Foucault Tres Fases

Foucault's oeuvre can be distinguished into three phases as suggests the title of Arnold I. Davidson's work: archaeology, genealogy, and ethics and they are three forms of analysis according to Foucault. His project can be delineated as follows: the analysis of systems of knowledge, the analysis of the modalities of power, and of the self's relationship to itself (or rapport à soi, which in myopinion reflects better its meaning in French) through the previously cited forms of analysis, that is archaeology, genealogy, and ethics. In Ian Hacking's terms, Foucault's project was first to write the history of "immature sciences". Archaeology is based on the idea of episteme or discursive practices that is "practices for the production of statements characterized by the delimitation of a fieldof objects". There would be a "positive unconscious of knowledge" that is to say an unformulated set of rules created by the participants in the discursive practices. Hence, the principles of autonomy and anonymity are applicable to the discursive practices. The problematic resides in the construction of series and his work per se constitutes a descriptive task. He describes the discontinuitiesof History through archaeology, which seems to be logical but he also finds new continuities that previously have not been taken into account, they were "overlooked because of a surface appearance of discontinuity".
As concerns genealogy it is said that it has "a wider scope than archaeology" and it is defined as "[the] mutual relations between systems of truth and modalities of power, the way inwhich there is a 'political regime' of the production of the truth". In order to understand what genealogy is, hence we must look at what "truth" means. "'Truth is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements... 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power that produce and sustain it, andto effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime of truth'". Here we will not define entirely what power means to Foucault because it would be a long task but we must point out that the term seems to have changed in meaning in the last part of his work (history of sexuality and governmentality). Briefly, we must say that power resides in the institutions and that is why he talksof "biopower". Moreover, it seems particularly important to say that we should "not study power merely as a form of repression or prohibition, but look at its positive effects, at what it produces; analyse power and its techniques in terms of their own specificity, and do not reduce it to a consequence of legislation and social structure [...] write a micro-physics of power; this will lead one toview power not as a homogeneous domination of one group or class over another but as net-like, circulating organization; finally, one should not analyse power at the level of 'conscious intention of decision', should not ask what certain people want and why they want to dominate others, but should ask, instead, 'how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of thosecontinuous and uninterrupted processes, which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc, those processes which constitute us as subjects". We will discuss these matters in the next section of this analysis. Before, we must add that genealogy's first goal is not that of finding origins but rather the interest would be that of the forms taken by origins: "Genealogy does not look toorigins to capture the essence of things, or to search for some 'immobile form' that has developed throughout history; the secret disclosed by genealogy is that there is no essence or original unity to be discovered." It is also interesting to note that there is convergence between archaeology and genealogy in the sense that they place "'everything considered immortal in man' within a process of...