Unregulated Powers: The Politics of Metaphysics in French Post-Kantianism

ABSTRACT

For thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze, it is not possible to engage with metaphysical questions without simultaneously considering other, more political problems concerning the power relations that are internal to thought. In this article I argue that, despite certain important ways in which this trend follows in the wake of Nietzsche’s polemic against the tyranny of Truth, to understand the political nature of metaphysics in late twentieth-century French philosophy we must see these thinkers as dealing with an explicitly Kantian problem. After some introductory material in the first section, I lay out the problem of legitimacy in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and assess his own solution to this problem. In the third section I explain Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s solution, while in the fourth section I explain how Foucault and Deleuze each return and respond to the political foundation of Kant’s metaphysics in their own way.

KEYWORDS:

• Metaphysics
• Politics
• French Philosophy
• Kant
• Nietzsche
• Foucault
• Deleuze

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Cutrofello, Continental Philosophy, 24.

2. Kelly, Political Philosophy, 23.

3. While these thinkers are often associated only with the death of metaphysics, this view is slowly being corrected. See Moore, Modern Metaphysics, 512–80. For the relationship between the politicisation of metaphysics and ontology in French philosophy, see Oskala “Foucault’s Politicization of Ontology.”

4. Lyotard, “Nietzsche and the Inhuman,” 84.

5. Deleuze, Negotiations, 5. Picking out Kant as the cornerstone of this shared education, Derrida adds: “For many of ‘us’ (‘us’: the majority of my supposed readers and myself), the authority of Kantian discourse has inscribed its virtues of legitimation to such a depth in our philosophical training, culture, and constitution that we have difficulty performing the imaginary variation that would allow us to ‘figure’ a different one” (Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?, 49).

6. Deleuze, “On Nietzsche,” 140; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 180.

7. Deleuze, “Michel Foucault’s Main Concepts,” 309.

8. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 83.

9. Foucault, Power, 298.

10. Ibid., 358.

11. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B73.

12. Ibid., A46/B64.

13. Gardner, Kant and the Critique, 304.

14. Adorno, Kant’s Critique, 2.

15. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, 9.

16. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 25.

17. “The critique is a treatise on method, not a system of the science itself” (Bxxii). See also Altman, Companion to Kant, 34.

18. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axi–xii.

19. Tarbet, “The Fabric of Metaphor,” 265.

20. Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, 75.

21. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A84/B116.

22. Ibid., A834/B862.

23. Black, Black’s Law Dictionary, 384.

24. Tarbet, “The Fabric of Metaphor,” 269.

25. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A751/B779.

26. Ibid., Aviii–ix.

27. Ibid., Bxix.

28. Ibid., Bxiii.

29. Caygill, The Kant Dictionary, 191.

30. In Critique of Pure Reason Kant also mentions the faculties of imagination, judgement, and apperception (see A81, A95, and A124, for example), but Kant’s concern throughout the book is to discern the proper relation between sensibility, understanding, and reason.

31. The relative powers of these faculties are summed up in Kant’s famous dictum that: “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B76).

32. Ibid., A51/B75.

33. Ibid., Bix, A487/B515.

34. Ibid., A126.

35. Ibid., Bxxxv; A669/697, A752/B780, A776/B804; A710/B738, A811/B839, A826/B854.

36. Ibid., Aix; A465/B493.

37. O’Neill, Constructions of Reason, 18.

38. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A752/B780; A768/B796.

39. Doyle, Nietzsche’s Metaphysics, 102.

40. Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” 33.

41. Deleuze, Negotiations, 6.

42. Brusotti and Siemens, Nietzsche’s Engagements, 9.

43. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 13.

44. Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, xi.

45. Cutrofello, Continental Philosophy, 18–19.

46. Burnham, The Nietzsche Dictionary, 264.

47. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 4.

48. Another way to highlight Kant and Nietzsche’s divergence here would be to reflect on their different approaches to anarchy. Kant characterises Critique of Pure Reason as an attempt to ward off anarchy and to institute reason’s “undisputed patrimony” (A768/B796). For Nietzsche, while anarchy is to be avoided, the question of which form of political organisation is best suited to the task is left open. It is interesting here to consider how Nietzsche’s attack on Socrates could have been applied to Kant (Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, xxviii).

49. The most important use of this concept is probably Nietzsche’s analysis of the will to power, where ‘Macht’ is used, but Nietzsche uses ‘Kraft’ in this context too. For example, where Nietzsche writes “Vor Allem will etwas Lebendiges seine Kraft auslassen – Leben selbst ist Wille zur Macht.” Here Judith Norman translates ‘Kraft’ as ‘strength’ and ‘Macht’ as ‘power’: “Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 15).

50. Burnham, The Nietzsche Dictionary, 342.

51. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 296.

52. Ibid.

53. Miyasaki, “Nietzsche’s Will to Power,” 259.

54. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, 7.

55. Foucault, Power, 13.

56. Flynn, Political Philosophy, 4.

57. See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 203–4; and What is Enlightenment? 32–50. For a more comprehensive account of Foucault’s response to Kant, and of the role that Nietzsche played in meditating this interaction, see Djaballah, Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience. For a detailed account of the shift in Foucault’s reception of Kant between his early and later works, see Louden “Foucault’s Kant.”

58. Foucault, The Order of Things, 264.

59. Mader, “Knowledge,” 228.

60. Rouse, “Knowledge/Power,” 96.

61. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 127.

62. Ibid.

63. For Foucault’s own description of the relationship between his use of the word ‘genealogy’ and that of Nietzsche, see “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

64. Foucault, “How is Power Exercised?” 222.

65. Foucault, “Prison Talk,” 53. For a more detailed account of the influence of Nietzsche’s conception of power on Foucault, see Ansell-Pearson, “The Significance of Michel Foucault’s Reading of Nietzsche,” 268–69.

66. Oskala, “Foucault’s Politicization of Ontology,’ 45.

67. Deleuze, “Responses to a Series,” 42.

68. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 180.

69. Ibid., 291.

70. Ibid., 180.

71. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 91.

72. Ibid.

73. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, xi.

74. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 171.

75. Ibid., 173.

76. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 137; quoted in Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 171.

77. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 68 and 296.

78. Ibid., 296.

79. Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edward Thornton

Edward Thornton, PhD, is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, UK. His expertise is in the history of European philosophy, with current research examining twentieth-century French thinkers’ responses to the major problems of the philosophical canon. He also has interests in the work of Deleuze and Guattari and in the practice of Institutional Analysis.