karlis racevskis - an archaeology of silences

8/13/2019 Karlis Racevskis - An Archaeology of Silences

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Michel Foucault and the Subversion of Intellectever-present system that grants discourses their validity asstatements of truth, Foucault grounds his w riting not in theclaim of an Imaginary, authorial creation, but in the aware-ness of the Symbolic-the sUent void against which we areable to constitute our meanings.

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An Archaeology of Silences

The dimension of the Symbolic precedes all empirical ex-perience of reality; it is what makes such experience possiblewhile keeping it from ever becoming a definitive representa-tion of reality. An awareness of this Symbolic dimensionwill inevitably undermine the claims of any systematic andobjective reconstruction of the human experience: Manspeaks therefore, but it is because the symbol has made himman/ Foucault sees this awareness as an inherently criticalimpulse, one that characterizes the fields of psychoanalysisand ethnology in particular, not because they reach downto what is below consciousness in man, but because they aredirected towards that which, outside man, makes it possibleto know, with a positive knowledge, that which is given toor eludes his consciousness (OT, p. 378). It is in this sensethat they are sciences of the unconscious and it is in thissense that Foucault's own investigations carry forward theircritical strategy, seeking to analyze man's discourse as some-thing that mediates betiveen his Other and the Self it man-ages to reconstruct. Foucaulfs archaeology does not seizeupon the meanings or the images generated by discoursebut brings to light all that is conspicuous by its absence, theareas of silence that are outlined when a discourse purports

i. Lacan, The Language of the Self (Baltimore: The Johns Ho pkins Univer-sity Press, 1953), p. 39.

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karlis racevskis - an archaeology of silences

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