Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience

Marc Djaballah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135912673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This study presents the theoretical apparatus of Foucault's early historical analyses as a version of Kantian criticism. In an initial textual exposition, the author attempts to distill a unified discursive practice from Kant's theoretical writings, arguing for Foucault's proximity to Kant on the basis of this reconstruction, 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, this study belies this picture.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Foucault’s Kantian Enigma
• Chapter One A Standpoint in Kant’s Critical Philosophy
• Chapter Two Nietzsche and the Critical Need to Wake Up
• Chapter Three The Aim of Criticism in Foucault
• Chapter Four Practices as Forms of Experience
• Chapter Five Literature as a Formal Resource
• Conclusion Contestation and Creating Beings of Thought
• Notes
• Bibliography