Regimes of Relevance: On Their Use for Literary Theory

At the core of this essay is an exploration of the notion of regime of relevance introduced by Galin Tihanov in his monograph The Birth and Death of Literary Theory (2019). On the one hand, the author traces the ramifications of Tihanov’s coinage and demonstrates possible arenas for its further application; on the other, the essay researches the origins of the notion in Michel Foucault’s formulation of regime of truth. After a brief account of the Bulgarian reception of Foucault’s work, the text turns to Foucault’s early monograph The Order of Things (1966) to explore the paths that link Tihanov’s work to Foucault’s and then compares a reconstructed version of Foucault’s project for literary theory to Tihanov’s project.