'Precipitous existence': The idea of the limit in Michel Foucault

A significant part of Michel Foucault's philosophy can be regarded as a sustained engagement with the notion of the "limit." Although this notion takes on a complex profile in Foucault, its basic functions can be identified as follows: beginning with The Order of Things and extending to Power/Knowledge, the limit serves to represent those historically specifiable boundaries that determine discourse, as well as a critical strategy that interrogates the epistemologies mandated by these boundaries. As critical strategy fundamentally related to an historical ontology, the idea of the limit is employed to describe the play inherent in any formation of discursive territory--the play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. This study is concerned with identifying the forms and descriptive phenomena, as well as the methods, processes, and modes of thought associated with these functions.;Chapter 1 examines Foucault's delineation of the historical formation of the Renaissance and Classical epistemes in order to highlight the role of the limit as a representation of the historical specificity of discourse.;Chapter 2 reviews Foucault's mapping of the Modern episteme in which he introduces the idea of "precipitous" thinking. By reconstructing the boundaries of modernist discourse and moving beyond them, Foucault is able to employ the idea of the limit as a critical strategy. Foucault extends the critical scope of this strategy in his analysis of the concepts of "death," "event," and "phantasm" as limit-setting entities in the essays in Language, Counter-memory, Practice (Chapter 3).;Chapter 4 and 5 focus on Foucault's deployment of the idea of the limit in archaeology and genealogy. In these critiques, Foucault challenges the continuist, subject-centered status of historical epistemology and uncovers the capillary relations of power/knowledge that underlie the sovereign discourses of truth.