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[ritwik bhattacharyya]

Archive and the Subject



As has already been argued, the passage from Foucault's earlier works,
especially 'Archaeology', (which stands for a sort of explanation of what
Foucault had been doing in his first two or three works) to what would be
called genealogy is important for adressing the question raised on the
archive or its status. And this would draw our attention to the problem of
subject formation/self-constitution of the subject -relating it to the
archive. Much of later Foucault is valuable because of the questions on
subjectivity that has been posed there.



But for the time being if one concentrates on 'Archaeology of Knowledge' one
would find that Foucault is trying his best to contest a certain idea of the
subject found in the extant historiography  and  is attempting to look at
the historiographic operation as a whole with this contestation in mind. It
would be imprudent for us to pose the questions surrounding archive and its
function etc. without at once raising the problem of subjectivity for
discussion.



Hopefully this shall broaden our horizon a bit.



Thanks


Ritwik.