Author: Laura Hengehold File Type: pdf Late in life, Foucault identified with the critical tradition of Kant, encouraging us to read both thinkers in new ways. Grounding modern knowledge in the limits of human reason engendered highly successful forms of political, social-scientific, and medical rationality as well as Kants Copernican turn. These limits achieved a concrete, manageable form in historical structures like the asylum, prison, and the sexual or racial human body. Such institutions built upon and shaped the aesthetic judgment of those considered normal.Following Kant through all of Foucaults major works, this book shows how bodies functioned as problematic objects in which the limits of post-Enlightenment European power and discourse were imaginatively figured and unified. It suggests ways that readers in a neoliberal political order can detach from the imaginative schemes vested in their bodies and experiment normatively with their own security needs.ReviewBy examining Foucaults writings on Kant and the concept of aesthetic judgment in the work of both philosophers, Hengehold reveals compelling connections between these pivotal thinkers. Reading Foucault through Kant, she offers a serious challenge to critics who would dismiss Foucaults last works as a mere reduction of ethics to aesthetics. Hengeholds elegant prose and meticulous scholarship add interest and depth to a very original analysis. Every Foucault scholar needs to read this book. --Ladelle McWhorter, University of RichmondThis thought-provoking work on Foucault reads him against a Kantian background replacing transcendental critique with genealogical critique. Locating Kants critical standpoint in a resistance to being dominated by such problematic limits as a thing in itself and an infinite subject, Hengehold goes on to explore how Foucault treats madness, sexuality, and delinquency as individual embodied modes of resistance to the limit concepts of the body politic. This book will be of interest to readers in contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, feminism, critical theory and the social sciences. --Rudolf A. Makkreel, Emory University About the AuthorLaura Hengehold is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University.