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P A R T 1 the political topology of kantian reason In 1961, Foucault submitted a translation and commentary on the genesis and structure of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View as a ‘‘thèse complementaire’’ for his doctorat d’état at the University of Paris (Foucault 1961). The reading of Kant I offer here is tailored to addressing the kinds of issues Foucault raises in his Introduction à l’anthropologie de Kant and which perplexed him throughout his career. While Foucault’s essay on the Anthropology does not figure disproportionately in my account of Kant’s work, the strategy of examining ‘‘genesis and structure’’ is very important. Kant’s claim to give a philosophical account for the totality of experience inevitably leads the reader to sort through his or her experience for aspects corresponding to, or explicable through, terms in the Kantian architectonic.1 If, as Claude Lévi-Strauss argues, the signi- fier precedes and articulates the universe in its significance (1987, 60–61), then every human experience and perhaps many nonhuman experiences must fall under or be translatable into some Kantian concept, however distorted the translation may be. Indeed, Kant often defines terms such as sensibility, imagination, judgment, and feeling in opposition to one another and uses these terms to introduce order into the ‘‘signified’’ or set of representations from which coherence is expected, notably in ‘‘On the Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection’’ in the Critique of Pure Reason. He also tries to explain the unity beneath such oppositions (for example, in the Transcendental Dialectic and the whole of the Critique of Judgment), a project sometimes leading to greater complexity and disunity rather than the hoped-for synthesis. For the contemporary reader, the totality of Kant’s structure can identi fied by the simple historical facticity of his text. On the other hand, Kant 1. For example, I began by looking for—and unexpectedly finding—reference to the familiar act of diagramming or sketching out an idea through gestures in the ‘‘space of the mind’s eye.’’ 28 part 1: the political topology of kantian reason did not write his books with a total catalogue of concepts and terms in mind. His explicit knowledge had to catch up with his feeling for the world’s significance, to continue the analogy to Lévi-Strauss (1987, 61). Kant had to develop what readers now appropriate as a totality, responding to the intellectual and political conflicts of his particular circumstances as well as leaving room for future thoughts.2 After reflecting on my own experience in light of Kant’s structure, and reflecting on his structure as ‘‘constituted out of processes of correcting and recutting . . . patterns, regrouping, defining relationships of belonging and discovering new resources ’’ over time, it seemed to me that Kant struggled repeatedly with the difficulty of creating a totality for reason, and that he identified this difficulty with the dangerously divisive potential of imagination or an ‘‘imaginative’’ understanding. It also seemed that Kant found a provisional solution to this danger in the aesthetic and anthropological capacities discussed in his Critique of Judgment. This is the version of Kant that Foucault drew upon and also resisted. Because the strategy through which Kant finally mastered the ‘‘signi- fied’’ of his own experience as a thinker and distanced himself from the threats of fanaticism, social disorder, and political authoritarianism is a version of the strategy that enabled disciplines like the human sciences and institutions such as medicine and the prison to flourish, I think it is worth considering this strategy in detail if we hope to exercise political imagination after Foucault. The key to Kant’s strategy is positing the existence of a ‘‘problematic object,’’ which divides the field of human thought into a manageable, knowable part and an indefinite, unknowable part. Kantian reason overcomes its bifurcations to the extent that the aesthetic appearance of human bodies and their aesthetic reactions to one another 2. Foucault points out that Kant was teaching and improving his anthropology course over the entire period when he was also developing and publishing his critical philosophy. He therefore reasons that Kant assumed anthropology was a structural component of the critical philosophy, one that probably showed the strains and traces of its construction (1961, 7, 120). The concepts employed in his anthropology course, after all, are the same ones found with greater theoretical development in the three Critiques...

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