Introduction—The Subversion of Intellect

The relationship between Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst, and Michel Foucault, the historian, has often been characterized by incompatibility, if not hostility. Chapter 1 proposes a new departure for mapping points of convergence between their respective projects. Despite their differences, Lacan and Foucault shared a desire to formulate a discourse that would decenter the Western conception of the subject while retaining a critical purchase on the post-Kantian phenomenon known as subjectivity. The proposed framework examines this basic proximity through the lens of Foucault’s engagement with Kantian critique which I approach from the perspective of Lacanian discourse theory. Throughout his life, Foucault repeatedly returned to an encounter with Kant’s critical philosophy and came to distinguish between two opposing traditions of Kantian critique. Divided into two parts, Chapter 1 outlines the organizational structure of the book which follows from this split within the structure of Foucauldian critique. Part I, “The Hysteric’s Discourse”, covers the period from the early to mid-1970s in which Foucault conceives of critique along the anti-Kantian directives that Friedrich Nietzsche laid out in On the Genealogy of Morals (1881). I situate Foucault’s historical approach to critique within the problematic of a hysteric(al) questioning directed at Kant’s transcendental schema of knowledge. Part II, “The Analyst’s Discourse”, focuses on the period between 1979 and 1984 in which Foucault begins to understand his own work as a re-invention of the critique that Kant betrayed at the same time he conceived it. Foucault’s resumption of the critical project on a new basis and with new concepts provides an interpretive context for addressing the discursive passage from Hysteric to Analyst. In Part II, I interpret Foucault’s transformation of Kantianism through an immanent conception of critique that develops in contingency, to align with the position of the Analyst as a practitioner of the Symbolic function.