Abstract

The work of Michel Foucault has been recognized as among the most important, original, and provocative contributions to the critical analysis of Western thought, society, and culture produced in the second half of the twentieth century. All the same, for all its acknowledged brilliance and chastening insight, Foucault's work has also been the subject of repeated charges that his radical form of criticism ultimately collapses into irrationalism, self contradiction, and ethico-political relativism. This dissertation aims to neutralize a number of these criticisms by demonstrating that Foucault's work is substantively and methodology more coherent, and ethically and politically more benign and less pessimistic, than his critics recognize. I offer a reading of his major works which, by placing the question of human nature and humanism in the forefront, throws into relief an overarching preoccupation on his part with what one might call the politics of human self-knowledge. I argue that more than simply revealing the conditions of possibility and costs of various historical forms of knowledge and practice---psychology, medicine, criminology, and sociology---related to the question of what we as human beings are deep down, his works question the conditions of possibility and costs associated with the assertion of the very question of human nature as the most compelling one for human thought and practice. Foucault questions both the fruitfulness and benevolence of this question as it relates to modern thought and practice, demonstrates ways in which a host of scientific discourses revolving around 'Man' during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries have been imbricated with strategies of social control, and condemns as humanistic all streams of thought, including progressive and critical ones, for which the primacy of 'Man' remains unexamined. By systematically reading each of Foucault's major works as an anti-humanist response to one form of humanism or another , I show that, together, they reveal an underlying unity of purpose: the decentring of 'Man'. Foucault pursues this objective not by providing a systematic post-humanist philosophy but, rather, by continually posing archaeological and genealogical questions about the various faces of humanism. In the course of doing so, his work also articulates a new post-humanist approach to criticism itself---which he calls the 'critical ontology of ourselves'---as well as ethics and politics, which I show harbour more fruitful and humane possibilities for critical theory and practice than his critics are able or willing to recognize. In short, the dissertation argues that Foucault's work can be seen as opening up new possibilities for providing a rational critique of reason and a humane critique of humanism