ABSTRACT
Even from a distance, Foucault’s method has unmistakable Kantian undertones, and his deceptively familiar concept of the ‘historical a priori” of practices is a striking terminological manifestation of this similarity. The concept marks a level of analysis for the formal conditions of thought during a given period of time in a particular culture. This analysis proceeds regressively from the experience of a historical practice, by way the exercise of an experimental protocol on archival material, to the configuration of concepts that forms and regulates it, thereby determining its order of intelligibility. The methodological insight is that this point of arrival, the regulating factors that form a given historical practice, can be postulated as real and effective on the basis of its indispensability for the point of departure. Foucault’s analysis isolates the forms of historical experience exercised through documentary and archival work by identifying an indispensable feature of that experience to it, and on the basis of this feature provides the description of a form that makes its rules explicit.1 This regressive dynamic marks a methodological constant in Foucault’s historical practice. It is decisive in determining the experimental transition from the documentary material that provides access to cultural difference indirectly, through the detour of a description of the norms that determine what is and what is not possible within the experience of that material. It is clear that this dynamic bears a resemblance to what Kant describes as the objectives of the critical method, but this assessment of Foucault’s Kantianism has yet to define the details of this relation and to indicate its primary and most immediate implications; while it is true that the form of movement in thought that transfers attention from what is undeniably indispensable in an experience to a description of the rules that determine the modality of that experience does characterize something definitive
in both Kant’s critical philosophy and Foucault’s historical analysis, it could also serve as a description of Plato’s dialectical method.2 A finer grain seems advisable.
