"Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?": Malabou and Foucault on the Kantian Organism

Wir fragten nach dem WERTHE [VALUE] dieses Willens [zur Wahrheit]. … Warum nicht lieber Unwahrheit? … Das Problem vom Werthe der Wahrheit trat vor uns hin—oder waren wir's, die vor das Problem hin traten? Wer von uns ist hier Oedipus? Wer Sphinx?¹

—Friedrich Nietzsche

C'est la vie elle-même et non le jugement médical qui fait du normal biologique un concept de valeur [value] … Valere qui a donné valeur signifie en latin se bien porter. La santé est une façon d'aborder l'éxistence en se sentant non seulement possesseur ou porteur mais aussi au besoin créateur de valeur, instaurateur de normes vitales.²

—Georges Canguilhem

1. the transcendental and the materialist turn

We have been called to account for the present philosophical turn towards ontology, matter, the body, the living—to metaphysics at-large. This is therefore an address unto our metaphysical inheritances, namely: Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger (to halt roughly a hundred years ago), and many beyond them, too soon to name in such a sweeping and reductive snapshot. In order to demonstrate that contemporary interest in the living-body in materialist and biological terms is an evolution already sprung into action by the previous movement (i.e., twentieth-century foci on embodiment, affect, phenomenon, and experience), this essay focuses on the genealogical leap between two contemporary interlocutors of Kantian metaphysics: i) Michel Foucault, lost far too soon, a voice surely structuring our episteme today, and ii) Catherine Malabou, central to the current debate on matter and life amidst philosophy's ontological turn (as following its linguistic or poststructural turn). However, new materialisms are challenged by speculative realisms to Relinquish the Transcendental! Malabou responds in a twofold manner: i) one cannot simply relinquish the transcendental without failing to account for the containment and continuity of life and the world (so in short—no, we cannot), and yet ii) one always relinquishes the transcendental as part of one's engagement with it at all—that this is inscribed not only in the tradition of rereading Kantian metaphysics, but in the very movement of Kant's project through the three Critiques overall (so in short—yes, and we must).³

The prompt of this journal is curiously similar to a prompt by a local newspaper posed to Kant who responded to his own epistemic turn with "Was ist Aufklärung?" (1784).⁴ This accounting for an imminent crisis in history as a concept, a diagnostic of "today," is observed by Foucault in his "What is Enlightenment?" (1984): "To reflect on 'today' as difference in history and as grounds for a particular philosophical undertaking appears to be what is unprecedented about this text. … Envisioned thus, one recognizes a point of departure: an outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity" (568). The prompt of this journal's issue is exemplary of this modern temporality, of our engagement with and our prognostic of where we are in the course of history-in-the-making. I shall respond by considering how—with Foucault, Malabou, and others—the suspended call initiated by Kant's reconciliation of the living-being with his transcendental philosophy has forwarded through the archive and once again reaches addressees.

Relinquishing the transcendental in the first sense (what we cannot), would indeed be to abandon not only Kant but all critical (theory) discourses that flow from this tradition that have resisted the shadow of empiricism from entirely foreclosing a consideration of a priori emergences and conditionings of all that exists or is possible. Speculative realism insists on "post-critical" thought, one coming "after finitude, after the a priori, after Kant,"—after all consideration of the a priori conditioning of the real. This, of course, declines the call initiated by Kant to think that which conditions thinking.⁵ Accordingly, one shouldn't pay mind to the mere coincidence that the world endures and is contained in a whole, that life evolves, that bodies age, for this could all at any moment be otherwise given "the absolute necessity of everything's non-necessity...