Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience

by Marc Djaballah

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135912673
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/05/2008
Series:	Studies in Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	358
File size:	583 KB

About the Author

Marc Djaballah (PhD, University of Chicago) is Professeur de philosophie continentale at Université de Québec à Montréal. He has also taught at Acadia University, Faculté de théologie in Montréal, and at the University of Memphis, where he was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy in 2005-6.

Table of Contents

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

Index

Editorial Reviews

"The level of scholarship in Djaballah's book is exemplary... Djaballah's comprehensive charting of these texts is in itself a groundbreaking undertaking." — Johanna Oksala, University of Dundee, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

From the Publisher