In an interview on The Enlightenment

Your fourth book is Foucault’s What is Enlightenment?, which I assume is a response to Kant’s essay, but which was published 3 centuries later, some years after the Second World War.

I wanted to recommend a couple of Foucault books here. He’s going through a less fashionable phase now, but I think he’s one of the most exciting, innovative thinkers of the twentieth century. I also wanted to show that part of post structuralist thinking in the twentieth century – i.e. what went on to become cutting edge modern philosophy – was still deeply indebted to the Enlightenment. Something amazing happened in the last years of the seventeenth century that somebody in the 1960’s was still thinking through. And I suppose that the question Foucault asks is, how, after the catastrophes of the twentieth century - the holocaust, the world wars, the economic depression - are we going to reground ourselves? How are we going to find an intellectual framework from which we can understand what we’ve done to ourselves and establish the foundations of an ethical life?

And what does Foucault have to add to Kant? How does he borrow from Kant and yet redefine the question in the context of the twentieth century?

There were cultural turns that Foucault was considering that had not yet become central issues in Kant’s time: the historic and philosophical meaning of insanity, of poverty, of certain kinds of deviant sexuality. So Foucault is daring to know, but what he wants to look at are the margins of cultural life, what the rejected parts of life look like. He’s inserting what had previously been unknowable narratives into our understanding of what it means to be human.