From the gaze to language: procedures for the production of knowledge - a Foucaultian discourse analysis

Abstract

The constitution of knowledge is possible through certain procedures. In this paper, I see language as a procedure in a similar way to Foucault’s work on the gaze (in Birth of Clinic). Language is thus seen as a procedure that enables a certain configuration of  what the gaze produces as an objet. I analyse, then, the way a certain object (hysteria) is thought and produced through a clinical gaze (by Charcot) and through language (by Freud). Finally, I think about language as a procedure in the field of psychoanalysis, from the perspective of what Foucault calls “tactics of confession”, a characteristic of christian practices.