ABSTRACT
Foucault’s criticism is a transitional form of the Kantian practice. He occupies a level of abstraction at which the form of experience is analyzed determinately, in terms of practices. From his standpoint, these are considered as forms, but forms analyzed in their empirical concreteness and their historically contingency, rather than at the purified level of their absolutely universal, necessary, and thereby immutable, atemporal features. They are considered, moreover, in terms of a form of receptivity in experience that itself fluctuates in response to the needs of what it receives and for which it hosts the formation into an objective reality. This limitation of the form of experience to the practice in which the experience takes place marks the possibility of practicing the criticism of practices of criticism. When Foucault’s own historical grid is applied at this second order, the transformation the practice of criticism undergoes in his discourse reflects the transformation in the form of sensible experience that Foucault diagnoses as the discursive and epistemological specificity of contemporary culture; one in the midst of an important transformation. According to Foucault, there are clear early indications of a shift of this kind in certain forms of contemporary literary discourse. While the new form may well continue to adhere to the basic Kantian form of experience at the level of thought (i.e., a combined exercise of spontaneity and receptivity punctuated by the use of basic rules, the discursive employment of which necessarily forms experience), a different description would be required of the forms of intuition and of the function of judgment. This chapter is in large part devoted to an examination of Foucault’s analyses of this contemporary order of thought in the transitional, unbalanced state in which he found it, and an attempt to reconstruct a more developed outline
of the implication of the generalization of the aspect of the literary discourse in question to the form of thought itself.
