The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault - Hardcover

Hengehold, Laura

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0271032111 ISBN 13: 9780271032115

Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Late in life, Foucault identified with “the critical tradition of Kant,” encouraging us to read both thinkers in new ways. Kant’s “Copernican” strategy of grounding knowledge in the limits of human reason proved to stabilize political, social-scientific, and medical expertise as well as philosophical discourse. These inevitable limits were made concrete in historical structures such as the asylum, the 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 Foucault’s 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.

About this title

About the Author

Laura Hengehold is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0271032111
• ISBN 13: 9780271032115
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336