DISCURSO:

O ESPAÇO DO SUJEITO

Abstract

This text deals with the archaeological analysis of discourse as a methodology for research in the social sciences. Its aim is initially to discuss Foucault's discourse analysis, and then to describe archaeology from the work The Archaeology of Knowledge, specifically the introduction, chapter IV (“The archaeological description”) and the conclusion. Archaeology is the method that Foucault develops to study ruptures. In order to understand it, the concepts developed regarding the subject, the utterance, discourse, discursive formation and regularity as a rule of dispersion are important. In archaeological analysis, the excavation site is language, where the layers of discourse are laid down. For this reason, the subject that matters is the one that expresses a position that can be occupied by different individuals. For Foucault, this subject constitutes a space, so Foucauldian archaeology subtracts the unpredictability of the free individual. It is discourse that provides the conditions for the emergence of subjects, and through this formulation, the subject appears not as an instance of foundation, but as the effect of a constitution. The aim of archaeological analysis is to analyze the formation of knowledge, where discursive formation constitutes a regularity that is established at the expense of rules. It is the specificity of these rules that gives the sign its value as an utterance. Discourse is thus presented in a series of statements, which are based on the same discursive formation. The discursive formation will be defined by the description of a certain number of similar statements, which constitute a regularity. Therefore, if you identify a regularity between statements, you have a discursive formation. Thus, archaeology presents itself as an independent critique of the rational subject, and the book The Archaeology of Knowledge is the work that, in dealing with discursive formations based on the things that have been said, presents the method of archaeological discourse analysis developed by Foucault.

Keywords: Analysis; Archaeology; Discourse.