Clues to Posthuman Kant: Deleuze-Foucault’s Kantianism without Humanity

Abstract

Rather than simply breaking up with Kant, Deleuze and Foucault endeavored to delineate lines of thought that originated from Kant but extended beyond the limits set by Kant himself. Two pivotal inquiries, supplanting the foundational question of Kantian philosophy, “What is the human being?” guide this movement from within Kant to without: “What can a subject outside of the human-form be?” and “What can a faculty beyond the limits of the human-form do?”. This paper aims to explore the prospect that such a project of Kantianism beyond Kant could serve as the starting point for the task of rethinking Kant within the context of posthuman conditions and, conversely, contemplating the posthuman world through a Kantian lens. Consequently, this essay is not preoccupied with expressing sympathy for or offering counter-criticisms of the prevailing critiques of Kant’s humanism in numerous posthumanist theories. Instead, the principal objective of this paper is to problematize the oversimplified nature of this binary opposition. In essence, it seeks to elucidate the intricate relationship between posthumanity and Kantian philosophy that eludes the rigid constraints of the confrontational framework. This is accomplished through an examination of the works of Foucault and Deleuze, who, situated within Kant’s philosophical anthropology, identified vectors that problematize the very notion of the human, and employed them to develop new theories of subjectivity and faculties that transcend the conventional boundaries of anthropology.