Han-Pile, Beatrice. Review of Michel Foucault's INTRODUCTION A L'ANTHROPOLOGIE. NDPR (March 2009).

Foucault, Michel. Introduction à l'Anthropologie. Paris: Vrin, 2008. Trans. as Introduction to Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008. Foucault's Introduction to Kant's Anthropology (henceforth IA) and his translation of the latter text make up his 'Thèse complémentaire de Doctorat', which was submitted in 1961 with his main thesis (later published as Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique). Although the translation was published in 1964 by Vrin, with a very short introduction by Foucault, the longer text (a 128 page manuscript kept at the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne) remained unpublished until 2008. Its focus is the question of the relation between the Anthropology and the Critique, a question prompted for both exegetical and philosophical reasons. Exegetical, because it is very difficult to date precisely the content of the Anthropology: although it is the last text published before Kant's death, it was also a course he gave (and constantly transformed) for over thirty years. Thus the first four sections of IA are devoted to retracing the genesis of the final version through comparison with other writings, both pre- (section 2) and post-critical (section 3). Philosophical reasons, because for Foucault the key to a proper reconstruction and evaluation of both Kant's position and post-Kantian developments resides in understanding the relation between man as an empirical being and man as transcendental subject. The problem is introduced early on in IA, in the form of the following alternative:

was there from 1772 onwards, and underlying perhaps the Critique, a certain concrete image of man that no philosophical elaboration essentially altered, and which is formulated at last . . . in the last of Kant's published texts? . . . But it is also possible that the Anthropology was modified in its central elements as the critical endeavour developed. . . . This is to say that the Critique would add to its specific character of being a propaedeutic to philosophy a constitutive role in the birth and future of the concrete forms of human existence (IA: 12-13; note the use of the conditional and the numerous modal qualifiers).

How these speculations are to be resolved is of great importance both for Foucault's reading of Kant and for his interpretation of modernity. If the Critique turned out to be 'constitutive' for the Anthropology in such a way that the distinction between a priori conditions and empirical facts was preserved, then the Kantian project on the whole would be free of any empirico-transcendental slippage, and Kant's Anthropology could function as a model and point of reference for subsequent anthropologies. If, however, the relationship of subordination was reversed and the Anthropology 'underlaid' the Critique, then the resulting empirico-transcendental confusions would both throw in jeopardy Kant's critical project itself and cast an ominous shadow on the philosophical movements that grew from it. As is well known, five years later Foucault addressed in The Order of Things (henceforth OT), in particular chapters 7 and 9, the issue of the (in his view) nefarious role played by 'man' in contemporary thought. However IA is of particular interest at least for three reasons: (a) it is a close examination (the only long piece of writing he devoted to Kant) of a text which Foucault clearly regarded as seminal, (b) it presents an interestingly ambiguous reading of Kant which oscillates between two incompatible theses (repetition or displacement of the Critique by the Anthropology), an ambiguity which is minimised but still present in OT, and (c) beyond Kant, it expands (from p. 67 onwards) on the nature and influence of anthropological thought itself and anticipates many of the themes which will be central to OT (not just the empirico-transcendental double but also, for example, the analytic of finitude as the circular attempt to give empirical conditions a transcendental role).[4] So what does IA tell us about the relationship between the Anthropology and the Critique? Perhaps revealingly, Foucault's text is ambivalent almost to the end, and it is difficult to organise his various attempts at conceptualising the relation of the two texts . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15505.