly, maximally empty tautologies. It
could have no content of its own, and thus no history of development intrinsic to itself. Cavailles thus
concludes that Husserl's account of the content of formal logic is inhabited by a deeply recalcitrant
strain of precisely the sort of naturalistic positivism that he had tirelessly sought to oppose. Second,
turning now to the intentional act itself (the noetic), Cavailles argues that in tracing the rules of formal
logic back to the constitutive performances of consciousness, Husserl's approach ultimately ties the
norms of scientific inquiry to a stratum of activity that, precisely because it is the foundation of all
norms, cannot itself be bound by norms. As a result, the work of constitution, the productive activity
of conscious life, can be nothing more than contingent and arbitrary. The transcendental logic that
Husserl had sought to uncover as the foundation of formal logic thus could not be a logic at all. All
that is left is the flow of temporality, the empty form of becoming.

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 10 KEVIN THOMPSON

78/409)14; but such movement as this is simply ruled out by recourse to the seam
less flow of lived experience, "the coexistence and interweaving of sense-forma
tion and sense-sedimentation." In Cavailles's succinct formulation, "if there is
a consciousness of progress, there is not a progress of consciousness" (SLTS,
78/409). Therein lies, in Cavailles's judgment, the ultimate failure of Husserlian
phenomenology as a foundation for a viable theory of science: it simply doesn't
appear to provide the conceptual tools needed to articulate the unique historicity
of scientific progress.
But what then does Cavailles offer as an alternative? In the last few lines of
the final paragraph of the essay, Cavailles provides what is an admittedly cryptic
sketch of another way of approaching the historicity of science. Its details are
murky, but we can say that he does not here propose simply to abandon the terrain
of phenomenological inquiry. Instead, what he advances is a call for a modified
form of this methodology, transformed precisely so as to be able to get at the pro
foundly eruptive historicity of science itself.15
Cavailles's approach takes its bearings from the rejection of the claim that con
sciousness does not itself develop. Conscious life is not a detached, seamlessly
flowing stream to which all objectivities can ultimately be traced back, as Husserl
appeared to presume. Rather, the transcendental field of consciousness is nothing
other than the theories and investigations within which it dwells and, as such, it is
caught up in their continual movement of enrichment and overturning. The logic
of scientific development is, then, the logic of the development of consciousness.
Cavailles writes, "The progress is material or between singular essences [that
is, between historically distinct theories], and its engine (moteur) is the need to
surpass (depassement) each of these" (SLTS, 78/409). This, then, is the structure
of the historicity that is endemic to scientific inquiry itself. It progresses not by a
linear accumulation of knowledge, what Cavailles calls "augmentation of volume
by juxtaposition," but by a constant eruption of new insights, concepts, and grids
of intelligibility that overturn and replace what preceded them: "What comes after
is more than what existed before, not because it contains it or even because it

14. Foucault quotes this passage in the Introduction?"a continual revision of contents by
deepening and eradication"?attributing it to Cavailles, but without specifying an exact refer
ence (see "Introduction par Michel Foucault" Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume III. 1976-1979,
435; "Introduction by Michel Foucault" in The Normal and the Pathological, 14-15; and "La vie:
l'experience et la science," Dits et ecrits: 1954-1988. Volume IV. 1980-1988,770; "Life: Experience
and Science," in Faubion, ed., Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 471). Canguilhem refers to this
same passage in terms of working out a proper historical methodology for scientific development in
his "Le role de l'epistemologie dans l'historiographie scientifique contemporaine," in Ideologic et
rationalite dans Vhistoire des sciences de la vie (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1988), 23-24;
"The Role of Epistemology in Contemporary History of Science," in Ideology and Rationality in the
History of the Life Sciences, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 13-14.
15. For a more comprehensive examination of Cavailles's thought that seeks to offer an alternative
interpretation of this final paragraph to the one proposed here, see Hourya Sinaceur, Jean Cavailles:
Philosophie mathematique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 110-122. See also Jan
Sebestik's useful commentary on the entire essay in his "Postface" to Jean Cavailles, Sur la logique
et la theorie de la science (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1997), 91-142, esp. 138-142. Both
Sinaceur, and following him, Sebestik, seek to show the roots of Cavailles's thinking in Spinoza and
Brunschvicg, but, in my judgment, fail to see the way in which what Cavailles proposes builds upon
and actually furthers the methodological resources he found in Husserlian phenomenology.

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 HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENTALITY 11

prolongs it, but because it necessarily breaks out (sort) of it and carries (porte)
in its content the mark, each time singular, of its superiority. There is in it more
consciousness?and it is not the same consciousness" (SLTS, 78/409). With this,
we expose the real nerve of Cavailles's analysis and the moment at which he deci
sively opens a new way of doing phenomenology, one that takes its bearings from
the integration of the historical and the transcendental.
He argues that since the eruptive movement of historical mutation is endemic
to the very nature of scientific knowledge, it must also be inherent in the transcen
dental field that grounds such knowledge, for otherwise this stratum would not be
the foundation for a form of knowing that develops in this way. It follows from
this that the transcendental must itself be alterable, changeable, and historical for
it to be the condition for the possibility of scientific inquiry.
Cavailles concludes his reading by naming the new approach that would seek to
remain faithful to the unique historicity of the transcendental foundations of sci
ence: "It is not a philosophy of consciousness but a philosophy of the concept that
can provide a theory of science. The generative necessity is not that of an activity,
but that of a dialectic" (SLTS, 78/409).16
We find here, then, the original formation of the distinction that Foucault was
to invoke some thirty years later. At its center was the attempt to work out a
transcendental theory of the historicity of knowledge, an insistence that to do
justice to science we must think the integration of transcendentality and histo
ricity. Cavailles therefore sets forth the basic outline of such a program, what I
propose to call a phenomenology of the concept. At the center of its agenda is the
uncovering of a conception of the transcendental that is divorced from its roots in
consciousness, a truly anonymous transcendental field.
The program for such an approach in Cavailles is clear. A phenomenology of
the concept must forsake allegiance to the primordiality of consciousness. That
which had been the last court of appeal for Husserl must now itself be seen as
caught up in the movement of historicity. All a priori structures must necessar
ily be conceived as historically mutable and ever-changing forms. In taking this
approach, the genuine historicity of science can be understood and a true logic
of the constitution of consciousness can be found. But in leaving the sphere of
consciousness behind as the ultimate ground of explanation, a phenomenology of
the concept does not thereby abandon the transcendental field itself. The promise
of Husserlian phenomenology proves to lie, then, for Cavailles, not in the concept
of intentionality conceived as a tranquil stream, but in a different form of ar
chaeology: in the ability of phenomenology to break open the seemingly timeless
domain of science to expose the movement of transcendental historicity at work
within it. Cavailles thus points the way to carrying out a truly immanent critical
appropriation of Husserlian phenomenology, one that carves out a way of doing

16. I leave aside here the vexing question of exactly what is meant by a dialectic. However, it is
clear from the context that it refers to a movement of surpassing that is immanent within the devel
opment of scientific theory itself. In this sense, it is a dialectic of noemata, rather than a dialectical
relation between consciousness and its object. For an excellent examination of this originary dialectic,
especially as it was taken up in the thought of Derrida, see Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The
Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), Part Two.

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 12 KEVIN THOMPSON

a new form of eidetic description: a phenomenology of the ruptural development,

the strange "dialectic" of the concept.
But admittedly Cavailles leaves us with only a provocative and incomplete
sketch. We are left wanting to see what conceptual tools and theoretical strategies
are really required to employ this new form of inquiry. It was this question that
stood as the underlying impetus that led Canguilhem and Foucault, among others,
to seek in Cavailles a new way of doing the history of science. Furthermore, it was
from this stream that Foucault retrieved the methodological concepts of archaeol
ogy and the historical a priori from their Husserlian framework and put them to
work in an importantly new way. I propose, then, that we now take Foucault at
his word and consider his and Canguilhem's works as contributions and innova
tions within this new methodological paradigm, as interconnected streams fed by
a common tributary, the phenomenology of the concept.

Ill

If my argument thus far is tenable?that Canguilhem and Foucault ought to be

seen as working under the rubric of a phenomenology of the concept?then it is
equally important to recognize that they pursue this project in significantly differ
ent ways. To begin to get at what separates them, and thereby shed light on both,
we can say that whereas Canguilhem tracked the rules immanent within scientific
discourse that govern the production of veridical statements, Foucault sought to
unearth the conditions that regulate the formation and transformation of scientific
discourses themselves. Put rather simply, and to employ Foucault's own means of
contrasting their approaches, while Canguilhem was concerned with "true saying
(dire vrai)," Foucault looked for the principles that determine what it is to be "in
the true (dans le vm*)."17
For Canguilhem, the proper object of the history of science is concepts rather
than theories, and, accordingly, its true methodology is epistemological rather
than descriptive.18 A concept, as Canguilhem uses the term, is not, as we so often
assume, simply a term as it is defined or interpreted within a specific theoretical
or disciplinary framework. Rather, it is the initial account of a phenomenon that
enables scientists to pose the question of how to explain it. On this rendering, a
concept is structurally polyvalent. The same concept can play a multitude of dif
ferent roles in different theories and yet still retain its identity as a specific con

17. For a useful account of this distinction, see Arnold Davidson, "On Epistemology and
Archeology: From Canguilhem to Foucault," in his The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical
Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),
192-206; and Han, Foucault's Critical Project, 79-85.
18. See Canguilhem's statement of method, "L'objet de l'histoire des sciences," in his Etudes
d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences, 5th rev. ed. [1968] (Paris: Vrin, 1983), 9-23; cf. "Le role
de l'epistemologie dans l'historiographie scientifique contemporaine," in Ideologic et rationalite
dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie, 11-29; "The Role of Epistemology in Contemporary History
of Science," in Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, 1-23. For useful discus
sions of Canguilhem's historical method, though they fail to recognize Cavailles's important role,
see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 32-52; and Guillaume Le Blanc, Canguilhem et les normes (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1998).

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 HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENT ALITY 13

cept. The history of science is thus to be written as a history of concepts, and this
is just what Canguilhem's studies of health, illness, bodily reflex, and even the
concept of life itself, are. The historian's task, however, is not simply to record the
variations in the usages of concepts, but instead to work out what might be called
the intrinsic grammar of the scientific theories in which these concepts operate.
Reversing Gaston Bachelard's important dictum, Canguilhem thus holds that a
historian of science must be a unique kind of epistemologist. Historians of science
must find the structure of the theoretical models that have prevailed in history. To
do this they must isolate the rules internal to scientific discourse that set down the
conditions for the coherence, the regularity, of a body of scientific knowledge.
These rules govern the construction of concepts, their fields of application, and
their range of usages. Borrowing from Husserl, we can say that what historians
must uncover is the material a priori for specific sciences. To speak truthfully in
science, then, means to speak within the parameters established by the rules that
are endemic to a specific scientific discourse. These internal systems are the a
priori conditions for producing veridical scientific statements. It is in this sense
that Canguilhem's historical epistemology seeks to identify the division of truth
and falsity specific to each body of knowledge; and it is by virtue of this method
that, in turn, it is able it to mark the transformations in these rules. The historical
epistemologist thus moves beyond both the court of transcendental consciousness
(the non-historical a priori) and the brute empiricality of the chronicler of dates
and biographies (empirical history) to grasp the eidetic structures of the deeper
logic of the historicity that is inherent in scientific development: "the time of the
advent of scientific truth, the time of verification, has a liquidity or viscosity that
is different for different disciplines in the same periods of general history."19 In
this way, historical epistemology seeks to take up and extend the project of a phe
nomenology of the concept.
But if true speaking (dire vrai) means to speak in accordance with the a priori
standards internal to scientific discourse, then what does being in the true (dans le
vrai) mean? In other words, how does Foucault take up the project of a phenom
enology of the concept?
Foucault argues that what Canguilhem's approach can do, and what it does
extraordinarily well, is mark out the changes in the truth conditions that are im
manent within scientific disciplines. It creates a record of epistemic breaks. What
it cannot do, however, is account for these transformations themselves. That is to
say, historical epistemology shows what rules govern truthful statements within
specific domains of scientific inquiry, but it cannot get at the coherence and trans
formability of these disciplines. To do that, eidetic description would have to have
recourse to the deeper stratum of the norms that define the fields of knowledge
themselves. Canguilhem's approach thus remains, for Foucault, at the level of
connaissance, and it thus cannot explain the regularities and shifts?the rarity,
exteriority, and accumulation of disciplines?that are governed by the principles
of savoir. It follows that if a phenomenology of the concept is to get at the basis of
scientific progress, and not just mark its shifts, it must go beyond historical epis

19. Canguilhem, "L'objet de l'histoire des sciences," in his Etudes d'histoire et de philosophic
des sciences, 19.

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 14 KEVIN THOMPSON

temology's exploration of the internal conditions for the possibility of scientific

claims?what we have called, following Husserl, the material a prioris of spe
cific disciplines?and unearth the fields by which and in which such knowledge
is able to arise, the historical a prioris that regulate the constitution of disciplines
as discursive formations. In a word, then, one must move from epistemology to
archaeology.
As we have seen, for Cavailles, the historical a priori and archaeology desig
nated phenomenology's fundamental object and its ultimate methodology. The
latter was its excavation and renewal of a science's buried layers of intentional
sense-history, while the former was the ultimate structure of temporality that gov
erns the process of sense formation and sedimentation that is history itself. On
Cavailles's reading, as we can now see, the failure of this project lay in its pre
sumption that these layers and such a structure as this were tied to the unchanging
flow of conscious life. Consequently, if the project of a phenomenology of the
concept is to see all intentional structures as part and parcel of the historically
mutable forms of science, then Canguilhem's historical epistemology certainly
provides access to the intentionality embedded within the eruptive flow of scien
tific change. But, as we have noted, his approach has also left open the question
of the a priori structures that govern the field within which science itself operates,
the domain of savoir, the historical a priori, the stratum of the archaeological.
Foucault's method thus does not mark a simple return to the project of Husserlian
phenomenology, but rather carries out a decisive retrieval of its central method
ological concepts, placing them in service to a truly comprehensive phenomenol
ogy of the concept.20
Our review of the history of this line of development lays before us, then, two
rather simple questions that take us to the very heart of Foucault's philosophical
project: (1) what is a historical a priori?, and (2) what is archaeology? My conten
tion is that these questions must be answered together.
For Husserl, the historical a priori is the non-historical, unchanging transcen
dental structure of history itself: "the living movement of the coexistence and
interweaving of original sense-production (Sinnbildung) and sense-sedimentation
(Sinnsedimentierung)." But to conceive of the nature of scientific change in this
way is, as Cavailles argued, just to deny it its unique form of development. Cavail
les therefore pointed to the necessity of identifying the specific a priori structures
at work in science and tracing out the eruptive historicity of these conditions, the
dialectic of the concept. Canguilhem's work fleshed out this project through care
ful historical investigations of the employments of specific scientific concepts. In

20. In an exchange with George Steiner, Foucault noted that his employment of the concept of
archaeology derived from Kant's work on progress in metaphysics ("Monstrosities in Criticism,"
Diacritics 1 [Fall 1971], 60). Bernauer traces this reference to Kant's 1793 manuscript entitled
"Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit Leibnitzens und Wolfs Zeiten
in Deutschlands gemacht hat?" where he defines "philosophische Archaologie" as the investigation
of that which renders a certain form of thought necessary (James W. Bernauer, Michel Foucault's
Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990],
202, n. 113). I believe that the intellectual lineage that I have sought to reconstruct here supports the
claim that Foucault's actual usage of the method is derived more from phenomenology than from
transcendental idealism.

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 HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENTALITY 15

doing so, Canguilhem made the move to work within the interiority of scientific
discourse, and, as a result, was able to uncover the various forms of intentional
ity embedded in concrete scientific disciplines. But what this approach fails to be
able to do, precisely because it remains within the internal parameters of its ob
ject, is account for the changing nature of scientific knowledge as a whole. It can
not set out the shifting sets of rules under which some form of knowledge counts
as scientific in one epoch or another. A phenomenology of the concept demands,
then, that transcendentality and historicity be thought together; this is precisely
what Foucault's retrieval of the historical a priori seeks to achieve.
In the dense pivotal chapter of Uarcheologie du savoir [1969] entitled "L'a
priori historique et 1'archive," Foucault argues that to examine scientific discours
es as discursive formations is to take them as they stand dispersed in the field
within which they may be said to communicate or fail to communicate with one
another, the space of what Foucault calls their "positivity."21 Foucault detects here
a stratum that lies between the material interiority of science, the domain of the
statement (Uenonce), within which Canguilhem worked, and the wholly formal
exteriority of timeless structures that were Husserl's ultimate concern. It is the
space defined by the principles that govern the formation of (1) the delimitation
and description of a specific phenomenon (objects), (2) the determinate place and
status from which an authority speaks (subject-positions), (3) the definition of the
arrangements and complexes of acceptable statements (concepts), and finally (4)
the circumscription of compatible and incompatible theories and themes (strate
gies). These rules thus set out the "field in which it would be possible to deploy
formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical
interchanges" (AS, 167/127). These rules are then the conditions for the reality of
discourses that are, we could say, extrinsic to the scientific theories themselves.
These rules are necessarily, at once, a priori and historical. They are a priori
because they set down the conditions for being in the true. That is to say, they
govern not speaking in general, but what has actually been said. They define the
parameters of truth and falsity that are operative within a specific epoch and mark
the threshold that a statement must cross in order to be acceptable as a candidate
for evidential confirmation or disconfirmation. They are, then, the "conditions of
emergence of statements, the law of their coexistence with others, the specific
form of their mode of being, the principles according to which they subsist, trans
form, and disappear" (AS, 167/127). These rules are normative and, as such, bear
prescriptive efficacy. But they do so not in the sense of absolute standards whose
binding force derives from their being principles under which one can freely act,
nor do they possess some form of physical causal determinacy. Rather, these rules
function at the level of the categorial. Archaeological research carries out a form
of transcendental deduction: it establishes the legitimacy of the rules of discur
sive formation by showing, through a form of imaginative variation, that, within

21. Michel Foucault, L'archeologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 166; The Archaeology
of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1972), 126. All further references to this work are designated in the text as "AS" followed by
the appropriate page reference to the French edition and then to the English translation. Where neces
sary, I have modified the translation.

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 16 KEVIN THOMPSON

a specified historical epoch, a statement can enter the domain of acceptability

only insofar as it accords with these conditions not just as a matter of factual
happenstance (quidfacti), but by right (quid juris). Just as in all transcendental
approaches, archaeology takes the empirical fact of its object as a given and seeks
the conditions under which such a fact is possible. Discursive formations exist;
there are complexes of existent interrelated statements whose integrity demands
that they be treated as unique events; they are, to make use of Foucault's formula
tion for this, temporally dispersed. Archaeology seeks, recursively, the categorial
structures, the principles, by virtue of which such occurrences as these are pos
sible, and this means not the empirical scheme that some collection of claims must
satisfy in order to be counted as a science, but rather the eidetic structure that a
formation must possess in order to be the coherent, stable body that it is. It is thus
as categorial conditions that the rules of discursive formation are a priori.
But inasmuch as these rules are categorial, the conditions for being in the true
are, at the same time, historical: "the a priori of positivities is not only the sys
tem of a temporal dispersion; it is itself a transformable complex (un ensemble
transformable)" (AS, 168/127). The rules for the formation of objects, subjects,
concepts, and strategies are not timeless forms, schemes, or transcendentals,
whether these be considered ideal or real. Rather, it is precisely as categorial that
they are mutable. That discursive formations change is signaled by the empirical,
historical shifts in the ways in which these unities are forged. But if the empirical
nature of discursive formations changes, then the rules that govern the constitu
tion of such bodies must also shift because the categorial is a dimension that
does not stand outside of the discourses that it regulates. It is a plane immanent
within discourse itself whose groups of rules are, as Foucault says, "caught up
in (engagees dans) the very things that they connect" (AS, 168/127). Thus, the
categorial is mutable precisely because it is immanent in that which it governs.
Archaeology's transcendental deduction is also, then, a historical deduction: it
carries out historical-eidetic descriptions in order to lay bare the economies that
regulate the acceptability of statements. When archaeology succeeds in its work
of excavating the stratum of positivity, it has thus unearthed the epochal system
that governs not only what is say able (statements: event), but how what is said
can be combined, that is, put to use, and this is what Foucault calls the "archive"
(AS, 169/128), the epochal economy of order.
Archaeology is then a form of eidetic description that seeks to remain faithful
to the ruptural historicity of knowledge. It works not by uncovering the sense
history, the traditionality, of the sciences with which it is concerned, but by ex
cavating the empirical surface of words and things so as to lay bare the stratum
of rules, the layer of savoir, that governs the fields within which scientific dis
courses operate. In doing this it also disembeds these principles and, in doing so,
it opens up the immanent transcendental historicity that is at work in the develop
ment of knowledge itself. To be sure, it does not seek to offer an explanation for
why these shifts occur. (To do that would be to seek the non-historical condition
of history itself. As we have seen, this is precisely how Husserl conceived of the
historical a priori, and Foucault rejects this as a purely formal a priori because, in
the end, all it can do is impose an extrinsic unity on the eruptive movement of his

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 HISTORICITY AND TRANSCENDENTALITY 17

tory.) Thus, Foucault, building on the work of Canguilhem, takes up the project
first announced in Cavailles's critical appropriation of Husserlian phenomenol
ogy, and works out a method that takes fidelity to the matters themselves in all
their density and fractural dispersion as its fundamental obligation. Archaeology
is thereby a phenomenology of the concept?it "describes discourses as practices
specified in the element of the archive" (AS, 173/131) ?and this means that, at
its core, it thinks transcendentality and historicity together as the stratum of the
positivity of knowledge.

IV

I want to conclude by briefly considering two questions that arise out of attempts
such as I have undertaken here to reconstruct some of the intellectual tradition
within which Foucault worked.
The first question is one that Foucault himself poses: if the historical a priori
is the reigning set of conditions under which we continually labor, how is it
possible to render an account of it? Foucault is clear as to the methodological
presupposition under which archaeological investigation labors. The archive
under description must be at once historically close to us, but no longer our own.
That is to say, such research can take place only with the presumption of a kind
of closure, that the epoch to be examined has "just ceased to be ours (viennent de
cesser justement d'etre les notre)" (AS, 172/130). Breaking open the historical
eidetic structures that have made us what we are thus operates in a "gap/deviation
(Vecart)" (AS, 172/130). Whether it be the beginnings of our detachment from
the identification of disease with the body, as in Naissance de la clinique (1962,
rev. ed., 1972), or the withering away of man as the principle of knowledge, as
in Les mots el les choses (1966), archaeology necessarily speaks from and out
of the "border of time," what Foucault calls the "outside (dehors)" of our own
language (AS, 172/130).
The second question is one that I earlier set aside: what was it about the
specific type of phenomenological investigation that Cavailles initiated that
ultimately led Foucault to grapple not just with the historicity of knowledge but
with its relationship to power and subjectivity? Now, of course, even before he
began to describe his work as genealogical Foucault was interested in the rela
tions between discursive and non-discursive practices. Consider Folie et derai
son (1961, rev. ed., 1972) and Naissance de la clinique. He was convinced that
knowledge is always invested in centers, techniques, and procedures of power.
But why would a phenomenology of the concept of itself lead one to a concern
with these investments? Husserl and, following him, Cavailles, never took sci
ence as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. It was and is at the very center
of the Western project of rationality to shape our world so as to be able to live
freely within it. But whereas Husserl sought the cause of the crisis that afflicted
humanity in the twentieth century in this project's going awry?hence, the call
to renew the original animating intentions of the sciences?a phenomenology of
the concept shows that the problem lies not in falling away from some teleologi
cal progression endemic to history, but rather in the specific epochal constella

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 18 KEVIN THOMPSON

tions, the stamps of savoir, that govern knowledge as well as the mechanisms
of subjugation with which structures of reason become intertwined. It was when
Foucault gained sufficient clarity about this issue that he was able to see that
archaeological inquiry must not only seek out the historical a priori by which
discursive formations arise, but the transcendental historical rules that regulate
the entwinement of power, knowledge, and subjectivation. He thus moved from
describing discursive practices as they are specified in the element of the archive,
to excavating the dispositif that governs discourse and power. There is perhaps
no better example of this to be found in Foucault's corpus than in Parts Two
and Three of La volonte de savoir (1976) where the "discursive orthopedics" of
telling everything [discourse] are shown to be bound up with tactics that solidify
perversion in the body [power]; both of these, in turn, are shown to operate under
the rules of a specific dispositif, a determinate "will to knowledge (savoir)"'. the
scientia sexualis (subjectivation).
I have argued that the coherence of Foucault's philosophical project lies in its
development of a historical methodology to unearth the stratum of experience
that governs the thought and practice of the epochs that have shaped the present
age. I have shown that this required him to work out a way of passage between
the absolute purism of the transcendental and the mundane contingency of the
historical. But this presented us with a rather stark choice. It seemed that the
integrity of the transcendental had to be bought at the price of excluding the im
purity of becoming or it would be condemned to be the empirical in but another
guise. Setting Foucault's work within the lineage of a phenomenology of the
concept has, however, demonstrated that this dilemma is rooted in an important
misreading of Foucault's project. Foucault's research is dedicated to unearthing
the transcendental-historical conditions in and through which we have come to
be what we are. It therefore stands squarely within the broader tradition of tran
scendental philosophy. It seeks to isolate the strictures that govern knowledge
and practice, the work of critique, so that we can clearly see where and how we
might begin to constitute ourselves otherwise, the task of enlightenment. Archae
ology is thus the method for a genuine "art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective
indocility."22

DePaul University

22. Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ce que la critique? (Critique et Aufklarung)," Bulletin de la societe
frangaise de philosophic 39; "What is Critique," The Politics of Truth, 32.

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