Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

INTRODUCTION
3) Enlightenment and modernity. This is where Foucault proposes that
we think of his work as dealing with the “history of the present” and the
“ontology of actuality.” Here we also find his exchanges with Jürgen
Habermas, Hubert Dreyfus, and Charles Taylor, as well as his renewed
reading of Kant. Accordingly, Foucault picks up the thread from his
extensive, and for a long time little known, early work on critical philosophy,
comprising the translation of Kant’s Anthropology in 1961 as well as
a long preface (which for a long time remained unpublished), both of which
were submitted in 1961 as a thèse complémentaire to History of Madness,
and where we find an outline of what would later become the analytic of
finitude in The Order of Things. 9 In the later reflections, Kant is however no
longer an obstacle for thought that needs to be overcome, but a positive
resource. While these discussions were to some extent forced on Foucault
by the debate on postmodernity, which was singularly irrelevant to his
work, they allowed him nonetheless to situate his own research in the wake
of Weber and the Frankfurt School, which he had only rarely commented
upon in his earlier writings. 10 What is central, he now says in retrospect, was
substance, and not just consists in dysfunction, disorder, and deviation. When Foucault
in Binswanger locates a dialectic between experience and institution, or between anthropology
and social history, his question is whether we can unearth something like a
shared historicity that would be a common root of these two modes of analysis, and
bring together the subjective and objective in a third dimension that does not treat them
as fixed forms, but can account for their mutual and conflicted emergence. This question
will resonate throughout Foucault’s work, as we can see in one of the last texts, a sketch
for a preface to The Use of Pleasures, where he returns to the question of experience, and
the common root as one of the underlying themes of his work. See “Introduction,” in
Dits et écrits, Vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 65-119, and “Préface a l’‘Histoire de la
sexualité,’” in Dits et écrits, Vol. IV, 578-84.
9 See Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique,
précédé de Introduction à l’Anthropologie (Paris: Vrin, 2008), ed. Daniel Defert, François
Ewald, and Frédéric Gros. In fact, as the editors point out, the theme is present already
in Foucault’s first preserved philosophical text from 1952–53, a series of lectures at the
University of Lille, under the rubric “Knowledge of Man and Transcendental
Reflection.” These still unpublished 97 manuscript pages discuss Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Dilthey, and form an early matrix for the introduction to
Kant’s Anthropology. I discuss the link between the early and late readings of Kant in
more detail in my “Governance and Rebellion: Foucault as a Reader of Kant and the
Greeks,” Site 22-23 (2008).
10 The Frankfurt School is mentioned briefly in The Birth of Biopolitics as one of the outcomes
of the dual heritage of Weber in Germany, one line passing through ordoliberalism
and the other through Critical Theory, both of which then come together in a
violent clash during the events of May 1968: “history had it that in 1968 the last disciples
of the Frankfurt School clashed with the police of a government inspired by the Freiburg
School, thus finding themselves on opposite sides of the barricades, for such was the
double, parallel, crossed, and antagonistic fate of Weberianism in Germany.” (BB, 106)
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