I have now completed my goal for this semester of reading through 5 years of Foucault’s lecture series: ‘Society’ Must Be Defended, Security, Territory Population, The Birth of Biopolitics, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, and The Government of Self and Others. Here, I don’t offer a grand synthesis of these lectures. And while I have blogged about these lectures a few times in the past months, I don’t have any kind of definitive statement about the lectures. Well, maybe one: a number of the titles are entirely misleading… But I have forgiven Foucault on this point already.
The final two lectures in the series above, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, and The Government of Self and Others, do however, share a number of thematic and organizational commonalities. First, Foucault does away with the formal lecture structure in favor of talking for two hours each session with a short break in between. Second, Foucault opens The Hermeneutics of the Subject, largely dedicated to readings of ancient Greek, Roman, and Stoic techniques of the self, with a critique of Descartes. In a similar manner, Foucault opens The Government of Self and Others, largely dedicated to the consideration of one technique of the self, parrhesia, as a form of life, with a provocative reading of Kant. It is this reading of Kant that I am interested in exploring.
In the first two hours of The Government of Self and Others, Foucault reads Kant’s essay “What is the Aufklärung?” as an important transition in philosophical thought, especially for the relationship shared between philosophy and politics, or, philosophy and revolution. In this one essay, it is Foucault’s claim that Kant both makes a gesture toward reorienting philosophical discourse and redefines philosophy’s relation to the political. First, Foucault writes, In Kant’s text on the Aufklärung
there is no question of origin, and, as you will see, and despite appearances, there is no question concerning the completion of history, its point of fulfillment. And the question of the immanent teleology of the process of history only in a relatively discreet, almost lateral way . . . In fact, the question which seems to me to appear for the first time in the texts by Kant–I do not say the only time, we will find another example later–is the question of the present, of present reality. It is the question: What is happening today? What is happening now? What is this “now” in which we all live and which is the site, the point [from which] I am writing? (11)
So, with this question, “What is the now?” Kant is not concerned with a formulation of the present that serves as an explanation for philosophical questioning. “It is not simply: What is in the present situation that can determine this or that philosophical decision?” (12). Rather, it is a question of what the present is; Foucault reads Kant as asking “What is in the present that current has meaning for philosophical reflection?” (12). But also, Foucault reads Kant as claiming that
within this reflection on this element of the present is the bearer of or which reveals a process, what is to be shown is in what respect and how the person who speaks as a thinker, as a savant, a philosopher, is himself part of this process. But it is even more complicated than this. He has to show not only how he is part of this process, but how, as such, as savant, philosopher, or thinker, he has a role in this process in which he is thus both an element and an actor. (12)
Stated another way, Foucault claims that, with the text on the Aufklärung
the question will no longer be one of his [Kant's, or, the philosopher more generally] adherence to a doctrine or a tradition, or of his membership of a human community in general, but a question about him being part of a present, about his membership of a particular “we” if you like, which is linked, to a greater or lesser extent, to a cultural ensemble characteristic of his contemporary reality. This “we” has to become, or is in the process of becoming, the object of the philosopher’s own reflection. By the same token, it becomes impossible for the philosopher to dispense with an interrogation of his singular membership of this “we.” (13)
So, what Foucault reads in Kant’s text on the Aufklärung is a moment in which philosophical reflection of time, particularly of the now, is immediately a question of partisanship. What remains important in this consideration of temporality and partisanship is what follows and the arguments made in The Government of Self and Others more broadly. Immediately, what follows the block quotes above is a consideration of revolution. Here, on Foucault’s reading of Kant, what is important about revolution is not what happens in or during the revolution. Nor is understanding revolution within a schematic charting social progress, progressing toward democracy, for instance, important. Rather, what is important is “what goes on in the minds of those not making the Revolution, or at any rate who are not its principal actors; it is their relationship to this Revolution in which they themselves are not engaged or in which they are not the main actors” (18). What remains important for Kant in this question of revolution is the way in which revolution displays how all, in Kant’s words, men, believe in a freely chosen political constitution and a political constitution that avoids war. Thus, it is an engagement with autonomy–the autonomy and authority of knowledge–and with revolution in which the contents remain unimportant, that here interests Foucault.
But, as we move through the entirety of The Government of Self and Others, we find, most clearly in Foucault’s engagement with Plato, that the task of philosophy is not to determine, in any programmatic way, what this constitution should be or how revolution should avoid war. In fact, philosophy, in its engagement with the political, does not take on the language of should or ought–to do this is not to think or act philosophically or politically. Clearly, Foucault is not claiming that philosophy does not or should not engage with the political. Here, it becomes a question of how philosophy is to engage with the political in a non-prescriptive way. Also, this reading of Kant cannot be generalized or remain applicable to his other works. There are many moments in Kant’s political writing where does attempt to determine the right or best constitution, does attempt to determine and prescribe behavior, etc. I guess this is to say, this is a reading of Kant that I would not have come up with on my own. However, I think that this is one moment in which Foucault doesn’t merely write off the Enlightenment project. It is a moment that, on Foucault’s view, poses a crisis and a challenge to philosophy that is immediately and directly political:
It seems to me that the philosophical choice confronting us today is the following. We have to opt either for a critical philosophy which appears as an analytical philosophy of truth in general, or for a critical thought which takes the form of an ontology of ourselves, of present reality. It is this latter form of philosophy which, from Hegel to the Frankfurt School, passing through Nietzsche, Max Weber and so on, has founded a form of reflection to which, of course, I link myself insofar as I can. (21)
Further, I think it is a moment wherein the question of the present is immediately a question of partisanship, of membership within a cultural ensemble, that a philosophical focus on the temporal, particularly in the figuration of the now, or what Deleuze would oppose to the now, the instant, that a discourse on partisanship would be particularly fruitful.
Anyway, here, Foucault provides a provocative reading of Kant that maybe only Foucault could get away with and have taken seriously.
–MLA
Filed under: Everything's Political, Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, revolution, The Government of Self and Others
