Michel Foucault em Ipanema

Abstract

This essay analyzes some important differences between the manuscript Archéologie des sciences humaines, which contains Foucault’s course at the FFCL of USP in the autumn of 1965, and the text of Les mots et les choses, published almost a year later. It is suggested, from theoretical indications provided by Gérard Lebrun, that the role of Kant and the transcendental in Foucault’s argument was not yet defined when he arrived in São Paulo. That would explain the lesser importance, in the manuscript, of Phenomenology as a point of reference in Foucault’s critical horizon. It is also observed that it is quite possible that this change resulted from a dialogue with Lebrun, who at the time was meditating precisely on the Kantian notion of finitude as a distinctive mark of the Critique of Pure Reason in relation to the great systems of “l’âge classique”.