The Order of Things

The Order of Things is not only Michel Foucault’s most important work, expressing his philosophy, but it is also the best evidence of the mind’s ability to rediscover its epistemological systems and, for the first time in the history of modern philosophy, revise them outside the ideological frameworks that have traditionally served to persuade and exploit them. In the current transformations of Western thought, this book constitutes a fundamental reference for the philosophy of modernity and the rationalization of its major historical ruptures, reaching beyond them, toward what is now called postmodernity, or postmodernism.
Translating this book into Arabic provides Arab culture with keys to unlocking the secrets of the Western mind and the turning points of its major ruptures, which constitute the deepest secret of the so-called miracle of Western superiority. It also provides the mind with a study of its cognitive methods and their evaluation, as well as a privilege of a superior civilization and the ultimate witness to its vitality and ability to maintain and renew its capabilities for advancement. At the same time, it makes modernity not merely a historical emergency, but rather an ongoing entity, surprising in its own promises.
Foucault’s translation into Arabic represents a difficult contribution to changing the concept of reading and writing and the mechanisms of common scientific knowledge, just as The Order of Things did when it appeared in its original language. The effort required to understand and familiarize itself with it is a genuine effort to change the habits of the Arab mind. It is an attempt to practice what is both more difficult and more real in the term “modernity,” transforming it from a quasi-political slogan into an exercise of reason itself.