Conditioned by History: Experience and Critique in Foucault's Thought

<p>This dissertation examines French philosopher Michel Foucault's theory of historical conditions. It argues that historical conditions take the form of what Foucault calls “historical a priori”: rules that are at once transcendental and historical, and that, as such, serve as historically modifiable yet necessary conditions of what is knowable, sayable, and thinkable in a given period and at a given place. These conditions, this dissertation show in a second step, extend to experience as such; experience is conditioned by historical a priori forms of knowledge, power, and subjectivity. Finally, the dissertation shows that these conditions form the limits of critique: critique of the present is only available for those historical-transcendental conditions that are already in the process of withering away. This dissertation intervenes in the secondary scholarship on Foucault’s work in three decisive ways. First, I show that the historical a priori—which is typically seen as a methodological failure—is not only a methodologically viable concept, but the operative form of historical conditions throughout the entire Foucauldian corpus. Second, I show that even though the concept of experience, due to Foucault’s repeated critiques of phenomenology, is a rather neglected concept in the scholarship on his work, Foucault develops a robust non-phenomenological account of experience. Third, pace charges of a normative lacuna in Foucault’s work, I show that Foucault is committed to autonomy as a historically immanent, yet necessarily underdetermined, norm. This account of historical conditions avoids the facile opposition between determinism and freedom, by showing that the historical a priori neither determines the individual’s action, nor is it rendered inoperative by the spontaneity of human freedom: rather, these conditions delineate a restrictive realm within which freedom can be exercised. </p>

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Philosophy

Year dc:date.available

2022

Author dc:creator

• Aavitsland, Vilde Lid

• Michel Foucault
• history
• experience
• critique
• historical conditions

Repository record dc:identifier

https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/332

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:via.library.depaul.edu:etd-1330