Kant and Foucault on Enlightenment and Revolution

Enlightenment and Revolution Kyla Bruff 1 Introduction: The Role of Kant in Foucault’s Remarks on Revolution In his analyses of the French Revolution in the 1790s, Kant draws a crucial distinction, which allows him to ascribe a positive, philosophical significance to the Revolution, while at the same time condemning its isolated acts of terror, especially the execution of the King.1 This distinction, which Foucault takes up in his 1983 lecture, “What is Revolution?,” is between the French Revolution as an event which functions as a “historical sign [Geschichtszeichen]” on the one hand, and the morally unjustifiable acts that make up the Revolution on the other.2 While he appreciates the enthusiasm of the spectators of the French Revolution and interprets the Revolution as a sign of the progress of humanity, Kant rejects the right to resist state authority, the right to revolt, and thereby the right to revolution.3 In this way, Kant lays the foundation for the late Foucault’s criticisms of revolutionary ideals and attempts to pursue them through means of terror and violence and his suggestion that the excitement for revolution can show something positive regarding the drive of human beings toward freedom. By effectuating what appears to be a poststructuralist move in dividing the signifier (the Revolution itself) from the openness of the signified (the Revolution’s potential meaning, which exceeds it and which is not completely fulfilled in the present, but rather extends into the future), Kant provides the grounds for Foucault to explore the philosophical significance of the enthusiasm of the spectators who live through revolutions, without therefore providing a justification, even retrospectively, of the right to revolution. That being said, from a poststructuralist point of K. Bruff (*) Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Rajan, D. Whistler (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_19 399 400 K. Bruff view, Kant perhaps gives too much shape to the signified by associating the meaning of the Revolution with the progress of humanity toward a more free, peaceful condition. Foucault remains cautious on such matters. Although he agrees with Kant that there is a will to revolution, or an enthusiasm for it, which is detectable in revolutions throughout history, the “work of freedom” and the form of its future manifestations are left “undefined.”4 In this way, both Kant and Foucault address crucial questions regarding revolutionary activity, equally important to the German Idealists and Romantics as to twentieth-century French Intellectuals,5 without falling firmly on either side of the “pro-” or “anti-” revolutionary binary; these are questions such as whether terror and violence can be legitimized in the name of social progress, and whether enthusiasm for revolutionary movements is warranted or amounts simply to Schwärmerei. While Kant and Foucault generally answer the first question with a no, the second question is trickier, for their appreciation for revolutionary enthusiasm is primarily a retrospective one. Foucault’s statements on revolution are not unified throughout his writings. Indeed, the very concept of revolution presents an apparent tension in Foucault’s work. This tension can be identified in his reading of Kant on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, as presented in three lectures near the end of his life: “What is Critique?” (1978), “What is Revolution?” (1983), “What is Enlightenment?” (1983, published in 1984).6 After referencing Kant both critically and appreciatively in various works throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Foucault turns to Kant anew in these lectures.7 Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” essay is an important resource for Foucault’s articulation of the Enlightenment-based critical attitude he sees himself as espousing, first toward modes of governance and their effect on subjectification, and then toward the ever-changing present out of which the thinker thinks and the shifting scope of possibilities for the self. The self is always caught between relations of power, truth, and subjectivity and should find ways to resist and transgress the limits which constrain it. This brings Foucault to revolution, the enthusiasm for which, as presented in Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties, can reveal aspects of the mentality and historical conditions of the pursuit of freedom in a given place and time. Foucault’s interest in revolutions, therefore, is related to his attempts to critically understand the present and his late concern with finding localized instances of human freedom within historical conditions and networks of relations of power and knowledge. To summarize his position on revolution in relation to Kant, on the one hand, Foucault shares with Kant a positive view of the exercise of a “will to revolution,” which can be understood as a will to freedom, through history. This will was first detected by Kant in the French Revolution (and can be identified in prior “great revolutions”) and persists within human beings today.8 In his late lectures on Kant, Foucault proposes that the human drive to pursue freedom via the transgression of limits in the present time can be productively considered in terms of this will, also described as “enthusiasm.”9 The will to revolution, for Foucault, is a will to freedom, an enthusiasm for a future with more possibilities. On the other hand, Foucault shares Kant’s critical perspective of planned attempts to achieve a better political future through revolutionary activity. The late Foucault Enlightenment and Revolution 401 goes so far as to consider himself as a kind of disciple of Kant, linking his work on subjectivity and truth to Kant. Kant initiated the critical attitude through which Foucault proposes that one examine oneself and one’s embeddedness in one’s surroundings, as a speaker, thinker, and actor.10 This post-Enlightenment approach to self-understanding and the present Foucault calls a “historical ontology of ourselves.”11 However, despite this shared perspective, Foucault and Kant differ on the questions of progress and freedom. Foucault rejects any notion of teleology or progress in history. For Foucault, freedom is not about the autonomous use reason, but is a more open concept, concerned with one’s shifting sphere of possible speech and activity in relation to critique and transgression. As Johanna Oksala puts it, despite the fact that “Foucault’s thought—and post-structuralist thinking as a whole—is often read as a rejection of the subject” as an ”agent of social or epistemic changes,” it is possible to “rethink freedom” with Foucault.12 Despite their differences, as I will show, there is some overlap in Foucault’s and Kant’s identifications of historical conditions necessary, especially in relation to authority, to be able to exercise one’s freedom, which Kant particularly investigates in reference to public reason in the “What is Enlightenment?” essay.13 In his late work, freedom is a positive concept for Foucault, rather a naïve, evasive one, which disappears under the new and hidden forms of domination produced by the Enlightenment.14 Kant’s notion of the Enlightenment, picked up on by Foucault, is not about “personal, private freedom,” but is present “when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.”15 Of course, Foucault will not defend the universal use of reason, nor will he agree with Kant on the need to obey authority “in conformity with universal reason.”16 But Kant and the Enlightenment importantly open the questions of historical use of reason. This is the question of “knowing how the use of reason can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in broad daylight, while individuals are obeying.”17 2 Foucault on Revolution and Transgression: A Constellation Between Kant, Nietzsche, and the Ancients Foucault is not simply an anti-revolutionary. Despite many appearances of arguments against revolution in Foucault’s work, there is evidence in favor of reading Foucault as a supporter of revolution in his repeated call for resistance to power. This advocacy for resistance amounts to Foucault’s conditional support for “revolutionary action” in the struggle against the normative workings of power through institutions in the early 1970s.18 Generally speaking, Foucault focuses on the way individuals challenge and transgress the limits to (what they identify as) their realm of possible experience. He advocates for resistance to the mechanisms of control in a society in which relations of domination and subjugation, perpetuated by the circulation of power through norms and institutions, are ubiquitous.19 In the context of 402 K. Bruff his positive endorsement of the will to revolution and his support for transformative change, despite his criticisms of the pursuit of revolution, the concept of revolution also seems to take on a positive, and even normative, significance in Foucault’s work. Individuals are instructed to pursue freedom through transgressive activity. In consideration of Foucault’s ambiguous stance on revolution, it is important to note that Foucault visits Iran twice in 1978, penning thirteen essays, giving numerous interviews, and providing written responses, all on the topic of the Iranian Revolution.20 On numerous occasions, he expresses support for this Revolution. He writes with great respect for the “dreams” of an Islamic Government in Iran, in which religious structures would be used “not only as centers of resistance, but also as sources for political creation.”21 In these texts, Foucault appreciates the readiness of people in “uprisings” to “risk their lives in the face of a power that they believe to be unjust.”22 The journalistic medium in which Foucault expresses these opinions is not unimportant. His concern with his own relation to the present, especially in reference to the ongoing Iranian Revolution, finds a parallel in Kant’s engagement with the present through the period of the French Revolution. Kant similarly expresses his views on the Revolution in the form of magazine articles, often in the Berlinische Monatsschrift—the magazine in which “What is Enlightenment?” was first published.23 In this way, both Foucault and Kant take on the role of public philosophers of their own respective presents. However, Foucault takes this role a step further than Kant by his going to Iran as a public journalist, but at the same time as a private person, who was not representing the academy. As a private person, Foucault retained a public function to report back to newspapers and the media (especially to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, as well as Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur). A trip with such a mission would be unacceptable for Kant. On Kant’s account, the philosopher may go to Iran in his “private” role, but in his “public” role, he must only reason about revolution, not implicate himself in it. Of course, in Kant’s example, the private individual is the one who is conservatively governed by the state and is performing his state-assigned function, while the public person claims the limited freedom of the lower faculty of philosophy.24 Foucault thus blends the public and the private in his travels to Iran, expressing his own private partiality to the revolution in a public voice (for countermeasure, Foucault condemns the use of terror and violence by groups seeking to overthrow existing government in Le Nouvel Observateur and Tribune socialiste in 1977). One could never imagine Kant coming so close to revolutionary participation.25 Nevertheless, by turning to Kant on the concept of revolution, Foucault allows his relationship to political activism to be mediated through the practice of a constant critical attitude, which promotes a cautious approach to revolutionary programs and involvement through self-oriented critique. Through critique and his analyses of power, Foucault acknowledges his own limitations and possible oversights as a historically situated thinker of his present. On that point, despite his occasional expressions of appreciation for revolutionary activity, Foucault is skeptical of whether human beings can ever possibly envisage—let alone bring about through revolution—the conditions of a better, more just Enlightenment and Revolution 403 society. Foucault’s assessment of the formative, conditioning role of power relations in all human life seems to undercut the possible value of any attempt to draw the contours of a society free of oppression, let alone the justification of the pursuit of such a society through revolutionary means. Foucault states, “I admit to not being able to define, nor for even stronger reasons to propose, an ideal social model for the functioning of our scientific or technological society.”26 He repeatedly denounces universalist political programs. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that any oppressed group that emerges victorious in a revolution would be immune from exercising and abusing their newly acquired power to oppress others, regardless of their intentions. I argue that these apparently conflictual statements on revolution are compatible if we read them together as an endorsement of the will to revolution and “revolutionary,” transgressive activity without the encouragement to undertake specific, planned political revolutions. Foucault encourages individuals to exercise and expand their capacities to speak and to act, a practice that originates in the critique of the historically contingent limitations of the scope of possible activity and experience. This critical work should lead to localized acts of transgression. The critique of such contingent limits, which are mistakenly taken to be absolute, whether in the form of theoretical or socio-political universals, should bring one to transgress these limits, change them, and experiment at the thresholds of the possible. This pursuit can lead individuals to “escape” or break through some of what appears to be necessary in history. Foucault directly criticizes revolutionary political programs that are utopic or timeless. Preferable to planning or joining a revolution is the careful, rigorous, constant assessment of our present conditions and ways of thinking within our own specific moment in history. Once we identify restrictions on our field of possible speech and action, which is constantly being narrowed through practices, norms, and institutions that dominate and subjectify us, we can resist and transgress them. From here, we can engage in contextualized self-examination, participate boldly in public discourse, discover our capabilities, and, in this way, pursue freedom. To develop this complex position on transgression, revolution, critique, and selfexamination, Foucault requires more interlocutors than Kant alone. For Foucault, Kant’s call for the courageous use of reason in public, while simultaneously recognizing that reason itself is has limits, must be supplemented by the resources Nietzsche provides to acknowledge the precarity of the subject, the roles of drive and power in human activity, and the non-linearity of history. Foucault also invokes the Ancient Greeks and Romans, particularly the Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics, on the concept of parrēsia, or speaking freely and openly, to show what it means to execute the critical attitude of the Enlightenment. In this section I will construct a “constellation,” in which I read Foucault in dialogue with these thinkers to arrive at his final view of the transgressive activity and the self and of his position on revolution. Foucault establishes an early pattern of turning to Nietzsche to counterbalance the universalist tendency in Kant, particularly the establishment of universal structures of knowledge. Foucault is convinced that Kant’s critical project in fact leaves 404 K. Bruff a space for historical, empirical, and cultural accounts of subjectivity and the creative production of knowledge, for which he invokes Nietzsche. As early as his secondary doctoral thesis on Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1959–1960), Foucault shows appreciation for Kant’s critique of the limits of knowledge and the importance of an empirical and historical approach to human existence, while also turning to Nietzsche.27 Empiricity, Foucault notes, cannot provide its own (theoretical) ground; its principles are revealed through the concepts and structures of the three Critiques (structures which Foucault, of course, will not accept, on his own account, as absolute).28 Important for Foucault is that Kant identifies that we can only approach finitude as always already organized through the set of conditions under which we know it.29 Finite being is always already conditioned by a set of forms that critical thought attempts to reveal.30 This search for the hidden structures underlying conditions of finitude and subjectivity is a theme that recurs in Foucault’s thought, even if his own critical attitude is not transcendental, but rather “genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.”31 For Foucault, there is no “natural access” to the foundational structures or “essence” of the human being.32 Nothing we identify about the transcendental subject is natural or true in an unshakable, foundational sense. Foucault thus concludes that we ought to turn our attention to the critique of the self-grounding, epistemological subject, which is always enmeshed in a series of relations and conditions that it can never exhaustively identify. Anything deemed to be natural in the human being should be subject to constant critique, through which we uncover and scrutinize who we are in the present.33 Concepts like “meaning,” “structure,” and “genesis,” which “circulate indiscriminately throughout the human sciences,” are insufficient to justify what we think an who we are.34 What is needed is a “critique of the anthropological illusion” of the self-grounding of finitude as a basis from which one can seek truth.35 This is precisely what Foucault thinks Nietzsche can provide. The “trajectory” of Kant’s crucial question, “What is the human being [Was ist der Mensch]?” comes to “its end in the response which both challenges and disarms it: der Übermensch [the overman].”36 Nietzsche, even for the young Foucault, holds a disruptive and liberatory function, especially though the concept of the overman. Nietzsche is a motivating force in Foucault’s radical critique of, and thereby a way out from, existing illusions about the nature of the human being and of the infinite.37 Nietzsche’s “double murderous” gesture of critiquing the pre-established concept of “man in his finitude” while simultaneously critiquing (killing) God, for Foucault, is “as liberating with regard to man” as it is “with regard to the infinite.”38 From here, we can embark upon a liberatory “desubjectification” process.39 This endorsement of Nietzsche foreshadows the radical depth of how far the late Foucault thinks we should take Kant’s Enlightenment “ethos” of critique. In Foucault’s work more generally, especially The Order of Things, Nietzsche’s critiques of the “last man,” herd mentality, collective complacency, and idealistic thinking come together with Kant’s identification of the constitutive role of the subject in her representations.40 This hybrid critical attitude is at the root of Foucault’s interpretation of revolution and utopia in relation to the Enlightenment. For Enlightenment and Revolution 405 example, Foucault recalls that one of the characteristics of the “arrangement of knowledge” in the second half of the Enlightenment critically addressed by Nietzsche is “the fulfillment of an end to History.”41Any given population’s vision of the ideal end of history that ought to be pursued through revolutionary means is itself historically conditioned, and therefore is not stable and immemorial. For example, Foucault explains that the utopias of development between the Classical and Enlightenment ages differed in a fundamental way, which he links back to the Copernican—in turn, Kantian—revolution regarding the center of representation and meaning. In the Classical period, on Foucault’s account, utopia is concerned with origins and what could unfold from them. “Utopia functioned rather as a fantasy of origins.”42 This view is connected with the one-to-one connection representations had with the presence of objects at that time.43 By contrast, utopia in the nineteenth century was associated with deceleration, decline, and a slowing down—“the final decline of time rather than with its morning.”44 This, Foucault is clear, is linked to a paradigm shift in the nature of knowledge and the role of the finite, human being’s place within it—a shift in which Kant holds an important historical role. Knowledge itself is now understood to be in movement, for, the connections that we make as situated human beings are part of its constitution. In consideration of this epistemic dynamicity, the last age of history, from the late-Enlightenment point of view, will be marked by either a “slow erosion or violent eruption,” which will cause a breakthrough of the immobile secret, “man’s anthropological truth.”45 This final expression of the truth of the human being at the end of history is accordingly linked to the reconceptualization of finitude and time. Any truth that is established within finitude is truth within time. In line with the Copernican Revolution in thought, whose consequences were brought to the fore by Kant, history and its events are specific to the human being. As a result, time is considered to be neither metaphysical nor cyclic. Historical events, such as revolutions, are our historical events, void of permanence, but with expressive potential. Finitude and the construction of history occur in time, and thus the “great dream of an end to History” is a utopia that is specific to “causal systems of thought,” which have the finite human being as their self-confessed origin.46 Enlightenment utopia is therefore concerned with the winding down of time and the development of knowledge, as relative to the finite human being, whose true essence exceeds her finitude and will be revealed at the end of history. But as a historically contingent utopia, it does not have the last word. Nietzsche, particularly through his concept of the eternal return, dares to reconceptualize the possible relationship of human finitude to time. This is crucial for how we think about the role of the human being in history in relationship to ideal societies and utopian political programs. Foucault links Nietzsche’s rethinking of this relationship to his proclamation of the death of God (which, it is to be noted, is enabled by the Enlightenment thesis on the end of time) and the “odyssey of the last man.”47 The human being ought to seize the opportunity of the end of time to find her own truth and values through the “prodigious leap” of the overman.48 Moreover, the eternal return offers the individual an opportunity to relate to the concept of infinity through finitude, precisely by leveraging the power of one’s finite existence 406 K. Bruff in a way that matters uniquely to the single individual. Nietzsche encourages us to give significance to everything we do in the context of the infinite and the eternal, without thereby violating Kant’s critique of reason, that is, without initiating a return to a metaphysics of absolute truths or to the old dogmas of the relationship of representation (and thus thought) to objects. The stability of the “archeological framework” of nineteenth-century Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinking was accordingly, to speak in a Foucauldian key, set ablaze by Nietzsche, who cleared a path for a rethinking of the “promises” of this period.49 Nietzsche problematizes the course of history as understood in (especially nineteenth-century) theories of utopia and revolution and the relationship of human action to different paradigms and structures (e.g., tragedy).50 In general, he criticizes common understandings of Enlightenment ideals in relation to their historical context. As James Schmidt emphasizes, Nietzsche seeks to disentangle Enlightenment individualism from political revolutions.51 The “egalitarian dreams” of the French Revolution, particularly as represented by Rousseau, for example, are in fact prohibitive to the individual’s pursuit of “the work of the Enlightenment,” especially insofar as the latter would signify free, independent thinking.52 Let us now turn our attention to how Foucault supplements Kant’s defense of public reason and the courage it requires with the ability to speak freely in the ancient sense of parrēsia. Parrēsia refers to a way of speaking frankly and truthfully, and requires “the opening the heart.”53 As noted above, Kant makes a case for reason to be “free in its public use” and encourages people to debate rationally in public.54 Everyone should be able to speak freely and participate in public debates regarding matters of common concern. On Foucault’s account, this is the opposite of what is “ordinarily” called “freedom of conscience,” which rather calls for one to think freely in private but obey in public. The capacity and courage to express oneself freely—the capacity for parrēsia—is necessary for carrying out the ethos of the Enlightenment and for developing one’s self-relation, or for “caring for oneself.”55 It also involves a type of risk-taking familiar to us from Nietzsche—frankness, boldness, courage in speaking and acting. It is in moments of intense risk in the resistance and rejection of regimes and laws that freedom and the “subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone)” is strongest for Foucault.56 Moreover, Foucault directly links Kant’s “critique of the Enlightenment” with parrēsia in his lectures on The Hermeneutics of the Subject in 1982: Kant’s text on the Aufklärung is a certain way for philosophy, through the critique of the Aufklärung, to become aware of problems which were traditionally problems of parrēsia in antiquity, which will re-emerge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which became aware of themselves in the Aufklärung, and particularly in Kant’s text.57 The ancients, just as Kant and the moderns, identify impediments to speaking freely and question power and processes of subjectification in view of the construction of truth. This can only be done in dialogue with others and must be tested through concrete action. One develops one’s independence as a subject through speaking courageously and truthfully, which involves risk, as we often speak to those “who cannot accept [our] truth.”58 Parrēsia thus helps us, claims Foucault in reference to Enlightenment and Revolution 407 Seneca, to “manage” the soul. We live its consequences.59 When we speak freely, the “effectiveness and usefulness of the speech heard” must be put into action so we can assess the effectivity of what has been said.60 Thus, the words I speak have a function that extends beyond them.61 The critical project, as initiated by Kant, requires an interrogation of the present, which begins from understanding what we are, as historically conditioned beings. The prominent role of parrēsia in Foucault’s work in the early 1980s can thus be seen as an extension of Foucault’s interest in Kant’s critical attitude in reference to one’s own speech and positions, both in theoretical and practical domains.62Selfawareness and freedom should be pursued through the exercise of the critical, parrēsiatic attitude. Parrēsia, as a type of free speech, concerns freedom. It is “bound up with the choice, decision, and attitude of the person speaking’” to such an extent that, Foucault notes, it was translated into “libertas” in Latin. “The telling of all parrēsia was rendered by libertas: the freedom of the person speaking.”63 Parrēsia is therefore bound up with the moral attitude that one adopts publicly, which engenders self-examination and self-liberation. For this reason, Foucault describes parrēsia as an ethical attitude. While Foucault and Kant share an “Idealist” concern for freedom, their positions ultimately differ. For Foucault, practical freedom does not depend on “transcendental freedom,” or “independence from everything empirical,” as in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.64 Freedom is practical all the way down. It breaks open new possibilities for creative subjectivity through transgression. Through freedom, we can discover, in practice, new ways of speech, action, and self-relation, which we coconstitute in the historical spaces in which we operate through courageous, honest activity. The path one takes to resisting and transgressing limits, thus exercising one’s freedom, cannot be determined through the universalization of maxims or an appeal to universal principles.65Additionally, we have no “innate right” to freedom, as in Kant.66 These differences notwithstanding, Kant’s definition of freedom in the “What is Enlightenment?” essay, “to make public use of one’s reason in all matters,” presents an opportunity for a possible overlap with the freedom exercised through the pursuit of parrēsiatic activity, and the courage and risk involved. 3 Foucault on the Will to Revolution as a Will to Freedom Foucault’s interest in revolutions is not about the future that could be, or even the injustice of the past. It is rather in the significance of the widespread experience and perception of major revolutions by the larger population—in his terms, the role of the revolution as a “spectacle”—that has value for the philosophical critique of the present, a task which Foucault appropriates from Kant. By critically reflecting on the present, Kant practices this “ethos” of the Enlightenment, which is an attitude of permanently critiquing the present from within. Kant simultaneously recognizes himself as a thinker of the Enlightenment and yet vehemently critiques the “immaturity” of his present moment from within, presenting a path, through the use of 408 K. Bruff public reason, to transgress the external sources and structures of authority and control. Foucault attempts to uphold this attitude. The importance of revolutions as collective experiences and as historical signs, which are overdetermined with philosophical significance for Foucault, does not amount to an endorsement of revolutionary political programs that aim to bring about a better society. Rather, Foucault focuses on the reflection of the philosopher on herself and the present and the exercise of the will to revolution (which is also the will to freedom). The critical approach that the philosopher takes to the present should, through its revelatory and destabilizing functions, present challenges and possibilities to transgress existing paradigms and universals, which not only constitute knowledge and truth but can be seen as limiting what is possible. The will or enthusiasm for revolution is distinguished from the revolutionary event. The detachment of this “will” from the event is possible because the event, as is exposed through the poststructuralist tradition, is irreducible to a single occurrence that took place on certain dates. The effects of the event “French Revolution” are beyond the Revolution itself and yet to be fully comprehended. Accordingly, the will to revolution, shared by the spectators of the revolution, can hold back from mobilizing itself into rapid action and from a total unification with the development of reality. This will, initially proposed by Kant in The Conflict of the Faculties, is first and foremost present in each individual, as the drive and enthusiasm, which, to borrow from one of Foucault’s essays on Iran, motivates the type of “uprooting that interrupts the unfolding of history” as people “rise up.”67 It is a will, but also an enthusiasm, found not only in those who take part in a revolutionary uprising but also in those who experience the revolution as a moment in history. As Kant describes it, the will to revolution displays itself in a group of individuals as a risky “partiality” for one side, a “universal yet disinterested sympathy.” It is detectable in the “mode of thinking of the spectators which reveals itself publicly in this game of great revolutions.”68 In a major revolution, it is found in the “hearts of all spectators,” who share a “wishful participation.”69 One can appeal to it when inciting political change.70 Foucault claims that this will persists throughout history. His remarks suggest that there could be an ahistorical element to the human being—a source of freedom—that motivates her to resist her own domination and to will freedom in the face of power. On my reading, the will to revolution is the condition of the freedom of an individual to resist and transgress, which in turn prevents the individual’s total dissolution into power relations or into the sum-total of the conditions of her own subjectification. To will her own freedom, the individual human being must exceed her social and historical conditions. Although it is internal to us, the will to revolution is recognizable as the enthusiasm that accompanies the collective experience of major political upheavals all throughout history. In rare moments, it can coalesce, as Foucault thinks was the case in Iran, into a fleeting, coordinated expression of a collective will.71 At a minimum, there is a great deal of openness as to how we interpret the will to revolution in Foucault, especially as a will to freedom from, for example, Enlightenment and Revolution 409 oppressive rule.72 In 1978, after having steered clear of the will for many years, Foucault sees that it is “necessary to pose the problem of will” in both collective and individual senses.73 Foucault himself says that he “tried to avoid” the “question of the human will,” but in relation to revolution and the critique of governing practices, it became an “unavoidable” topic for him.74 In relation to the “decision-making will not to be governed,” the late Foucault, while expressing skepticism on the topic, will not totally rule out the possible existence of “an originary freedom, absolutely and wholeheartedly resistant to any governmentalization.”75 This contentious claim could support a case for a free will at the root of transgression. Despite what has been said, Foucault himself is not intensely concerned with describing and testifying to the will to revolution, but rather with the more precise question of “what must be done” with it, “with this enthusiasm for the Revolution, which is something other than the revolutionary enterprise itself”?76 The question of the presence and direction of this will—its historical manifestations and what to do with it—is linked, for Foucault, to how “give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.”77 Freedom for Foucault on its own is an “empty dream”; it requires an “experimental,” “historico-critical attitude,” the work of which is done at the “limits of ourselves.”78 What is thus required is the critical work of a “historical investigation” of the present, specifically into our contingent conditions that appear to be necessary. Critique allows us to identify the “possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.”79 It can help us to discover how things could be different, for ourselves and for the society in which we live. Through such critical reflection, we can engage in a “patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.”80 According to Foucault, Kant is the first proponent of this desirable philosophical attitude or “ethos.” Kant engages in this critical, reflective “practice of liberty that simultaneously respects [the reality of modernity] and violates it.”81 He does so firstly by asking persistent questions about who we are in the here and now; in his writings on Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Kant carries out, in his own time, the “permanent critique of ourselves” and the critical analysis of “limits,” both of which are part of the Enlightenment “ethos.”82 However, Kant identifies an aim for the will to revolution that Foucault would not endorse.83 Specifically, for Kant, the expression of this will is a sign of the teleological progress of history rooted in a shared moral disposition of humanity. He claims that the experience of the French Revolution in particular “points to the disposition and capacity of the human being to be the cause of its own advance towards the better.”84 The will or enthusiasm for revolution, like all “genuine enthusiasm,” claims Kant, “moves only towards what is ideal and, indeed, what is purely moral, such as the concept of right, and it cannot be grafted onto self-interest.”85 It teleologically drives us on, whether or not we know it, toward a moral and political condition, which will culminate in a fair constitution and the freedom of all.86 That being said, for Kant, this teleology remains an “idea of reason” that can only have regulative status. It is therefore not an ontological concept. Foucault, however, would never accord teleology even such regulative status. 410 K. Bruff Foucault’s refusal to provide an assessment or judgment about this outcome of the will to revolution poses an interpretive challenge. Certainly, he would not commit to Kant’s decision to place human beings, by virtue of their natural disposition, at the basis of any narrative of the inevitable progress of history. Even setting the concrete production of a people’s constitution as the goal of the will to revolution would be too specific for Foucault. But this does not result in a problem, for Foucault’s focus is on precisely how interpretations of revolutions as historically significant spectacles contribute to different interpretations of the present. Kant initiates an important move for Foucault, directing our attention to “what happens in the heads of those who do not participate in [the Revolution] or, in any case, are not its principal actors.” He shifts our focus to their enthusiasm and “the relationship they themselves have to this Revolution of which they are not the active agents.”87 Kant impressively does this from within a tradition in which signs of progress were sought not in the collective experiences of revolution, but in the “reversal of empires,” the disappearance of old states, and the “reversal of fortunes.”88 In the “What is Enlightenment?” essay, Kant alternatively encourages us to look to the “less grandiose,” “less perceptible” events to identify the sign of progress.89 It is noteworthy that although the French Revolution is indeed grandiose, Kant here anonymizes it as yet another revolution of a “gifted people.”90 Foucault and Kant focus on the change that revolutionary events instigate within those who “watch” these events and have “sympathy” for them.91 The change in the mentality of people who experience the exciting and turbulent times of political revolutions is more important than whether or not a given revolution is a success or failure. For example, in Kant’s time, the events of the Revolution prompted people to reflect and understand that they should have their own constitutions, rights, and a state of peace and that they should use their own reason. This approach to revolution requires a “recodifying” of values surrounding the signs of social change. We no longer seek to evaluate the outcomes of major political events, but rather look to their significance for how people understand and analyze their own present. Such a “recodification process” enables “us to express the important meaning and value we are seeking” (in this case, the past, present, and future value of the event of the revolution as signifier which “apparently, is without meaning and value,” which for Kant proves that progress has a cause outside of time).92 While Kant’s conclusions about the value of the French Revolution amount to problematic claims regarding the existence of progress and human nature, we can turn the analysis around and view Kant himself as a contextualized subject of history who was looking for a cause of progress to explain a theory he espoused in his own time. This allows for a Foucauldian reading of Kant against Kant, seeing the latter as seeking an event as the cause (and thus as evidence of, a sign of) “progress” in his changing time. Despite its significance for Kant, once again, the French Revolution is not to be evaluated in terms of its objective results for France or for Europe: the “content” of the Revolution, according to Kant, is “unimportant,” because “its existence attests to a permanent virtuality.”93 This virtuality concerns Enlightenment and Revolution 411 the changing mentality of people, as individuals able to challenge external authority and who participate in the historical application of reason.94 On the topic of the will to revolution, Foucault once again merges the influences of Kant Nietzsche, this time without naming the latter. The proximity between Foucault’s will to revolution and Nietzsche’s will to power has been noted by scholars, such as Jürgen Habermas and Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves.95 D’Entrèves notes that any comparison between the two is complex and open to numerous interpretations. Habermas, however, narrowly aligns the will to revolution with the “will to knowledge.”96 While Habermas justly recognizes the importance of the will to revolution, his interpretation of Foucault’s use of this concept is not without its own motive. Habermas’ identification of this will with the “will to knowledge” allows him to claim that Foucault is contradicting himself through his late return to Kant (to whose philosophy, Habermas notes, Foucault sees himself as heir). “Up to now,” writes Habermas, “Foucault traced this will to knowledge in modern powerformations only to denounce it. Now, however, he presents it in a completely different light, as the critical impulse worthy of preservation and in need of renewal.”97 Habermas concludes that Foucault’s genealogical critique of power always needed “normative yardsticks,” Foucault simply never admitted it. Thus, Habermas suggests, Foucault’s late return to Kant could be his “re-entrance” into the “discourse of modernity” in which normative commitments undergird the analysis of human activity in history.98 However, the presence of normativity in Foucault’s work is nothing new. Resisting illegitimate forms of governmental rule requires minimum normative commitments, and questions of which institutional practices to resist and how questions were already addressed by Foucault in reference to his genealogical analyses of power in the 1970s (discussed below). I agree with d’Entrèves’ proposal that a productive alternative to the Habermasian identification of the will to revolution with the will to knowledge is to identify it with the “will to freedom,” which “would transgress the limits of the given and provide a space for the refashioning of subjectivity.”99 But this will to freedom need not be seen as “prosaic,” “non-Nietzschean,” and divorced from the “will to power,” as d’Entrèves proposes. An interpretation of the will to power as the will to freedom (and thus the will to self-overcoming in the process of transgressing limits) is not antithetical to Nietzsche’s own presentation of the will to power in Beyond Good and Evil. The “will to power” here describes “life itself,”100 and philosophy is “the most spiritual will to power” which aims at the “creation of the world.”101 Philosophers are not just guided by the “will to truth,” nor are they guided by a will to explicitly dominate others. Rather, they aim at a form of world-creation in the image of their own philosophical decisions. The will to power in this context is engaged in free creation, even though this drive is also admittedly described by Nietzsche as “tyrannical.”102 The creative aspect of the will to revolution, understood as a will to freedom in relation to becoming oneself while participating in the alteration of one’s conditions, through transgression and creation, can thus be productively linked with Nietzsche’s will to power. 412 K. Bruff 4 The Distinction Between the Revolutionary Enterprise and the Revolution as a Spectacle Foucault is interested not in revolution as a goal or “model” for a future society, but more specifically in the revolutionary will as a drive, an enthusiasm, and an “impatience for liberty.”103 “The question for philosophy,” explains Foucault, is “not to determine which is the part of the Revolution that it would be most fitting to preserve and uphold as a model.”104 Kant’s interest in the French Revolution is also not in the “revolutionary enterprise” itself as a vision for social change and its outcome. Rather, Kant explores the will to revolution and the broader experience of the revolution as a spectacle in European society in his time. Foucault picks up on this distinction between the revolutionary enterprise and the philosophical value of the revolution as a spectacle and develops it to refine his position on revolution insofar as it concerns an analysis of the present. The critique of the “enterprise of revolution” or revolution as a “model” is linked to Foucault’s criticisms of large-scale revolutionary activity, which he developed in the 1970s. While he encourages localized, revolutionary resistance to institutional practices, for example in schools and prisons,105 he describes his own intellectual project as modest and not radical. From here stems his critique of revolutionary action, which he articulates in a debate with a number of French historians in 1978: I don’t feel myself capable of effecting the ‘subversion of all codes,’ ‘dislocation of all orders of knowledge,’ ‘revolutionary affirmation of violence,’ ‘overturning of all contemporary culture,’ these hopes and prospectuses which currently underpin all those brilliant intellectual ventures which I admire… To give some assistance in wearing away certain self-evidences and commonplaces about madness, normality, illness, crime and punishment; to bring it about… that certain phrases can no longer be spoken so lightly, certain acts… no longer so unhesitatingly performed; to contribute to changing certain things in people’s ways of perceiving and doing things; to participate in this difficult displacement of forms of sensibility and thresholds of tolerance—I hardly feel capable of attempting much more than that.106 In this passage, Foucault makes explicit that major revolutions and “overturnings” are not part of his thought. He repeats his opposition to the violence motivated by revolutionary goals of any class or political group, as he had articulated in an interview the year before.107 But more importantly, he reminds us of the important, transgressive imperatives within his critical project: to challenge and change the status quo through productive, critical analysis, and to disrupt the limits of our possible experiences through the confrontation of “thresholds of tolerance.” A political revolution, even if successful on its own terms, would likely result in a redistribution of power that would simply bring about new configurations of the same relations of domination. The workings of power in history are more formative for human relations than our ideals about justice or utopia. Foucault, like Nietzsche, suggests our theories of utopia are deeply beholden to history. They are theories of our time. It is even “possible that the rough outline of a future society is supplied by drugs, sex, communes, other forms of consciousness, and other forms of individuality.”108 Enlightenment and Revolution 413 Justice—and also human nature as something to be “fulfilled”—should be understood as a set of historically contingent concepts that cannot serve as stable revolutionary goals.109Absolute justice as an utopia to pursue through revolution is an equally pernicious ideal, for what we consider to be justice can serve as an “instrument of power.”110 In general, Foucault is skeptical of any appeal to ideal or perfect justice; even the proletarian struggle is a fight for power.111 “If justice is at stake in a struggle, then it is an instrument of power.”112 Ideal or pure justice cannot transcend history, as contingent historical, social, and political factors are fundamental to it. For example, we often recast the question of what justice is in relation to a specific social or political struggle, in which we are involved. It is most frequently a specific type of political or social justice that we are after, one which is narrowly defined and fits our context, not the “hope that finally one day, in this or another society, people will be rewarded according to their merits, or punished according to their faults.”113 Foucault does not trust the proletariat, or any oppressed group that rises up, to rule without domination: “When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power.”114 No ideals or revolutions can eliminate power relations. Referring to Spinoza, Foucault claims: the proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class, it considers such a war to be just… one makes war to win, not because it is just.115 The power of the proletariat would “itself be an unjust power.”116 Foucault reiterates this view about the fundamental role of power relations in relation to socio-political confrontations in a conversation with Deleuze in 1971. In a post-Marxist vein, he adds that the proletariat is not the only one group or place from which one can “enter into a revolutionary process” against “particularized power.”117 However, as a possible path to solidarity, one can identify an overlap of the “controls and constraints,” which serve the system of power that “maintain[s] capitalist exploitation.”118 We must therefore exercise skepticism toward any ahistorical concepts of utopic societies, human nature, and justice when used to justify or motivate revolution.119 These notions of human nature, of justice, of the realization of the essence of human beings, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilization, within our type of knowledge and our form of philosophy, and that as a result form part of our class system; and one can’t, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should—and shall in principle—overthrow the very fundaments of our society.120 For these reasons, the revolutionary enterprise and its goals in general are problematic for Foucault. But if a revolution happens, its value to the present, for Foucault and Kant alike, lies not in its concrete outcomes or even in the program that motivated it, but in its significance as a spectacle, which is itself an overdetermined sign: 414 K. Bruff overdetermined because it does not have one single meaning that is not relative to those who interpret it.121 Kant shares Foucault’s skepticism regarding those who would come out victorious in a revolution, especially if the revolution is violent. In the overthrow of the head of state, for example, an inversion between this head and the people takes place.122 “Violence” is raised above right.123 This leads Kant to make the claim that such an act of revolutionary terror is akin to the state’s own suicide.124 Kant and Foucault are thus equally concerned about the inversion of relations of power within the state achieved through revolutionary violence.125 For Kant, this inversion is a result of an overthrow based on a self-oriented maxim that is “hostile” to the law.126 On Foucault’s account, an inverted condition does nothing to dismantle the complex structures of power and knowledge that enable oppression. The actual events and outcome of the revolution are consequently of little significance.127 Rather, “for future history,” the Revolution for Kant is a “guarantee of this continuity of an approach to progress,” not necessarily a concrete, indestructible step to social progress itself.128 Kant claims that if the revolution’s aims and constitution failed and if everything were to fall backward, the “philosophical prophecy would lose nothing of its force.”129 And while a given revolution may mean something different to us now in the light of our own theoretical frameworks—take Foucault’s digression from Kant on the progress of humanity, for example130—the will and enthusiasm for the revolution can always reveal something to us about our present. Thus, on Kant’s account, the significance of the revolution is not that it “topples things over,” and reverses relations.131 Its meaning as a sign does not come from “the revolutionary drama itself,” but rather from “the way in which it is received all around by spectators who do not participate in it,” but watch and “let themselves be dragged along by it.”132 Therefore, it matters little if the French Revolution “succeeds or fails,” whether “it accumulates misery and atrocity,” or whether, in view of its cost, it should ever be repeated.133 Indeed, if we could foretell what the consequences of the French Revolution would be, we would not see it as an indisputable sign of progress. The historically specific inversion of ruling classes or groups caused by “revolutionary upheaval,” combined with the fact that revolutions can never completely do away with the structures through which power circulates, means a revolution’s outcome can never reliably be used as a basis for judgment.134 Its significance also ought not to be derived from its viability as a model for future revolutions and political action. However, the revolution as a spectacle, regardless of its results, is able to signify meaning. It functions as a “repository” or site of investment for “those who watch it.”135 On Kant’s account, it is a sign that reminds us of or commemorates our moral predisposition.136 It shows “things have always been like this (the rememorative sign),” that “these things are also presently happening (the demonstrative sign)” and that “things will always happen like this (the prognostic sign).”137 Insofar as he identified a will to revolution in the French Revolution as a sign or spectacle, Kant could use it to encourage people to move beyond the condition of “immaturity” and use their reason. The manifestations of the will to revolution, in this case, help Kant to Enlightenment and Revolution 415 “encourage others” to be part of the change toward an “enlightened society,” in which all would be equally free.138 This is because the will—which is also a desire and enthusiasm—for revolution is also a will toward collective freedom and autonomy. Foucault seems to agree with Kant that we have a tendency to will our own freedom, especially in our acts of resistance and disruption against power. However, unsurprisingly, he does not express agreement that a revolution can signify a timeless disposition of a humanity whose historical telos will be fulfilled. As seen above, Foucault is critical of the idea that politics can progress on the basis of a nature or permanent predisposition of the human being that will come to its full maturity or development.139 Every will-for-revolution exercised in a “present” moment is precisely a historical expression of freedom in that specific context. It does not fulfill anything teleological. Kant’s suggestion that revolution can be seen as “a value, as a sign of a predisposition that operates in history and in the progress of the human species”140 is just one possible, contextualized interpretation of many at a given time. Rather than serving as proof of a predetermined telos, a revolution as an experienced spectacle or a sign rather presents the opportunity for a theoretical decision to be made in one’s analysis of the present moment. It “allow[s] us to decide if there is progress,” to make our decisions about meaning and value in the critical analysis of our time.141 5 Normativity and Critique So, was Habermas right? In order to uphold his late philosophical views, informed by Kant, on revolution and the Enlightenment, does Foucault need to make normative claims at odds with his earlier work, especially his genealogical analyses of power? I have suggested “no,” that normativity was always present in Foucault’s work. The imperative to actively resist constricting institutional practices, especially in schools, prisons, and in the context of psychiatry, is clear in Foucault’s middle period. There is also no doubt that we should expose “the relationships of political power which actually control the social body and oppress or repress it.”142 But which normative measures or “yardsticks” does Foucault need to ascertain precisely what practices and which institutions are to be opposed? On precisely this point, Nancy Fraser and Charles Taylor perceive a contradiction in Foucault. Foucault invokes liberal values espoused by Kant, particularly freedom and autonomy, in order to judge certain disciplinary practices as wrong and worthy of opposition. This would not present a problem if Foucault had not, on Fraser’s account, so heavily criticized these liberal, Enlightenment values in the past.143 But no value ought to be immune from historical critique; Foucault, in continuation with the Enlightenment tradition on his own account, is constantly criticizing the values and norms of his present. He can therefore coherently refrain from taking a single, definitive position on freedom, yet still retain the concept when describing the engagement of individuals in transgressive activity, and even the uprising of individuals in revolutionary activity, 416 K. Bruff directed against institutional practices and the limits placed on their knowledge and experience. James Schmidt and Thomas Wartenberg, Amy Allen, and Christina Hendricks have all defended the compatibility of Foucault’s positions on freedom and autonomy with his analyses of power.144 Freedom, for Foucault, begins in the “critical attitude.” Through critique—motivated by the will to revolution as a will to freedom—we attempt to “desubjugate” ourselves in the domains of the “politics of truth,” which is, despite the expression, never absolute.145 This desubjugation process could also be read as a process of liberation from the contingent, normative constraints placed on the self. This requires resisting certain oppressive governmental and institutional practices. Critique therefore also involves confronting “the arts of governing” through “defiance, as a challenge, as a way of limiting these arts of governing and sizing them up, transforming them, of finding a way to escape from them, or in any case, a way to displace them, with a basic distrust.”146 Critique, especially insofar as it is directed toward methods of government control and illegitimate ruling practices, is political. It is, Foucault asserts, “the art” of “being governed” less.147 On this point, one can identify the normative role of the concept of freedom, in relation to the will to revolution and resistance, in Foucault’s project of critique. The history of critique is the history of identifying and “refusing, challenging, limiting” alternatives to unsuitable arts of governance in a given moment in history.148 Critique means challenging the sources of authority in governance that lead to the domination and control human beings, thereby exercising the will to freedom. “Critique” will thus “be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability.”149 It occurs in the intersection of subjectivity, power, and truth.150 Despite Foucault’s critique of ideal justice, he directly links this definition of critique to the resistance to “unjust” laws. Recall that concepts of justice are always situation-specific. If laws are “unjust,” not because of their failure to measure up to some ideal notion of justice, but due to their “illegitimacy” based on “antiquity” or because a sovereign has invested them with power, they should be opposed.151 Foucault, on this point, takes a surprising turn in the direction of Kant and universal rights. If historically specific critiques of forms of governance mean challenging unjust laws, Foucault notes, “critique means putting forth universal and indefeasible rights to which every government, whatever it may be… will have to submit.”152 Such an endorsement of universal rights is surprising for Foucault. If all concepts of justice are historical, we could surmise that all rights are, too. However, although the specific human rights we take to be universal and their scope of extension are constantly changing, they remain a viable way to limit, and even destabilize, the authority and power of governments as exemplified through their ruling practices. Foucault returns to Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment through the terminology of limits and the critique of authority. Governance always has limits and these limits must be challenged and transgressed.153 Moreover, nothing should be accepted as true on the basis of authority alone.154 Here, the critical enterprise and the “call for courage” to the people of the Enlightenment to free themselves from external sources of authority through self-directed understanding intersect.155 Both Kant’s Enlightenment and Revolution 417 critique of reason and the courageous pursuit of freedom in the Enlightenment describe a “critical attitude which appears as a specific attitude in the Western world starting with what was historically… the great process of society’s governmentalization.”156 To dare to be beholden only to one’s own exercise of reason and be thereby responsible for one’s own decisions necessitates courage. According to Foucault, in Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” one finds a courageous uprising of the subject against historicized forms of authoritative rule. Foucault extends Kant’s Enlightenment motto, “Have the courage to make use of your own intellect!,” to the courage to first critically examine one’s own capacities and limits as a subject enmeshed in relationships of power and truth in one’s own time, and then transgress these limits.157 Kant demonstrates that one ought to have the courage to identify the illegitimate origins of one’s “minority condition,” especially in “religion, law and knowledge,” and to attempt to transgress them through one’s own intellect.158 Critique, suggests Foucault, is a particular type of virtue with the normative aim to transgress. Foucault claims critique seems to be “supported by some kind of more general imperative… than that of eradicating errors. There is something in critique akin to virtue.”159As Kant demonstrated, precisely through the identification of the limit of the scope of one’s knowledge and the responsible and appropriate use of reason, “the principle of autonomy can be discovered.”160 In this endeavor, “our liberty is at stake.”161 In Kant, this autonomy is present in the regulative use of the “ideas” of reason in the First Critique (as opposed to their constitutive use), as well as in the applied us of practical reason. As a result of ascertaining the limits, together with the possibilities, of reason, “instead of letting someone else say ‘obey’” and having to listen to another, “the obey will be founded on autonomy itself,” as one will obey reason.162From this point, for Kant, we become the authors of the laws we obey. Expanding the link of his work to Kant’s critique of reason, Foucault claims that we ought to “transform” Kant’s critical project, insofar as it concerns “necessary limitation[s],” into “a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.”163 However, it is also important to highlight the discordance between Kant’s and Foucault’s critical projects, which Foucault identifies himself. To “obey” reason, he reminds us, is still to “obey” universal structures and is certainly “not at all opposed to obeying the sovereign.”164 In the face of the power of the state and the “supreme authority” that passes its laws, in Kant’s account, citizens emerge rather powerless: “The power of the state which makes the law effective is also irresistible, and there is no lawfully constituted commonwealth without such power to put down all internal resistance.”165 Kant explains that laws should be passed by the head of state – who, as the “source of the laws, cannot do wrong.”166 These laws should be on the basis of right and are thus “irreprehensible.” They are backed by the “authority to coerce” and “the prohibition” of any resistance against the “will of the legislators.”167 The need to obey, for Kant, applies regardless of who governs. Even if a revolution is, in principle, never justifiable, Kant urges us to accept its results, and in particular its constitution. He writes, “when a revolution has succeeded and a new constitution is established, the unlawfulness of its beginning and implementation 418 K. Bruff cannot release the subjects from the obligation to submit to the new order of things as good citizens.”168 Ironically, the results of the unjustifiable revolution can still positively contribute to human progress in history. The “new order of things” and replacement authority, states Kant, must be obeyed.169Although undesirable for citizens, the only pushback permitted is from the former head of state, whose “right” to their former “office remains, since the revolt that took it from him was unjust.”170 The question remains unsettled for Kant regarding whether former heads of state, with external aid, may attempt to reinstate the pre-revolutionary constitution after the revolution has already occurred.171 Constitutions can be reformed, claims Kant, but only by the sovereign—“not by the people, by means of revolution.”172 The conclusion is clear: “all resistance against the supreme legislating authority… all revolt that leads into rebellion, is the highest and most punishable offence.”173 Foucault does not agree that an individual’s conduct should always be in accordance with state laws and that state authority should always to be respected to avoid civil unrest and the destruction of the state’s foundations. Additionally, Kant specifically argues for social cohesion through a respect for the limits of reason in one’s civic duty (he therefore restricts the use of “private reason”).174 Foucault endorses no such “acceptable” restraints on the subject’s activity, whether in private or public. The acceptance of such restrictions by private citizens, especially as imposed from above, is always open to misuse to increase the social control of those in power. This discordance between Kant and Foucault on social unity is also highlighted by Habermas who suggests that Kant’s theory of a final cosmopolitan state of freedom, along with his concerns for worldcitizenship and proposed steps toward perpetual peace, would likely be criticized by Foucault.175 These objections notwithstanding, by linking the Enlightenment and his critical philosophy so closely, Kant, according to Foucault, motivates us to question the structures and use of reason itself in reference to the historical exercise of power.176 From this critique, we can engage in a process of “desubjectification” within our present context. In this process, we have a responsibility to “know knowledge” or to know our present and how it subjugates us as thinkers of the present. This is the condition of the possibility of following the “ethos” of the Enlightenment, which calls us to identify and transgress limits as part of the “ontology of ourselves.” Foucault distinguishes between “two great traditions” founded by Kant, “which divide modern philosophy”: the analytic of truth and the ontology of ourselves.177 The first is rooted in Kant’s critical enterprise, and concerns “the conditions under which true knowledge is possible.”178 The second is the “critical questioning” inaugurated by Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” and The Conflict of the Faculties, through which we ask about the present and what is possible in the present.179 This ontology of ourselves is the type of philosophical inquiry that Foucault sees himself, together with Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Habermas (and the “Frankfurt School” in general), as pursuing.180 In one way or another, all of these thinkers pose the question “What is the Enlightenment?” out of their respective presents. Enlightenment and Revolution 419 The “ontology of ourselves” (which is also an “ontology of actuality”181), first requires that we, as historically situated subjects, identify the limits of the conditions we take to be universal and true and expose their contingency. Then we ought to challenge and transgress these limits to widen “the present field of possible experiences.”182 In other words, we must (a) carry out a “permanent critique of our historical era,”183 and (b) engage in the task of “producing” or re-inventing ourselves” as “autonomous subjects,” as far as that is possible.184 The goal is to constantly transgress the limits of what one takes to be permanent in the given and in our selfunderstanding, thereby initiating new configurations of our environments and our ourselves. The ontology of ourselves is also an inquiry into who we are as successors of the Enlightenment who cannot deny this fact. What are the conditioning factors of who we are and how are they limiting what we can do and experience? The ontology of ourselves responds through a “permanent critique of ourselves” through our “reflective relation to the present.”185This permanent critique must concern the possibility of our freedom, as we ask: in which institutionalized and social practices is reason used to play “strategic games of liberties” whose ends are not our freedom at all?186 How can we liberate ourselves, even partially, from the disciplinary hold of power effected through structures, institutions, and norms that appear to be absolute? Foucault’s criticisms of revolutionary political programs are linked to the universalizing tendency he critiques through the ontology of ourselves. Any “projects” which have universal or “radical” aims, Foucault claims, are not part of the critical ontology of ourselves.187 In fact, the heavily programmatic and universalist nature of revolutionary programs exposes not only a dangerous level hubris, but it demands critique. Revolutionary programs often promote a self-defeating form of escapism from our current conditions, instead of challenging us to carry out the difficult, necessary critical work on our present and ourselves. Foucault writes, “We know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.”188 Foucault proposes an approach to the present that is critical and contextual rather than revolutionary. “The historical ontology of ourselves,” he explains, “must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical.”189 To analyze our own present—to construct an ontology of ourselves—in a way that is transgressive, we must instead look to “specific transformations” in “areas that concern our ways of being and thinking.”190 Once we provisionally outline the limits of what we are in our context, we can then challenge these limits specific to us and transform them. Kant was working on such an ontology of the present when he conducted his analysis of the French Revolution. He examines his present from within, as someone who also experienced the spectacle of the Revolution. Kant’s immanent critique of his time and incitement of transgressive activity is clear through his theory of public and private reason in relation to autonomy. Kant’s call to use one’s own reason in a liberatory fashion was highly relevant for social change and selfunderstanding in his time. Foucault thus saw Kant as a relevant public philosopher, 420 K. Bruff emphasizing that Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” was published as “a newspaper article.”191 Similarly, as noted above, Foucault published in many newspapers and gave numerous interviews, especially on the topic of Iran at the time if the Iranian Revolution. Visiting the site of revolution as a journalist may have allowed Foucault, at least in his intentions, to get as close possible to present events as a true ontologist of the actual.192 In his investigation of the meaning of the French Revolution as a sign, Kant came to very different speculative conclusions about the will to revolution with regards to progress than Foucault. But this is to be expected, as both lived in very different presents, which they approached with their own independent sets of concerns and intellectual heritage. Despite their diverging views on the meaning of the will to revolution in history, Foucault successfully shows that Kant is not merely a thinker of ahistorical universalism, but also a relevant philosopher of historical change and self-examination—a real philosopher of the present. Kant, in turn, through his concept of the will to revolution that persists throughout history, his endorsement of the values of freedom and autonomy, and defense of universal rights, offers Foucault certain normative commitments, which prevent his transgressive, resisting individual from completely dissolving into the contingent development of history and the workings of power.193 Notes 1. Immanuel Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Right, §43–§62,” in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, trans. David L. Colclasure (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 119–21. Kant claims that the “formal execution” of a monarch, such as “Charles I or Louis XVI,” is “regarded as a crime that remains eternally and can never be expiated” (ibid., 120n). 2. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), 151–53. The Revolution is an “event,” which “consists neither in momentous deeds nor crimes committed by men,” but is simply “the mode of thinking of the spectators” (ibid., 153). 3. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Hold in Practice, Parts 2 and 3,” in Toward Perpetual Peace, 53–57. For Kant, the law, as formulated in a constitution, is more foundational than any right to revolution. Rebelling against a sovereign or the laws of the state produces a contradiction regarding how to legitimize the alternative. Therefore, Kant explains, in the constitution, there cannot be a right to rebel (Kant, “On the Common Saying,” 52). 4. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” in The Politics of Truth, trans. Catherine Porter, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 127. 5. Regarding the debates on revolution and violence in German thought in the 1790s, see Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). On the German debate concerning the right to resistance in response to Kant’s position on the French Revolution, see Reidar Maliks, “Revolutionary Epigones: Kant and His Radical Followers,” History of Political Thought vol. 33, no. 4 (2012): 647–71. For an example of the conservative, anti-revolutionary turn in German Romanticism, see Friedrich von Schlegel, “Lecture XVII,” in The Philosophy of History: In a Course of Lectures, Delivered at Vienna, trans. James Burton Robertson, 2nd ed (London: Henry Enlightenment and Revolution 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 421 G. Bohn, 1846). For examples of the appearance of these questions in twentieth-century French thought, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John O’Neil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) and Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Acts of Religion, trans. Mary Quaintance, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 228–98. All three lectures are translated and published in the volume The Politics of Truth. “What is Critique?” was delivered to the French Philosophy Society in 1978. “What is Revolution?” is the first hour of Foucault’s inaugural lecture of his 1983 course at the Collège de France. It was first published in 1984 as “Un cours inédit,” Magazine littéraire, May 1984; the text was subsequently translated under different titles, including “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” trans. Colin Gordon, Economy and Society vol. 15, no. 1 (February 1986) and “The Art of Telling the Truth,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). Finally, the text of “What Is Enlightenment?” is loosely based on the second hour of the aforementioned inaugural lecture. It was subsequently delivered in the spring of 1983 at Berkeley. A revised version of this lecture was published for the first time in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). On the history of these texts and their relationship to one another, see James Schmidt, “Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault,” History of European Ideas vol. 37, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 48; and Frédéric Gros, “Course Context, ” in Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France, 1982–1983, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Gros explains that the 1978 lecture differs from the other two, for it is “situated in the perspective of a ‘critical attitude’” in relation to how not to be governed (the question of “‘desubjectification’ in the framework of a ‘politics of truth’”) (Gros, “Course Context,” 378). Contrastingly, “in 1983 the question of Enlightenment will be thought of as the reinvestment of a requirement of truth-telling, of a courageous speaking of truth that appeared in the Greeks,” thus leading Foucault to explore the type of “government of self” that “should be posited as both the foundation and limit of the government of others” (ibid., 379). I discuss Foucault’s return to the ancients in relation to Kant below. The first lecture concerns the breakdown of processes of subjectification, whereas the next two focus more on our active capacity to both critique and fashion ourselves in the present—how we can speak the truth a context, in which we play a constitutive part. It is noteworthy that as Foucault was preparing his material on Kant and the Enlightenment in 1983, he invited Habermas to a “private conference” with Paul Rabinow, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor to discuss Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” essay—a conference which Foucault would not live long enough to see. See Jürgen Habermas, “Foucault’s Lecture on Kant,” trans. Sigrid Brauner and Robert Brown, Thesis Eleven vol. 14, no. 1 (1986), 4. I discuss Foucault’s earlier engagement with Kant in more detail below. For an overview of Foucault’s reception of Kant and an argument in favor of the compatibility his early and late remarks, see Amy Allen, “Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal,” Constellations vol.10, no. 2 (2003), 180–98. Michel Foucault, “What Is Revolution?” in The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa Hochroth, Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 153. Foucault, “What is Revolution?” 99, 94–95; Compare the discussion of liberty, autonomy and courage in Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa Hochroth, 35. Foucault, “What is Critique?,” 24. On subjectivity and truth as informative for Foucault’s work in the 1980s, see Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) pp. 2–3 and Fréderic Gros, “Course Context,” 377–378. See Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 124, 126. 422 K. Bruff 12. Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–2. 13. See Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in Perpetual Peace, 18–21. 14. For a summary of how Enlightenment “successes” have produced new forms of domination in the realms of the prison system, sexuality, and medicine, see James Schmidt and Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self,’ in Critique and Power, 284. 15. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” 109. 16. Ibid., 110. 17. Ibid. 18. Brent L. Pickett highlights that in the 1970s, Foucault supports local, contextualized resistance against the systems of practices of schools, prisons, and the judicial system. See Brent L. Pickett, “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance,” Polity vol. 28, no. 4 (June 1996): 451–57. Compare Michel Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now’,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 223, 228–9; and “Intellectuals and Power,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 209. 19. Foucault’s interest in emancipation and the scope of possible experience and actions is linked to his interest in politics and approach to the concept of society, the latter of which includes the range of what we can and cannot do. Foucault claims that politics, defined as “the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct,” is “probably the most crucial subject to our existence.” In Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (London: The New Press, 2006), 36–7; emphasis is mine. 20. Michel Foucault, “Appendix: Foucault and His Critics, an Annotated Translation,” in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, trans. Karen de Bruin et al., ed. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 179–277. 21. Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 207. 22. Foucault, “Is It Useless to Revolt?,” in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 263. 23. Kant published extremely regularly in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, producing 15 articles between 1784 and 1796. In the first of these pieces, the “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (also from 1784), Kant presents his view of the progress of humanity toward an Enlightened, cosmopolitan community, which is crucial for understanding his will to revolution. It is also important to note that the 1793 Berlinische Monatsschrift piece, “On the Common Saying’” is where we find Kant’s early argument against revolutionary violence and uprisings against state authority. 24. Philosophy, as a lower faculty, must be kept at a “distance” from the “higher faculties” of theology, law, and medicine. But this “lower faculty” has the “duty… to see to it that everything put forward in public as a principle is true” (Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 35, 27, 53). 25. I am grateful to Tilottama Rajan for drawing my attention to the importance of this difference. 26. Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate, 40.For more on Foucault’s long-term revolutionary pessimism, see Pickett, “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance,” 448. 27. See Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Roberto Nigro, trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2008), 108–24. 28. See Ibid., 118–19. 29. Ibid., 119. 30. Ibid. 31. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” 125. 32. Foucault, Kant’s Anthropology, 121. Enlightenment and Revolution 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 423 Ibid., 122. Ibid., 124. Ibid. Foucault, Kant’s Anthropology, 124. Ibid. Ibid. It is important to note that the question of “who we are, what our present is… today” is not only Kant’s question, according to Foucault—it is “Nietzsche’s question,” too (Foucault, “What Our Present is,” The Politics of Truth, 148). Foucault praises Kant for initiating a great turn in the history of philosophy through an interrogation of the source of representation and its relationship to knowledge. Nevertheless, he is critical of Kant’s handling of the genesis of the subject through transcendental subjectivity (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan [London and New York: Routledge, 1989]). In his argument for the discontinuity between Foucault’s early and late approach to Kant, Habermas emphasizes Foucault’s critique of Kant’s “anthropocentric mode of knowledge,” which supports the “dangerous façade of universally valid knowledge” (Habermas, “Foucault’s Lecture on Kant,” 8). For a detailed analysis of Habermas’ juxtaposition of the two positions, see Schmidt and Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment.” Foucault, The Order of Things, 285. Ibid. Ibid., 286. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Foucault, Folie et déraison (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1961), quoted in Schmidt, “Introduction,” 26. James Schmidt, “Introduction: What Is Enlightenment? A Question, Its Context, and Some Consequences,” in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and TwentiethCentury Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 25. Schmidt, “Introduction,” 25; see also Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 25–26, 367; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 293, as quoted in Schmidt. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 137, 164. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” 108. Caring for the self involves an examination of “the historically situated ‘techniques’ by which a subject constructs a definite relationship to self, gives form to his or her own existence, and establishes a well ordered relationship to the world and to others” (Gros, “Course Context,” 378). Foucault, “Is it Useless to Revolt?,” 266. “It is a fact that people rise up, and it is through this that a subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) introduces itself into history and gives it its life. A delinquent puts his life on the line against abusive punishment, a madman cannot stand anymore being closed in and pushed down, or a people rejects a regime that oppresses it.” Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, 350. See Andreas Folkers, “Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2016). Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 19. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 403. Ibid., 404. Ibid. 424 K. Bruff 62. See Gros, “Course Context,” 379. 63. Ibid., 372. 64. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 79. Kant here adds that transcendental freedom “alone is practical a priori,” and without it, “no moral law is possible and no imputation in accordance with it” (79). 65. Foucault, “Is It Useless to Revolt?,” 263. 66. Kant, “On the Common Saying,” 47. 67. Ibid., 263–4. 68. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 153. 69. Ibid. 70. On this point, see Hendricks, “Foucault’s Kantian Critique,” Philosophy and Social Criticism vol. 34, no. 4 (2008), 364. 71. See Foucault, “Iran: The Spirit of a World without Spirit,” in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 253. 72. For different paths of navigation through this ambiguous space of the will and freedom in relation to Foucault’s return to Kant, see Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 302–22; Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” Political Theory vol. 12, no. 2 (1984): 173–4; Carlos Palacios, “Freedom Can Also Be Productive: The Historical Inversions of ‘the Conduct of Conduct,’” Journal of Political Power vol. 11, no. 2 (2018): 254–6. 73. Foucault, “What is Critique?,” 74. 74. Ibid., 75. 75. Ibid., 73. 76. Foucault, “What Is Revolution?,” 99. 77. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 126. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 125. 80. Ibid., 133. 81. Ibid., 117, 124. 82. Ibid., 121. 83. For Foucault’s summary of the function of the Revolution as a sign for Kant, see Foucault, “What is Revolution?,” 94–96. 84. Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 151. 85. Ibid., 155. 86. The will to revolution, for Kant, is “the sign” of “humanity’s moral predisposition” which is “perpetually manifested in two ways: first, in the right of all people to provide themselves with the political constitution that suits them.” Secondly, this constitution should conform “to the law” and morality “such that it avoids, by virtue of its very principles, any offensive war.” Foucault, “What Is Revolution?,” 95. 87. Ibid., 94. 88. Ibid., 92. 89. Ibid. 90. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 153. 91. Foucault, “What Is Revolution?,” 93–4. 92. Ibid., 92–3. 93. Foucault, “What is Critique?,” 90. 94. Foucault, “What Is Revolution?,” 98. 95. See Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, “Between Nietzsche and Kant: Michel Foucault’s Reading of ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’” History of Political Thought vol. 20, no. 2 (1999), 337–56, especially 347; Jürgen Habermas, “Foucault’s Lecture On Kant,” 7. 96. See D’Entrèves, “Between Nietzsche and Kant,” 347; Habermas, “Foucault’s Lecture on Kant,” 7. Enlightenment and Revolution 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 425 Habermas, “Foucault’s Lecture on Kant,” 8. Ibid. D’Entrèves, “Between Nietzsche and Kant,” 347. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15. Ibid., 11. Ibid. Ibid., 99. Ibid. Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now’,” 223, 228. Foucault, “Questions of Method,” in Studies in Governmentality, trans. Colin Gordon, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 82–3. In this interview, Foucault challenges movements of “terrorism where one says, in the name of the class, in the name of a political group, in the name of a vanguard, in the name of a fringe group: ‘I’m getting up, planting a bomb and threatening to kill someone in order to gain this or that.’” Foucault, “La securité et l’État,” Tribune socialiste (24–30 November 1977), 3. Foucault, “Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now,’” 231. Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate, 43. Ibid., 50. “The idea of justice … has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power” (Ibid., 40). Ibid., 50. Ibid. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 50–1. Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate, 53. Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” 217. Ibid. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 58. Foucault, “What Is Revolution?” 90–1. Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” 120n. Ibid. Immanuel Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” 121n. For a critical analysis of this point, see Lewis W. Beck, “Kant and the Right of Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 3 (1971), 416–17. For Foucault’s rejection of the use of terror and violence in revolutionary movements of a class or political group, see Foucault, “Va-t-on extruder Klaus Croissant?,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 679 (14 November 1977), 62–63, and Foucault, “La securité et l’État,”3–4. Ibid., 120n. Ibid., 97. Ibid., emphasis mine. Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 159; Foucault, “What Is Revolution?,” 96. On Foucault’s critique of progress, see Amy Allen, “Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress: Critical Theory in Postcolonial Times,” in Critical Theory in Critical Times, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2017), 183–206. Foucault, “What Is Revolution?,” 92–3. See also Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” 121n, where Kant explains that the act of executing a monarch “is based on a principle that would make even the reestablishment of the toppled state impossible.” 426 K. Bruff 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. Ibid., 93. Ibid. Ibid. Foucault, “What is Revolution?,” 95. Ibid. Ibid., 91; Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 151. Hendricks, “Foucault’s Kantian Critique,” 363. For Kant’s view on the final free, universal human community, see Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” in Perpetual Peace, 3–16. See, Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate, 42–3. Foucault, “What Is Revolution?,” 99. Ibid., 91. Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate, 40. This analysis and exposure must involve not only scrutinizing governmental and administrative institutions, but other institutions which mediate the transmission of power more insidiously (Foucault’s examples include the family, as well as institutions in educational systems that serve to transmit knowledge, medical systems, and psychiatry). Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” in Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 30. Compare Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth.” See Schmidt and Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment”; Amy Allen, “Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal”; Hendricks, “Foucault’s Kantian Critique.” Foucault, “What is Critique?, ” 32. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. Ibid. Ibid., 32. Ibid. Ibid., 30. Ibid. Ibid., 31. Ibid. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 34. Compare Foucault, “What is Critique?,” 32. Ibid. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Ibid. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 125. Foucault, “What is Critique?,” 36. Kant, “On the Common Saying,” 53. Immanuel Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” 119n. Kant, “On the Common Saying,” 53. Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” 121. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” 120. Kant, “On the Common Saying,” 53. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. Enlightenment and Revolution 427 174. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 19. With regard to the restriction of private reason (reason used “in a civil post or office”) and obedience and passivity in society, Kant states that in certain matters of concern to the whole, “some members of the commonwealth must play only a passive role, so that they can be led by the government in the pursuit of public ends by means of an artificial unanimity, or at least be kept from undermining those ends. In these cases, of course, one may not argue, but rather must obey” (ibid.). 175. Habermas, “Foucault’s Lecture on Kant,” 7. 176. Foucault, “What is Critique?, ” 37–8. 177. Ibid., 98. 178. Foucault, “What Is Revolution?,” 99. 179. Ibid. 180. Ibid., 32; Foucault, “What Is Revolution?,” 100. 181. Ibid., 100. 182. Ibid. 183. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 121. 184. Ibid., 120–1. 185. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 121. 186. Ibid., 133. 187. Ibid., 126. 188. Ibid. 189. Ibid. 190. Ibid. 191. Foucault, “What is Critique?,” 33. 192. Foucault claims in 1978, the year he went to Iran, that “there is much work to be done on the relationship between philosophy and journalism from the end of the 18th century”; we ought to observe how “philosophers intervene in newspapers in order to say something that is for them philosophically interesting and which, nevertheless, is inscribed in a certain relationship to the public which they intend to mobilize” (What is Critique?,” 33–4). Cem Kömürcü emphasizes Foucault’s dual role as a journalist and a “modern” philosopher in his travels to Iran, claiming “The Iranian Revolution was a challenge for Foucault to show how modern and therefore actual he was” (Cem Kömürcü, “Enlightenment and Revolution—Michel Foucault’s Way to Iran,” in Aftershocks of an Event, ed. Carlos Ramírez and Michael Schulz [Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2020], 182). For a rare appreciative analysis of Foucault’s interest in the possible viability of a spiritual revolution in Iran, see Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 193. I would like to thank the volume editors, Tilottama Rajan and Daniel Whistler, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.