I take the first point as given: that was the whole point of my play on
the word asylum - reason as generally being understood as a knowledge
free from power (i.e. without seizure), but in Foucault's analysis of
madness "reason becomes the asylum (actual institutional practice of
seizure) of the mind.
As for the second point, it seems to me that that might be over-complexifying things.
The way I see it, and this may actually be an over-simplification of things, and I could certainly be critisised for this, but it seems to me that Foucault simply took what was necessary and given in Kant and historicised it: i.e. turned it into a contingent and constitutive. That is, that what Kant took to be the necessary transcendental a priori of understanding, experience, etc., Foucault took to be thoroughly historicised forms of understanding, shot through with relations of power, and constitutive of possible fields of experience, of experiencing historically singular forms of subjectivity: mad, ill, order, crime, sexuality, and so on.
Regards - Kevin.
xavier delcourt wrote:
As for the second point, it seems to me that that might be over-complexifying things.
The way I see it, and this may actually be an over-simplification of things, and I could certainly be critisised for this, but it seems to me that Foucault simply took what was necessary and given in Kant and historicised it: i.e. turned it into a contingent and constitutive. That is, that what Kant took to be the necessary transcendental a priori of understanding, experience, etc., Foucault took to be thoroughly historicised forms of understanding, shot through with relations of power, and constitutive of possible fields of experience, of experiencing historically singular forms of subjectivity: mad, ill, order, crime, sexuality, and so on.
Regards - Kevin.
xavier delcourt wrote:
Thanks forFirstly
Secondly, nevertheless, there seems to be à light flaw in your translation of asylum: "a" is not the latin ablative (like in "a priori") but the greek privative (meaning "not" or "without"): although the modern sense of asylum, as an institution, does not obviously point to it, asylum is a place (generaly sacred) where there is not right of seizure, luckily.
As for the "historical a priori"(independant of or not given in experience, but appliable to any object of possible experience, universal and necessary), which, indeed, is central in the foucaldian definition of experience it poses some analytical questions too, as to how Foucault builds and applies a (several) rule(s) of transformation to the kantian a priori: does it relate to the (transcendantal) subject as such(constitutive of conditions and a little more), to the categories (concepts, conditions of objects, or representations), or to the forms of intuition -internal: time, or external: space-(conditions of apparition or presentations). Or/and does it relate to the synthetic a priori judgement (rule of construction of an object in experience or practice, ie synthesis between a concept, or a conceptuel determination, and an ensemble of "spatio-temporal"-i am not sure of the english equivalent- determinations, which allows a synthesis between -at least-two heterogeneous concepts)?
And these, of course, are just a beginning, staying within the first of the critics.