Foucaultova geo-epistemologija: geografija, prostori, mjesta
Foucault's geo-epistemology: Geography, spaces, places

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses Foucault’s “spatial turn” which represented a very firm criticism of the western historical thought. By introducing “new” spatial metaphors or dispositives in the restoring Foucauldian discourse, through the concept of geo-epistemology, we identify the significance of this turn. Geo-epistemology simultaneously represents the analysis of knowledge and discourses which are formed through spaces and the analysis of space formed through knowledge/power/discourses. Of many spatial metaphors that Foucault used in almost his entire opus we single out the metaphor of the scenography of space/dramaturgy of scenes, which reflects well Foucault’s usual starting points of the analysis which he used to indicate points of break and transformation: of discourses, established practices, their effects, ritual regularities and implementations, their relationships – towards bodies, population, the diseased, prisoners, people on the margins, abnormal people. The paper names examples of discourses and practices that Foucault researched in order to demonstrate that the subjects of his analysis always had their spatialized forms, their geography, their archaeology, history, and a Nietzschean type of genealogy, i.e. spaces where they were placed and in which their speeches or technologies were distributed. The paper also discusses Foucault’s “heterotopic geography” which was only seemingly reactionary and conservative in its relinquishing of dialectal sources of a totalizing history. In the conclusion the paper stresses that, unlike Neo-Marxist responses to the hegemony of a temporal narrative, Foucault’s research of space had much more far-reaching consequences: an epistemological transformation of space and other basic geographic concepts.

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