ABSTRACT
In the initial list of the fundamental questions of philosophy given in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant omitted the one which he would later regard as the most important of all: ‘Was ist der Mensch?’ (What is the human being?).2 According to Kant, this question belongs to the domain of anthropology, but he adds that the other three questions could also be counted as anthropological since they are all ultimately aspects of what it means to be human. With a calm assurance, Kant suggests the predominance of anthropology amongst intellectual disciplines. Influentially, in Les Mots et les choses (1966) Foucault traced back the modern conception of man precisely to the moment when Kant established anthropology as the key area of philosophical enquiry.3
To ask and to privilege the question ‘What is the human being?’ makes of philosophy pre-eminently an investigation into the nature of man and assigns to it the task of uncovering fixed universals behind surface differences. So Kant’s question predetermines the kinds of answers that will be given and thereby constitutes the field of enquiry it purported merely to describe. The question is then a major philosophical event in its own right, since it sets the task of philosophy for future generations. For Foucault though, it is time to wake up from the ‘anthropological sleep’. Man is merely ‘a recent invention, a figure which is not two centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge’.4 Foucault is here trying to set a fresh agenda for thought by pleading for the possibility of finding new questions and new ways of going about answering them. This requires in part that the anthropological conception of man should be dismantled; and for the structuralists and poststructuralists the death of man and the
