Focault

“I had allowed their names to function ambiguously”: Implies that the ‘authors’ name serves a specific purpose.

“I wanted to determine…the functional conditions of specific discursive practice.”: the purpose of The Order of Things. A primary concern of Foucault’s is to examine the context of a discursive event/practice to see what gave rise to it, how it operates, etc…
In doing so, for this piece, he asks many questions (1623) but mainly concerns himself with the relationship between the author and the text.

This moves him to two thematic issues concerning Becket’s line “what matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking”. Here the text is privileged over the author. What is important is what is said not who it was said by, leading into two themes.
“writing…has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression” (1623): This posits a change from content confines to “nature of signifier”. So what does all of this m...