’Man’ as X-Foucault, Kant and their doublets
Keyword(s):
The concept of ‘man’ is introduced by Michel Foucault in the context of a discursive formation that, for him, emerges toward the end of the 18th century, following the epistemes of the Renaissance and Classical periods, which, by way of contrast, had foregrounded similarity and representation as ordering principles. Instead of a guaranteed correspondence between the subject and the object of thought, the modern era is concerned with the finitude of concrete ‘human beings’ in their relation to an abstract ‘humanity’, and asks under what conditions is a correlation of a subject with its objects possible in experience.