Dissensus Communis: Foucault and Kant on Political Imagination

Dissertation, Loyola University of Chicago (2000)
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Abstract

This dissertation is a study of Kantian themes in the work of Michel Foucault, undertaken with an eye to understanding what role bodily spatiality and sensibility play in our ability to make sense of political events or to feel ourselves plausibly drawn into public action. The first sections of the dissertation present a reading of Kant, focusing on the Critique of Judgment, that illustrates the relationship between the space of bodily experience, imagination, and properly delimited "critical" thought, a relationship which finds its telos in the possibility of communication regarding a common world. In the latter sections of the dissertation, Foucault is shown to challenge the assumption that a single world of perception and thought exists in the absence of disciplinary techniques which shape our expectations as to which experiences and forms will be communicable, techniques which act directly upon the bodily substrate of our aesthetic perception and exclude certain bodies and behaviors from "sane" public life. These practices can be understood as "imaginative" restrictions on the public use of imagination. In the end, the dissertation suggests that the concept of the "body" employed in Foucault's work is a "problematic concept" in Kant's sense of a logical marker delimiting the bounds of a consistent and communicable, i.e., "critical" domain of knowledge and experience, a marker, however, which also opens the structure of that domain to critique and implicates us in social antagonisms that exceed the content of our conscious deliberation or interest.

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Laura E. Hengehold
Case Western Reserve University

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