Enrico Redaelli

ABSTRACT: The way in which Foucault confronts Husserl helps to highlight the instance that drives Foucauldian research and its current legacy. Foucault inscribes his work through Husserl within a broader tradition, namely, that of the critical thinking that has crossed all of modernity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and up to phenomenology. His main legacy can be identified precisely in the way he relaunches and radicalises this tradition by intensifying its critical gaze. We will follow the steps of The Crisis of European Sciences to evoke the underlying purposes of Husserl’s work, showing how his genealogical analysis of scientific knowledge, as a mix of historically determined practices, is guided by the ethical aim of self-determination. Later we will show how Foucault takes up this instance in a completely original way, and we will analyse which analogies and differences can be traced between the two authors’ approaches to the problem of an individual’s self-determination in his relationship with the network of knowledge-power in which he is immersed. In fact, both authors consider that there can be no emancipation and self-determination of the individual without a preliminary historical-critical retrospective on knowledge and on the ways in which its contents have been constituted. But this retrospective, which we could define generically as genealogical (genetic-phenomenological in Husserl’s terms), is played out differently by the two authors and implemented by Foucault with a greater degree of radicalism.

Every structure, therefore also every institution, is inhabited by an “empty box”, a mobile space that can never be filled, which sets the elements in motion. This idea – which finds one of its many formulations, perhaps the most famous, in Deleuze’s Structuralism – is the outcome of a long and fruitful path, from Durkheim, through Mauss, to the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss. To understand its genesis and follow its evolutionary path, it is necessary to focus attention on Marcel Mauss’s work and on his way of thinking about institutions.

L’autore tesse un dialogo tra le svariate istanze emerse dagli altri saggi qui raccolti, rimettendo via via in prospettiva quei problemi all’interno di una originale rilettura della proposta “etica” variamente elaborata dalle voci più avanzate dell’ermeneutica contemporanea: fare filosofia dopo Nietzsche significa esibire il limite e la volontà di verità a partire da cui parla la filosofia stessa; ma esibire quel limite non è più un gesto “veritativo” quanto un atto “politico”: non è un nuovo sapere né un ironico non sapere, ma un fare; non un’esercitazione alla morte ma una messa in opera della vita