Le Point de Capiton: Two Kantian Legacies

Chapter 5 , “Le Point de Capiton: Two Kantian Legacies”, sketches Foucault’s discursive passage from Hysteric to Analyst, drawing on the conceptual landscape that Lacan developed to give new rigor to the psychoanalytic account of language. Applying the Lacanian concept of the point de capiton (quilting point) and related notion of the ‘signifying chain’, I outline the retroactive logic of the determination of meaning as it figures in the act by which Foucault symbolizes his philosophical project of critique. I interpret Foucault’s repeated attempts to situate himself in relation to the symbolic economy of Kant’s critical philosophy as a key instance of ‘the slippage of signification’, refracted by the vector of changing subjective intentions. The identificatory signifier ‘Kant’ has a shifting and contingent signified in Foucault’s discourse with no stable referent. Drawing on the elementary cell of Lacan’s graph of desire, I present Foucault’s lecture course “The Government of Self and Others (1982–83)” as the site of chain’s punctuation: the retroactive moment when the signifier and signified form an attachment. Chapter 5 offers an account of how Foucault’s critical ontology symbolizes the contingent dimension of Kant’s transcendental legacy and realizes the symbolic by situating the question of enlightenment in a past and future signifying relation to the Real.