Every philosophy conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The relation of Foucault’s work to philosophy remains an unsettled issue. Indeed, Foucault sometimes preferred to present himself as ‘the masked philosopher’. Much like Nietzsche’s ‘hermit’, Foucault wrote books to conceal what lies within, a deeper cave behind every cave, ‘a stranger more comprehensive world beyond every surface, an abyss behind every ground, beneath every “foundation”’.1 However, a number of readers of Foucault have noticed that he constantly returned in his published work and interviews to an encounter with Kantian philosophy and the concept of the ‘transcendental’. Although these readers – including Gilles Deleuze, Jürgen Habermas, Beatrice Han, Gary Gutting and others – represent a broad range of interpretations of his work, the idea of the transcendental plays a key role in these readings providing the grounds for the legitimation, critique or disqualification of Foucault’s thought and its relation to philosophy. What is the status of the transcendental in Foucault’s work and what is Foucault’s relation to transcendental philosophy? Is the transcendental just another mask that is temporarily utilized and then abandoned in Foucault’s thought when it became clear that forging a new relation between the transcendental and empirical would eventually lead to insurmountable logical and theoretical difficulties? Or, rather, is there perhaps an attempt on Foucault’s part to ‘restore the forgotten dimension of the transcendental’,2 developing a conception that goes ‘all the way down’, so to speak, an immanent conception of the transcendental consistent with a thought without ground?
Drawing from some of the readings examined here I want to argue for this latter view. Foucault’s philosophy can be understood in terms of the development of his own conception of an immanent transcendental out of resources provided, in part, from Kant’s own work. Foucault’s work could thus be seen as a ‘radical transformation of Kantianism, a re-invention of the critique which Kant betrayed at the same time as he conceived it, a resumption of the critical project on a new basis and with new concepts’.3 Rather than a set of inconsistent, contradictory or viciously circular relations between the transcendental and the empirical, as some of Foucault’s best-known readers have claimed, I argue that in Foucault’s reinvention and transformation of Kantianism he develops an immanent conception of their relation as contingent and differential, a circle in which transcendental elements are immanently ‘caught up in the very things they connect’4 without being reduced to the same or to a simple repetition. By contrasting these differing accounts of the transcendental I will attempt to renew the question of what is at stake in Foucault’s critical project more than twenty years on, as well as raise important questions about the contemporary value of the transcendental, the Kantian legacy and the nature of philosophy itself.
