Time for history: The problem of time and the historicity of Michel Foucault's archaeologies

I analyze the early works of the French thinker Michel Foucault. I study the essential connections between his historical works, or "archaeologies," and his elaborate articulation on method and historical epistemology, The Archaeology of Knowledge, (1969). Given the fact that Foucault's work has had an enormous impact on how some historians conceptualize the methods and aims of historical inquiry, I take up the question of the historical status of Foucault's method of inquiry, namely "archaeology." By analyzing interpretations of Foucault by two of his contemporaries, Louis Althusser and Michel De Certeau, I attempt to test new concepts that can determine the boundaries of the historicity of Foucault's archaeological method. I consider my work to be a theoretical conceptualization to fill epistemological gaps in a past system of thought (Foucault) by way of a historical analysis of the context of its interpretations (Althusser and De Certeau). By exploring the historicity of Foucault's theory of history and its ambiguous concept of historical time, I argue for major differences between Foucault's archaeological inquiry and our modern understanding of historical practice. My main conclusion is that Foucault's archaeological field and the contemporary historical field can be contrasted in terms of how they relate to a concept of historical time, the ontological problem of origins, the epistemological problem of change and causality, and the hermeneutic question of historical consciousness and subjectivity.