Introduction

What is modern philosophy? Perhaps we could respond with an echo: modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung?[1]

In outlining the contours of his project Michel Foucault refers us to Immanuel Kant’s answer to the question ‘What is the Enlightenment?’. This text is crucial for Foucault because it combines transcendental critique with an ethico-political perspective of cosmopolitan man.

Drawing on Kant’s answer, Foucault tries to capture the particular attitude of the Enlightenment and posit it as the task of philosophical exercise. This is that ‘critical’ attitude to actualité consisting in a philosophy that interrogates history with a focus neither on its origin nor its telos, but rather on the question of its belonging to the present.[2] This situatedness of philosophical thinking is premised on a view of man as both element and agent of the object of critical analysis[3] and shifts the task of critique from one of analytics of truth to that of an ontology of ourselves as diagnosis.[4] The enquiry on the present is an enquiry of the present day and a search for the difference introduced by the present with respect to the past.

In classical age the question of the modern was often posed on an axis with two poles: the ancient and the modern. (…) It was formulated through the concepts of an authority that one could accept or reject (…) the new question of modernity has no longitudinal reference to the ancient, but rather a sagittal relation to its own actuality.[5]

For both Kant and Foucault philosophical exercise entails preliminary thinking for oneself, sapere aude (Wahlspruch) as an invitation and task of one’s time. Foucault stresses that any attempt at thinking limits implies the opening to autonomy as self constitution.  As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari observe:

when Foucault admires Kant for posing the problem of philosophy in relation not to the eternal but to the Now, he means that the object of philosophy is not to contemplate the eternal or to reflect History but to diagnose our actual becomings: a becoming-revolutionary that, according to Kant himself, is not the same thing as the past, present, or future revolutions.[6]

The condition of immaturity Kant outlines in his text on the Enlightenment, and the definition of Enlightenment as the process of exiting such condition are directly linked to a set of power relations that denote both an excess of authority and a lack of courage. Foucault notes: ‘From the very first paragraph, Kant notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus, it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself’:[7] a practice of the self on the self, a matter of self conduct, a technology of the self. Hence, an ontology of the present cannot avoid questioning how not to be governed like this and at this price (l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné). For Foucault, to resurrect the contents of the Enlightenment would actually be a betrayal to this ethical project, because the latter can only be enacted in the form of a critical attitude to the present.[8] ‘The point is not to preserve the remains of the Aufklärung, we must keep in mind and safeguard the very problem of this event and its meaning (the problem of the historicity of thinking the universal) as that which is to be thought.’[9]

In Kant’s original answer, the Revolution is primarily what produces an effect through the change of the collective attitude, social imaginary and conceivable realm of possibility.[10] The Revolution has an impact as spectacle, as the trigger of that courage to think of limitation as something to liberate oneself from, rather than as the framework within which action and thought must be confined and deemed legitimate: this attitude requires the courage of ‘facing the task of producing oneself’. For Foucault, a critical and historical ontology of the present entails a genealogy of what constituted us and made us recognisable as subjects of what we say, do and think.

It must be considered not as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it must be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. The overcoming of the foundational character of the transcendental perspective consists in not deducing from the form of what we are what we can do and know, but in catching from the contingency, that makes us be what we are, the possibility of not being, not doing and not thinking what we are, do and think. [11]

Critique must become an épreuve d’évenemèntialisation, a production of events, the questioning of the actual field of possible experiences and practices, rather than an analytics of the formal conditions of truth and search for the legitimacy of their discursive status.

                  It is in the framework of a critical ontology of the present and ourselves that we will look at Foucault’s oeuvre. As his work is embedded in the present and engaged with it in a constant questioning of  practices of existence, we are interested in how Foucault’s notion of biopower, technologies of the self and aesthetics of existence contribute to our understanding and production of current practices and technologies of being. In the Lectures delivered at the Collège de France between 1970 and 1984, Foucault presented his work-in-progress in a mode of constant engagement with the present, relating it to issues of actualité. Most of this research did not feature in his publications, but we believe it essential to understand how the project of a critical and historical ontology of the present was carried out. For this reason, we will analyse much of the research presented at the lectures, which will hopefully soon be published in its entirety in French and English.

In the first chapter of the thesis, we will focus on the notion of a critical ontology of the present in relation to historiography, linguistic analysis and anthropology. A brief outline of the theoretical import of Formalism and the Annales School will help us introduce Foucault’s work on epistemology in relation to language and history. When asked about his relation to Structuralism, Foucault replied that Formalism had a greater influence on his thought. We have chosen to explore this claim in more depth for two main reasons: one is to investigate the elements at play in Foucault’s conceptualisation in The Archaeology of Knowledge of a historical ontology of language. The other is that the relation between Formalism and Structuralism in linguistic analysis is a fertile ground for developing an analysis of language in its relation to subjectivity today. In this context we will introduce the interventions on the debate on linguistics of the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, who recently interrogated the role of language in relation to Kant’s philosophy with a particular emphasis on the state of subjectivity in the present.

Foucault’s critical ontology of the present is also a historical one. The importance of the theoretical and methodological innovations of the Annales School for Foucault’s practice of writing histories is often underestimated. We will briefly discuss these innovations in order to introduce the way in which Foucault developed his genealogical method in terms of eventalisation, which is a central element in our analysis of his idea of an ontology of the present.

We will then move onto Foucault’s engagement with anthropology. Firstly, through his critique of humanism expounded in Maladie mentale et personnalité and the Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz, we will analyse the conceptual development of Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self as emerging out of a reflection on the role of an anthropology of concrete existence in relation to a philosophy of being. Secondly, through his critique of finitude, we will explore Foucault’s engagement with the epistemological and ontological status of the object of anthropological analysis. In the framework of an anthropology that takes man as citizen of the world as its point of departure, we will then dwell on Foucault’s Commentaire to Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view.

By looking at Foucault’s relation to Kant at length we aim to establish the theoretical correspondences between the epistemological role of self affection in Kant’s Critique and Anthropology and Foucault’s political conceptualisation of technologies of the self. The role of an ontology of the present emerges out of a reflection on epistemology and ontology in philosophy, and in Foucault’s reading of the attitude of the Enlightenment we will find the important difference between aesthetics of existence and analytics of truth. Foucault’s relation to the notion of rationality and modernity will be analysed against the background of Kant’s writings on the question.

In the second chapter of the thesis, we will begin to look into the way in which a historical ontology of the present was practiced in Foucault’s later work on the genealogy of technologies of the self, in the context of his differentiation between philosophy and spirituality and processes of liberation against practices of freedom, as expounded in the 1982 course L’Herméneutique du sujet. This course is important because it bridges the changes in technologies of the self –from care of the self to knowing yourself- from the Hellenistic period to Early Christianity and sheds light on the notion of aesthetics of existence and alternative ethics as a positive ontological project. The more explicit theorisation of technologies of the self will then be related to Foucault’s work on power, the latter seen in the framework of a study of practices and discourses of power and resistance. To this aim, we have chosen to look into the 1976 lecture course on “Il faut défendre la société”, as it brings together a reflection on the historical political analysis of the war of races with the outline of the emergence of biopower. This will take us to the work of Giorgio Agamben on biopolitics and the state of exception, which will aid our assessment of the ontological import of Foucault’s positive conceptualisation of aesthetics of existence as a technology of the self, whilst questioning it in the context of our current political framework.

In the third and final chapter, we will turn to our present and the development of an ontology of ourselves in the framework of biopower, with the aid of the recent debate on biopolitical production initiated by the thinkers of Postfordism. First we will discuss the use of Foucault’s writings on disciplinary power and the welfare state in postfordist analyses of the changing paradigms of control. The claim that there has been a shift from disciplinary to control society and the respective changing nature of subjectivity will be analysed through the writings of Jacques Donzelot, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. In outlining the elements at work in biopolitical production we will look into theories of immaterial labour in the contributions of Maurizio Lazzarato and Christian Marazzi.  

Foucault’s work has been received in very different ways. We have chosen what we regard as the most constructive interpretations and adoptions of his contribution for the purpose of our thesis, which draws on many resources in Italian and French. As we believe that our debates would greatly benefit from them, our effort has also been one of translation.

Acknowledgements

First of all, I should thank my supervisors, William Outhwaite and Darrow Schecter, for reading and commenting on the thesis. The thesis has greatly benefited from consulting the Archive Foucault at the Institut de mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in Paris . The Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome was also an important source of material. I could research in France and Italy thanks to an ERASMUS grant and the ESRC scholarship. I am grateful to those who participated to the Generation-Online reading and discussion group and made it possible to experiment in cooperative production, exchange and dissemination of theory. Special thanks to Alessandro Pandolfi for introducing me to the literature that was to change the course of my research. I am also grateful to Paul Joey Clark and Thanos Kastritis for their encouragement. But I am most indebted to Erik Empson, for his invaluable support and continuous inspiration.  

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