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This thesis explores the question of autonomy in Kant and Foucault. It aims to provide an understanding of theoretical-political consequences implied in the relationship existing between Kant and Foucault. In particular, it seeks to explain why Foucault towards the end of his life returns to ethics in general and the notion of autonomy in particular, when this would appear to contradict almost his entire previous philosophical stance. On this basis, the thesis follows five problematics in the form of separate chapters which interrogate the relationship between these two philosophers, often challenging the doxa within dominant interpretations. These chapters are intended as at once as treating separate problems and functioning as chronological axis which follows the development of Foucault’s philosophy in relation to Kant. The aim is to reconstruct Foucault’s reading of the Enlightenment generally and of Kant specifically as both: real historical event/process and as particular philosophical position. The objective is not to discuss the Enlightenment in all its various national iterations and forms, but to try to understand the role of Kant, who after all comes at the very end as, so to speak, a closing figure of the Enlightenment. Although Foucault initially himself expressed negatively towards the Enlightenment as historical event and its proclamation of the autonomy of subject, in the end he endorsed it, attempting however to go beyond the Kantian separation between theoretical and practical reason. This is what this thesis proposes to call Foucault’s “politics of autonomy”. It is not just Kant, but also Foucault who developed his own philosophy of the subject “in the tension field between metaphysics and critique of knowledge, between practical and theoretical philosophy.” In order to understand the tensions and contradictions in the long and difficult philosophical encounter between Foucault and Kant, this thesis argues for historical, theoretical and political importance of the relation between the subject and autonomy throughout modernity. In Foucault’s interpretation, this relation conditioned modernity as a whole, and almost all of the issues we have inherited stem directly from the “long18th century” and the problems of normativity relating to the very form in which we relate to ourselves and to others. |
