Genealogy as an Ethic of Self-determination: Husserl and Foucault

Auteurs-es

  • Enrico Redaelli University of Verona

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i36.7225

Mots-clés :

Husserl, Foucault, genealogy, self-determination, phenomenology

Résumé

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.

Biographie de l'auteur-e

Enrico Redaelli, University of Verona

Enrico Redaelli teaches Etica e filosofia della persona at University of Verona. He deals with contemporary philosophy and its relationship with anthropology and psychoanalysis. Among his publications are Il nodo dei nodi (Ets 2008), L’incanto del dispositivo. Foucault dalla microfisica alla semiotica del potere (Ets 2011) and Judith Butler. Il sesso e la legge (Feltrinelli 2023). He edited the books La lezione di Pasolini (Mimesis 2020) and, with F. Vandoni and P. Pitasi, Legge, desiderio, capitalismo. L’anti-Edipo tra Lacan e Deleuze (Bruno Mondadori 2014). He is a professor of Trasformazione dei legami sociali at the IRPA (Istituto di Ricerca di Psicoanalisi Applicata) in Milano and he is a member of the research center “Tiresia – Filosofia e psicoanalisi” at University of Verona.

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Publié-e

2024-09-01

Comment citer

Redaelli, E. (2024). Genealogy as an Ethic of Self-determination: Husserl and Foucault. Foucault Studies, (36), 398–419. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i36.7225

Numéro

Rubrique

Special Issue: Foucault’s Legacy in Contemporary Thinking