What happened to the historical subject in Michel Foucault’s archeology? A debate with Sartre and the tradition

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault fought an acute debate about their conceptions of what is History. In the present article we examine the debate between these two authors phocusing on the contributions they have made in their major works of the referred period. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre explicited a notion of history on the overall perspective of the overcome and transformation of structures by the human praxis, thus determining a fundamental place for the activity of the subject and his consciousness in the history understood as a process of totalization. On the other side, in The Order of Things and in The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault subscribes his archeology to the broader context of an epistemological mutation of history. Thus, he claims to defend a new methodological practice, unmaking the anthropological subservience that, in his words, permeate an obsolete conception of history. From this point we compreend his objective to deconstruct a determined relationship between dialectics-humanism-history which forges a “great continuous and homogeneous evolution” to where everything converges. Investigating to what extent this archeology aimed at  an opposition to the notion of history which has man as a guarantee, that is, a subject who makes history and ensures its continuity, we shall see that the sartrean project of man desalienation meets its limit in Foucault in the form of a historicizing project which aims to reduce the place of this transcendental subject. Finally, we observe how this debate opens new possibilities for thinking the relationship between history and philosophy.