Sabina Bremner, "Anthropology as critique: Foucault, Kant and the metacritical tradition"

This week we read Sabina Bremner's fine piece, "Anthropology as critique: Foucault, Kant and the metacritical tradition"

 

The group began, as usual, with questions:
1. In what sense is Foucault doing a genealogy in referring to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche,
Weber? Is he? Pg. 18
a. Why is ambivalence the right concept? What are the other options for getting at this?
Pg. 13

2. Why does a 1950s lecture from Foucault do to help our interpretation of late Foucault who
doesn’t discuss anthropology in his later work?
a. Why this appeal to Kant’s anthropology in order to show the positive dimension of
Foucault’s relationship to Kant?

3. What is the relationship between anthropology, practical reflexivity and critique? What is
practically reflexive about anthropology?
 

4. What is the distinction between the form of anthropology and its content? Pg. 10
a. How do the similarities in theme between Kant and Foucault do for Foucault’s late
work? Pg. 12

5. What kind of form does this thin, purely formal conception of the practical agent take? Pg.
18
a. How universalizable is this subject historically?
 

6. Anthropology is said to be helpful for thinking about political change? To what extent is
this explored in the body of the text?
 

7. What does formal or structural reflexivity without a constituting subject do for critique? Pg.
18

We then moved to discussion....

What is anthropology for Bremner?
- Philosophical anthropology is different from the contemporary discipline of anthropology (esp. cultural anthropology) because in general anthropologists today don’t attempt universal anthropologies.
- What would a philosophical anthropology be that’s not universal?
- What is left of philosophical anthropology at the end of this?

 

We can conceive of reflexive processes beyond a constituting subject.
- Thermostats and other feedback driven self-organizing processes are examples.  But this is presumably not what SB has in view (nor likely MF, though it's an open question if he would be strictly opposed to a more cybernetic conception, were it to prove useful in some circumstance [which is an open question of course]).
- Is SB reading Foucault as hollowing out an anthropology?  With Nietszche, we get to practical reflexivity without a constituting subject.  Nietzsche as the endpoint (section IV of the article) seems to hollow out anthropology but still leave room for (or at least want to leave room for) critique.
 

Reflexivity is the most salient element in Foucault. We see this in Plato and the Stoics and self-
practices.
- What do we think of this formulation?  Reflexivity is what it is to be a practical agent. Is reflexivity all you need to get a practical agent? Is reflexivity a sufficient account of (or, for some of us, basis of) normativity? Foucault offers a non-metaphysical argument for normativity.  (CK very interested in these ideas and thinks there is much to go on here.)
- Foucault offers a non-metaphysical account of self-relation.  SB's presentation of this as "thin" and "formal" seems like a valuable contribution in line with MF (maybe not with what MF always said, but rather with how MF conducted his own experiments in genealogical critique).

 

What can critique do in light of SB's account of MF? One thing is this: it can do its work without a theory of a human nature. It can proceed experimentally without having to justify itself in advance. In this way, anthropology empties itself with the figure of a man and nevertheless still persists critically and genealogically. Genealogy is on this view just one mode of self-reflexive criticism.
 

One question for us is, "Is practical agency universal and transhistorical?"  But a better way to pose this question is as follows: "How is a view of practical agency politically or ethically mobilizable?  What can be mobilized if one were to try to posit the human as a self- reflexive function?  What would the politics of that kind of account of the person look like, in contrast to, say, the politics of an account of the person as a rational agent?"

SB doesn’t mention power-knowledge in trying to understand self-relation
- Subject as an effect of power such that power must be important for the historical determination of subjectivity and self-relation. But an object of power is always an agent. But self-relation is not just an effect of power but an effect of technologies of the self.

Why do we need to recuperate Kant’s anthropology? Why not just work off of Foucault's discussions of "WIE?", etc.?  Theoretically, what is it about Foucault that leads us to go back to the early lectures and survey his overall arch?
- MF is somewhat unique in the history of European Philosophy in not writing extensively about the history of philosophy or locating himself in a specific tradition.  Strong contrast to Deleuze.  Strong contrast to Beauvoir or Heidegger.  Strong contrast to the typical mode of self-presentaiton in European Philosophy.