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.But it is only a provisional privilege.Two facts must be constantly borne in mind: that the analysisof discursive events is in no way limited to such a field; and that the division of this field itself cannot be regarded either as definitive or as absolutely valid; it is no more than an initial approximation that must allow relations to appear thatmay erase the limits of this initial outline.((34))2.DISCURSIVE FORMATIONSI have undertaken, then, to describe the relations between statements.I have been careful to accept as valid none of theunities that would normally present themselves to anyone embarking on such a task.I have decided to ignore no form ofdiscontinuity, break, threshold, or limit.I have decided to describe statements in the field of discourse and the relations ofwhich they are capable.As I see it, two series of problems arise at the outset: the first, which I shall leave to one side forthe time being and shall return to later, concerns the indiscriminate use that I have made of the terms statement, event,and discourse; the second concerns the relations that may legitimately he described between the statements that have beenleft in their provisional, visible grouping.There are statements, for example, that are quite obviously concerned and have been from a date that is easyenough to determine with political economy, or biology, or psychopathology; there are others that equally obviouslybelong to those age-old continuities known as grammar or medicine.But what are these unities? How can we say that theanalysis of headaches carried out by Willis or Charcot belong to the same order of discourse? That Petty's inventions arein continuity with Neumann's econometry? That the analysis of judge-ment by the Port-Royal grammarians belongs to thesame domain as((35))the discovery of vowel gradations in the Indo-European languages? What, in fact, are medicine, grammar, or politicaleconomy? Are they merely a retrospective regrouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as to theirown past? Are they forms that have become established once and for all and have gone on developing through time? Dothey conceal other unities? And what sort of links can validly be recognized between all these statements that form, insuch a familiar and insistent way, such an enigmatic mass?First hypothesis and the one that, at first sight, struck me as being the most likely and the most easily proved:statements different in form, and dispersed in time, form a group if they refer to one and the same object.Thus,statements belonging to psychopathology all seem to refer to an object that emerges in various ways in individual orsocial experience and which may be called madness.But I soon realized that the unity of the object 'madness' does notenable one to individualize a group of statements, and to establish between them a relation that is both constant anddescribable.There are two reasons for this.It would certainly be a mistake to try to discover what could have been said ofmadness at a particular time by interrogating the being of madness itself, its secret content, its silent, self-enclosed truth;mental illness was constituted by all that was said in all the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, explainedit, traced its developments, indicated its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by articulating, in itsname, discourses that were to be taken as its own.Moreover, this group of statements is far from referring to a singleobject, formed once and for all, and to preserving it indefinitely as its horizon of inexhaustible ideality; the objectpresented as their correlative by medical statements of the seventeenth or eighteenth century is not identical with theobject that emerges in legal sentences or police action; similarly, all the objects of psychopathological discourses weremodified from Pinel or Esquirol to Bleuler: it is not the same illnesses that are at issue in each of these cases; we are notdealing with the same madmen
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