This essay is an investigation into my late mentor Edward T. Ch'ien's methodology of intellectual history, as it is practiced most systematically but not exclusively in his Chiao Hung and the Restructuring of Neo-Confucianism in the Late Ming. I start by suggesting that Ch'ien's pedagogical performance of ever-foregrounding be considered as an embodiment of his personal formulation of relating contemporary critical theories to the study of chinese intellectual history. Theory, in Ch'ien's classroom and his research practice as well, is viewed not as a universalizable Western model waiting to be uncritically imposed on any Chinese case, but rather as a well-formulated self-articulation of those linguistic media through which one's whole being is constituted. Secondly, by comparing Chiao Hung and the Restructuring with three other works published later in the same field, I attempt to demonstrate that, once moving beyond the genre of intellectual biography, historians have developed different approaches of dealing with a broader intellectual context, varying from a further elaboration of conventional wisdom to more aggressively interpretive acts of construction. Thirdly, the distinction of Ch'ien's historiographic operation consists in that he provided us a fully-fledged and sophisticated way of conceptualizing human intellectual development as a textualized context, in which human subjectivity is not only actively engaging with but also unintentionally embedded in a triadically-structured discursive formation in terms of uttered statements, deployed objects, and the discursive regularity.