Ori Rotlevy, Askesis, Critique, and Tradition: Foucault and Benjamin.
Lecture on Soundcloud, October 2019.
Editor: Update 24 Feb 2026. No longer available. An article was published in 2022 with the same content as this lecture. See
Ori Rotlevy, (2022). Askesis and Critique: Foucault and Benjamin. Foucault Studies, (32), 28–53.
https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi32.6702
Abstract
While Foucault referred to Benjamin just once in his entire corpus, scholars have long noticed affinities between the two thinkers, mainly between their conceptions of history: their emphasis on discontinuity, their historiographical practices, and the role of archives in their work. This essay focuses, rather, on their practice of critique and, more specifically, on their conception of the relation of this practice to exercise or askesis. I examine the role of askesis as a self-transformative exercise in Foucault’s late work and how this concept reverberates throughout his idea of critique as the exercise of an ethos demanding arduous work. Against this background, the role of exercise (Übung) in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Traeurspiel, his interest in ascetic kinds of exercise or schooling, and its ties to critique are discerned. This comparison reveals significant similarities in Foucault’s and Benjamin’s conception of philosophy, as well as different emphases in their inheritance of the Kantian critical project: critique as an exercise of an attitude attentive to possibilities for transformation in the present vs. critique as involving an attitude-transforming exercise; critique as a modern ethos that needs to be reactivated vs. critique as propaedeutic, as a preparation for a modern tradition.
Keywords: Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Immanuel Kant, Pierre Hadot, Spiritual Exercise, Critical Theory
Lecture abstract
Consortium for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of California, Berkeley
A central concept in Foucault’s later work is Askesis: an exercise of oneself, related to self-mastery and self-transformation. The concept of “ascetic schooling” in the foreword to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel has a similarly significant role, much neglected by scholarship. Both Foucault’s askesis and Benjamin’s “ascetic schooling” relate to the transformation of the subject through arduous work as fundamental for philosophy. At the same time, their considerations of askesis/asceticism illuminate the complex relations between the different models of critique they promote – the reactivation of an attitude alien to doctrine and tradition (Foucault), versus a change of attitude as propaedeutic for their presentation (Benjamin).
Ori Rotlevy is a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He teaches philosophy in Tel Aviv University, where he also co-directs a research group in the Minerva Humanities Center on “Tradition: Transmission, Canon and Critique”.
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