Revisable A Priori as a Political Problem: Critique of Constitution in Critical Theory

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This paper presents a new interpretation of Michel Foucault's critical project. It is well known that Foucault's genealogical critique does not focus on issues of justification, but instead tackles “aspectival captivity,” that is, apparently inevitable limits of thought that constrain the subject's freedom but that, in fact, can be transformed. However, it has not been recognized that, according to Foucault, critique can proceed along two distinct paths. In a key passage of “What Is Critique?,” Foucault states that critique is tasked with questioning truth about its effects of power and with questioning power about its discourses of truth. We show that this “double movement” organizes Foucault's critical project as a whole, giving it a significantly wider scope and a more complex structure than has been previously acknowledged. At the heart of the above‐mentioned bifurcation lies an apparent tension between two contrastive roles Foucault assigns to truth‐telling in the context of critique: on the one hand, truth‐telling (as avowal) is a target of critique; on the other, truth‐telling (as parrhesia) is one of critique's methods. We argue that combining these two dimensions in a unified account is crucial for understanding and re‐evaluating Foucault's critical project as a whole. By showing that truth‐telling remains an essential element of Foucauldian critique, this paper also rectifies some influential misinterpretations according to which Foucault's critical project seeks to eliminate truth from the picture.

The architectonic of Foucault's critique

Lorenzini

Tiisala

2023

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Sex, truth, and law: Rereading Foucault's History of Sexuality after volume 4, The Confessions of the Flesh

Tiisala

2023

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Foucault's historical studies were motivated by problems he identified in the present and there is no reason to think that History of Sexuality is different in this regard. 1 But that raises a question no reader of The Confessions of the Flesh can escape: How is a scholarly 426-page treatise on the Church Fathers relevant to the contemporary world, or, at least, to concerns that emerged from Foucault's own historical present? 2 The question is only highlighted by the absence of explicit links between the past and the present in Foucault's text, which was published posthumously, in 2018, as the fourth and final volume of History of Sexuality. This book had been advertised as forthcoming already in 1984, when volumes 2 and 3 were published weeks before Foucault's death. 3 Therefore, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that only now, in light of the perspective the long-awaited final volume offers, are we in a position to assess Foucault's History of Sexuality project as a whole. At the same time, this broader context is vital for understanding the philosophical significance of volume 4, which remains, no doubt due to its unfinished state, strikingly silent about the philosophical aim of the meticulous historical work, as Foucault himself understood it. Therefore, the question of contemporary significance needs to be examined both with respect to the project overall and, specifically, by asking what role the analyses of baptism, repentance, libido, virginity, and marriage, which fill out volume 4, might play in it. | HISTORY OF SEXUALITY AS CRITIQUEFoucault's History of Sexuality is critical history in Nietzsche's (1997: 75-77) sense of using history to liberate us from elements of the past that continue to define the present. It is well known that, according to Foucault, the genealogical aim of critical work is to enlarge the scope of discursive possibility that sets limits to the work of freedom subjects can

Genealogy: A conceptual map

Ratcliffe

2024

The blossoming literature on genealogy in recent years has come as somewhat of a pleasant surprise to the historically inclined among us. It has not, however, come without its difficulties. As I see it, the literature on genealogy is guilty of two conflations, what I call the “debunking/problematizing conflation” and the “problematizing/rationalizing conflation.” Both are the result of the inadequate typological maps currently used to organize the literature. As a result, what makes many genealogies philosophically interesting often remains obscure. In response, I propose a new two‐dimensional typology that avoids these conflations and outfits us with a richer conceptual vocabulary with which to understand and organize the genealogies which populate the literature. By identifying a second dimension of analysis which has thus far gone untheorized, my typology enables us to elucidate the various normative objectives and objects of investigation structuring a literature which is more diverse than previously acknowledged. We can thus get a clearer understanding of the problems those genealogies face, of their critical potential, and of their implications for our conception of critique.