Foucault’s Heraclitism and the concept of history

Deleuze states that Foucault would have created a new relationship between men and
history, a relationship other than that established by the philosophers of history. In order to specify the
steps Foucault took to accomplish this invention, I shall support, according to Deleuze, “Foucault’s
Heraclitism” as the basis for a genuine Foucaultian concept of history. After outlining the risks taken by
Foucault’s concept of history, I observe this concept at work through the three periods that perform his
thought: Archeology, Genealogy and Aesthetics of Existence. The main characters that embody his
concept of history through these periods are: a) the discontinuous profile of history; b) the
denaturalization of would-be unhistorical objects; c) the historical dimension of body; d) the eddies of
subjectivation in history. We shall focus our inspection on the turn made along Foucault’s work when he
takes into a new account the theme of subjectivity, mostly in the last two volumes of the History of
Sexuality. Thus, our attention turns to the subjectivity defined as a process, in order to investigate
individual identity as the result of history.
KEYWORDS: Foucault – Heraclites – Time – History