ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why critique, in Foucault's sense, must rely on the archaeology of knowledge. The task of critique, as Foucault promotes it, is to enlarge the scope of discursive possibility and thereby autonomy. The constraints critique tackles are “present limits of the necessary” that function implicitly on the structurally inevitable background level of discursive and other social practices. These limits are constituted as patterns of concept-use that are congealed into obviousness through repetition in a practice. The resultant apparent inevitability is ethically problematic in the light of the ideal of autonomy and therefore calls for critique. But this critique should be distinguished from ideology critique, even if both require a “critique of concepts.” The chapter distinguishes two meanings of this term, corresponding to the two kinds of critique, and thus provides a new explanation of the problem of conceptual dogmatism. On this view, the problem is not a lack of conceptual alternatives but a lack of rational control that can be gained by means of critique and therefore ought to be pursued for the sake of increasing autonomy in the domain of understanding.
