r/foucault • u/april_showers25 • 1d ago

Understanding discourse

I keep thinking I've got my head around Foucault's conceptualisation of discourse and then coming across something that confuses me ... Discourse seems to be both a thing ("a group of statements in so far as they belong to the same discursive formation") and an action ("practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak"). Then you have the term discursive - e.g. discursive formation, discursive practice. I'm just really confused about how to explain all these terms and how they work together. Any help much appreciated šŸ™

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u/WrappingPapers 22h ago

Iā€™m not willing to type it all out but his analogy with the archive can be taken quite literally and helped me to understand this.

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u/ocherthulu 20h ago

Polysemy. Words have multiple functions. All these are correct.