CFP: Foucault’s Archaeology: Sources, Questions and Legacy – June 2026

Discipline Filosofiche, XXXVI, 2, 2026: Foucault’s Archaeology: Sources, Questions and Legacy, ed. by Elisabetta Basso and Andrea Cavazzini

In Michel Foucault’s published and unpublished writings, between Naissance de la Clinique (1963) and L’archeologie du savoir (1969), the recurrence of the term “archaeology” marks the centrality of this notion in the period when the philosopher’s research stood out in the “structuralist” intellectual landscape for its binding together of philosophical reflection and historical research.

Following an analogy that Freud applies to psychoanalysis, archaeology emerges as a historiography of the unthought: that is, as an attempt to reconstruct how what from the past arrives to constitute the present in which we live, without ever having been present in the explicit consciousness of historical agents. Archaeology therefore starts from what is given in the present – in Foucault’s work, the objects or practices of knowledge – and traces back the layers of historicity that remain imperceptible to the immediate gaze of those whose actions are shaped through these objects and practices of knowledge.

However, the title of the chair at the Collège de France that Foucault came to hold in 1970 – Histoire des systèmes de pensée – suggests a more traditional history of philosophy or ideas. And from 1970 onwards, Foucault largely abandons “archaeology”, rendering the term somewhat enigmatic and, in any case, not fully explored in its implications.

The hypothesis animating this special issue is that archaeology, far from being reduced to a stylistic device, constitutes a philosophical concept in its own right, whose meanings and possible developments are not limited to Foucault’s direct reference to it in his works. A decisive factor in the reconfiguration of the relationship between philosophy and historiography (which is far from any philosophy of history in which becoming is crushed under the weight of retrospective awareness), archaeology also implies – as Enzo Melandri suggested as early as 1968 (La linea e il circolo) – an intention to recover what remains unexpressed or repressed from the past. While in the historical field, this entails the distinction in principle between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum (between actual events and their appearance in explicit awareness), in the philosophical field the effect of archaeology seems to consist in a therapeutic posture aimed at dissolving the painful “cramps” in the self-consciousness of an epoch or a society.

On the occasion of the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth and in light of the posthumous publication of numerous unpublished works by the philosopher, this special issue of Discipline Filosofiche aims to offer a reflection on the “archaeological” method in philosophy and the history of thought. 

All the details here; thanks to Foucault News for the link