Is early Foucault a historian? History, history and the analytic of finitude

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 31, Issue 6, 2005, Pages 585-608

  Han Pile, Béatrice ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

analytic of finitude; Foucault; historical a priori; history; idealism; Man; philosophy; transcendental; pist m

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247666072     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453705055491     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. See, for example, G. S. Rousseau, ‘Whose Enlightenment? Not Man's: The Case of Michel Foucault’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1972–3): 283–6;
2. G. Huppert, ‘Divinatio and Eruditio: Thoughts on Michel Foucault’, History and Theory 3 (1974);
3. M. Pélorson, ‘Michel Foucault et l'Espagne’, La Pensée (152, juillet-août 1970)
4. or again J. Greene, ‘Les Mots et les Choses’, Social Science Information 6 (1967).
5. A translation has been published as Michel Foucault Philosopher (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).
6. G. Gutting's review was published in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (01/05/2003) [it can be found at: http://ndpr.icaap.org/content/archives/2003/5/gutting-han.html]. There are no page numbers, but the passage I quote is in the fifth paragraph. I have written a reply to the review, which can be found at: [http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~beatrice/].
7. Another very important element is his concern for truth: ‘If someone wanted to be a philosopher but didn't ask himself the question, “what is knowledge?”, or, “what is truth?”, in what sense could one say he was a philosopher? And for all that I may like to say I'm not a philosopher, nonetheless if my concern is with truth then I am still a philosopher.’ (See Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, Sx: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 66.
8. The distinction was introduced by Hegel in the following passage: ‘in our language, the word “history” [Geschichte] combines both objective and subjective meanings, for it denotes the historia rerum gestarum as well as the res gestae themselves, the historical narrative and the actual happenings, deeds and events — which, in the stricter sense, are quite distinct from one another.’ See Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 137 (second draft, 1830).
9. Cf. in particular the ‘Table ronde du 20 Mai 1978’, in L'Impossible Prison, ed. M. Perrot (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 56.
10. As I have explained elsewhere, this has consequences for Foucault's theory of truth. Just as beings are dependent on their épistémè for their constitution, in the same way it is only within the specific space of ‘acceptability’ defined by the historical a priori that propositions can count as true or false. See Béatrice Han, Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 73–108.
11. Hence the famous passage in the Philosophy of Rights: ‘philosophy is its own age comprehended in thought’ (Preface, VII, 26).
12. On these issues, see Frederick C. Beiser, ‘Hegel's Historicism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
13. On this issue, and more generally on Foucault's reconstruction of the evolution of philosophy after Kant, see B. Han-Pile, ‘Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity’, in the forthcoming edition of The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. G. Gutting.
14. Foucault sees Kant's refocusing of the three critical interrogations on the question ‘Was ist der Mensch’ as the prefiguration of this focusing of the contemporary épistémè on Man. Cf. Han, Foucault's Critical Project, part I. See also ‘Analytic of Finitude and History of Subjectivity’, where I show that for Foucault, the empirico-transcendental structure governs the whole development of philosophy since the 19th century.
15. On this point, see B. Han, ‘Heidegger and Foucault on Kant and Finitude’, in A. Milchman (ed.) Critical Encounters: Heidegger/Foucault (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), where I have shown that to understand the analytic of finitude, one must distinguish between two forms of finitude: empirical finitude on the one hand (i.e. the fact that man is a living, working, speaking being, and thus dependent on contents and forms which he does not master), and transcendental finitude (as the absence of intellectual intuition) on the other. The analytic of finitude is the movement whereby empirical finitude is shown to be dependent on transcendental finitude. Thus although we are causally determined by life, labour (etc.), they are dependent on us to be understood and known as such.
16. See L'ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), in particular p. 37 et seq.
17. For an analysis of what Foucault has in mind by ‘being in the truth’ and the idea that the space of truth has no ‘outside’, see Foucault's Critical Project, part II, chapter 1.
18. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: PUF, 1990).
19. Cf. C. Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: Unesco, 1952).
20. In particular: ‘Critique et Aufklärung’, Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 84: 35–6.
21. Cf. Hegel: ‘physical perception and a finite understanding are not enough; we must see with the eye of the concept, the eye of reason, which penetrates the surface and finds its ways through the complex and confused turmoil of events’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], p. 30).