Is Foucault an inaugural gesture in discourse studies?

Abstract

The discourse studies begun in France in the 1960s were reverberated in the following years in various disciplines and extended to other European countries and to other continents. This article intends to recover the context of appearance of basic concepts for the studies of the discourse, investigating how Michel Foucault's theoretical-analytical reflections in the books A Arqueologia do Saber and A Ordem do Discurso and in their commentators are responsible for an inaugural disciplinary gesture that established with the notions of discourse, discursive formation, archive, discontinuities, systems. It is therefore evaluated how Archeology was central to revolutionizing History, to question the power of the archive, to give centrality to the discourse. Considering the scope of the concepts discussed in M. Foucault, we also evaluate the productivity of discussions that followed the reflections on archeology in the second half of the 1970s, involving the notions of know-power, disciplinary power and biopower. The aim is to validate Foucault's inaugural gesture for discourse studies and to expose the epistemological cuts, scientific displacements and innovative thinking that came to constitute this disciplinary field that continues to be productive for the analysis of current discourses.