NOTES ON THE PRESENT OF THE CONCEPT OF DISCURSIVE FORMATION

This paper aims to discuss some points on the concept of discursive formation’s formulation and application. I elaborate my point by putting in relation three French texts equally stated in Brazilian soil. Jean-Jacques Courtine, Jacques Guilhaumou and Dominique Maingueneau separately wrote each one of these three texts. Moreover, I have not randomly chosen their names: they are three authors who constitute concepts across theoretical formulations of Discourse Analysis in France, and, because of that, they are often cited in order to keep this area of knowledge in Brazil. So that my argument is justified by the need of analyzing, throughout the meeting of those three statements, an attempt to define the current status of the concept of discursive formation to the historical a priori for the Discourse Analysis’ discourse in Brazil. In order to be guaranteed of some theoretical approach, I turn my attention to the famous conference by Michel Foucault (1971), L’ordre du discours, in which he exposes four principles to examine the statement’s function of existence: specificity, inversion, discontinuity, and exteriority. Underlining the principle of specificity of a statement through the series of statements, I aim to demonstrate that a concept’s circulation does not depend on an ontological truth, or on a founding text, or on the specificity of a father; it is determined by the will to truth, which offers historical conditions to the underlying discursive practices.