The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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standpoint, for which the world remains to be made (EIKA, 33). This external standpoint on human beings in the world is adopted mostly in the shorter second part of the Anthropology (the Characteristic). The lion’s share of the lectures are devoted to the Didactic, in which the igure of human existence is presented as spirit’s principle (Gemüt). Neither the soul (Seele), dispelled as illusory by the Paralogisms of the irst Critique, nor the closely related spirit (Geist), which animates it with ideas, spirit’s principle gives it the living igure it has in experience, the orientation that opens it onto “a virtual totality,” a duration that removes it from “indifferent dispersion” (EIKA, 57–62). Freed of the illusions generated by their transcendental use by being restrained to possible experience in its temporal intensity, ideas vivify existence by giving birth to “the multiple structures of totality in becoming that make and undo themselves as so many partial lives that live and die in spirit” (EIKA, 63). Thus Foucault concludes that the very movement that gives birth to “the transcendental mirage” in the Critique “prolongs the empirical and concrete life of spirit’s principle” in the Anthropology, freeing spirit from its determinations and consecrating it for the possibilities of a future of its own making (EIKA, 63). Whereas from a transcendental standpoint spirit implies that “the ininite is never there, but always in essential retreat,” from which it “animates the movement towards the truth and the inexhaustible succession of its forms” (EIKA, 65). In its anthropological form, spirit for Foucault is a “secretly indispensable” aspect of the structure of Kant’s thought, the reversible basic root of pure reason: both the source of its transcendental illusions and the principle of its movement in experience (ibid.). As discourse, the structure of the Anthropology inverts that of the Critique: the one repeats the other negatively, like a print repeats a photonegative (EIKA, 66–73). As practice, anthropology makes the passage to transcendental philosophy possible by formulating existence in terms of a play of source, domain, and limit. These specify the relation between man and world, transposing the three capacities of the Critique, sensibility, understanding, and imagination, by posing the three basic questions of Kant’s thought – what can I know? what must I do? what can I hope for? – backwards. This is why the Anthropology, a textbook of empirical lessons and popular exercises, is the record of the practice of critique that gives the capacities of reason described in the Critique their “fundamental cohesion” (EIKA, 86). As Kant practiced it in his lectures (and presumably in his life), anthropology is prior to transcendental critique, even though as discourse it was published after it. However, the exercise of critique in the Anthropology is also “systematically projected,” making it possible for it to grasp truth recast in the element of freedom as transcendental philosophy. Foucault reconstructs Kant’s thought in terms of a passage from transcendental critique, which investigates a priori knowledge, to anthropology, which explores the originary relation between temporality and language, to transcendental philosophy, which establishes the fundamental relation between truth and freedom (EIKA, 106). Thus there is a circular relation between anthropological and transcendental practices of critique, relected

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by the fact that the Anthropology is both popular and systematic: it gives a priori description its true meaning by repeating it in the originary, “the truly temporal” medium of concrete existence beyond subjectivity, in which the universal emerges: the always already, never yet there lux of temporality in which truth and freedom are one (EIKA, 92). As discourse, the Anthropology repeats the results of the Critique backwards, but as practice it is transcendental critique that reverses anthropology.

Transcendental and anthropological critiques share the objective of learning to live with unavoidable illusion. Thus Foucault describes the “anthropological illusion” as “the reverse, the mirror-image of the transcendental illusion”: the one is produced by the “spontaneous transgression” by reason’s will to know the ininite, the other accounts for the transgression in a “relexive regression” (EIKA, 122). This inversion generates “false anthropology” in Kant’s wake (EIKA, 92). Relection on the limits and transgression of thought and the possibility of nonpositive afirmation becomes the pretension to be the source of man’s self-knowledge, when anthropology serves as the positive foundation of the human sciences. Although Kant’s Anthropology may well be the birthplace of the illusion, as Foucault maintains in “A

Preface to Transgression,” noncritical anthropology is inadmissible from a Kantian standpoint, given that anthropology, the reversal of transcendental critique, cannot lay claim to positive knowledge (EEW2, 74). Consequently, Foucault’s assessment of post-Kantian anthropological thought is severe. He claims that it exploits its intermediary position between the a priori and the fundamental, entitling itself to the privileges of both (to be preliminary like critique and complete like transcendental philosophy), and that it confuses both necessity and existence, and knowledge and initude (EIKA, 106). As Foucault has it, the muddle comes from an illusory objective, positive knowledge of “man,” or “initude in itself” (EIKA, 118). For Foucault, the importance of this anthropological illusion is such that the history of post-Kant- ian philosophy needs to be retold from the perspective of its denunciation, a project that he undertakes as The Order of Things.

In that text, Foucault detaches the birthplace of anthropological thought as an epistemological coniguration from Kant speciically, to cast it as the result of the general recession of the theory of representation as the universal foundation of discourse in Western culture. He presents it as the organizing principle of a partly philosophical, partly positivistic form of relection on man that is formed as the basis for the series of “quasi-transcendentals” – life, work, and language – the post-Kant- ian precritical metaphysical categories that emerge at the beginning of the nineteenth century in symmetry with transcendental philosophy. These objective ields of empirical knowledge describe the conditions of possibility of experience from within the being of the object represented, rather than the representing subject, and concern a posteriori truth, rather than the synthetic a priori of all possible experience (EOT, 243–248). Anthropology is discourse on the natural initude of human beings, an analytics of man as an empirico-transcendental doublet, for which the

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concrete forms of existence are reductively equated with the limits of knowledge. Kant’s distinction between the empirical and the transcendental results in a mixed discourse, in which empirical observation-based knowledge and critical thought overlap, confusing experience from the outside and experience from the inside. In this fold, Foucault proposes, its pathos relieved at the return of “the reign of the humanity,” modern philosophy falls asleep “in a new slumber; not of dogmatism, but of anthropology” (EOT, 341). But he also explains how Nietzsche stirs this sleep by showing that the discovery of the initude of man already implies his decline, thus providing the tools for the destruction of post-Kantian anthropology, the doubly dogmatic historical a priori that served as the universal unrelective grounds of the human sciences. This for Foucault would be required to make the emergence of a new philosophy possible after the death of man. Thus, echoing the alarm with which Hume sprang Kant from dogmatism, it was Nietzsche who woke Foucault up from anthropological slumber, by showing him that the lip side of the initude of human experience (the “death of God”) is its own disintegration (the “death of man”). This calls for a renewal of critique, not of reason, but of the inite form of being from which it is abstracted, of what in post-Kantian thought is called “man.” The epistemological interests of Kant’s transcendental critique – about how a subject can know something universally and necessarily – can be displaced by interrogation of its ontological presuppositions, about how such a subject can be such a subject. Foucault inds the ill-fated kernel of such a critique not in Nietzsche paradoxically but in Kant’s Anthropology. There he inds the aim to demystify the anthropological illusion, initude caught in a “relexive regression that must account for that regression” that leaves it subjected to absolute subjectivity, to the dialectic of the inite and the ininite (EIKA, 123). Properly practiced as “true critique,” an ontological attitude of contestation and self-transformation, anthropology aims to free individuals from both initude and the ininite by initiation into the game of life through a mode of existence in which initude is “the knot and curb of time where the end is also the beginning” (EIKA, 124).

Foucault insists on the ascetic dimension of this anthropological practice: the Anthropology is a “book of daily exercise” that is not “theoretical” or dogmatically

“scholastic”; it is neither “the history of culture” nor “the successive analysis of its forms,” but “the immediate and imperative practice” through which individuals learn how to “recognize their culture in the school of the world” by being initiated into the game of life, which is its own school, such that they teach themselves how to use the world, its rules, and its prescriptions (EIKA, 53). In this respect, the practice of anthropology aims not to establish a body of empirical knowledge of man through external observation but to transform individuals’ relation in a given culture to themselves and to their concrete forms of existence. Indeed, for Foucault, in this pragmatic dimension, the Anthropology itself is a user’s guide of sorts to the world. Foucault leaves aside this focus on temporal experience after the Introduction

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to Kant’s Anthropology, but an underlying concern remains for the critical ascetic practices through which individuals can change their relation to themselves and to their culture in the interest of existence in a mode in which truth and freedom are not mutually exclusive. It surfaces again much later, in the context of relection on practices of governing in Western culture through which individuals were subjected to a politics of truth, a form of power incompatible with freedom.

In a 1978 lecture, Foucault addresses Kant’s critique at the intersection of power relations and spiritual relations in terms of its historical conditioning as a sociopolitical practice. In Kant’s essay on Enlightenment, he inds a formulation of critique not as a discourse but as an attitude toward oneself and one’s actuality. Foucault’s genealogy identiies this form of activity in the social practices in which a form of religious power previously exercised within the Church is transferred to the political sphere, in the context of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, as a means of resisting the effects of governing in which the imperative to obey direction is validated by an appeal to the truth. This governmentalization politicizes the pastoral power exercised in a religious context between God or his representative as a shepherd and his faithful as sheep needing care, protection, and salvation. Indeed, practices of resistance to the biblical pastorate can be seen as precursors to these critical practices, such as secondto fourth-century Gnostic sects, which exercised social and religious transgression motivated by principles internal to the practices that governed them (suicide or destructive sinfulness on the basis of the identiication of matter as evil, or systematic infraction of the law on the basis of the entreaty to overturn the world of legality).

Foucault’s suggestion is that the attitude of being critical surfaces as a form of counterconduct to these arts of governing, as internal points of resistance that contest the effects of its conlation of power and truth. In a biblical register, one inds a vindication of the direct appeal to Scripture as attenuation of the authority of the magister in order to rectify the individual’s relation to the truth. In a juridical register, an appeal to universal natural right supports the recusal of unjust laws based on sovereign iat. In an epistemic register, the rejection of dogmatic claims to knowledge and truth is habilitated by the application of a criterion of available justiication, accepting them only if one has reason to do so. These attitudes of being critical dispose individuals “to interrogate the truth about its effects of power, and power about its discourse on truth” (FQC, 39). They exercise principled refusal of subjection to mechanisms of power based on the will to truth.

In Foucault’s reading, what Kant formulates as Enlightenment is precisely this spiritual attitude of being critical. In Kantian terms, it is culture’s movement out of its state of minority in which, incapacitated by their lack of courage and decisiveness, individuals are authoritatively denied the use of their own understanding. In a state of minority, they voluntarily submit to external authority, not because they have to but because they lack the courage to use their own reason. In the movement out of

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this state, individuals come to differentiate the private and the public uses of reason and obey only in the case of the latter, as a citizen and in other social functions, in which it would be incoherent not to obey (in this register, power relations are constitutive of the experience, such that transgression is synonymous with dysfunction). In its public use, enlightened reason does not submit to externally prescribed regulation and direction but holds discourse as a subject in the universal medium in which rules are formulated in the interrogation of the conditions of possibility of experience. Thus Foucault considers that Kant’s Critique is the theoretical “logbook” of this autonomous public use of reason that is the distinctive mark of the attitude of being critical (EEW1, 309). He inds it exercised in Kant’s very formulation of it in the Enlightenment essay as a form of philosophical and historical interrogation that aims to formulate the speciicity of the present in its distinctiveness from the past. It poses the problem of its relation to this present and to itself by assessing the possibilities of philosophical relection, the practices in which they are exercised, and the modalities of participation in them as philosophers. This kind of critical attitude in which philosophical discourse becomes relective about its position in its own actuality, its belonging to a “we” to which it attributes a philosophical signiicance, is characteristic of what it means, for Foucault, to be modern. Modernity is a way of being critical.

Besides its philosophical and historical disposition to the present, Foucault characterizes critical modernity as a practice, an ethos, a voluntarily chosen and permanently reactivated way of being that aims to elaborate and transform its relation to actuality and to itself. In this register, freedom is a matter of being critical, the curious exercise of testing the limits of the possibilities of experience by recognizing the contingency in what is presented as universal and necessary, and formulating the regularity of that contingency as another possible way. For Foucault, this philosophical version of the attitude of being critical animates the critical tradition he calls the “ontology of ourselves,” which he opposes to the “analytics of truth,” a tradition of critique that stems from Kant’s transcendental critique (ECF-GSO, 20–21).Whereas the latter can be recognized in the form of analytic philosophy, the former shapes the outlooks of thinkers in the vein of Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, the Frankfurt school, and Foucault himself.

Mirroring the effects of the anthropological illusion, critique as analytics of truth is in Foucault’s reading incapacitated by a lack of self-awareness about its conception of subjectivity, which leads it to forego the practical and ascetic dimension of philosophy, its function as an exercise of self-transformation. Transcendental critique is disabled by the fact that its access to truth and experience of freedom do not require a transformation of the subject. Since the structure of the knowing subject speciies what it is impossible to know, the idea that access to truth requires a transformation of the subject can get no purchase; it is impossible even to conceive.

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Thus it would seem that in his discovery of the attitude of being critique in his later readings of Kant, Foucault distances himself from the relation of circular reversibility between the transcendental standpoint of the Critiques and its mirror repetition as ontological exercise in the Anthropology. As historical traditions of critique, he presents them as disjunctive options and associates himself exclusively with the latter. The positive assessment of transcendental critique in his earlier work – he credits it with the invention of the form of relection on limitation and transgression around the possibility of nonpositive afirmation that he considered to be the mark of viable postanthropological philosophy, such as one inds in Nietzsche and Blanchot, for example – has disappeared in his frequent methodological formulations, in which resistance to the transcendental practice of Kantian critique is a recurrent theme. For example, in a debate with Preti, Foucault latly rejects the notion that the epistemes his archaeology describes are historical versions of Kantian categories (FDE3, 372). In The Archaeology of Knowledge, he emphasizes the need

“to free the history of thought from its transcendental subjection,” to strip it of its “transcendental narcissism,” in order to deine the conditions and historical transformations of knowledge with a regressive analysis that functions outside the transcendental aim of making philosophy as metaphysics possible by functioning at a level of abstraction at which universal and necessary knowledge of the conditions of experience is possible (EAK, 202–203). This, for Foucault, is an incoherent objective that belongs to the anthropological sleep characteristic of modern philosophy. With the epistemological orientation under the spell of the anthropological illusion, bedeviled by a naive conception of the subject, transcendental critique can only bring philosophy further from experience. In Foucault’s philosophical assessments and in his methodological relections, transcendental critique is no longer considered to be an indispensible detour in the exercise of being critical as it was in his reading of Kant’s critical anthropology. This gives the impression that Foucault’s ontological critique no longer requires transcendental relection on the conditions of possibility of thought, and that Foucault’s debt to Kant is entirely at the level of the attitude of being critical.

It would be hasty to draw such a conclusion. It is important not to lose sight of the side of Foucault’s work that echoes transcendental critique, despite his reservations about it. This methodological debt is most visible in the archaeology of discursive practices, but it is present in more or less concentrated form throughout his work. The primary objective of Kant’s transcendental critique is, of course, to establish the conditions of possibility of real experience in view of guaranteeing universal and necessary knowledge of it. His overarching concern is the state of the metaphysics of his day, moribund, victim to its lack of self-awareness about the kind of knowledge philosophy can obtain scientiically, given the experience it is possible for the knowing subject to have. The preparatory work of critique aims to make metaphysics possible as a science, dispelling transcendental illusion by curtailing its dogmatic

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Suggested Reading

Davidson, Arnold. 2001. The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Djaballah, Marc. 2008. Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience. London: Routledge.

2013. “Foucault on Kant, Enlightenment, and Being Critical,” in A Companion to Foucault, eds. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki. Oxford: Blackwell,

pp. 264–281

Eribon, Didier. 1991. Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientiic Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Hacking, Ian. 2002. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Potte-Bonneville, Mathieu, and Daniel Defert. 2010. “Filigranes philosophiques,” in Foucault.

Paris: Les Cahiers de l’Herne, pp. 39–46.