Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy, Second Edition

Chapter TwoThe Domains oUnderstanding Foucault requires heightened awareness of important differencesbetween his presuppositions and methods and those that structurephilosophy in North America. Deleuze is quite right in sdying that whatFoucault offers rwns coLlnter to established philosophical practices and objectives.1The trouble is that one's own presuppositions and methods areusually transparent, just what it is that Foucault opposes is not always obvious,A necessary prelude to consideratim of Foucault's work and ideas isa brief recapitulation uf what his genealogical views most sharply counter,Tn the previous chaptcr f contrasted analytic philosophy with Continentalor European philosoph?i, implying that the bulk of North Americanphilosophers are analytic philosophers, The people 1 have in mind sharepresuppositians, priorities, techniques, methodologies, interests, and goalsthat have deiined philosophy in the United Scares 2nd Canada for most ofthis century. Philosophy in Great Britain, Australia, and Scandinavia is alsolargely anaIytic.Vhat this means is that the philosophy practiced in thesecountries is generally a dissective or takil-tg-apart style of intelleaual inquiryas upposed to a more synthesizing m putting-together sort of inquiry,This contrast is often drawn in histories of philosophy, as in comparingphilosophers like Hurne and Russell on the one hand and G. W. Leibniaand Wenri Bergson on the other. The fctrmer are described as analytic becausethey try "CO understand complexes by reducing them to their . . .parts and to the relations in which these parts stand."" The latter are thendescribed as "integrative'3hecause they believe the things we try to understand""are parts of larger unities">nd can he fully understood only whenfitted into those unities.3The analytic approach to intellectual inquiry began in earnest withPlato's Theaetet~s and Sophkt and Aristotle" Prior Amlytics. It is paradigrnatieallyillustrated in Rent5 Bescartes's DDzourse on Method and Medita-