Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/5031

Title

A 'limit attitude': Foucault, autonomy, critique

Author(s)

Healy, Paul

Abstract

On Foucault's own telling, his distinctive approach to critique is to be characterized as a 'limit attitude'. Definitive of this limit attitude is a problematizing, transgressive style of thinking oriented toward challenging existing ways of being and doing, with a view to liberating new possibilities for advancing 'the undefined work of freedom'. From the outset, however, the efficacy of this problematizing approach to critique has been beset by doubts about the adequacy of its normative resources. In the present article, it is argued that progress can be made toward a productive resolution of this contested issue if adequate account is taken of both the Nietzschean and the Kantian dimensions of Foucault's thought. Specifically, it is argued that the balance between these potentially conflictual elements must be appropriately (re)negotiated, if the normative efficacy of Foucauldian critique is to be ensured, while its distinctive problematizing thrust is preserved. In defending this view, the Foucauldian concept of autonomy is seen to have a pivotal role to play both in advancing the task of problematization and, in its relation to intersubjectivity, in securing its normative efficacy. In thus vindicating the integrity of Foucault's distinctive approach to critique, new light is shed on the structure, dynamics and logic of a contemporary mode of inquiry committed to the problematizing exercise of critical reason.

Publication type

Journal article

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Life and Social Sciences

Source

History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2001), pp. 49-68

Publication year

2001

Keyword(s)

Autonomy;  Critique;  Intersubjectivity problematization;  Situatedness

Publisher

Sage Publications

ISSN

0952-6951

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/095269510101400103

Copyright

Copyright © 2001 Sage Publications.

Peer reviewed