[DiscourseFan]

Foucault is a very subtle thinker. His second dissertation was a translation of Kant’s anthropology, with a very long and thorough introduction[0]. It is quite important to the rest of his thought. Remember his advisor was Jean Hyppolite, France’s leading scholar of Hegel at the time, so it is kind of interesting that Foucault decides to return to Kant. But Discourse and Punish is a philosophical anthropology, similar to Hegel’s project, that reads Kant in terms of force and Violence (Gewalt), which is central to, say, Heidegger’s reading of Kant, his pinpointing that negative pleasure in the face of death that, for him, constitutes the ontological structure of Dasein. Foucualt is able to retain the structural force of Heidegger’s ontology without falling into the trap of Dasein’s basically ethical stance that also relies on a “phenomenological destruction” of the cartesian cogito that is never achieved. Foucualt, on the other hand, understands that the fabric of history is determined architectonically, and he achieves a schematic, positive anthropology that even contains its own absence in the figure of a violence that vanishes in its activity, as seen in the examples of the schools, the prisons, the panopticon, etc. Not a Hegelian negative or even a metaphysical one, but a positive force that is always already vanishing as it appears, as constituitive of an architectonic structure—say, and architecture—of violence that acts as the horizon of epistemology as such. Thus, the public executions relied on a dialectical relation: the audience must legitimate the sovreign’s exercise of power. In the modern period, such a sight is foreclosed, violence structures but is always absent in its appearance, it derives its force, even, from its insistent absence, as we see in the example of the panopticon.

We could say that this is a reintepretation of Kant’s “ding-an-sich” that goes beyond what either Heidegger or Hegel could achieve, which is perhaps why he reaches toward Nietzsche, who makes a similar move in his work, if not as far.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Kant%27s_Anthr...