ABSTRACT
In isolating the theoretical objectives of Foucault’s criticism, this chapter aims to define the unifying orientation of the practice. The study continues to define a standpoint from which to assess the relation between Kant and Foucault, in this case, one that marks the distinction between the two in the terms of the three remaining segments of Kant’s practice: real possibility as a level of analysis, experience as the exercise of thought, mind and thought as capacity. Foucault himself was at times surprisingly insightful about the Kantian resonance of the aim of his historical analysis, and this chapter accordingly exploits Foucault’s own technical terminology more centrally than the treatment of the other aspects of his practice of criticism. Following Foucault, the main lines of a relation to Kant in the register of the conceptual motivations of criticism will be tracked in terms of a shift from finitude to contingency as the constitutive principle of motivation in critical activity, and as the decisive factor in the definition of its theoretical objectives. This will require two preliminary analyses of Foucault’s own interpretation of Kantian criticism as a historical and conceptual factor of first order importance. The exposition will begin with (a) a rehearsal of the elements of the role of Kant’s criticism in Foucault’s historical analysis of the human sciences in Les mots et les choses, before turning to Foucault’s concept of a critical attitude, its origin in Kant’s theorizing the Aufklärung, and its importance in modern philosophical discourse. Against this background, the coincidence of the aim of criticism in Kant and the objectives of Foucault’s own approach is readily
apparent. This discussion sets a stage to (b) specify the variation between them in this connection in terms of a transformation of the object of the practice of criticism from subjective finitude to historical contingency. The comparison is discussed in terms of the variations of this factor in relation to the negative and the positive tenors of criticism. This appears to be the fulcrum of the difference between their views: at the surface, Foucault’s concept of the aim of criticism replaces the negative, limiting factor of Kantian criticism with a positive one, a principle of creation that Foucault explicitly ties to, paradoxically, Kant’s pre-critical concept of the description of limits and rules as a creation not of being of sense, but of being of thought. Indeed, this way of restating the project seems to strip criticism of its distinctive feature, thereby marking a regression to traditional metaphysics, and this would not be entirely false. However, by exploring the space of play between the status of the theoretical and the specificity of the theorized in Foucault, the analysis will show that (c) the more obvious positive element of Foucault’s theoretical grid is counterbalanced to some extent with a negative factor that functions at a second order. This aspect of criticism is considerably further accentuated in Foucault than in Kant.1
