The Illusion of History illusion of history: time and the radical political imagination

9. The Timeless Will Attacks Itself

193 9 The Timeless Will Attacks Itself Kant’s timeless will, the foundation of all modern emancipatory political projects, was such a powerfully endowed conception of human thought and judgment that it was inevitable that that activity would seek itself out and subject itself to the treatment that it inflicts upon the world. Critique allows nothing to remain solid and unquestioned, as it is obedient to nothing but itself. When such activity solidifies its initially variable and flexible nature into a rigid constellation of thought over the course of time, it is inevitable that its original impulse will rise above its institutionalized pretense and question its capabilities for radical critical thought. Much of Michel Foucault’s thought represents this self-reflexivity of the critical tradition. In Foucault’s entry in the Dictionnaire des philosophes, signed pseudonymously by Maurice Florence, but almost certainly written by Foucault himself , the opening sentence clearly states his allegiance to the critical project: “To the extent that Foucault fits into the philosophical tradition, it is the critical tradition of Kant, and his project could be called a Critical History of Thought.”1 This sentence sums up the contradiction at the center of Foucault ’s enterprise: a critical project that will eventually survey the 1. Michel Foucault, Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 459. 194  Michel Foucault thought that nourishes it—modern thought devouring its tail. Within the twentieth century this particular curve of thought is not isolated to Foucault, as one could easily find more radical proponents of this school. Yet Foucault does represent one of the more popularly received variants of this modern tendency, and more importantly he is the one theorist who met with a definite reckoning of this impasse and who began to dialogue with himself on this subject in his later work. This suspicion with the endless litany of truth claims and ethical values that are perceived as being constitutive of the “Enlightenment” by Foucault and others in the postmodern enterprise is represented quite differently within the angle adopted by this study. What has traditionally been seen as the skepticism of reason, an exhaustion of metanarratives , the death of “Man,” or the decentered subject, can alternatively be understood as indicators or symptoms of this project’s forced closure of two directions of time. The past and the future dimensions of critical thought are negated so as to affirm the limited and nominal, yet historically unpolluted dimensions of the present. This idea needs justification and explication. What is undeniable is Foucault’s affiliation with the critical spirit, a modern incantation that flourishes only in the wake of Kant’s thought. What is in question is only the aspect of time that Foucault invokes within this slipstream. Many have affirmed that Kant represents a rupture within the philosophical tradition, and yet the Rousseauean inspiration for this epistemic break is also its one anchor of continuity with the past. Rousseau imbibes the past (of nature and antiquity) as his stimulus for the future. As his example of the free will was bequeathed to Kant, his philosophy represents the nostalgic pangs of loss within Kant’s commanding conception of the timeless morality. In many ways it creates a bond for Kant’s timelessness with the virtues of the past, or more accurately , favors the illusions of the past reflecting upon the surface of timelessness ’s abstract expanse. The social contract is like an intellectual/ political structural antenna for the reception of an imagined past. With the timeless will and a universal morality as its sponsors, the social contract is a future mechanism for the faint reminding of a previous innocence , a memorial of past dignity for heartening moral use in the future. On the other side of the spectrum is Marx’s philosophy. In the same vein as Rousseau, his philosophy is a particular type of historical imagin- The Timeless Will   195 ing upon the endless ocean of timelessness. In Marx’s case, timelessness is projected into the future. Rather than bearing the marks of reminiscence , melancholy, defeated nostalgia, and future artificial communion with the past, Marx’s future represents the hopeful, cataclysmic promise of new historical life, an as yet unfulfilled future pledged to history by Kantian morality’s timeless break with history. Marx views philosophy as having closed the doors of the past behind him, giving him only one directive ... the future. Rousseau...