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H I S TO R I C A L A P R I O R I

“H istorical a priori” is a Foucaultian énoncé that, like the strange list

from Borges that opens The Order of Things, seems explicitly designed
to provoke mischievous laughter. As Foucault himself observes, “juxta-
posed these two words produce a rather startling effect” (EAK, 127): exactly how,
one is led to wonder, can an “a priori” (that which is both prior to and independent
of all experience) be “historical”? Conversely, how can the shifting materiality of the
historical constitute any kind of transcendental condition of possibility? One can
only assume that the difficulty of the statement “historical a priori,” and the adjacent
necessity for some kind of stammering translation between the opposed realms that
it names, is central to the practice or concept itself. However, rather than following
the road of critique (trying to resolve this empirical-transcendental antinomy at a
higher theoretical level), perhaps we should follow Foucault’s archaeological prac-
tice and simply trace the statement “historical a priori” in its discursive emergence
and transformation in his work.
The phrase makes its first, halting attempts at emergence in the guise of the sib-
ling phrase “concrete a priori,” which is used in the History of Madness (see EHM, 130,
376, for example) and in Foucault’s 1963 book The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of
Medical Perception. In the introduction to the Clinic, Foucault writes that, “Medicine
made its appearance as a clinical science in conditions which define, together with
its historical possibility, the domain of its existence and the structure of its ratio-
nality. They form its concrete a priori [l’a priori concret], which it is now possible to
uncover, perhaps because a new experience of disease is coming into being that will
make possible a historical and critical understanding of the old experience” (EBC,
xv). As Foucault sums up the Clinic book, he uses the actual phrase “historical a pri-
ori” for the first time, in tandem with the concrete a priori: “Since 1816, the doctor’s
eye has been able to confront a sick organism. The historical and concrete a priori

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[L’a priori historique et concret] of the modern medical gaze was finally constituted”
(EBC, 192).
In the Clinic book, this “historical and concrete a priori” seems to name those
discursive and institutional conditions of emergence that have to be in place for the
aesthetic and political practice of the gaze to mutate into the central practice of the
human sciences, and specifically as the linchpin practice of medicine. Importantly,
this early formulation of the “historical and concrete a priori” also suggests the dual
importance of both the empirical and diachronic dimensions involved in Foucault’s
thinking about the conditions for a discourse’s emergence and transformation. One
cannot, Foucault suggests, easily describe or transform one’s own concrete historical
conditions (one cannot, perhaps, diagnose one’s own clinic), but one can perform a
halting archaeology of how we’ve arrived at the clinical practices that dominate our
present. In short, only when a new conception of a given phenomenon (a new domi-
nant regime of treatment) has emerged can one hope to name the concrete contours
of the former historical a priori.
In Foucault’s archaeological work, then, the historical a priori serves as a
mechanism by which certain specific, bounded, and concrete practices (like the
gaze, which organizes aesthetics) are able to saturate and reorganize domains
seemingly far removed from them (domains like medicine). And, in the process,
these “historical” discourses sculpt new “a priori” objects for their disciplines: they
construct (in the guise of “discovering”) new objects and new protocols that enable
different engagements and new methods of investigation. The medical gaze, for
example, allows clinical medicine to invent new enabling possibilities and dan-
gers lurking within the body – a prioris that medicine can then go on to study,
combat, and hopefully outflank. Specifically, new practices and understandings of
health, disease, and death are reconstituted by the emergent historical a priori of
the medical gaze – in the way that Foucault will later show how something like
an “author-function” is historically reconstructed in and through various ways of
handling texts. Like the discovery of abnormality through the medical gaze of
diagnosis, the author is discursively and historically constructed precisely as a kind
of a priori, a grounding mechanism supposedly outside and prior to the object
being examined.
Archaeology, then, is a discourse that emphasizes the emergence of the new
(the historical invention of new a prioris, and thereby new practices) rather than a
discourse dedicated to the rediscovery of the a priori conditions of possibility for
any discursive formation: a discourse of historical emergence rather than philosoph-
ical origin. Archaeology is a science of what Foucault calls “positivity” rather than
an investigation of the inevitable lacks, gaps, or slippages that haunt any discourse
from its origin. As Foucault writes, “this form of positivity . . . defines a field in which
formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical

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interchanges may be deployed. Thus positivity plays the role of what might be called
a historical a priori” (EAK, 127).
The historical a priori is native to Foucault’s self-described “archaeological”
work. As we’ve seen, the phrase emerges in The Birth of the Clinic, but it is first
deployed consistently throughout 1966’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. In the introduction to The Order of Things, Foucault states outright
that the book’s function is to examine the historical a priori of the human sciences:

Quite obviously, such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or
of science: it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis
knowledge and theory become possible; within what space of order knowl-
edge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori . . . ideas could
appear, sciences be established, experience reflected in philosophies, rational-
ities be formed – only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards. (EOT,
xxi–xxii)

In constructing and mobilizing such a historical a priori for the emergence and
transformation of the human sciences in Europe, Foucault goes on to demonstrate
in The Order of Things that the nineteenth-century triumvirate of life, labor, and lan-
guage –the discourses of biology, Marxism, and linguistics – all emerge in the context
of the same historical a priori: the search for new practices of analysis in the wake of
the epistemic breakdown of representation in the early modern period. As linguistics
turns away from Adamic understandings of language (the sense that things are repre-
sented and their meaning guaranteed by their original names), so, too, does econom-
ics gradually turn away from discussions of ground rent (as natural, representational
value) to discussions of money and credit, while biology abandons the plant (fully
representable from root to flower) as the primary marker of life and slowly adopts
the unrepresentable vitalism of animality to model this emergent object called “life”
(see EOT, 287–304).
Although the énoncé historical a priori is deployed at strategic points throughout
Foucault’s work of the period, it receives its most thorough theoretical articulation
in The Archaeology of Knowledge – most specifically in the chapter, “The Historical A
Priori and the Archive” (EAK, 126–131). In a fashion characteristic of that book on
the whole, Foucault spends much of his time separating out his practice and concep-
tual apparatus from more recognizable methodological presuppositions in play in
philosophy, the history of ideas, history of science, or sociology. The first traditional
concept that Foucault rejects is the formal a priori of mathematics and transcenden-
tal philosophy: “[T]here . . . would be nothing more pleasant, or more inexact, than
to conceive of this historical a priori as a formal a priori” (EAK, 128). He continues
in the Archaeology, “this a priori does not elude historicity: it does not constitute,
above events, and in an unmoving heaven, an atemporal structure: it is defined by the

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group of rules that characterize a discursive practice: but the rules are not imposed
from the outside” (EAK, 127).
Following the Archaeology’s characteristic discursive move, then, Foucault’s his-
torical a priori is defined almost exclusively negatively, in terms of what it isn’t:

not a condition of validity for judgments, but a condition of reality for state-
ments. It is not a question of rediscovering what might legitimize an assertion,
but of freeing the conditions of emergence of statements, the law of coexis-
tence with their others . . . [a]n a priori not of truths that might never be said,
or really given to experience; but the a priori of a history that is given since it
is that of things actually said. (EAK, 127)

So the historical a priori is far from constituting an interruption or absence at the

arché of any discourse (a secret silently said or repressed at the origin); rather, it func-
tions as the positive condition (the operating system, so to speak) of the “archive” – a
“complex volume” of “different types of positivity” (EAK, 128): “first the law of what
can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events”
(EAK, 129) and that which afterward “differentiates discourses in their multiple exis-
tence and specifies them in their own duration” (ibid.).
Following along from Foucault’s own practice of negative definition, it may
help to think about ways that the historical a priori differs from its two closest ana-
logues in French thought of the 1960s: the Marxist discourse of ideology critique
and the phenomenological emphasis on philosophical conditions of possibility. First,
Foucault wishes to distinguish the historical a priori from the Marxist concept of
ideology – understood as the falsely naturalizing and hegemonic “common sense”
that serves to ensure the reproduction of dominant ideology by covering over the
true kernel of class antagonism. Recall that for Louis Althusser ideology consists
of a subject’s imaginary relation to her real conditions of existence, and ideology as
such functions as a theoretical a priori that is made concrete in institutions. For the
Althusserian Marxism dominant in Foucault’s archaeological period, ideology names
that hidden but normalizing force of unacknowledged consensus – “what you think
before you think” – which the science of ideology critique would consistently unmask
as a limiting brake on new, emergent, or revolutionary thinking. As such, Althusser’s
notion of ideology can seem on the surface to be very similar to Foucault’s discourse
of the historical a priori.
Elsewhere, however, Foucault outlines three specific objections to the Marxist
notion of ideology critique:

The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to some-
thing else that is supposed to count as truth. . . . The second drawback is that
the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order

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 204 / Jeffrey T. Nealon

of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to some-

thing that functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant.
(EEW3, 307)

For Foucault, the historical a priori is – unlike ideology – not primarily a set of ideas
or limiting constructs, and thereby the historical a priori cannot be characterized as
either true or false. In other words, Foucault’s historical a priori is not primarily a
set of ruling-elite interests that, before the fact, limits or censors what can be said
or thought (which is precisely the function of hegemonic ideology). Rather, the his-
torical a priori functions a bit like the phrase that Foucault later borrows from his
teacher, Georges Canguilhem. Any given period’s historical a priori is neither true
nor false, but certain statements can be shown to reside “in the true” or “in the false.”
In other words, in order to be heard as either “true” or “false” at a given historical
juncture, a statement first has to be judged “within the true,” able to be evaluated
as bearing in some functional way on a given discourse (see “The Discourse on
Language,” EAK, 224).
The historical a priori is not, as ideology would have it, akin to the blinders
that an author has to wear in order to engage in normative discourse, but rather
the historical a priori functions as the baseline of enabling discursive practices and
thematics that all participants – whether they are speaking for or against a supposed
normative discourse – have to follow in order to be relevant to a given truth proce-
dure in the first place. As he continues in the Archaeology, Foucault argues that the
historical a priori functions as

a more extensive space than the play of influences that have operated from one
author to another, or than the domain of explicit polemics. Different oeuvres,
dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive for-
mation – and so many authors who do or do not know one another, criticize
one another, invalidate one another, pillage one another, meet without know-
ing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they
are not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth
they have a very inadequate idea. (EAK, 126)

At that level, the historical a priori allows discursive participants to distinguish

between what Nietzsche calls “timely” and “untimely” discourses – discourse that
actors are able to use or understand and those pronouncements that are, by defini-
tion, not assimilable into existing discursive paradigms. More than that, perhaps, the
historical a priori functions as a selection mechanism that decides which statements
survive and become housed in the archive and which ones pass unheard, unconsid-
ered, forgotten as soon as they are uttered. But Foucault stresses that such forgetting

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or ignoring is not primarily a “repressive” operation, as it might be understood for

the critic of ideology (i.e., only those statements in sync with the dominant modes
of power are allowed to pass into the archive). Just as for Foucault “there are no
machines of freedom, by definition,” there are no inherently repressive ideological
mechanisms at the level of the historical a priori.
However, understanding the historical a priori as the conditions for any discur-
sive event to be seen as relevant within a given domain – as being “in the true” – flirts
not so much with the Althusserian science of ideology critique but with the other
great enemy of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge: Derrida’s deconstructive focus on
the linguistic “conditions of possibility” for the emergence and functioning of a dis-
course. On that register, barely a page of the Archaeology goes by without some kind
of stinging critique of any and all discourses of hidden depth or absent origin – a
theoretical a priori of any kind, even one of absence, gap, lack, or trace. As Foucault
clearly writes, what he seeks in concepts like the historical a priori is “not a condi-
tion of possibility but a law of coexistence”: the historical a priori and the statement
constitute “something more than a series of traces” (EAK, 107). The statements that
comprise and transform the archive of the historical a priori are “not defined by their
truth – that is, not gauged by the presence of a secret content” (EAK, 120). In other
words, the domain of the historical a priori is characterized neither by the masked
(historical) content of ideology nor by a species of hidden originary (a priori) gap or
lack that haunts all language usage.
In his most pointed criticism of Derrida in the Archaeology, Foucault points out
that the hazardous historical a priori of discourse “can be purified in the problematic
of trace, which, prior to all speech, is the opening of inscription, the gap of deferred
time [écart du temps différeré]: it is always the historico-transcendental theme that is
reinvested” (EAK, 121). And just as ideology for Foucault entails a certain privileged
understanding of subjectivity, so, too, does the whole phenomenological legacy of
Dasein, that “subjectivity that always lags behind manifest history, and which finds,
beneath events, another, more serious, more sober, more secret, more fundamental
history, closer to the origin, more firmly linked to its ultimate horizon (and conse-
quently more in control of all its determinations)” (ibid.). In short, Foucault’s archae-
ological apparatus insists that the historical archive of discontinuously constructed
statements, and not the quasi-transcendental conditions of discourse’s general possi-
bility, governs the reception and impact of the statement: why certain statements are
received as relevant and influential and others – the vast majority of all statements –
are not. The historical a priori does its work at the material level of discursive emer-
gence – with positivities, things that are actually said – rather than ventriloquizing
the quasi-transcendental murmur that exists in the originary ether before things are
said (which remains, in Foucault’s reading, the domain of deconstruction, phenom-
enology, and ideology critique).

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 206 / Jeffrey T. Nealon

In closing, and as a passing and final example of the work of the historical a
priori, one could conjecture that Foucault’s own reception in the English-speaking
world was configured by the historical a priori operating within linguistic-turn
structuralism and poststructuralism in England, Australia, and North America. For
“French theory” to have resided “within the true” in the 1970s and 1980s, it had to be
based on – and somehow speak positively to – the historical a priori of the linguistic
turn, and so Foucault’s archaeological work on discursive formation was received as
a type of linguistically based structuralism or poststructuralism. In short, Foucault’s
archaeological work was understood as akin to the work of Barthes or Derrida rather
than constituting a wholesale critique of linguistic-turn thought and its obsessions
with language’s inevitable lacks, gaps, and absences. Outside that “postmodern” leg-
acy, one can perhaps more easily read these early Foucauldian formulations of the
statement, the archive, and the historical a priori as archaeological predecessors to
his midcareer thinking about mobile dispositifs of power, and the late works’ empha-
sis on “modes of veridiction” – similar notions to be sure, but ones stripped of the
historical a priori’s apparent emphasis on language and discourse.

Jeffrey T. Nealon

See Also

Archaeology
History
Language
Jacques Derrida
Immanuel Kant

Suggested Reading
Djaballah, Marc. 2008. Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience. London: Routledge.
Han, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical,
trans. Edward Pile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Webb, David. 2013. Foucault’s Archaeology: Science and Transformation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.

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