Abstract

I read Foucault’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” as his apology. Responding perhaps, to those who claim his work undermines Enlightenment thinking, Foucault sketches a way to continue that liberatory tradition, offering his own genealogical critique as an heir to Kant in the promotion of human freedom. This recovery is questionable. In commenting on Kant’s version of the Enlightenment, Foucault fails to examine the archaeology of the key notion of public reason. I attempt a Foucauldian reading of Kant’s essay as an assertion of power rather than of the freedom of thought from power, Foucault’s silence here makes conspicuous the relations of critique. This silence is not fatal, but his apology must be depended for a recovery of critique. The emerging aporia, that in order to criticize power we must first be invested by and implicated in it, is a profound, but not unanswerable, challenge to any contemporary attempt to retain the liberatory promise of Enlightenment thinking