Michel Foucault is not a Freudian, a Marxist, a structuralist, a phenomenologist, a sociologist, or a historian, but his work draws on ideas and assumptions and methods from all of these areas or disciplines. Rather, think of Foucault, like Derrida and like Freud, as the founder of his own "school" of thought. He is a poststructuralist thinker, with affinities to most all the other theorists we've read so far, but he is enough unlike them that we should think of him in a category all his own.
Foucault starts off this essay, "What is an Author?," by discussing criticisms of a previous book, The Order of Things In this book Foucault had started an investigation into the conditions of possibility under which human beings become the objects of knowledge in certain disciplines (what we might call the "human sciences" or the "social sciences"). He was working to discover and explain the rules and laws of formation of systems of thought in the human sciences which emerge in the nineteenth century. His main method for looking at these disciplines, and how they constitute the objects of their study, was through examining "discourses," or "discursive practices."
For Foucault, a "discourse" is a body of thought and writing that is united by having a common object of study, a common methodology, and/or a set of common terms and ideas; the idea of discourse thus allows Foucault to talk about a wide variety of texts, from different countries and different historical periods and different disciplines and different genres. For example, the "discourse" on blindness would include writings by schools for the blind, writings by doctors who work with vision and blindness, novels with blind characters, and autobiographies of blind people, as well as writing about blindness from other disciplines.
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