Times of Elephants: Foucault-Inspired Intervals of Production, Critique, and Accelerated Configurings

The chapter articulates a different formulation from current traditions of history and philosophy found elsewhere in this volume. It is original in a specific blurring of history and philosophy inspired by the French theorist Michel Foucault. His work broke with traditions both inside and outside of French thought in its own time. As a blurring, its structure plays with time and space, fiction and fact that is entirely contingent and nominal. To take up a Foucault inspiration, it invokes an intelligible arrangement of previously heterogeneous events under an auspices of a unique conception of interval. Intervals are composed of episodes and episodes of events, entailing internal elements of both chronology and analysis. Further, episodes develop their own relationships of non-structural production and critique. The story, ‘delightfully’ skipping over centuries, is “times of elephants”.