A contemporary skeptic: Michel Foucault and the problem of normativity

Abstract

This article examines the criticism according to which Michel Foucault’s philosophy lacks normative grounding. It begins with Jürgen Habermas’s classical formulation of this objection, according to which Foucauldian genealogy, by replacing the problem of validity with the analysis of power effects, falls into presentism, relativism and cryptonormativism. It then shows how Nancy Fraser resumes this line of criticism by arguing that Foucault neither makes explicit the normative basis of his judgments nor offers a sufficiently determinate alternative to the social paradigms he denounces. Against these readings, the article argues that the best way to understand Foucault is to read him as a skeptic. His skepticism leads to a refusal to ground critique on anthropological, historical or moral universals. The strength of his analyses therefore lies less in the formulation of a universal ought than in the historical problematization of the rationalities that govern us and of the dispositifs that produce subjects, forms of knowledge and behaviors.