Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Atopia (Stanford, Calif.).) - Hardcover

Han, Helene Beatrice

 
9780804737081: Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Atopia (Stanford, Calif.).)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0804737088 ISBN 13: 9780804737081
Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

This book uncovers and explores the constant tension between the historical and the transcendental that lies at the heart of Michel Foucault's work. In the process, it also assesses the philosophical foundations of his thought by examining his theoretical borrowings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who each provided him with tools to critically rethink the status of the transcendental.

Given Foucault's constant focus on the (Kantian) question of the possibility for knowledge, the author argues that his philosophical itinerary can be understood as a series of attempts to historicize the transcendental. In so doing, he seeks to uncover a specific level that would identify these conditions without falling either into an excess of idealism (a de-historicized, subject-centered perspective exemplified for Foucault by Husserlian phenomenology) or of materialism (which would amount to interpreting these conditions as ideological and thus as the effect of economic determination by the infrastructure).

The author concludes that, although this problem does unify Foucault's work and gives it its specifically philosophical dimension, none of the concepts successively provided (such as the épistémè, the historical a priori, the regimes of truth, the games of truth, and problematizations) manages to name these conditions without falling into the pitfalls that Foucault originally denounced as characteristic of the "anthropological sleep"—various forms of confusion between the historical and the transcendental. Although Foucault's work provides us with a highly illuminating analysis of the major problems of post-Kantian philosophies, ultimately it remains aporetic in that it also fails to overcome them.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Béatrice Han is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

This book uncovers and explores the constant tension between the historical and the transcendental that lies at the heart of Michel Foucault’s work. In the process, it also assesses the philosophical foundations of his thought by examining his theoretical borrowings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who each provided him with tools to critically rethink the status of the transcendental.
Given Foucault’s constant focus on the (Kantian) question of the possibility for knowledge, the author argues that his philosophical itinerary can be understood as a series of attempts to historicize the transcendental. In so doing, he seeks to uncover a specific level that would identify these conditions without falling either into an excess of idealism (a de-historicized, subject-centered perspective exemplified for Foucault by Husserlian phenomenology) or of materialism (which would amount to interpreting these conditions as ideological and thus as the effect of economic determination by the infrastructure).
The author concludes that, although this problem does unify Foucault’s work and gives it its specifically philosophical dimension, none of the concepts successively provided (such as the épistémè, the historical a priori, the regimes of truth, the games of truth, and problematizations) manages to name these conditions without falling into the pitfalls that Foucault originally denounced as characteristic of the “anthropological sleep”—various forms of confusion between the historical and the transcendental. Although Foucault’s work provides us with a highly illuminating analysis of the major problems of post-Kantian philosophies, ultimately it remains aporetic in that it also fails to overcome them.

Aus dem Klappentext

This book uncovers and explores the constant tension between the historical and the transcendental that lies at the heart of Michel Foucault s work. In the process, it also assesses the philosophical foundations of his thought by examining his theoretical borrowings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who each provided him with tools to critically rethink the status of the transcendental.
Given Foucault s constant focus on the (Kantian) question of the possibility for knowledge, the author argues that his philosophical itinerary can be understood as a series of attempts to historicize the transcendental. In so doing, he seeks to uncover a specific level that would identify these conditions without falling either into an excess of idealism (a de-historicized, subject-centered perspective exemplified for Foucault by Husserlian phenomenology) or of materialism (which would amount to interpreting these conditions as ideological and thus as the effect of economic determination by the infrastructure).
The author concludes that, although this problem does unify Foucault s work and gives it its specifically philosophical dimension, none of the concepts successively provided (such as the épistémè, the historical a priori, the regimes of truth, the games of truth, and problematizations) manages to name these conditions without falling into the pitfalls that Foucault originally denounced as characteristic of the anthropological sleep various forms of confusion between the historical and the transcendental. Although Foucault s work provides us with a highly illuminating analysis of the major problems of post-Kantian philosophies, ultimately it remains aporetic in that it also fails to overcome them.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Foucault's Critical Project

BETWEEN THE TRANSCENDENTAL AND THE HISTORICALBy BATRICE HAN

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1998 Editions Jrme Millon
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3708-1

Contents

Foreword..............................................................................................................................ixList of Abbreviations.................................................................................................................xiPeriodization of Foucault's Books.....................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction..........................................................................................................................1Part I. The Archaeological Transposition of the Critical Question and the Aporiae of the Transcendental Theme1. The Critique and the Anthropology: The Two Versions of the Transcendental Theme According to Foucault..............................172. The Different Meanings of the Historical a Priori and the Transcendental Theme: The Methodological Failure ofArchaeology...........................................................................................................................38Part II. The Reopening of the Critical Question: Genealogical Solutions and Difficulties3. The Reformulation of the Archaeological Problem and the Genealogical Turn..........................................................734. The Genealogical Analysis of the Human Sciences and Its Consequences for the Revising of the Critical Question.....................108Part III. Truth and Subjectivation: The Retrospective Stakes of the Critical QuestionIntroduction to Part III..............................................................................................................1495. Truth and the Constitution of the Self.............................................................................................1526. The "History of Subjectivity" and Its Internal Tensions............................................................................174Conclusion............................................................................................................................188Notes.................................................................................................................................199Index.................................................................................................................................235

Chapter One

The Critique and the Anthropology: The Two Versions of the Transcendental Theme According to Foucault

The Ambivalence of Kant's Position in The Order of Things

In chapters 7 and 8 of The Order of Things, Foucault traces back to Kant the caesura that marks the end of the age of representation. According to him, criticism marked a shift from the horizontal interrogation of representation to the vertical questioning of its conditions of possibility, which were henceforth situated outside of representation and consequently escaped the epistemic horizon that the latter had previously assigned to thought.

The Kantian critique ... marks the threshold of our Modernity; it questions representation ... on the basis of its rightful limits. Thus it sanctions for the first time that event in European culture which coincides with the end of the XVIIIth century: the withdrawal of knowledge [savoir] and thought outside the space of representation. That space is brought into question in its foundation, its origin, and its limits: and by this very fact, the unlimited field of representation, which Classical thought had established ... now appears as metaphysics. (OT, 242-43)

The importance of the critical caesura lies in its paradoxical movement, which makes the creation of the new epistemic space the very solution of the questions that can be asked within it. Kant's introduction of the "transcendental theme" (OT, 244) thus was meant to renew and solve an older question, that of the conditions of possibility of knowledge. This question had already been addressed, but in a metaphysical way (OT, 160 ff., 236 ff.) by natural history, and, for example, by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac's ideology. According to Foucault, Kant renews this question by looking beyond the space of representation for what thereafter could no longer be found within it-the "conditions of the constitution and legitimacy of all possible knowledge." He resolves it, following the now well-known movement of the "Copernican" revolution, by referring these conditions to the transcendental subject in its capacity as "the foundation of a possible synthesis of all representations" (OT, 244; modified)-a prodigious tour de force, in which the questioning subject ends up defining by its very interrogation the field in which its answer will be given, thus revealing itself to be the "condition of possibility of experience itself" (OT, 244; modified).

In chapter 7 of The Order of Things, the specificity of criticism is, therefore, that by the simple fact of its apparition it determines the general configuration in which all possible reflection must take place. But chapter 9 disturbs this picture, for two main reasons. Firstly, it is now the "Analytic of finitude," and no longer the transcendental theme, which defines the "threshold of our Modernity": "Our culture crossed the threshold beyond which we recognise our Modernity when finitude was conceived in an interminable cross-reference with itself" (OT, 318; modified). So now, far from being architectonic, the transcendental theme constitutes the first of the "doubles" produced by the specific structure of finitude and therefore seems to become identified with the contents of knowledge rather than with the space that determines it. Secondly, the status of Kantianism itself becomes very ambiguous. Kant, Foucault tells us, is the first to have emphasized human finitude and dethroned the sovereignty of "I think": "When to his traditional trilogy of questions he added an ultimate one: the three critical questions (What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to hope for?) then found themselves referred to a fourth, and inscribed, as it were, `to its account': Was is der Mensch?" (OT, 341). Foucault continues, without transition, in the following way: "This question, as we have seen, runs through thought from the early nineteenth century: this is because it produces, surreptitiously and in advance, the confusion between the empirical and the transcendental, even though Kant had demonstrated the divide between them" (OT, 341; modified). But these two statements hardly complement each other. It would mean that the same Kant had, on the one hand, "demonstrated the divide" of the empirical and the transcendental, and on the other, blurred the frontiers of this same division by recentering the three critical questions around that of man! Is it therefore the "divide," as analyzed by chapter 7, or is it indeed the focusing on man in which this division found itself undone-the thesis of chapter 9-that actually marks the break with the classical age? Does this mean that there would be in Kant a "good" and a "bad" version of the transcendental theme? A "critical" version that would initially separate the constituting from the constituted, and an "anthropological" version that would then superimpose the two elements? Should we see the recentering of Kantian thought on the question of man as a decentering of...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Stanford University Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804737088
ISBN 13 
9780804737081
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780804737098: Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Atopia (Stanford, Calif.).)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0804737096 ISBN 13:  9780804737098
Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2002
Softcover