This book is a lesser-known example of how the genealogical approach pioneered by Foucault can be fruitfully applied to contemporary times. Writing in the 1990s, Jürgen Link attempts to map the territory of what he calls the “archipelago of the normal” (p. 13). Among the many theoretical contributions of this volume is the concept of “discourse-carrying categories, which if they were to be removed, would cause a collapse of the discourse which they carried” (p. 15). Another imporant conceptual contribution is that of the delineation between specialised discourse, interdiscourse, inter-specialised discourse and everyday discourse. He defines special discourses as striving towards a maximum of immanent consistency, the absence of ambiguity and a clear delineation from other discourses. The usual examples are the scientific discourses (medicine, biology, geology). Interdiscourses are those discourses (or elements of discourse, i.e. a certain subset of statements of the discourse) which play a role across many special specialised discourses and feature heavily in general, so-called everyday discourses. Link further provides ample reason to believe that a general notion of normality is such an interdiscursive element (p. 50ff). Thirdly, inter-specialised discursive elements are those that, like mathematics, feature in various specialised discourses. Finally, everyday discourses are the “elementary socio-culture” that exists if it displays “functional independence” and is not “a pure epiphenomenon of the system of specialised discourses and interdiscourses” (p. 51). all translations mine