2026/02/02 by Leonhard Riep · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Foucault, Power, and Ethics #Philosophy and Social Theory #Political Theology and Sovereignty
paper · doi:10.6094/behemoth.2025.18.2.1127
The question of the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical-historical is of particular concern to Foucault during his archaeological phase in the 1960s, as is evident in the concept of the historical a priori. However, as I argue in this article, Foucault already problematizes the status of the transcendental in the so-called Lille manuscripts of the 1950s. The concept of ‘transcendental experience,’ which Foucault addresses in Phénoménologie et psychologie in relation to Edmund Husserl, and in La question anthropologique in relation to Wilhelm Dilthey, is particularly relevant in this regard, as it can be understood as a structurally analogous cue (among several) for the genesis of the concept of the historical a priori. Furthermore, I demonstrate that a philosophical problem is linked to the concept of transcendental experience, which will also preoccupy the later Foucault, namely the tendency of modern thought to either ontologize or empiricize the sphere of the transcendental. Despite the central contrast between the ontologization and the empiricization of the transcendental, the concept of transcendental experience, as Foucault encounters it in Husserl and Dilthey, is characterized by a methodological orientation. Based on this, I briefly conclude that the concept of ‘the naked experience of order,’ which Foucault prominently introduces in The Order of Things as the central aim of his archaeological investigation, can be made plausible as an experience of the transcendental.