Abstract

Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses correctly asserts that the attempts of the human sciences of the past five hundred years to represent the world in language have failed because these sciences did not recognize the opacity or thingness of language itself. Foucault pretends to have written a plotless anti-history of the human sciences which stresses the discontinuities that characterize the succession of one "'episteme" by another. In fact, he has explained these vicissitudes by the changes of tropological strategy that underlie epistemic shifts. Although he disavows the movement, Foucault's interest in revealing the poetic basis of all linguistic representations of reality places him in the eschatological wing of the structuralist establishment