A Different Sign: Outside the Double Archeological Game of Michel Foucault

The Faulcaultian project called The order of Things is inseparable from its metaphoric character which has not been scrutinized as yet. The literary effects of the latter are neither accidental nor scanty; on the contrary, they are the very supporting structure of the whole archeological project. With Foucault sign, writing as well as literature are reduced to epistemological positions or functions; therefore, he does not explore any of them as a hyperbolic madness of a possible sense. At that time he conceived of and defined signs and tropes in the frame of historicity of semiotics and tropology. What he omitted, however, was the idea of sign as a grapheme as well as the metaphoric character of writing and history. Foucault's work transcends the epistemic structure of the age of representation in a baroque style: the representation takes place on archeological level. But it is just the point he should have transcended.