Notes August 27 Kant and Foucault Background/ Cited/ Additional readings: 1. Habermas ...Transformation of the Public Sphere 2.

. Baudelaires essays On the Heroism of Modern Life, and The Painter of Modern Life (cited in Foucault) 3. Schmidt discussing Moses Mendelssohns answer to What is Enlightenment? (Mendelssohn cited in Foucault, original text unavailable online) 4. The first 2 chapters at least of Foucaults The Government of Self and Others (Collected Lectures) extended discussion of Kants essay 5. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire 6. Copleston and similar, basic histories of Western philosophy 7. Possibly Schacht, Classical Modern Philosophers, Descartes to Kant 8. Linked to Yack, Gaonkar, Koselleck readings. See Wakankar on the problem of the pre-modern subject 9. Raymond Williams, When Was Modernism?

Modernity as a stance as opposed to modernisation, which indicates processes and transformations. NB Foucault on modernity as ethos/ modernity as epoch Foucault and the idea of history (versus?) genealogy consider his other work as resisting the notion of history as a narrative (?) or, say, a teleological imperative which imposes itself The difference in style, address, implicit readership o NB the implications of self-reflecting, self-CONSTITUTING subject o NB Kant writing in a newspaper, to the public (at least in this particular address); Foucaults difference is that he is deliberating on the discipline of philosophy, on how it has developed that it will no longer appeal to the public for answers/validation Temporality o Foucault discusses the relation of subject and time the idea of presentness. He also foregrounds Kants analysis of the relation between time and the Enlightenment subject note that Kant talks to and focuses on the individual o Foucaults discussion of the mode of relating/ differentiating self from history o Foucaults use of Baudelaire is also a development of how time defines modernity how we mark an era, flag modernity using the subject and its experience of time. In Kants essay we have already become responsible for time, it is no longer something objective and nothing to do with us See also Yack and Gaonkar readings o To be modern is to be inserted into time, to be embedded in history. To be modern is to produce history (and history usually begins with writing)

Kant places the individual in time, and places a demand for action and ethics upon him, within the rubric or TIME STATE SUBJECT. This defines history, take away any one of the 3 and action would not be possible. The acting modern subject is inserted into time and the time he produces is modernity o Consider further: History nearly always is the history of the state. History makes itself out of actions it privileges which it flags as political, generally action against or relating to the state The non political action the non political subject is then outside history. Modernity is coded with terms and understandings made of TIME immature, primitive, pre-modern etc. Defined by the absenceof: subjects who are not rational actors, not writing history, not knowledge producers, not agents, not political. o Baudelaires idea of history and relation to time is different, of course aesthetic, for one. o NB Baudelaires idea of the modern is not historical (but an attitude) and the modern subject is not a historical entity (but a perfect representation/ formulation/ symbol perhaps? of the ethos, the aesthetic) Agency, will, power: Kants individual is being invited to action to cease being wilfully immature Side note the idea of childhood versus mature adulthood lingering in civilisational infancy being wilful, therefore deserving consequences colonial discourse o Compare the 1789 Revolution as a turning point or watershed in history to the Holocaust and WWII as ditto Authority in the Kant essay: What authorities and institutions is he addressing, which throwing open to reason? he addresses Fredericks state, and uses the Church as an example of authority keeping the individual immature. Situate the argument in his period political freedom to some extent has been wrested from the Church, the State is the embodiment of rationality o Note that he seems to be recognising the state as absolute working out a pact as Foucault says o He is trying to replace the Church a different more reasonable? absolutism o In fact, bringing the Church by implication under the State State and the individual: Kant is linking the polity, the collective to (voluntary? Wilful?) individual choice and action. You produce your polity/ society NB Foucaults discussion of modernity and the concept of time Session 5 will address this again Things Foucault doesnt want associated with modernity: o Modernity as an epoch the bookends of pre-modern, post-modern etc. Overarching theme to track the different contexts of knowledge, knowledge production, a discipline and to whom it speaks and in what vocabulary. Note that knowing/knowledge seem to mean different things in the 2 essays. Foucault in a sense is problematizing what philosophy has been doing till now in Kants time,

philosophy hopes it is determining how the modern world will be. Knowledge resists power or makes space in negotiation with it this is what Kant writes about; Foucault is analysing modes of knowledge production, of knowing the knowledge-power relation Overarching concept to consider Philosophical concepts produce CATEGORIES, which then produce [and so on]. Re-read Foucaults final word on Kant what choices are available? Can one choose not to be modern? To what extent have concepts and categories constituted us, inescapably? o See also Yack on what happens if we confuse the concept with the epoch Foucaults essay may differ from his other work in his acknowledgment of continuing questions from the Enlightenment See Yack also on how modernity is not homogenous as CONCEPT, though our tools of analysis or understanding or our institutions and technology may important to study the contestations within modernity, the (colonial) pathology of being (as a modern) intensely aware of inhabiting the present, and feeling that it is someone elses present, or not the right modernity The rationalisation of disciplines, different fields of knowledge separating history from literature and philosophy from theology is also a legacy of the Enlightenment, which Foucault is critically engaging with, unpicking its premises.