Continental Philosophy Review 35: 135159, 2002.

2002 Kluwer
Academic Publishers.
Printed in the,Netherlands.
FOUCAULT
, EXISTENTIAL
PHENOMENOLOGY
AND THE KANTIAN IMAGINATION

135

In that sleep of death what dreams. . .:

Foucault, Existential Phenomenology, and the Kantian
Imagination
LAURA HENGEHOLD
Department of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106-7119,
USA (E-mail: leh7@po.cwru.edu)

Abstract. Although Foucaults early writings were strongly influenced by the discourse of
existential phenomenology, he later considered it an obstacle to a better understanding of social
and political power. This essay seeks to understand some of the reasons for his shift, specifically with respect to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Foucault diverges from existential phenomenology according to an alternative tendency within the Kantian inheritance
they both share: one which stresses the world-disruptive rather than the unifying or worlddisclosive power of transcendental imagination. Examining the role played by dreams and
death in Foucaults early introduction to Binswangers Dream and Existence allows us to situate his later analysis of the historical and political (rather than existential) meaning of death
with respect to larger philosophical currents.

During the 1970s and early 80s, Michel Foucault identified phenomenology and Marxism among the factors preventing thinkers of his generation from
formulating an adequate understanding of political and social power.1 Yet several of his earliest writings, including an introduction to Binswangers Dream
and Existence2 and his own Mental Illness and Psychology,3 were strongly
influenced by both discourses, and shortly before his death he referred to
Heidegger as crucial to his whole philosophical development.4 Analyses of
the phenomenological resonances in Foucaults accounts of power, history,
and selfhood have been so fruitful for readers that his later resistance to this
philosophical approach seems almost inexplicable. And yet I suggest that
Foucaults change of heart exploits an ambivalence toward imagination already latent in the Kantian tradition of transcendental and critical thought
Foucault shares, in many respects, with phenomenology.5 Taking a clue from
the fact that Dream, Imagination, and Existence presents itself (and reads
Binswanger approvingly) as contributing to an anthropology of the imagination, I argue that Foucault eventually became dissatisfied with the way in
which phenomenological and existential discourse subordinates the divisive
powers of imagination to anthropological understandings of worldhood,

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mortality, and embodiment that is, to an ahistorical understanding of what

makes people human.
The dream, which seems to fragment the individuals phenomenological
experience; the world, which Kant considered a mere regulative ideal from
the critical standpoint but a realm of collective human self-creation in his anthropological writings; and the being of man, which both supports and results
from this historical action, are the three terms linked in this early Foucauldian
problematic. Foucaults unpublished thse secondaire on Kants Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View6 presents the historical and anthropological
dimension the world as a necessary supplement to Kants transcendental
armature of moral and theoretical reason. In the world, the same man whose
being-in-himself is bracketed by critical philosophy can make something of
his faculties or give them ontological force through discussion and moral action
(IAK, p. 40). But in his earlier introduction to Binswangers Dream and Existence (1954), Foucault took the dream rather than waking experience as the
basis for understanding an individuals transcendence in and toward the world.
And Mental Illness and Psychology (1954/1962) situated the mentally disturbed individuals thrown (geworfen), limited, and apparently pathological
style of being-in-the world with respect to the meanings made available by a
specific historical culture. Thus the very same imaginative capacities that
enable individuals to form a world of meaningful significations, to participate
in shared experiences, and to understand themselves as human beings and
human in their manner of being (projecting, disclosing, comporting) can also
disrupt the worlds unity or become occasions for social exclusion and dehumanization.
Being and Time, the Heideggerian text most significant for Binswangers
existential psychiatry and Merleau-Pontys corporeal phenomenology, is governed by the attempt to conceive understanding, feeling, and action as elements
of a structural whole.7 This world is intersubjective insofar as being-in-theworld is always also being-with other Dasein. In Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics, Heidegger traces the worlds communal horizon to the discursivity of the Kantian understanding, which must apprehend beings from a
communicable standpoint.8 Only imagination, according to Kant, enables finite subjects to reflect upon their temporally given experience through communicable concepts of understanding and reason, as well as to anticipate
agreement with others regarding pleasing and exemplary forms of experience.
But imagination is also implicated in errors of reason attributing being to
regulative ideals such as the totality of beings (world), the determining cause
of all beings (God), and the subject of all experienced determinations (soul),
as well as in aesthetic/political disagreements regarding the forms which are

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to represent our common sense (sensus communis). Finally, according to

the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the idiosyncratic imaginative content of dreams and madness draws individuals away from the generality and objectivity of shared experience or gives rise to social division.9 These
problematic features of the Kantian imagination play a secondary role in
Heideggers appropriation, when they are mentioned at all.
Although Kant regards imagination as both a fundamental faculty of the
knowing subject and an observed capacity of man understood empirically
and historically, i.e., in his or her anthropological aspect, it is in empirical
disagreements over the forms and concepts characteristic of common sense
in the Critique of Judgment that he seems to set the stage for interaction between the transcendental and anthropological domains. In the practices of
artistic education, creation and criticism, Kant suggests, we recognize how
central imagination really is to the intersubjective quality of our everyday
experience. We also, albeit secondarily, give plastic form to our ideals of moral
progress. Kant regards history more as a scene of potential moral freedom than
as a condition of finitude. But his historical/ anthropological domain is one
in which imagination, by revealing harmonies between reason and feeling,
leads those faculties to transform human contingencies into a nature worthy
of peace or happiness.10 Thus Kant would presumably hold that imagination,
an ahistorical faculty, is presupposed by the analysis of cultural consensus
and change as well as by the subjects ability to bring synthetic temporal coherence to his or her experiences.
Existential phenomenologists follow Kant in contending that Dasein has
being only by virtue of its ability to engage with beings and other Dasein
organized meaningfully in the form of a world. They are suspicious of various attempts to reduce human existence to the present-at-hand object of
scientific study. Despite his debts to Heidegger and his resonances with
Merleau-Ponty, however, Foucault is suspicious of the worlds apparent wholeness and the bodys role in lending it a unifying horizon of possibility. Increasingly, he comes to regard the being of man as an illusion created
through overlapping discourses and social practices which take the body and
its comportment as their common aesthetic reference, rather than the ontological ground through which bodies and historical meanings are disclosed
and invested with significance.11 Although each of these thinkers interprets
imagination and its role in the constitution and analysis of experience
differently, therefore, it seems to me that Foucault generally seeks out
intersubjectively dispersive or disruptive aspects of the phenomena in which
Kant would have seen traces of imagination, while his phenomenological and
existentialist predecessors tend to emphasize aspects of these same phenom-

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ena reinforcing and accounting for temporal, historical, and intersubjective

unity.
The purpose of my paper is not to argue that the trajectory of Foucaults
career is unified by a single problematic nor that it is governed by Kant. Still
less do I intend to attribute monolithic uniformity to the phenomenological
or Heideggerian theses regarding man, imagination, or historicity which provoked Foucaults interest and critique at various points in his career.12 As we
will see, even Heideggers initial support for the idea that imagination is Kants
name for the root of mans temporally transcendent being eventually turns to
dissatisfaction with the way in which Kant subordinates historical time to the
spatial and implicitly picturing acts of the one who imagines.13 What interests me are the ways in which these thinkers, beginning with Kant, have
understood social phenomena, especially those that condition the affective
quality and duration of human life, as shaped (constitutively or peripherally),
by imagination and, sometimes, as giving rise to experiments in which these
phenomena are imaginatively reframed as historically contingent rather than
naturally or transcendentally given.14 Every act of apprehension made possible by transcendental imagination, Heidegger warns, is accompanied by an
equally fundamental concealment. To every appropriation of the historical past,
therefore, must correspond an equally imaginative critique of the limits of
historically disclosed and disclosing imagination. Kants critical methodology, as Foucault adopts it, must not deduce from the form of what we are
what it is impossible for us to do and to know, but . . . separate out, from the
contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being,
doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think (POT, p. 125). The necessary
standpoint for critical thought is not the whole, but the always-fragmenting
limit.15
1. Conflicts within and about Kantian imagination
In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger put forward the famous
thesis that transcendental imagination should have been the common root
linking understanding and sensibility (KPM, p. 95), although Kants concern
to identify pure thinking with the self-determining capacities of moral reason
eventually led him to privilege judgment over imagination as the paradigmatic act of human experience. Heideggers reading is oriented by Kants
stated desire to understand how metaphysics as science is possible such
that it might come to prosperous and fruitful growth unhindered by its own
internal contradictions or the skepticism of philosophers (CPR, B2224).16

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139

For Heidegger, the answer to this question hinges on an understanding of

the peculiarly imaginative nature of finite thought, which must both receive an external given (being unable to completely determine an object on
its own) and must cognize this given in a conceptual form, apprehending it
from one aspect or another and enabling that apprehension to be shared among
thinkers.
Is the Kantian imagination primarily a unifying power or is it more frequently a capacity tending towards the dissociation of thought and the demonstration of finitude? In the Critique of Pure Reason, imagination performs
both functions. In both editions, the transcendental schematism is responsible for synthesizing a manifold of experience on the basis of temporal determinations associated with the given. In the first edition, as Heidegger notes,
Kants deduction of the categories of judgment concerning experience traces
them to the fundamental structures through which an imaginative type of
thought anticipates the given in terms which both resemble the given in
being sensate (spatial) and resemble the interiority of conceptual thought
in having a temporal character (KPM, p. 91). On the other hand, Kants
claims regarding the perfection of reasons unity (see, for example, CPR,
Axiii) are also frustrated by the fact that reason is subject to natural and
unavoidable illusion which will not stop hoodwinking and thrusting reason incessantly into momentary aberrations that always need to be removed
(A298/B354355). And in the end, Kant admits that although he would like
to believe that the powers of the mind can be attributed to a single basic
power, in which imagination combined with consciousness can be identified with memory, ingenuity, discrimination, or perhaps even [the same as]
understanding and reason (A649/B677) such a desire has merely regulative rather than constitutive force (A682684/B710712). Thus Heideggers
unifying imagination, as Kerszberg and Henrich have observed, can be no
more than an image bestowing unity upon thought since the texts own
critical mandate prevents us from boiling faculties down to any common
root.17
Towards the end of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger suggests that the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason disastrously
reconfigured Kants conception of finite reason in terms of its capacity for
spontaneous moral personality rather than transcendental imaginative receptivity (KPM, pp. 116117). In a laying of the ground for metaphysics, he
protests, the specific finitude of human subjectivity is the problem. It cannot exist merely as a possible instance of a finite, rational creature in general coinciding with what was extracted in the course of the consideration
(p. 118).18 And thus he discovers that Kant was ultimately brought up short

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in his quest to discover a legitimate ground for metaphysics because he failed

to consider how the humanity of the thinker affects the nature of metaphysics. It is not a matter of searching for the answer to the question, what is
man, he points out. Rather, it is first of all a matter of asking how, in a
laying of the ground for metaphysics in general, we can and must have asked
about man exclusively (p. 146). The three questions from Kants Logic:
(1) what can I know? (2) what ought I to do? (3) what may I hope? are not
linked to the fourth: what is man? as three equally fundamental expressions
of the same finitude which is expressed in human self-ignorance.19 Rather, it
is only because these three questions seek to define the nature of finitude
that they enable Kant to venture an understanding of man. To ask about the
finitude in man, Heidegger concludes, is not to ask an anthropological
question, but to mark the limit where philosophical anthropology exceeds
its own regional status and begs to be transformed into fundamental ontology (p. 148).
Why did Kant not ask this question, which would have enabled him to
understand how imagination itself was the transcendental ground for human
transcendence, its metaphysical engagement with externality? Was it because
of his background interest in developing a morality appropriate to any finite, rational creature? Or was it because of his critical commitment to
abstain from identifying any single power of thought as the ground of human transcendence, his distrust of that very same imaginative reason whose
sensuousness Heidegger extols, his ambivalence, in the long run, as to the
features which identify finite thought as human? In fact, both projects are
indissociable: it is through critical liberation from idiosyncratic and conflictual dogmatisms that Kant imagines us becoming more aesthetically and
morally attuned to the universal elements of human experience and action
through which we could both recognize ourselves as rational beings and a
distinct anthropological genre. But since the cultural and moral practices
through which we recognize one another as human do not cease to have
a specific form even if they are universally acknowledged, there remains an
anthropological paralogism at the heart of Kants social and historical
thought.
2. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: embodied finitude
Heidegger stresses Kants interest in laying . . . the groundwork for metaphysics, because he considers this to be one way of attempting fundamental
ontology (KPM, p. 1).20 In the 1929 essay What is Metaphysics? more-

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over, Heidegger identifies metaphysics as inquiry beyond or over beings

which aims to recover them as such and as a whole [im Ganzen] for our grasp,
an inquiry which forces us to ask why are there beings at all, and why not
rather nothing?.21 The question of the nothing [das Nichts], by which we
recognize the significance of the being of whatever there is, and its relationship to and distinction from whatever we are, puts us, the questioners, in
question (WIM, p. 109). Hence, the question of the nothing into which
human existence holds itself in apprehending beings is one which forces us
to ask how the peculiar being of man is implicated in, or even defines, the
possibility of metaphysics.
Significantly, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger describes
Kants transcendental imagination as a faculty which shapes the nothing.
In order for something to be given to finite thought, finite thought must
assume the likely form of a given object. For such objects to stand out as
something rather than nothing, the structures of thought must stage a
contrast between the being of the given and its absence; between the apprehending consciousness and its pure forms of intuition, on the one hand, and
any possible object, on the other. [W]hat is it that we, from out of ourselves,
allow to stand-against? It cannot be a being. But if not a being, then just a
nothing [ein Nichts]. Only if the letting-stand against of . . . is a holding oneself in the nothing can the representing allow a not-nothing [ein nicht-Nichts],
i.e., something like a being if such a thing shows itself empirically, to be encountered instead of and within the nothing (KPM, p. 49). The pure forms
of intuition are the armature or bodily grammar for this stylized act. Heidegger
explains: This look-forming [Anblickbilden] in the pure image [Bilde] of time
. . . always is in advance, prior to any possible [experience] (p. 90). By shaping
the form in which the Nothing will receive a given object and call our attention to its presence (by receding), productive imagination places us in contact with what is Other.
Finally, and most importantly, the look offered to the given is unified in
advance by the pure concepts of the understanding, and ultimately by the Ideas
of reason. As a totality, the understanding gives in advance that which is
contrary to the haphazard. Representing unity originally, namely, as unifying,
it represents to itself a connectedness which in advance rules all possible gathering together (KPM, p. 50). The possibility that imaginative thought has
equally strong tendencies towards dispersion, distraction, and dissociation is
never considered; the finitude of our thought, which prevents us from grasping the given wholly in itself, nevertheless is compelled to represent that given
as a unity, and counts the unity of the given as proof of its reality. Only in
the openness that it the representing unity as such is, in opposition to which

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the unifying unity as regulating has been set, can this representing come to
meet something (p. 53).
The unification of the object (or experience in general) against the backdrop of an imaginatively shaped Nothing in Heideggers reading of Kant is
structurally analogous to the way in which Daseins being-in-the-world is
unified by its anticipation of death in Being and Time. Although death is a
bodily event, Heidegger regards the specific contours of bodily existence as
ontologically secondary to the fact that our being-in-the-world is fundamentally temporal.22 This is not to say that Heidegger neglects the spatiality of
being-in; Being and Time elaborates Daseins spatial character in terms of our
subjection to moods and our capacity for desevering ourselves from worldly
objects of varying ontological status coffee cups, ideas, practices, other instances of Dasein.23
For Heidegger, the space of outer intuition is only a formal abstraction from
the spatiality of Dasein. For Dasein to be in the world is not for it to be located
inside of a space as an object is located within a container (BT, pp. 7981).
Daseins being-in precedes the space in which objects are found, and Daseins
spatial relationship to those objects is not determined in the first instance
by extension but through use-purposes. Being-in is characterized both by
thrownness [Geworfenheit], a constitutive limitation of possibilities, and by
the possibilities which remain and delimit a possible arena for thought and
action (p. 174). Mood [Stimmung] and deseverance [Ent-fernung] exhibit each
of these traits. Mood, a fundamental affective tone, characterizes all of our
states of being and orients us within a field of possible projects. Even the lack
of a mood or resistance to a mood, Heidegger argues, involve moods of their
own; affective attunement, therefore, is the most basic way in which we experience our inability to escape a situation or, more correctly, our inability
to escape situatedness (pp. 172174). Mood is not a content, mixing and being schematized among others in inner sense; mood is in some way a part of
the pure form of time itself (in Kantian terms) whose determinations enable that schematization, with its bodily references, to occur. In other words,
worldhood, as a context of possible involvements, precedes the distinction
between inside and outside which is necessary for the schematization of a sense
henceforth determined as inner.
The fact that Daseins spatial relationship to other things is only rarely
thematized as a matter of extension or measurable distance and more frequently
arises from useful interests, however, is what allows Dasein to move or desever
within the confines of its own situatedness (pp. 138139). Circumspection, a
sense of the concepts, gestures, and practical wherewithal needed if action or
thought are to proceed, first delimits the place [Platz] of objects in relation to

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one another (likewise, the relationship which concepts have to one another in
the logical space of a discourse). The relative place of entities in relation to
an intention or project precedes any conception of their measurable relations
in that space which is open to measurement but does not exhaust Daseins spatial possibilities. If Daseins spatiality is not limited to the relations of extension which it can hold with other extended things (relations which presuppose
a particular relation between the body and its similarly material environment),
it can be seen to involve the peculiar spatial relationship which thought holds
with abstractions or fantasies as well as the bodys relation to those same
abstractions and fantasies. Heidegger alludes to this possibility when he speaks
of regions [Gegenden] of being, toward which we are oriented through our
circumspection (pp. 136137).
Merleau-Ponty explicitly identifies the unity of the world and our capacity
to dwell therein with the unity of the body, its capacities for action, and its
mortality. Although the varying senses may have their own discrete spatialities,
these disclose a singular and coherent experience. According to Phenomenology of Perception (1945), which draws upon Heideggerian phenomenology
(especially in its treatment of time), lived or motor space, despite the fact
that it is perspectivally limited and situated, precedes and exceeds the infinite
intellectual space of objective measurement (pp. 98-147).24 Motor space
is the spatiality of a being whose engagement of possibilities is fundamentally bodily, and whose body is more than a mere object of transcendental or
medical thought, but encompasses the situation within which transcendental
reflection and empirical research can be conducted. Motor space is not uniform, consisting as it does of the congruence of many sensory spaces with
distinct perceptual styles, yet, ultimately, it is unified by the horizon of a
single world of possibilities. It is neither contradictory nor impossible, he
writes, that each sense should constitute a small world within the larger one,
and it is even in virtue of its peculiarity that it is necessary to the whole and
opens upon the whole . . . the spaces peculiar to the senses become concrete
moments of a comprehensive configuration which is the one and only space
[espace unique] (p. 222). By contrast to this unity, which Merleau-Ponty conceives as perceptual and not imaginative (although he refers to the body as a
schematism), explicit acts of imagination such as dreaming and madness stand
out by virtue of their incomplete, fragmentary character.
No object, whether actual or imaginary, can be isolated from its surroundings except on the basis of habitual involvement in a situation. For MerleauPonty, this involvement is held together at its margins by the presumptive unity
of the body and its perceptual synthesis: To have a body is to possess a universal setting, a schema [typique] of all types of perceptual unfolding and of

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all those inter-sensory correspondences which lie beyond the segment of the
world which we are actually perceiving (p. 326). For Heidegger, this involvement is unified in light of that ownmost possibility which individuates the
thinker and actor as such: death, which is not the death of the body, but which
arrives through the body (BT, pp. 284285).25 Heideggers world is not fragmentary, though regions of being may be distinguished from one another and
objects disclosed or left to fall into shadow in the course of circumspection
and practice. But Heidegger, unlike Merleau-Ponty, seems aware that this unity,
and the presumed unity of the perceptual synthesis, is brought about in light
of a possible fragmentation which is itself a failure of the body.
3. Dream and Existence
Foucaults 1952 Introduction to Binswangers Dream and Existence retains
the Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontyan idea that we are projected into the
world on the basis of a finite mode of thinking which understands itself best
in temporal terms as being-towards-death.26 Foucaults essay begins with a
reflection on the relation of anthropology to the transcendental structure of
Dasein, and views Binswanger as contributing in a crucial way to an anthropology of the imagination requiring a new definition of the relations between
meaning and symbol, between image and expression in short, a new way of
conceiving how meanings are manifested (DIE, p. 33). By contrast to most
writers in the phenomenological tradition, Binswanger is willing to grant the
dream status as a form of experience in its own right, whose lacunae contribute to the perceptual worlds capacity for meaning.27
However, for Binswanger, not only is the dream a genuine form of experience, involving inexhaustible horizons and proto-bodily orientations; it also
indicates a unique and important relationship between imagination and the
genesis of sense in the perceptual world. If the dream has meaning, it is because of and not despite the poverty of its objective content (DIE, p. 44); in
dreams, elements of an individuals experience are first detached from the
world of general public significations and become symbols with existential
significance enabling the waking world to be taken as a whole with a particular style (this is especially obvious in the case of symbols expressing the structure of a psychologically troubled individuals finitude).28 The dream serves
as a possible horizon for an anthropological understanding of Dasein because
its content points to man as transcended being (p. 45) whose possibilities,
despite the limitations of thrownness, exceed any particular medical understanding of psychic health. The peculiar spatiality of Being-in-the-world,

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which is neither inside nor outside any spatial realm but can only be understood in relation to the potential contingency of existence itself, is primordially expressed in the perspectival indistinction of dreaming (p. 48). Finally,
and most provocatively, Foucault proposes that the dream, whose selective
imagery expresses the dreamers particular history and aspirations, brings him
or her to that solitude and confrontation with mortality that enable freedom,
responsibility, and value to characterize his or her waking actions. What
constitutes the idios kosmos of the dreamer is not the absence of perceptual
contents but their elaboration into an isolated universe (p. 51).
Binswanger, therefore, does not assume that the world is paradigmatically
perceptual and only secondarily imaginative. In Phenomenology of Perception, to be sure, dreaming expresses an individuals relation to possibilities
in-the-world which are fundamentally corporeal. But the spatiality of MerleauPontys dream is secondary to and contained within the spatiality of the
sleeping body and its residual sensory awareness. It represents a reduction
of possibilities similar to those of the hysterical symptom, and it expresses as
a symptom expresses. We remain free in relation to sleep and sickness,
Merleau-Ponty explicitly states, to the exact extent to which we remain always involved in the waking and healthy state (PP, p. 164). Dreaming is expressive because it articulates the anonymous relation of embodiment to a
shared world whose horizon is open (p. 169). In Foucaults early engagement
with existential phenomenology, by contrast, the dream is that space in which
the possible fragmentation or disruption of death first reveals or assembles
the body as a locus of meaning. To be in the world is to dream, and thus constantly to be in transition among fragmentary spaces, with a body that is neither fully sensory nor fully imaginative. Where Kant gave cognitive/social
importance to aesthetic experiences that attune individuals to one anothers
tastes, Foucault (even more than Binswanger) attributes ontological and existential significance to a movement of imagination which pulls the dreamer
away from generality and the shared world of perception in order to make these
cognitive and sensory elements meaningful.
4. The Order of Things
Imaginative finite reason, according to Heideggers reading of Kant, does not
simply shape the horizon of transcendence in such a way that a unified experience of the world results for an individual thinker. The structures of opposition, contrast, and conceptual determination which constitute Kants
imaginative understanding also implicitly lend a temporal style or look

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to the community which that thinker shares with others. Insofar as imagination is a condition of knowledge as well as experience, it is a condition for
the communicability of that experience:
The intuited is only a known being if everyone can make it understandable
to oneself and to others and can thereby communicate it. So, for example,
this intuited particular this piece of chalk must allow itself to be determined as chalk, or rather as a body. In this way, we are able jointly to know
this being as the same for all of us. (KPM, p. 18)
As Kant himself was later to argue in the Critique of Judgment (1790), imagination itself has a public character or is predisposed to receive the given
in such a way that it is potentially communicable. The aptitude that human
beings have for communicating their thoughts to one another, Kant writes,
also requires that imagination and understanding be related in such a way
that concepts can be provided with accompanying intuitions, and intuitions
in turn with accompanying concepts, these intuitions and concepts joining to
[form] cognition.29 Thus the distinction between the privacy or fragmentary
nature of the dream and the publicity of the perceptual and intersubjectively
understood world might ultimately come down to the difference between
two aspects of the imagination. On the other hand, Heidegger reads the imagination as forming both the public given and its private variants through
purely temporal determinations which gather the manifold of (communicable, publicly perceptible) experience together with the private contents of inner
sense to form an infinitely self-enfolding whole. But the realization that imaginatively synthesized experience has a public character lends an inescapably spatial dimension to the Kantian imagination even in Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics.
The deseverant and mood-governed spatiality of Dasein seems to give equal
weight to the fragmentary spaces of thought, pure imagination, discourse,
and everyday practice. For Heidegger, the body is simply the enactment of
deseverant being-in and being-with. Merleau-Pontys understanding of bodily being-in-the-world is more concrete and tries to grant existential significance to the specific details of our biological makeup. Both deseverant
being-in and bodily transcendence have an irreducibly historical character
and situate us in a common world with others. But neither thinker accounts
for the sorts of sexual, economic, and cultural tensions and fascinations that
pervade political life and are often bound up with learned reactions to certain kinds of bodies. In other words, neither treats the specificity of our
embodiment as a historical product in addition to a natural horizon for
unifying transcendence.30

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147

In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that man and his body are both
historical constructs taking their significance from a particular arrangement
of modern discursive practices (OT, pp. 314315). Far from being the ontological basis for our insertion into a common destiny, in fact, Foucault suggests that the body is itself the imaginative construct through which our destiny
becomes common or is privatized in modern societies. No longer the transcendental horizon of temporal synthesis, moreover, death becomes a figure through which Western societies represent the relation between the privacy
and obscurity of the more-or-less outcast and the life of the communal world.
From Hlderlins Empedocles to Nietzches Zarathustra and on to Freudian man, an obstinate relation to death prescribes to the universal its singular face, and lends to each individual the power of being heard forever.31 And
life that which is gathered by the temporal synthesis becomes the object
of political techniques shaping the imaginative look or style of the public
space.
In the chapter entitled Man and His Doubles, Foucault suggests that
whether or not Kants attempt to ground metaphysics specialis would have,
as Heidegger argued, required him to reopen the question of metaphysics generalis and undertake a fundamental ontology of mans peculiarly finite being, in fact modernity developed something like a new metaphysics specialis
by invoking life, labor, and language as the positive content of that finitude
(OT, pp. 314316). These quasi-transcendentals are both the grounds by
reference to which social and biological phenomena are rendered intelligible
and the conditions which account for our inability to comprehend and master
such phenomena wholly in our scientific and social practices (pp. 244, 363
364). Moreover, he adds that this new metaphysics is not the result of a
modern refusal to consider mans being out of fascination with his anthropological determinations, but rather arises concomitantly with him. [T]he end
of metaphysics [in the pre-Kantian sense] is only the negative side of a much
more complex event in Western thought, Foucault writes.
This event is the appearance of man. However, it must not be supposed that
he suddenly appeared upon our horizon, imposing the brutal fact of his body,
his labor, and his language in a manner so irruptive as to be absolutely baffling to our reflection. It is not the positive misery [la misre positive] of
man that reduced the space of metaphysics so violently . . . Though it is
true, at the level of the various branches of knowledge, that finitude is always designated on the basis of man as a concrete being and on the basis
of the empirical forms that can be assigned to his existence, nevertheless,
at the archeological level, which reveals the general, historical a priori of
each of those branches of knowledge, modern man that man assignable

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in his corporeal, labouring, and speaking existence is possible only as a

figuration of finitude [qu titre de figure de la finitude]. (OT, pp. 317318,
translation slightly altered)
In other words, (to borrow a term from Foucaults later work), life, labor,
and language, the modes of human living and dying within the world, are
figures employed by modern societies in order to problematize the finitude
of thought by giving it an imaginative form. Between the pure standpoint of
transcendental reflection and the attempts to generate actual knowledge concerning the one who knows, to extend his or her political, biological, and economic life on the basis of that reflection, exists a complex and indissociable
relationship (Foucault refers to life, labor, and language as contents which
provoke transcendental reflection (OT, p. 319)). The concepts and practices
presupposed by discourses which give finite knowers to themselves as objects
of knowledge come to seem as timeless and self-evident as the very idea of
finitude, even though they formed a common epistemological space only when
linked by the fundamental presupposition of finitude. The unique being of man,
far from being the unexamined starting point for Kants inquiry in The Critique of Pure Reason, turns out to be a dream object distracting us from the
very real disunity of social spaces and practices. And so we find philosophy
falling asleep once more in the hollow of this Fold opened by Kantian thought
between the empirical and the transcendental; this time not the sleep of dogmatism, but that of anthropology. (p. 341).32 The anthropological slumber
arises from the presupposition that the solution to Kants search for a unity to
reason lies in the being of man as opposed to the being of the discursive practices which employ man as their common reference point and anchor us in
a common world. We are wrong, in other words, to take the imaginative
forms of finitude for things-in-themselves.
But here, Foucault is also extraordinarily close to Heideggers later critique
of his own early conception of Kantian imagination as a kind of ground enabling us to generate a picture of ourselves or project us into a world already
conceived as picture that is, as representation.33 In the modern age man
becomes subject, Heidegger writes in Age of the World Picture, and conceives of human thought as representing beings in language rather than as being
drawn by language into a disclosive relationship which, in fact, is the process
through which beings come to be. (AWP, p. 128). This means that man becomes recognized first and foremost as one who represents [Vorstellt], and ascertains the significance of beings on the basis of their ability to be represented
or to participate in a world view [Weltanschauung] (pp. 131134). The world
as horizon for all representing (not to mention the myriad other ways in which

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we might engage with beings) is erroneously reduced to a picture of the world;

a totality is substituted for the whole. Man is the name for the one who
thus reduces being to the representability of beings.
Heidegger distinguishes modern representational man and his world from
that of the medievals or ancients insofar as previous ages considered experience to result from an external demand, human passivity before or at least
coperception with the given, rather than an active synthesis and representation
of objects. Man is the one who is looked upon by that which is, Heidegger
writes; he is the one who is in company with itself gathered toward
presencing, by that which opens itself (AWP, p. 131). Representing does not
involve an openness of the one who sees and the one who is seen, but brings
what is present at hand [das Vorhandene] before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force
it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm.
Wherever this happens, man gets into the picture [setzt . . . sich ins Bild]
in precedence over what is. But in that man puts himself into the picture in
this way, he puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that
which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets himself
up as the setting [Szene] in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth,
must present itself [sich . . . prsentieren], i.e., be picture . . . Now for the
first time is there any such thing as a position of man. (AWP, pp. 131
132)
But only with the establishment of a totality of interwoven representations in
which the historical, natural, and spiritual whole enabling those representations to arise is lost or forgotten can we also counterpose the present age
and its world view to a past age; the world picture does not change from an
earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age [der
Neuzeit] (p. 130).34 Considerations of human historicity arise concomitantly
with the attempt to picture man as the embodied, speaking, laboring subject of representations. Moreover, history is also a way of picturing, supported
by specialized discourses as well as everyday practices of remembrance and
anticipation.
5. From the idios kosmos to spaces that resist synthesis
What I would like to argue is that Foucaults identification of dreams, fragmentary forms of experience, as the primary form of imaginative finite rea-

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son in his Binswanger essay already points towards a potentially antiphenomenological use of the Kantian imagination, i.e., the transcendent and
synthetic capacity of finite thought. But to understand why Foucault believed
that the spatial aspects of imaginative synthesis could lead to a better understanding of political and social power than focus on the process of temporal
determination, it may be necessary to look at Kants treatment of imagination in the Critique of Judgment rather than the first Critique. Inasmuch as
imagination is one of the faculties whose harmony or dissonance is at stake
in aesthetic judgments concerning the beautiful, sublime, charming, or incommunicable and unpleasant, imagination is implicated in the look of the public
space and the degree to which its participants possess common tastes or dispute with one another. Judgments concerning beauty indicate the conditions
under which imagination varies forms in a lawful manner guided by understanding in the absence of a particular concept; judgments of sublimity indicate the conditions under which imagination provokes reason to think the
unpresentable but fails to provide the thinker with an adequate image for the
whole. Like beauty, sublime aesthetic experience is an occasion for the exercise of a subjectively universal judgment making reference to a sensus communis (even if, in either case, such a judgment actually turns out to conflict
with the judgments of others).
Experience teaches us that the taste of reflection, with its claim that its judgment (about the beautiful) is universally valid for everyone, is also rejected
often enough . . . [but] What the people who make these judgments dispute
about is not whether such a claim is possible; they are merely unable to
agree, in particular cases, on the correct way to apply this ability. (CJ, p.
214; see also p. 338)
A sublime experience, on the other hand, relates the pure public horizon
for the communicability of experience to imaginative finite reasons desire
for commensurability between thought and experience; in short, for unity to
the world (p. 265, see also p. 292).35
If the spatiality of Dasein and Merleau-Pontys embodied being-in-the
world enables us to disclose and receive beings, it is because that space of disclosure is unified in advance by the Nothing the possibility of nothing appearing, as in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, or of there no longer being
possibilities for Dasein, as in Being and Time. However, the Critique of Judgment suggests that the imagination which underlies the unifying functions of
understanding and reason in Heideggers reading of the first Critique is also
always at stake in a conflicted sensus communis. In other words, the kind of
form which provokes a judgment of beauty or sublimity (a form which is not

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151

yet an object, since it is apprehended in partial or complete abstraction from

determining concepts (CJ, pp. 279281)) constitutes something like a pure
form of intuition through which thinkers are brought together and/or isolated
and individuated from one another. The aesthetic forms which constutite this
anticipatory look are not spatializing because they assume a plastic form,
but spatializing insofar as they disclose forms in such a way as to link us with
other thinkers and actors who are both concealed from us and revealed to us
in actual debates regarding taste.
For Foucault, the priority of space architectural, bodily, discursive, and
imaginative space over time as paradigmatic form of intuition even in his
approach to history signifies an effort to reorient critique away from the
finitude of subjective interiority, and to reconceptualize it in terms of a finitude
proper to exteriorization.36 Foucault sees a political imperative behind the turn
to questions of space, questions which do not rule out historical analysis but
no longer require history to take place in the common time of a universal
subject:
For all those who confuse history with the old schemas of evolution, living continuity, organic development, the progress of consciousness or the
project of existence, the use of spatial terms seems to have the air of an antihistory. If one started to talk in terms of space that meant one was hostile
to time . . . They didnt understand that to trace the forms of implantation,
delimitation and demarcation of objects, the modes of tabulation, the organization of domains meant the throwing into relief of processes historical ones, needless to say of power.37
In Birth of the Clinic (1963) and in the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1976), however, Foucault had already argued that biological human existence only came into being as an object/problem once certain historical
transformations in the methods of medicine had taken place.38 Thus man and
his death are not ontologically fundamental, but only become problems for
philosophical thought insofar as they are shaped by historical practices and
discourses. Only Bichats reconceptualization of medical pathology in relation to the conditions under which an organ system or organism ceased to
function, conditions discovered through the methods of autopsy and dissection, for example, enabled the needs of biological human existence to be defined as objects of medical approval and political demand (BC, chapter 8). In
his later study of the transition from the analysis of wealth to modern political economy, Foucault also stressed the way in which the conceptual unity of
this region of being economic activity was achieved by grounding value
in the time of the laboring beings struggle against death. Homo oeconomicus

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is not the human being, he writes, who represents his own needs to himself, and the objects capable of satisfying them; he is the human being who
spends, wears out, and wastes his life in evading the imminence of death (OT,
p. 257). Likewise, only the cessation of regular famines and plagues during
the early 17th century enabled Europes absolutist monarchs to set about
making the life of its subject populations historical, in the sense that new
methods of governance enabled its health and size to be consciously improved,
cultivated, and shaped.39 The social and political distribution of violence,
health, and opportunity assign some to different deaths than others. They are
implicated in the way death individualizes Dasein and shapes the body whose
presumed unity expresses the wholeness of the world.
Thus Foucaults gradual distance from phenomenology reflects the increasing importance of the politically divisive tastes and disciplinary tactics which
Kants later writings on imagination help us to explain, rather than to the
interiorizing, existential aspects of imagination aspects which may or may
not have been treated adequately in Kants first Critique. Ultimately, the question What is Aufklrung? serves Foucault as a historical opening through
which the historicity of contemporary being may be interrogated in much the
same way that the Aristotelian question concerning being serves Heidegger
as a standpoint from which to question our contemporary understanding of
historical possibilities. Foucaults insistence in early essays that the fragmentary space of the dream is ontologically prior to our being-in-the (perceptual,
historical) world suggests that the unity of this world, revealed against the
backdrop of death, is historically the product of conflicting intellectual and
social disciplines which have their own spatiality and whose temporality is
fundamentally disjointed. Thus, although initially committed to an anthropology of the imagination, the path lies open for him to claim in later texts
that man only appears in the intersection of these domains as a problematic or potentially hallucinatory object. Foucaults directive in The Order
of Things is to investigate the being of discursive practices through which
fragmentary spaces are sutured into an effective whole by reference to the
biological, bodily being of man, rather than to ground thought in the being
of man in himself.
Such an emphasis on the potentially discordant and internally conflicted
nature of the Kantian imagination reflects the critical thrust of Kants work
rather than Kants self-proclaimed goal of providing a secure ground for
metaphysics. The imagination which produces a pure public horizon for experience by schematizing the normal, human body is one which both
threatens to dissociate and promises unity to thought. In short, it is a heterotopic imagination, a non-place or battle-zone.40

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Notes
1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

See, notably, Gerard Raulet, Structuralism and poststructuralism: An interview with

Michel Foucault trans. Jeremy Harding, Telos 55 (Spring, 1983): 195211 (hereafter
cited as SPS) and Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R.
James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).
Michel Foucault, Dream, Imagination, and Existence, trans. Forrest Williams, ed. Keith
Hoeller. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, special issue 19/1 (1986): 29
78. Hereafter cited as DIE.
Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan. (New York: Harper
and Row, 1976). This text is a translation of the second edition (Maladie Mentale et
Psychologie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962]), heavily revised by the author. Although both versions attempt to analyse mental illness as a experience revealing
contradictions within the social world, later chapters of the first edition (1954) were heavily influenced by Pavlovian psychology, presumably because of its significance to French
psychologists working in the Marxist stream during the 1950s.
Michel Foucault, The Return of Morality, in Foucault Live (Interviews: 19661984),
trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylvre Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 326; see
also Truth, Power, Self: An Interview in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988): 915.
For a compatible perspective on the role of imagination in Foucaults retrieval of Kant
and its difference from the Heideggerian retrieval, see Ben Pryor, Counter-Remembering the Enlightenment, Philosophy Today (SPEP Supplement, 1998): 147159. Pryor
argues that Foucaults transvaluation of the Enlightenment or refusal of the blackmail
of belonging to the Enlightenment is made possible by Heideggers emphasis on the transcendental power of imagination rather than reason, even though Foucault refuses to take
this opening in an ontological direction. See also Stephen Crocker, The Fission of
Time: On the Distinction Between Intratemporality and the Event of Time in Kant,
Heidegger, and Foucault, International Studies in Philosophy 29(2) (1997): 122.
Introduction lAnthropologie de Kant: Thse Complementaire Pour le Doctorat es
Lettres (1961) is available in typescript as document D60 (1/2) at the Centre Michel
Foucault, lIMEC, Paris; hereafter cited as IAK. This text is discussed extensively by
Batrice Han, in LOntologie Manque de Michel Foucault (Grenoble: ditions Jrome
Millon, 1998): 3565; and Mariapaola Fimiani, Foucault et Kant: Critique Clinique
thique, trans. into French from the Italian by Nadine le Lirzin (Paris: LHarmattan,
1998): 95115. Lectures on the meaning of Enlightenment include Quest-ce que les
Lumires?, What is Enlightenment? the presentation to the Socit Franaise de la
Philosophie entitled Quest-ce que la critique? collected in The Politics of Truth,
ed. Sylvre Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997) hereafter
cited as POT; as well as SPS and The Subject and Power, appendix to Hubert Dreyfus
and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, second
edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), hereafter cited as BSH.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper and Row, 1962): cited hereafter as BT; Alphonso Lingis, The World as a
Whole, in From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, ed. Babette Babich
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995): 601; cited hereafter as WW.

154
8.

9.

10.
11.

12.

13.

LAURA HENGEHOLD

Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th Edition, enlarged, trans.
Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990): 18; cited hereafter as
KPM.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle
Dowdell, with an Introduction by Frederick P. Van de Pitte (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press): 8183, 108118; Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin:
Kniglich Preuische Akademie der Wissenchaften, Walter de Gruyter, 1968): vol 7, 189
191, 212220.
Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989): 185.
John Rajchman provides a brief comparison of Heideggers conception of finitude in
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and Foucaults critique of the episteme which gives
rise to the question What is Man? in The Order of Things. Rather than attempting to
provide an analysis for finitude, Rajchman glosses, philosophy should ask through what
historical practices finitude came to constitute a problem. Instead of being an occasion for fundamental ontology, finitude should be the starting point for a historical analysis. Instead of asking about our fundamental relation to the world, the body, the
other and so forth, one should ask how those relations became problematic enough to
require a philosophical analysis in the first place (Michel Foucault: The Freedom of
Philosophy [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985]: 112).
See Sam Ijsseling, Foucault with Heidegger, Man and World 19/4 (1986): 413424;
Arion Kelkel, La fin de lhomme et le destin de la pense: la mutation anthropologique
de la philosophie de M. Heidegger et M. Foucault, Man and World 18/1 (1985): 337,
and Jean Zoungrana, Michel Foucault: Un Parcours Crois: Lvi-Strauss, Heidegger
(Paris: LHarmattan, 1998). Ijsslings article provides a chronology of Foucaults involvement with Heideggerian themes; Zoungrana offers a detailed study of his biographical and textual encounters with the penseur de la Fort-Noire, including a brief
history of Heideggers French reception. In Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
(pp. 5057) Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow note Foucaults explicit refusal to consider the meaning of the statements he describes or to take background practices or
subjective intentions into consideration when identifying systems of statements. Although this prevents archaeology and genealogy from being hermeneutic, they still view
these techniques as essentially interpretive (BSH, p. 124). In a later essay Dreyfus
argues that Foucault and later Heidegger are both hermeneutic in their desire to
uncover the historical sources of contemporary self-understandings without reference
to the intentions of individuals, though Heideggers hermeneutic of suspicion is oriented by distaste for the technological mode of presencing and Foucaults is explicitly open ended, to be appropriated by various political orientations. See Hubert Dreyfus,
Beyond Hermeneutics: Interpretation in late Heidegger and Recent Foucault, in
Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst:
Univsrsity of Massachusetts Press, 1984). Hill reads Foucaults archeological works
as an attempt to historicize hermeneutic approaches to selfhood as contingent philosophical/cultural practices; see R. Kevin Hill, Foucaults Critique of Heidegger,
Philosophy Today (winter 1989): 334341.
Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977);
hereafter cited as AWP.

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14. For example: I wanted to see how these problems of constitution [structural or transcendental] could be resolved within a historical framework, instead of referring them
back to a constituent object (madness, criminality, or whatever). But this historical
contextualization needed to be something more than the simple relativization of the
phenomenological subject. I dont believe the problem can be solved by historicizing
the subject as posited by the phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through
the course of history. One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the
subject itself, thats to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. Michel Foucault, Truth and Power,
trans. Colin Gordon, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980): 117.
15. However, Heidegger also made reference to the simultaneously revealing and concealing character of that temporal anticipation and unification which make finite intuition
possible. The original imaginative shaping of time as a sequence of nows Kants
transcendental schematism serves as the first standard or measure against which
the capacity of concepts to truthfully represent intuitions or to misrepresent them
through error and illusion are determined. To this ontological truth engaged by the
transcendental imagination, however, there also corresponds a primordial concealment of the beings that show themselves within time. It is to this distinction between
beings insofar as they are solicited and framed by transcendental imagination (as well
as apperception and reason), and beings insofar as they might appear otherwise to a
differently constituted finite thinker or an infinite understanding, that the classic Kantian
distinction between appearances and things in themselves refers. But what also seems
clear is that the constitutive role of the imagination tends to disappear from the appearances which are taken up by the understanding; thought fails to recognize its
own imaginative character, the a priori ontological knowledge making experience
of objects possible, and the horizon of ontological truth rendering judgment capable
of truth or illusion. In revealing and concealing, in other words, the imagination reveals and conceals itself.
16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, unified edition, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996): B2224. Hereafter cited as CPR with reference to the pagination of B (1787) or A (1781) editions, as found in volumes 3 or 4 respectively of the
standard edition of Kants works, Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Kniglich
Preuische Akademie der Wissenchaften, Walter de Gruyter, 1968).
17. Pierre Kerszberg, Critique and Totality (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997); Dieter Henrich, On the Unity of Subjectivity, in The Unity of Reason: Essays
on Kants Philosophy, ed. Richard L. Velkley, trans. Guenter Zoeller (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1994): 1754.
18. To human finitude, he continues, belongs sensibility, meaning the intuition which
takes things in stride. As pure intuition, i.e., pure sensibility, it is a necessary element
in the structure of transcendence which distinguishes finitude. Human pure reason is
necessarily a pure sensible reason. This pure reason must be sensible in itself, it does
not first become sensible in this way because it is tied to a body. Rather, the reverse is
true: the human being, as finite, rational creature, can thus only have its body in a
transcendental (i.e., a metaphysical) sense because transcendence as such is sensible
a priori (p. 118).
19. Immanuel Kant, Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz (Indianapolis:

156

20.

21.

22.

23.
24.
25.

26.

27.

LAURA HENGEHOLD

Bobbs-Merrill, Library of Liberal Arts, 1974), 29; Kants Gesammelte Schriften, 9: 25.
See also Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan. (New York: Vintage Books, 1970): 341, hereafter cited as OT.
For Kant, metaphysics is identified with metaphysica specialis, the knowledge of
specific beings rather than being in general (metaphysica generalis) (KPM, pp. 56);
however, in seeking to understand conditions for the possibility of metaphysics specialis,
Kant was forced to admit that specialis and generalis both rest upon some primordial
ontological knowledge latent within the act of knowing (pp. 79).
[Warum ist berhaupt Seindes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?] Martin Heidegger, What
is Metaphysics? in Basic Writings, revised edition, trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell
(San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993): 106, 110. Hereafter cited as WIM.
For Lingis, the conflict between the worlds unity and its potential dispersion or dissociation arises insofar as the advent of death, which unifies the temporal ecstases, is not a single overarching possibility but rather accompanies each and every potentially divergent
possibility as its conditioning impossibility. Death is not the last moment, situated at the
end of a progression of moments ahead . . . The anxiety that anticipates dying does not
anticipate a last moment situated in the time of the world my existence extends; death is
neither present nor future; it is imminent at any moment. How could death then fix the end
and bring to flush the ends possible in the time that lies ahead? (WW, p. 606).
See especially sections 22, 23, 24, and 28.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), hereafter cited as PP.
Heidegger distinguishes between the existential meaning of dying [Sterben] as a possibility for one who has possibilities [Dasein], which moreover gathers those possibilities
into a whole, and the mere departure of life [Verenden] from a person or creature capable of life, who is, nevertheless, an object of our concern. It is notable, however, that
Heidegger does not use either German terms for the body, [Leib or Krper] in his explanation of the fundamental significance of being-toward-death.
Death, as the temporal horizon for our existence, is one form of the nothing shaped
by imagination, which enables the given to appear by contrast (as in KPM). See James
Bernauer, Michel Foucaults Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990): 2635, for a discussion of Foucaults transition from an existential to political analysis of mental illness in Mental Illness and
Personality.
In Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976),
Edward Casey outlines the general phenomenological approach to the problem of imagination by contrasting imagination and perception in various respects. For Sartre, and
to a lesser extent Merleau-Ponty, imagination is an engagement with non-being; it rips
us out of the necessity and stupor of our brute being and discloses possibilities for cognition and action. To this extent, however, Sartrean imagination remains an anti-world,
engaging discrete and fragmented intentional objects, rather than bestowing coherence
and continuity upon experience as does the Kantian imagination (p. 2) On the other hand,
Casey does acknowledge that imaginary content may fill in gaps in our perception;
the clearest case of continuity between imagination and perception in Caseys study is
found in aesthetic experience, such as witnessing an opera, when the perceptual and
imaginative components . . . shade into each other, and I cannot say exactly where one
begins and the other ends (p. 141).

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28. Simon During argues that the poverty of the dreams content permits the passage from the
plenitude of Being to a determinate meaning. Psychoanalytic accounts of the dream fail
because they have, in a reading that anticipates Foucaults association of the statements
rarity with its materiality in The Archeology of Knowledge, ignored the materiality of the
image, the stuff of the imaginary, at the same time as [psychoanalysis] tells us that signification can never divest itself of a certain materiality. See Foucault and Literature:
Towards a Genealogy of Writing, (London: Routledge, 1992): 27, hereafter cited as GW.
Already, During suggests, Foucault is attempting to envisage a poverty that is not a lack
(p. 28), a strategy that will be important not only in the Archaeology but also for his later
discussion of psychoanalysis and power in The History of Sexuality.
29. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1987): 295, see also 217, 292293. Hereafter cited as CJ, with page numbers referring
to volume 5 of the standard edition of Kants works.
30. With respect to Merleau-Pontys failure on this score in particular, see Dreyfus and
Rabinow (BSH, 166); for a feminist critique of asexuality in Merleau-Pontys account
of embodiment, see Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994): 86111.
31. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans.
A. M. Sheridan Smith. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973 [1963]): 196197, hereafter
cited as BC.
32. In The Order of Things, Foucault characterizes modern philosophy as founded not on a
critique of dogmatism so much as an ambiguity or Fold [Pli] between two forms of dogmatism: a transcendental account of man as finite by virtue of his temporality, on the
one hand, and an empirical account of the limitations in which this finitude is expressed
historically (OT, p. 341). In his book-length treatment of Foucault, Deleuze characterizes this fold-structure as Foucaults point of proximity to both Heidegger and MerleauPonty, but in the formers work the fold is composed of forces and opens onto different
historical forms such as god, man, or the Nietzschean overman rather than onto Being.
See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. Sen Hand (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988): 110112).
33. In The Age of the World Picture, Heidegger draws a more explicit distinction between
the role he would like to assign fantasia in the process of unconcealing beings, and the
imagination of the representing subject, who moves in imaginatio, in that his representing imagines, pictures forth, whatever is, as the objective, into the world as picture
(AWP, p. 147).
34. Compare, for instance, to Foucault: [A]t the meeting-point between representation and
being, at the point where nature and human nature intersect at the place in which we
believe nowadays that we can recognize the primary, irrefutable, and enigmatic existence of man what Classical thought reveals is the power of discourse. In other words,
language insofar as it represents...Where there is discourse, representations are laid out
and juxtaposed; and things are grouped together and articulated. The profound vocation
of Classical language has always been to create a table a picture: whether it be in the
form of natural discourse, the accumulation of truth, descriptions of things, a body of exact knowledge, or an encyclopaedic dictionary (OT, p. 310311). Foucault, however, believes that this age has passed, and far from being the reason for mans entry into the
history of Western thought, prevented anything like man from appearing until language
was recognized to contain an element of opacity and the picture lost its self-evidence.

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35. It is precisely natures inadequacy to the ideas and this presupposes both that the
mind is receptive to ideas and that the imagination strains to treat nature as a schema
for them that constitutes what both repels our sensibility and yet attracts us at the
same time . . . It is a fact that what is called sublime by us, having been prepared through
culture, comes across as merely repellent to a person who is uncultured and lacking in
the development of moral ideas . . . But the fact that a judgment about the sublime in
nature requires culture (more so than a judgment about the beautiful) still in no way
implies that it was initially produced by culture. . . . Rather, it has its foundation in
human nature: in something that, along with common sense, we may require and demand of everyone. . . (CJ, p. 265).
36. In making this claim, I am obviously assuming that finitude remains a transcendental problem rather than a merely historical ground for the self-imaging of thought, as
Rajchman argues (see footnote 11). See also Paul Veyne, Foucault Revolutionizes History, trans. Catherine Porter, in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): 146182. However, the relation between
the transcendental and the historical in Foucaults work is obviously an extraordinarily
difficult issue that I hope to explore elsewhere.
37. Michel Foucault, Questions on Geography, trans. Colin Gordon, in Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980): 70.
38. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), hereafter cited as HS.
39. One knows how many times the question has been raised concerning the role of an
ascetic morality in the first formation of capitalism; but what occurred in the eighteenth
century in some Western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon having perhaps a wider impact than the new morality;
this was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena
peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the
sphere of political techniques. This event involved an increase in population due to
temporary relief from famine and disease and an increase in agricultural productivity
even beyond the increase in population. In the space for movement thus conquered, and
broadening and organizing that space, methods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them. Western
man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have
a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an
optimal manner (HS, pp. 141142).
40. Several commentators, including During and Rajchman, have commented on the relationship between Foucaults evocation of the non-place inhabited by thought, the importance of transgression in his early work, and the Kantian sublime. Transgressive
thought, During comments, in phrasing remarkably evocative of Kants account of the
violence done to inner sense by the sublime, dissolves the subject because it finds its
finitude not where an inside is separated from, grounded on or reflects an outside,
but where the movement toward otherness begins to repeat what is not other the Same
(GW, p. 82). Rajchman, who links imaginations failure in the face of the sublime to the
revelation of the Nothing in Heidegger (and traces the trajectory of this idea through
Heideggers writings on Hlderlin through Foucaults engagement with Hlderlin in The

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Fathers No) refers to the sublime as an experience where language encounters its limit
while continuing to speak (FP, pp. 1722). See also Madness, the Absence of the Work,
in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1997): 102 for Foucaults own formulation of language as the transgressor rather
than man whose integrity is thereby put in question.

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