Kant, Foucault and forms of experience (Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault)

This dissertation presents the theoretical apparatus of Foucault's early historical analyses as a version of Kantian criticism. In an initial textual exposition, I attempt to distill a unified discursive practice from Kant's theoretical writings. I argue for Foucault's proximity to Kant on the basis of this reconstruction of criticism, by showing that his studies are modeled on this way of thinking. By recasting it in this framework, an unorthodox version of Foucault's work is generated, one that is at odds with the tendency to emphasize a certain skepticism about the possibility of universal and necessary knowledge in his writings, and to mistake it for irrationalism and a hostility to the practice of theory. By drawing attention to the structural parallel between Foucault's practice and Kantian criticism, my study belies this picture. One of the implications of this affinity is that the skepticism involved in Foucault's works is in fact a theoretical stage within the broader project of establishing the necessary conditions of knowledge, albeit within local, well-defined historical and cultural contexts. It represents the moment of self-estrangement that is required to recognize the historical limitations of the use of reason and its attendant forms of experience. And yet the diachronic pluralism of these forms does not imply the impossibility of historical knowledge.