Endnote 17 – The Shunammite Woman

I describe essentially a way to think about the operation of any critical method or, as the new jargon has it, “discursive practice.” Michel Foucault writes that “discursive practices are characterized by the delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories. Thus, each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that designate its exclusions and choices.” (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ., 1977), pp. 199–200.