A Question on Enlightenment: Foucault and the Critique of Modernity

Abstract

The text will try to present Foucault’s understanding of Enlightenment and his critique of modernity. Humanist sciences of the modern age are constituted, according to Foucault, as a relation between power and knowledge. All the terms of that relation gain, in his work, a descriptive meaning and »standardise« the present as a dispositif of work, life and language through discipline, normalisation, biopolitics. What connects history (the archaeology of knowledge), the knowledge of events in actuality (genealogy of power) with the subject (hermeneutics of the self) is the freedom of the modern world. Freedom is not determined by an outside factor. Since it is without basis, the whole project of modernity is ambivalent. The progress of mind and freedom is not linear. In the process of historical development, the discursive formations of knowledge are shown at the same time through new institutions of control over the freedom of man. It seems that pessimism prevails in the analysis and the critique of modernity. The basic thesis of this paper is that there is a gap in the notion of the mind between Foucault’s critique of Enlightenment and that in the works of the Frankfurt School. The subject that constitutes itself »above« (rationality of the mind) and the subject that constitutes itself »below« (the dispositif of life) end as freedom without power. Knowledge in the humanistic sciences becomes biopolitical merchandise on the global information market, and knowledge about the boundaries of the existence of the subject in the technical world becomes the ethics of caring for oneself. Can we, following Foucault, still speak about the »modern subject« if Enlightenment is just a fascinating history of the systematic madness of modernity?