Victor Gonçalves

Michel Foucault was a persistent, although sui generis, reader of Kant, and that is the appropriation that we will analyse. We will Start by the extensive introduction that he has made for his translation of Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, where he shows the failure of the kantian pragmatic anthropology. We will proceed with the study of the kantian criticism in Les Mots et les Choses, which set the conditions to the transition of the Classic to the Modem episteme, allowing nevertheless, and simultaneously, the creation of a new metaphysics out of the representations and forming a philosophy obsessed by man, by means of reducing his field of knowledge to the “empiricisms” of life, of language and of work. Nietzsche will come in his help by offering, with the “disappearance of man”, the promise of the renaissance of philosophy. Finally, in a third part, we will reflect on the way Foucault commits himself more directly to the Kantian reception, by enlarging and renewing it through the importance he gave to the “diagnosis of actuality” and to the “ontology of ourselves”, instead o f the “analytics of truth”, as well as to the axiology of revolution. This was already present in the texts he wrote in the 80’s about Was ist Aufklärung? and Der Streit der Facultäten, there defining much of his own condition as a public and private thinker.