Foucault News

The aim of my series of posts on the so-called “Foucault/Habermas Debate” has been to move the focus away from the discussion of the differences in their general approaches and return it to the more modest concerns that lay at its origin: the idea of a meeting between Foucault, Habermas, and a few others to discuss Immanuel Kant’s response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” on the bicentennial of its publication. What interests me is just what it was that Foucault and Habermas found interesting in Kant’s little essay and what this might tell us about their relationship to that thing that we have come to designate as “the Enlightenment” — a term whose various implications have, and will remain, the main concern of this blog. So, having spent previous posts probing the various ambiguities associated with “The Debate that Never Was,” I want to focus this discussion on how…