Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Foucault's Critical Project

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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 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 the transcendental theme and therefore of the critical project itself? And if it should appear necessary to pluralize the transcendental theme, how could we articulate its different formulations with the Analytic of finitude, an articulation that is veiled by the linear succession of chapters 7 to 9 as well as by the passage quoted above? Is the transcendental theme, therefore, just one of the many forms of this Analytic, or is it really the primary element from which the Analytic itself must be diachronically understood as a deviation resulting from the recentering of Kantian thought on man?

The "threshold of our Modernity," declares Foucault, attempting to synthesize his two preceding statements, "is situated ... by the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet that was called man" (OT, 19). It is therefore in the latter that the transcendental theme-clearly presupposed by the definition of man as a "double"-merges with the Analytic of finitude. But where and how was the conjunction of the transcendental theme and "man" effected? For the Foucault of chapter 7, the point of emergence of this theme is The Critique of Pure Reason. But if man is really a "strange empirico-transcendental double," then he cannot be the object of Kant's argument there, since the Critique

questions the conditions of a relation between representations from the point of view of what in general makes them possible: it thus uncovers a transcendental field in which the subject, which is never given to experience (since it is not empirical) but which is finite (since there is no intellectual intuition) determines in its relation to an object = X all the formal conditions of experience in general. (OT, 243)

Neither can it be "man" that the Critique of Practical Reason is concerned with, since, a few years after the first Critique, it extended the project of the a priori study of the subject, this time by examining the latter from the perspective of its practical powers and its status as a noumenally free will. Whether envisaged in its power of knowing or of acting, the subject is studied from the point of view of an a priori determination, either of the conditions of possibility of knowledge or of free action, from which it always appears in its constitutive power and never as a constituted subject. But if the critical perspective is not grounded in "man," then why tie the transcendental theme to anthropology?

The stakes of these questions are doubly important. Firstly, the coherence and pertinence of the theses put forward by Foucault in the last chapters of The Order of Things, which refer to the transcendental theme in a global and, as we saw, quite indecisive manner, depend on the possibility of answering them. Secondly, and most importantly, it is essential for the continuation of Foucault's project that he should be able to determine the exact point where the connection between the transcendental theme and anthropology was made. Indeed, the fact that this theme was negatively interpreted by the post-Kantians does not necessarily mean that it was already irredeemable at its Kantian origin. If the possibility remained of isolating a nonanthropological form of the transcendental theme, while analyzing in detail the way in which this theme has been perverted, then nothing would prevent Foucault from searching elsewhere, notably in what he called the "historical a priori," a revised and nonsubjective version of the transcendental. It is therefore crucial for him to know whether the anthropological usurpation of the transcendental theme was already effective within Kant's work, in which the later confusions would then originate, or whether the critical question was untainted at its origin by the anthropological tendency, although it opened the way for it in the post-Kantian thinkers.

At this point, the reading of one particular text becomes essential to answering these questions: Foucault's complementary doctoral thesis, which pursues the examination begun by the translation of the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View of the role played by "man" in Kant's oeuvre. Foucault emphasizes from the first pages of his Commentary that the anthropological "self-observation" has the specific characteristic of reaching "neither the subject in itself, nor the pure I of synthesis, but a self which is object and present only its phenomenal truth. Yet this object I, which is given to the sense in the form of time, is nevertheless not alien to the determining subject, since in the end it is nothing but the subject as it is affected by itself" (ITLITL, 23). The object of the Anthropology would therefore be neither the "subject in itself" of the Second Critique, nor the "pure I" as studied in the first, but an "object-I"-also "subject"-in other words, man in his paradoxical identity as determined and determining subject. Thus the great interest of the Anthropology is that, contrary to the two Critiques, which are only concerned with the transcendental, it takes account of man in his ambivalence as an empirico-transcendental double. For this reason, it constitutes a privileged site-indeed the only possible one-from which to reply to the questions discussed above, which are naturally reformulated into the interrogation that marks the Commentary like a Leit-motiv: what has the transcendental theme become in the Kantian corpus, and what is the relationship between the Critique and the Anthropology?

But Foucault's response is itself ambivalent. On one hand, he seems to read the Anthropology as a simple "repetition" of the Critique, in which case there would be only one version of the transcendental theme. It would therefore be possible, through an "archaeology of the text," to reveal the constitutive role of the Critique in "the birth and the evolution of human forms" (ITLITL, 14): the explicit foundation of the Anthropology would then be the transcendental conditions of possibility defined by the Critique some twenty-five years earlier. There would be "a certain critical truth of man, born from the critique of the conditions of truth" (ITLITL, 14). As we shall see, Foucault gives a privileged expression to this first interpretation through the concept of the "fundamental," which allows us to think the relation of the empirical and the a priori from a perspective that, although symmetrical to that of the Critique, nonetheless remains in conformity with it.

But this hypothesis of the subordination of the Anthropology to the Critique, which would preserve the univocity of the transcendental theme, is not the only possibility, as Foucault indicates from the beginning of his Commentary: "Was there, as early as 1773, a certain concrete image of man that no philosophical elaboration has essentially altered, which perhaps subsists in the very heart of the Critique and is formulated, without any major modifications, in the last of Kant's published texts?" (ITLITL, 14). The same logic that would cause Kant to move from the question of the limits of knowledge to that of the nature of man, would therefore have shaped the critical enterprise from the beginning, assigning to this "concrete image of man" the task, if not of "organizing and ordering," at least of secretly "guiding" and "orientating" Kantian thought (ITLITL, 4). Far from being founded by the Critique, the Anthropology would be its mute presupposition. There would therefore be an "inner fault [faille] affecting the transcendental revolution of criticism" (ITLITL, 67), a fault that generated a new version-anthropological, this time-of a theme originally believed to be pure.

These two interpretations-the repetition or the decentering of criticism-appear incompatible, and it is therefore curious that they should be featured without further justification in the same text. However, for Foucault it is not merely a exegetic problem: thinking the relation of the Critique to the Anthropology is in reality to understand the development of the transcendental theme, its articulation with the birth of man, and the apparition of the Analytic of finitude. Should the Commentary establish that the internal evolution of the Kantian corpus prefigures in miniature that of modernity, it would be possible to isolate even within the Kantian oeuvre itself the paradigm of the first empirico-transcendental "divide," as well as what Roland Barthes might have called the "degree zero" of the "confusions" (OT, 341) that enmeshed the post-Kantians. Thus the Commentary is crucial as it alone allows us to identify the most simple-since the most original-forms of the various stages of this development, and thus to uncover the foundational configuration of the three events, however dissimilar, that Foucault indifferently identifies as modernity's moment of birth, namely: the transcendental theme, the appearance of man, and the Analytic of finitude.

The Critical Version of the Transcendental Theme: The "Fundamental"

The theme of anthropological repetition recurs very frequently in the Commentary. The following passage is one of its clearest expressions: "The anthropological question asks, by taking them up, the questions that pertain to them. We are at the level of the structural fact of the anthropologico-critical repetition: the Anthropology does not say anything else than the Critique" (ITLITL, 76). It is possible to give four meanings to this "anthropologico-critical repetition." Firstly, the Anthropology could be the merely formal repetition of the arguments of the Critique-an obvious mirroring form of repetition. Secondly, it could repeat the Critique by presupposing it in its totality, that is, by grounding itself implicitly in it, in a massive, silent, but structurally necessary repetition. Thirdly, it could from this base shed a new light on some major critical concepts, a more modest kind of repetition whose explicit task would be to bring the critical project to completion without transforming it too greatly. Finally, repetition itself, or retelling, could move the Critique toward a more finished form, of which anthropology itself was the hidden presupposition, provided that repetition is given its greatest range and the dialectical and dynamic sense of an Aufhebung. To these four forms of repetition correspond four possible relations between the Anthropology and the Critique: mirroring, foundation, complementarity, or mediation, all of which are entertained by the Commentary.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Foucault's Critical Projectby BATRICE HAN Copyright © 1998 by Editions Jrme Millon. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.