Counter-discourse

Counter-discourse The French philosopher and social historian Michel Foucault contends that every social discourse which involves a politically generated truth-claim encounters a counter-discourse that challenges the original discourse’s legitimacy.

Truth for Foucault often seems nothing more than the outcome of a struggle between competing discourses. Thus power produces or creates notions of ‘truth.’

This is reminiscent of but also differs from the idea that ‘might is right’, an idea that hearkens back to Plato. In the Republic Thrasymachus argues that notions of justice are in the interests of the stronger, which often are unjust. Foucault, however, seems almost indifferent to making value judgements, at least on the theoretical level, and more concerned to simply outline his view of what is.

While some maintain that Foucault’s idea of counter-discourse brings his thought in line with the Hegelian dialectic, Foucault himself argues against such a comparison.

While the Hegelian pairs of thesis — antithesis simultaneously arise in conformance with a proposed teleology in which a World Spirit progresses through history, Foucault suggests that counter-discourse arises after the implementation of a discourse. Moreover, Foucault envisions no grand, master plan of teleological unfolding as in Hegelian thought. Instead, his poststructural perspective is discontinuous and largely open-ended.

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