The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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strategy of reading that recalls Heidegger’s “destruction” of the history of ontology, an approach aimed precisely at retrieving possibilities that had been closed off by the metaphysical tradition (Heidegger 1962, §6; Heidegger 1982, §5).

Foucault draws attention to the different roles played by time in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Anthropology, a difference that arises from the nature of the Anthropology’s inquiry into what the human individual “as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself” (Kant 2006, 3), not only by shaping our conduct but also by cultivating our sensibility, understanding, and taste. Kant irst explores this through a rehearsal of structures familiar from the Critique of Pure Reason (sensibility, understanding, reason) and then through a consideration of pleasure, displeasure, and desire that takes in discussions of topics such as distraction, mental illness, dreams, wit, boredom, and eating alone or in company, before going on to deal with character, physiognomy, and the character of races and the sexes, and more besides. Whereas in the Critique of Pure Reason the subject is divided between a transcendental unit that anchors the syntheses of the multiple and the empirical self that appears as an object of intuition, in the Anthropology the subject experiments with provisional variations on the human, each of which may be modiied or undone in turn. Here, writes Foucault, time is not the transparent condition of synthetic activity but rather that by which it is left obscure and incomplete. Simple determination gives way to a gradual and uncertain activity that Kant names Kunst. Time in the Anthropology is described by Foucault as the guarantee of a “dispersion that cannot be contained (qui n’est pas surmontable)” (EIKA, 89). It is “the dispersion of the synthetic activity with regard to itself” (ibid.), the noncoincidence of synthesis with itself as it works through time. By virtue of this structural incompleteness, Foucault writes, the time of the Anthropology eats away at the coherence of synthesis from within, making room for error, correction, repetition, and thereby also a certain freedom (EIKA, 91). The message that Foucault draws from this is that one must avoid a “false” anthropology that seeks to return to a beginning point, whether this be in an empirical sense or by recourse to a transcendental a priori. Instead, he proposes that the a priori of the Critique of Pure Reason be repeated “in a truly temporal dimension” (EIKA, 93). Like Heidegger, then, Foucault sees time as the key to Kant’s anthropology, and, like Heidegger, Foucault tries to identify the temporal structure of synthesis itself. However, whereas Heidegger directs his attention to the temporal dimension of the synthetic activity of the transcendental imagination, Foucault sees the locus of the problem shift to the anthropology, where the purity of this synthesis is adulterated by the time of concrete life. From the point of view of Foucault’s depiction of the way thought in modernity has been caught in an impasse, this disruption of dichotomy between the empirical and the transcendental, between the actual existence and the conditions that make it possible, seems to promise thinking a new future.

However, there are two obstacles that make it impossible simply to take Kant’s formulation in the Anthropology as a solution to the problem. First, the presentation

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of time as a linear series of events has to be constituted by an antecedent activity that cannot itself be represented in the series. The transcendental role of time as the condition of the order of experience is thereby kept out of view, but for this reason the disruptive potentiality of temporal dispersion is also blocked; that is, the account sits irmly within the very structure from which Foucault wishes to escape. Also playing a vital role here is language, which is seen as a regulated articulation of the freedoms by which individuals form a community and thereby accomplish a “concrete universal” (EIKA, 102). If time itself is the dimension of the “originary” (l’originaire), Foucault endorses the view that it “is not to be found in an already given, secret meaning, but in what is the most manifest path of the exchange” (EIKA, 102–103). This becomes problematic, in Foucault’s view, because Kant adopts a “popular” idiom for the Anthropology. By appealing to a common language, shared between author and public, it fosters a certainty that, in spite of the dispersion of time, something clear and whole is nonetheless given, or at least almost within our grasp. Taking up a language that is already familiar from our understanding of the world, the Anthropology deploys it to grasp the human, time is conirmed as an order of empirical events, and the radical potential of temporal dispersion is lost. So when Foucault writes that the reader of the Anthropology is placed in a milieu of “total evidence” where any number of new examples can be found, but that “‘popular knowledge’ is not the irst, the earliest, nor the most naïve form of truth” (EIKA, 94), he is on a path parallel to Heidegger’s contrast of authenticity with the common currency of the impersonal “they” (Heidegger 2010, §27). Moreover, like Heidegger, his solution is to recover a temporal form that has been concealed by this semblance of self-evidence. The difference is that for Heidegger an account of the Being of the subject is only possible once a clear distinction is made between everyday time and the original time of the ontological, whereas Foucault welcomes the way the two are folded together in Kant’s anthropology (a view that matches the one he sketched ten years earlier in his Introduction to Binswanger’s text). But in order that the transformative repercussions of this shift be felt, the screen of self-evidence placed around it when Kant cast anthropology as a “popular” discourse has to be drawn away.

Foucault’s work, as it unfolds later in the 1960s and beyond, retrieves the temporal dispersion he found in Kant from the restrictions of the “popular” idiom, allowing dispersion to shape a different understanding of the subject in its relation to ontology and to knowledge. Archaeological method suspends readymade unities (actors, discourses, works, traditions, artifacts) in the analysis of discourse, exposing history as the gradual, piecemeal, and provisional formation of such unities, their temporary stability, and their ultimate deformation. In this way, it turns a forensic eye on the genesis of forms that the analysis of discourse generally either takes for granted or deines as the conditions of possibility for a given class of events. Foucault sees the dispersion of events in their multiplicity challenge the synthetic activity by which such formal characteristics emerge and by which things, ideas, and

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even thought itself become intelligible. The archaeological analogue of synthesis produces discourse from discourse, according to rules formed within discourse that are transformed along with the shifting patterns they describe and yet for which they nonetheless establish local conditions of existence. As a response to Kant, and to Heidegger’s response to Kant, archaeology opens synthesis up to what Foucault again identiies as “temporal dispersion” (EAK, 25). The difference is that now the dispersion is caused not by an underlying linear time that eventually undoes the work of the subject but by plural times that are the formation and deformation of unities and regularities. The division between the transcendental and the empirical is erased, and, in the terms Foucault used in his Introduction to Binswanger, there is no a priori distinction between ontology and anthropology.

Foucault’s subsequent introduction of power into his analyses is already well prepared here; the Nietzschean conception of the will to power maps easily onto the transformation in the conditions of existence that comes with the ongoing production of discourse. Similarly, the Nietzschean refusal to see an agent behind the act, or an ideal behind things as they appear, can already be found in archaeology. That said, there is certainly a shift in emphasis in Foucault’s work to treat the rules shaping what can be said and done in terms of power and not just in view of the various functions and positions of discourse. With the emergene of power as a theme in Foucault’s work also comes a further point of comparison with Heidegger, in that Foucault’s insistence that power is not a thing and should not be treated as if it were a substance echoes Heidegger’s approach to Being and the ontological difference. The comparison is a valid one, but only up to a certain point, and the point at which it breaks down reveals an important difference between Heidegger and Foucault over the possibility of ethics and its relation to ontology. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes how we are thrown into a historical situation we did not choose and cannot master. Even so, it is possible for us to confront our own initude and thereby modify our relation to our own ontological condition. In this way, we can transcend the immediate conditions of our factical life. What we cannot do is change the fundamental conditions by which Being is disclosed, which make up the temporal structure of our existence. As Heidegger moved beyond Being and Time, the attempt to determine the temporal horizons of the meaning of Being gave way to a recognition that Being is historical, or rather that the truth of Being is historical, its disclosure taking different forms in different epochs. Since the prevailing form of the disclosure of Being varies from epoch to epoch, at any one time we stand within an opening that sets the conditions of interpretation without itself being open to such interpretation. It is therefore impossible to draw the different epochs of the history of Being into a single account. Similarly for Foucault, how things appear as objects

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See Also

Finitude

Phenomenology

Ludwig Binswanger

Immanuel Kant

Suggested Reading

Han-Pile, Béatrice. 2003. “Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude,” in Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 127–162.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.

1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

1990. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

2010. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised with a Foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: The SUNY Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 2006. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden and Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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includes Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, the central issue in Hegel’s thought is difference, the difference between nature and spirit, the difference between experience and logic, the difference between initude and ininity, and probably most importantly for Foucault, the difference between philosophy and history.

In his inaugural address at the Collège, Foucault acknowledged that he owed a lot to Hyppolite. Foucault added, however, that Hyppolite showed all of us that the task of philosophy lies not in generalization but in reestablishing contact with what precedes it, in drawing as close as possible to “the singularity of history” (EAK, 236). Undoubtedly, the task of all of Foucault’s archaeological studies can be summarized in this “task of philosophy.” At the same moment as his inaugural address, Foucault also wrote a eulogy for Hyppolite. There he makes this task clearer, saying that, “The problem that Hyppolite never stopped working on is perhaps this one: what is this limitation that is proper to philosophical discourse, the limitation that allows it or makes it appear as the speech of philosophy itself, in a word: what is philosophical initude?” (FDE1, 781, Foucault’s emphasis, my translation). The chair that

Foucault occupied at the Collège de France was the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought. We can see now that what Foucault called “systems of thought,” especially at the end of his career (see EEW1, 201), really concerned this very limitation that connects philosophy back to history. It concerned the difference that makes philosophy inite but that also allows philosophical thought to go beyond that limitation. Repeatedly, Foucault speaks of his histories having the purpose of transformation (see, for example, EAK, 130). It is this difference that allows thought to transform the very conditions in which it inds itself.

Leonard Lawlor

See Also

Archaeology

Finitude

History

Suggested Reading

Hyppolite, Jean. 1974. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel

Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

1991. Figures de la pensée philosophique. Paris: Quadrige Presses Universitaires de France. 1997. Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen. Albany: The SUNY Press. Lawlor, Leonard. 2003. Thinking Through French Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press.

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essay. The problem of the relation between the two is the leitmotif of the experience of Kant in Foucault.

Kant’s importance for Foucault stems in part from Hyppolite, with whom he studied briely at Lycée Henri-IV in 1945 and who supervised both his Diplôme d’Études Supérieures (a French degree roughly equivalent to an advanced Master’s, degree) on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in 1949 and his 1961 PhD thèse complémentaire at the Sorbonne. The thesis, a translation of Kant’s Anthropology accompanied by an extensive introduction (published in 2008 as FKF), is Foucault’s irst and most sustained study of Kant. Hyppolite had reservations about it, notably that Foucault’s reading was “inspired by Nietzsche more than by Kant” (Eribon 1991, 114). The fact that Foucault was known to refer to it as his “book on Nietzsche” goes to show that he took the criticism well, to say the least (Potte-Bonneville and Defert 2010). Indeed, if Foucault’s Kant is post-Nietzschean, it is surely not a matter of exegetical weakness. One also hears echoes of Heidegger – through whom Foucault came to the study of Nietzsche – in the recurrence to “repetition” and the “originary.” But despite its unavowed inspirations, the thesis is by no means merely a student work. Clearly the culmination of years of study and teaching (the Anthropology igured in

Foucault’s teaching at least as early as 1953), its penetrating analysis of the genesis and structure of Kant’s text and of its historical signiicance is of great value for an understanding of his subsequent work. Its interrogation is genetic, systematic, and historical.

The problem of the relation between transcendental and popular standpoints in Kant surfaces at the intersection of the genetic and the systematic register. Foucault addresses Kant’s thought as a discursive practice, a form of experience that can be either described from the outside as a closed discursive system on the basis of its materialization in a text or verbal expression or exercised, by lateral insertion, as an opening onto a reality. Critical discourse circularly does the former by means of the latter: it describes forms of experience – ways to sensibly interrogate reality – by using what it describes as its method. The experience of Kant in Foucault is polarized not only between the Critiques and Anthropology or the Enlightenment essay but also with respect to the priority of the discourse of critique and of the exercise of a critical attitude. We will see that these are not theoretical options like prongs of a fork but directions of a reversible polarity; the one is just the other turned inside out.

Foucault shows that the Critiques record an epistemologically oriented version of the practice by describing the form of experience in terms of the conditions under which universal and necessary knowledge is possible. This transcendental critique reaches a level of abstraction apt for its radically general external description by moving inferentially from qualities of reality such as it is given from the inside to an external description of the rules according to which we systematically determine and regulate it as such by way of chains of indispensability relations. Absolutely general

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regularities are thereby sifted from our experience. The idea underlying Foucault’s reading is that this transcendental critique betrays itself as a practice. By foreclosing the objective of self-transformation as a condition of access to truth in a conception of the subject that is also the condition of impossibility of knowledge, it screens itself from the indeterminacy of its experience and denies its self-participation in what it describes, leaving only the description. The practice of transcendental critique functions as though it were not a practice at all but the material record of its exercise in a circuit of distinctions, its image in the mirror. It is as though the conceptual matter of the Critique exhausted its practice.

In The Order of Things, the historical signiicance of transcendental critique is tied to its simultaneity with ideology (Destutt de Tracy and Gerando), with which it shares a ield of application, representational relations. Their overlap is the hinge in the passage of classical representational to modern anthropological thought. Whereas the Ideologues attempted to capture the nonrepresentative in the very form of representation, critique suspends the analysis of representations by asking how representation itself is possible. Kant’s transcendental critique pulls thought out of the ininite space of representations the Ideologues had attempted to exhaustively render scientiically. At the level of nonrepresentative conditions of representation, he unmasks the attempt, and the project of representational thought in general, as dogmatic metaphysics. Paradoxically, for Foucault regrettably, this moment – the simultaneity of Ideology and Kant’s critique that denounces it – also paves the way for a new anthropological metaphysics (EOT, 241–242).

The priority in transcendental critique of discursive over practical criteria, of a closed system over its exercise as opening, is reversed in the ontological practices of critique such as recorded in the Anthropology and the Enlightenment piece. This explains Foucault’s resistance to the objectives of transcendental critique and his antipathy for post-Kantian anthropology, which replays transcendental betrayal and begs the question of the extent to which his own histories of experience do not succumb. With an ontological orientation, anthropological critique reverses this critical practice, taking the results of transcendental critique as given – the capacities and categories through which experience is conditioned – and showing that, transposed from the a priori to the originary temporal lux, they lend their igure to concrete existence.

When they were published toward the end of his life in 1798, Kant had given the Anthropology lectures for a quarter of a century, in the midst of which transcendental critique was developed and published in the irst Critique. Foucault shows that the relation between the two implies that transcendental critique is a moment in the elaboration of anthropological critique, which reaches a point of stabilization in transcendental philosophy (EIKA, 23). Foucault explains how the anthropocritical repetition brings about a shift in Kant’s thought from the cosmological standpoint of the 1760s and 1770s, which takes the world as already given, to a cosmopolitical