Abstract

In his introduction to Canguilhem’s Le normal et le pathologique, Michel Foucault claims that the “question of Enlightenment” has been taken up differently in the German and French philosophical traditions. Nevertheless, Foucault signals a “correspondence” between the works of Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School, on the one hand, and the French epistemologists (including himself), on the other. In this article, I deepen this correspondence by assessing Foucault’s and Lukács’s respective relations to the neo-Kantian problem of the form and content of knowledge. In theorizing the problem of reification, Lukács mobilizes Emil Lask’s understanding of the concept “form of objectivity.” He starts from Lask’s unification of the form and content of knowledge by suggesting that the commodity form emerges as the form of objectivity that constitutes both objects and subjects of knowledge in capitalist societies. I show that Foucault’s use of the notions episteme, historical a priori, and regime of truth shares the neo-Kantian concern with of the content of knowledge. By arguing that Foucault’s critique of the philosophical anthropology underlying Marxism does not apply to Lukács’s neo-Kantianism, I make room for considering both of their philosophical strategies as a “critique of social forms.”