How We Think and Are Being Thought: From Michel Foucault to Louis Althusser and Michel Pêcheux

The first chapter deals with Michel Foucault’s concepts of episteme and discursive formation defined as noetic systems. It shows to what extent such systems of ideas and discourses determine what individuals and groups can think, say and do in a given historical situation. Foucault’s arguments are then related to those of the philosophers Louis Althusser, Georges Canguilhem and Michel Pêcheux. Towards the end of the chapter, it should become clear that Foucault, who is neither sociologist nor linguist, uses quite a rudimentary concept of discourse, which is hardly applicable in practice. This is why the author relies on Bourdieu, Fairclough and especially Greimas in order to work out a more concrete and more sophisticated concept of discourse geared towards Structural Semiotics (Greimas) and a Sociology of Texts (cf. Zima 2021). Towards the end of the chapter, the early Foucault’s thesis according to which the individual is over-determined by linguistically articulated power structures, is confronted with Jean-Paul Sartre’s antithesis, which states that the individual is free. The author proposes a dialectical synthesis of thesis and antithesis, arguing that individuals are only free to choose because they are subjected to constraints in the course of their socialisation.