Archives, Thresholds, Discontinuities: Blumenberg and Foucault on Historical Substantialism and the Phenomenology of History

Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age was published in the same year as Foucault's The Order of Things (1966). Both books attempt to grasp certain not altogether self-evident changes in the Western history of knowledge and attempt new methods of considering these discontinuities and the so-called "thresholds" between epochs. Beyond such general points of shared interest, one must ask if Blumenberg and Foucault share other intellectual features, for they both developed strong philosophical critiques of Husserlian and Heideggerian approaches to history, critiques that arose from their shared hostility to a kind of "historicism," alongside their refusal of any "substance."