The English ‘knowledge’ translates the French ‘connaissance‘ and ‘savoir‘. Connaissance refers here to a particular corpus of knowledge, a particular discipline – biology or economics, for example. Savoir, which is usually defined as knowledge in general, the totality of connaissances, is used by Foucault in an underlying, rather than an overall, way. He has himself offered the following comment on his usage of these terms:
‘By connaissance I mean the relation of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it. Savoir refers to the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to connaissance and for this or that enunciation to be formulated.‘
Throughout this translation I have used the English word, followed, where the meaning required it, by the appropriate French word in parenthesis (Tr.).
by Michel Foucault
translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith
(1982)
http://monoskop.org/images/9/90/Foucault_Michel_Archaeology_of_Knowledge.pdf
Introduction
p.15
Footnote 2
**
In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to begin with a few observations.
– My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances),2 a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge. It may well be that this transformation, the problems that it raises, the tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis. But this kind of analysis is not specifically used;
_______
2 The English ‘knowledge’ translates the French ‘connaissance‘ and ‘savoir‘. Connaissance refers here to a particular corpus of knowledge, a particular discipline – biology or economics, for example. Savoir, which is usually defined as knowledge in general, the totality of connaissances, is used by Foucault in an underlying, rather than an overall, way. He has himself offered the following comment on his usage of these terms:
‘By connaissance I mean the relation of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it. Savoir refers to the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to connaissance and for this or that enunciation to be formulated.’
Throughout this translation I have used the English word, followed, where the meaning required it, by the appropriate French word in parenthesis (Tr.).
par Michel Foucault
(1969)
The Discourse on Language (Appendix) was originally published in French under the title “L’ordre du discours”.
par Michel Foucault
(1971)
L’ordre du discours est la leçon inaugurale de Michel Foucault au Collège de France, prononcée le 2 décembre 1970.
by ミシェル・フーコー