Epistemology & Philosophy of Science

Volume 55, Issue 1, 2018

Subjectivity and normativity in the early Soviet Russian structuralism

In this paper, our analysis lays on two different levels. Firstly, we dis­cuss the central concepts of the early Russian structuralism within an epistemological framework focusing on the way in which linguistic knowledge is structured. In order to achieve this goal, we mobilize the concept of episteme developed by Michel Foucault in his works The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). This Foucauldian approach leads us to highlight a new epis­teme which is different from those that Foucault described in the Order of Things. Secondly, we analyze the political and social impli­cations of this epistemological approach in the context of European and (post)colonial history. We highlight the material “action” of the linguistic knowledge under discussion. This second dimension of our approach is important insofar it represents a critic of the idea accord­ing to which the theoretical knowledge is separated from praxis. Our hypothesis is that the language constitutes a marker of particular so­cial interests, which are overdetermined by power relations.