Special Issue: Foucault Before the Collège de France

Theory, Culture & Society

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Foucault and ! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276420963553

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Man, before the

‘Death of Man’
Arianna Sforzini
Université Paris-Est Créteil / Sciences Po Paris

Abstract
In the unpublished manuscript of a lecture course probably given by Foucault at the
École normale supérieure of Paris in 1954–5 (‘On Anthropology’; the dating is still
uncertain), Foucault undertakes an erudite and detailed reconstruction of the history
of anthropological knowledge, from modernity (Descartes and Malebranche) to
20th-century Nietzschean commentaries (Jaspers and Heidegger), including analyses
by Kant, Feuerbach, and Dilthey, among others. My article explores this lecture
course to emphasize the importance of anthropological criticism for the young
Foucault, addressing in particular the anti-anthropological significance of the encoun-
ter with Nietzsche’s philosophy, which becomes an output power (puissance de sortie)
both of the figure of man and the notion of truth in which he was involved. These
unpublished manuscripts will therefore allow me to find a common thread in
Foucault’s work in the 1950s and 1960s (and even beyond): the exploration of
new potentialities for thought opened by ‘the death of man’.

Keywords
anthropology, critique, Descartes, Foucault, Kant, Nietzsche, psychology

Introduction
This article aims to present the manuscript of one of Michel Foucault’s
first courses, which was probably delivered in 1954–5, even if this dating
remains uncertain. Foucault was then a young professor under 30; he had
been a psychology re´pe´titeur (teacher) at the École normale since 1951
and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Lille since
1952. Daniel Defert identifies this manuscript, contained in box 46 of the
Foucault archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, as the text of

Corresponding author: Arianna Sforzini. Email: [email protected]

Extra material: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

a course on anthropology held in Lille in 1952–3 (box 46, folder 1,

Foucault Archives, BnF, NAF 28730. Henceforth cited as: ms 46, 1;
my translations). It is indeed a long and rich reflection on anthropology
and its history, which bears on the first leaflet the handwritten title
‘Knowledge of Man and Transcendental Reflection’. Nevertheless,
Foucault cites at the end of the manuscript some texts by Heidegger
published in 1954 (Heidegger, 1954a, 1954b), which makes it necessary
to consider dating the document after this year. Jacques Lagrange’s
course notes, taken at the ENS in 1954–5 and kept at the IMEC archives
in Caen, actually correspond to the manuscript. It is therefore probably a
course held by Foucault at the École normale, rue d’Ulm, in the same
year. This does not exclude that Foucault used these notes in his previous
courses in Lille and was able to prepare this final version during his
seminars in 1952–3.
The manuscript consists of 97 double-sided A4 sheets, filled in by hand
by Michel Foucault with dense writing and pressing argumentation.
There are some handwritten notes on the side of the manuscript that
might be evidence that Foucault revised his text and possibly used it
more than once. The construction by dots and interlocking enumerations
(A., B., C.; 1., 2., 3.; a., b., g.; etc.), as well as the bibliographical refer-
ences indicated in brackets in the body of the text, make one think of
notes written for an oral presentation – presumably, as it has been said, a
university course. It is nevertheless true that the manuscript opens with a
title preceded by an enigmatic: ‘Chapter I’ (‘Chap. I. Knowledge of Man
and Transcendental Reflection’). There is no indication of other ‘chap-
ters’ in the text (and no table of contents), but this opening could well
mean that Foucault conceives of his reflection on anthropology not only
as a course subject but in a wider working context. He was probably
considering a future publication on these same themes as part of his
doctoral dissertation. The chronology of Foucault established by
Daniel Defert (for Dits et e´crits in 1994, reprinted and corrected for
the Pléiade edition of Foucault’s books in 2015) affirms that in 1951
Foucault, ‘resident at the Thiers Foundation, began his thesis on post-
Cartesians and the birth of psychology’ (Defert, 2015: XXXIX, my
translation).
Beyond the question of exact dating, we are therefore in the presence
of a course prepared in great detail and erudite in its contents, a true
history of philosophical anthropology from Descartes to Nietzsche,
which almost always proceeds in chronological order (confirming the
hypothesis that it acts primarily as course material) and ends with two
contemporary interpretations of Nietzschean thought (Jaspers and
Heidegger). From a purely quantitative point of view, the manuscript
consists of three roughly equivalent parts: a first one on knowledge about
man in the 17th and 18th centuries, from Descartes to Kant; a second one
on the post-Kantian philosophical and anthropological debate, with an
Sforzini 3

important focus on the analyses of Feuerbach and Dilthey; a third one on

Nietzsche and some interpretations of Nietzschean philosophy.
References to Jaspers and Heidegger are used in this last framework,
in the conclusive 10 sheets only. One does therefore not find here a
direct confrontation of Foucault with the thought of these 20th-century
philosophers, although they obviously remain important both for a
reflection on the genealogy of Foucault’s analyses (it is through them
and notably through Jaspers that Foucault approaches the Nietzschean
texts) and for the openings they make possible for a philosophical ques-
tioning of anthropological and critical issues.
This course of the early 1950s, undeniably complex in terms of its
contents, finally has a special status also due to its likely target audience:
students preparing for the agre´gation, the French state competition exam
for prospective philosophy teachers in secondary schools. It is therefore
not surprising that the text has some scholarly features and remains
confined within certain standards of academic discourse. Nevertheless,
the manuscript already very clearly prefigures directions of critical ques-
tioning specific to Foucault’s later philosophical development. As the
editing work is still ongoing, it is impossible to explore and systematize
all the issues and problems pointed out by the course in the framework of
this contribution. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this article aims to
present some of the manuscript’s key ideas, showing its importance and
fertility in the light of successive developments in Foucauldian thought.

Why a History of Anthropology?

In order to understand Foucault’s reflection on the birth and death of
anthropological knowledge, one must first raise the question of his choice
of content: how does Foucault approach the history of anthropology in
this early course? One of the key points that Foucault develops in his
course is the idea that the writing of the history of anthropology involves
two fundamental operations (a theoretical and a chronological one).
First, it is a question of showing how the theme of the world has detached
itself from that of nature. The history of man’s knowledge of himself1 is
also the history of man’s scientific discourse about his world – which
means a certain positioning in a complex and critical dialogue with phe-
nomenology. The importance of the ‘nature/world’ distinction in
Foucault’s course on man explains why he unfolds his history of anthro-
pology through a periodization that he is going to repeat in several of his
later works (Foucault, 2002, 2006a, for example), namely to differentiate
between two major moments: classical knowledge (approximately 17th–
18th centuries) and modern knowledge (19th century), tracing points of
difference and rupture between these two ‘epistemes’. Thus, we discover
with Foucault that, despite the existence of a rich philosophical, moral
and theological knowledge about man, anthropology does not exist as
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

such in the classical age. It is an invention of modernity – a post-Kantian

rather than a Kantian creation, hence the great importance given in this
course to authors such as Feuerbach, Hegel, and Dilthey.
One needs to begin by more clearly defining the idea of an ‘anthropo-
logical rupture’ that would mark the turning point of modernity.
Foucault places the starting point of his history of anthropology at the
beginning of the classical age. It begins with Descartes and post-
Cartesians, notably Malebranche, but its argument goes back to
Aristotle and the differences between the scientific discourse of
Antiquity and the Middle Ages on the one hand and that of modernity
on the other. He wants to show that, although in the classical age several
‘Treatises of Man’ are written, man as an object of scientific knowledge
in his own right – the man of anthropology – does not yet exist. Man is a
figure called upon within classical knowledge to locate the difference
between world and nature: the world is the kingdom of finiteness, error
and uncertainty, while nature is the kingdom of the Galilean ‘mathem-
atical God’, of absolute truth, of the fullness of Cartesian evidence. Truth
is therefore not on the side of man and his world. It belongs to man only
to the extent that there is something in him that gestures towards a
transcendental dimension: his reason, his transcendent origin (God),
his absolute meaning (the abstract truth of nature). Man cannot there-
fore be the object of a discourse of truth, for he is the limit point of the
truth of reason. With the appearance of man, one is immediately con-
fronted with problems of meaning and the foundations of what would
constitute error, of the status of sensible knowledge, of errors that turn
into truths in the realm of human existence as well as with spontaneous
judgements (for example, not feeling oneself turn when the Earth
revolves around the sun, or the horror of death, from a moral point of
view, which would not make sense if man was aware of his immortal
nature). Foucault supports his account with quotations from Descartes,
Malebranche, Spinoza, etc. The problem of man is, to sum up, that of the
imagination, the problem of

the status and justification of the concrete world, once its rationality
has been exiled, defined now, before the world and outside the
world, in the universal form of an abstract nature. At the same
time, it is the problem of man placed inside this world, but with
the need to restore it to the absolute truth of its nature. It is there-
fore the problem of the path of truth, the questioning of how truth
announces itself to man and founds, in his errors, his limitations
and his finiteness, the access he may have to it. (ms 46, 1)

Foucault opens his course with a dazzling reprise and explanation of the
aporia of Cartesian dualism as an opposition between nature and my
nature, the body and my body, nature and the world. Dualism is in
Sforzini 5

fact a simultaneously real and impossible problem to overcome for

Descartes because man is indeed a being exposed to two fronts, divided
between his abstract and universal truth, his rational nature, on the one
hand, and his body which does not and cannot have the evidence of
thought on the other: his lived body, his own body (to use phenomeno-
logical expressions anachronistically), his imperfect and contingent exist-
ence in this world. The meaning and purpose of this dualism are moral
and theological: man is tested in a body that is not his ultimate truth.
This is in a way Descartes’ solution too in his Letters to Elizabeth
(Descartes and Elizabeth of Bohemia, 2007): I do not immediately
know that I have a body but I am in its evidence, and especially I am
called to live it, with all its strengths and inadequacies.
Paradoxically, the classic questioning of man makes anthropological
knowledge impossible within its own structure. ‘The world, when asked
about its truth and its being, does not respond by pointing to man, but by
a curious paradox: it shows that, at the bottom, man is foreign to it’ (ms
46, 1). The only possible anthropology would then be a discourse that is
both moral and once again theological. It is in particular a discourse of
fall and salvation: the questioning of what man should have been by
nature before sin and what by his freedom (and by the grace of God)
he is called to become again – the ‘joyfulness of Adam’, says Foucault,
man’s native and paradisiacal condition. Hence the Foucauldian fascin-
ation for post-Cartesians, whose doctrines of grace and sin would con-
stitute a kind of proto-anthropology. But in fact Adam’s world, ‘Adam’s
joyfulness’, the existence of a man who has not sinned, does not consti-
tute the ontological condition of an anthropology, because this state is
actually the demonstration not of a truth proper to man but of the truth
of God and his Creation. It is precisely not an anthropology. On the
contrary, it is a truth that makes it ‘impossible for man, in his interpret-
ation of the world, to fall into ‘‘anthropology’’’ (ms 46, 1). It is a truth
that transcends man and has to be found in God’s presence. Even in
Spinoza’s pantheism or Leibniz’s theodicy, it is still not the truth of man
that is at stake, but precisely the truth of God within the truth of man –
God the architect of the world, God the monarch of the spirit, God the
creator and the order of the whole against all individuality. ‘In classical
philosophy, man can never speak to himself the language of his truth,
because he actually has been stripped of his truth’ (ms 46, 1).
For a true anthropology to be possible, then, man must find himself ‘at
home’ in the realm of truth, and truth must at the same time be thought
of starting with man and his finiteness: from an ‘analysis of reason’.
Hence the central place played by Kant in the Foucauldian reconstruc-
tion. The course on anthropology already outlines in the early 1950s the
main axes of thought that one can later find in Foucault’s complemen-
tary doctoral dissertation: an introduction to Kant’s Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View, which accompanied the translation of the text,
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

defended on 20 May 1961, and for which Jean Hyppolite was the rap-
porteur (Foucault, 2008). Could one then presume that Kant is the
founding father of anthropology? According to Foucault, the answer
to this question would have to be negative. With Kant, anthropology
is not quite born yet. Or rather, one would need to emphasize that
Kantian critical thinking opens the possibility of a scientific reflection
on man, although it is not reducible to it. One could rightly think of a
text that Foucault comments on, in the course and again in the comple-
mentary dissertation: the famous excerpt on anthropology in Logic.
Kant, in this 1800 text, states that the field of philosophy can be sum-
marized by the following questions: (1) what can I know? (2) what should
I do? (3) what can I hope for? (4) what is man? The first question is
answered by metaphysics, the second by morality, the third by religion,
the fourth by anthropology (Kant, 1992). But basically, all these inter-
rogations could be reduced to anthropology, since the first three ques-
tions relate to the last one. For Foucault, however, to conclude from this
that Kant is the founder of anthropology would entail an overly hasty
and ultimately false conclusion. It would be wrong to see in the
Copernican revolution (it is no longer the object but the subject that
gives universal rules to knowledge) the refocusing of philosophy on
man, and thus the genesis of anthropological knowledge. For Kant,
man is the way and not the content of truth; he is at home in truth but
he is not himself his own truth. When asking the question: ‘what is man?’,
Kantian philosophical anthropology does not seek the truth of human
being but the way in which he can make room for truth. ‘If man inhabits
the truth, how can he arrange his dwelling there, and what truth must
inhabit man himself in order to build and recognize for him, in the truth,
his dwelling?’ (ms 46, 1).2 Kantian criticism does not attempt to replace
‘the meaning of truth under the anthropological constellation of man’
(ms 46, 1). It indicates, through man’s experience of himself, the way for
the proper exercise of reason (theoretical and practical reason and aes-
thetic judgment).
We can then understand why, despite the famous passage of Logic,
anthropology occupies a marginal place in Kantian and post-Kantian
philosophy, right up to Feuerbach, who is, according to Foucault, the
true founder of anthropology, the one with whom man’s knowledge of
man becomes the primordial dimension of philosophical interrogation.
Anthropology is nevertheless discovered with Kant as a possibility, as the
possibility of man’s knowledge of himself, producing a shift in the rela-
tionship between nature and world that is now radically detached from
its link to transcendence. Man can now be ‘questioned at the level of his
world, and not from the questions that the universe may ask’. His truth
‘is said here, on the spot, in the comfort without exile of bourgeois com-
merce’ (ms 46, 1). This is the essential anthropological meaning of
Kantian critique.3 ‘Man presents his truth as the soul of truth’
Sforzini 7

(Foucault, 2008: 124). According to Foucault, Kant makes anthropo-

logical knowledge possible by clearly distinguishing its four essential
philosophical traits: the questioning of man at the level of his own
world; the man-made origin of all meanings; the loss of man’s charac-
terization in relation to the absolute (finitude is his one and only dimen-
sion); the fundamental quest for a human essence that would be both his
truth as authenticity and his destiny as freedom.
After Kant, throughout the philosophy of the 19th century, there will
be real ‘anthropological boosts’ (‘pousse´es’, Foucault says) aiming to go
beyond critique and trying to realize it in the form of an anthropology, or
rather to establish an anthropological criticism with man as the very
foundation of critique. This is the project of Hegel, Feuerbach and
Dilthey, authors to whom Foucault devotes long and important passages
in his course. Yet it was Kant who made these ‘boosts’ possible, by
establishing a fundamental relationship between critical thinking and
anthropology.

Critical thinking has shown that we are ‘with the truth’: we

inhabit it, and we are inhabited by it. But the anthropological ques-
tion immediately arises: how do we find ourselves residing in this
truth, how can it be manifested in the concrete experience we have
of ourselves, this original kinship with the truth that makes us at the
same time its contemporaries and its compatriots? (ms 46, 1)

It is noteworthy that Foucault uses the term ‘phenomenology’ at this

point of his analyses in order to talk about the birth of anthropology.
The use of this term, while obviously part of the Kantian conceptual
lexicon, is not insignificant. It suggests that the Foucauldian gaze has
since its beginnings been turned towards his philosophical present and its
critique. The question of the co-ownership of man and truth, a funda-
mental question for anthropology, can in fact be formulated as follows:
‘how can man be for himself the phenomenon of his own ability to know,
his own ability to desire, his own ability to judge? [. . .] we encounter
‘phenomenology’ as a requirement for a unity between anthropology
and critical thinking’ (ms 46, 1). Kantian phenomenology opens the
space for a critical philosophy that is at the same time a thinking of
truth and the analysis of this real man who is himself the subject of
the truth. Modern knowledge becomes fully anthropological, until
another phenomenology, this time Husserlian, ‘takes its beginning in
an anti-anthropologism, put forward as an anti-psychologism’.

At its starting point, [phenomenology] will seem to oscillate between

psychology and logicism; or it will seek a middle way between the
two. But in fact what it will face is the consequences of this fourth
Kantian question in so far as it raises the problem of the implication
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

of (a) the truth to which man has access; and (b) his access to his
own truth. (ms 46, 1)

Phenomenological thought remains tied to an anthropological dispositif

in Foucault’s account, which he is going to further lay out in the 1960s,
from the Birth of the Clinic to The Order of Things. Certainly he acknow-
ledges that:

the phenomenological breakthrough will be made on the day when

Husserl avoids the fourth question, by questioning the meaning of
truth in the name of and starting from truth itself, on the original
ground of true being, – and independently of man, whether one
considers him in general from the point of view of a theory of rep-
resentation, or takes him immediately in the context of a science of
nature. (ms 46, 1)

But it is also true that Foucault will be able to affirm 15 years after his
course on anthropology that phenomenology remains trapped in this
‘strange empirico-transcendental doublet’ (Foucault, 2002: 347) specific
to modern knowledge: it is always man with his consciousness, rooted in
a body, that gives meaning to the world. There is undoubtedly a displace-
ment of Foucault on this question of the novelty of phenomenology from
the early 1950s to 1966 (the year in which The Order of Things was first
published in French). Moreover, the very term of phenomenology is a
rather broad and general one. It would certainly be necessary to distin-
guish Foucault’s long (and for the most part unpublished) analyses of
Husserlian phenomenology and the influence of Merleau-Ponty’s phil-
osophy, for example, which, although not as explicit, is no less essential –
let us not forget that during his own student days at the École normale,
Foucault had attended classes with Merleau-Ponty (Revel, 2015).
However, the confrontation with phenomenology is a key aspect of the
archaeological exploration of the human sciences. Foucault questions the
conditions of scientific knowledge about the individual, knowledge of
which man is both subject and object. Modernity is really ‘anthropo-
logical’ because man in his finitude becomes for himself the object of
positive knowledge. The history of anthropology and the critique of phe-
nomenological thought come together to show a new path: a critical
history of the human sciences, the description of those forms in which
man has become both object and subject of scientific knowledge, in spe-
cific relationships to the (and to his own) truth, and the attempt to ima-
gine, beyond the anthropological paradigm, new forms of subjectivity
and truth.
The reflection on anthropology then arises in continuity with the main
thematic axes in the work of the young Foucault, at least on three
points: the analysis of Hegel and the posterities of Hegelianism;
Sforzini 9

phenomenology and its philosophical engagement with ‘the world’; the

history of psychology (Basso, 2007, 2019; Miotto, 2011). Foucault wrote
his first master’s thesis on the constitution of the transcendental in
Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit in 1949 and benefited from the
work of important Hegelian thinkers such as Jean Hyppolite. At the
beginning of the 1950s, when the course on anthropology was written,
he worked on texts and dissertation projects on Binswanger, the phe-
nomenological psychiatry, and Husserl’s phenomenology (see the other
folders in box 46 of the BnF Foucault archives). He studied scientific
psychology at length, while also being a psychologist himself: he was one
of the first graduates in psychology at the Sorbonne (1949) and com-
pleted his academic career by passing his diplomas in psychopathology
(at the Institut de psychologie de Paris) and in experimental psychology
the following year in 1952. Foucault also had been teaching psychology
since 1951 and did internships at Saint Anne’s Hospital, which allowed
him to work with the Rorschach psychodiagnostic test and to attend
clinical electroencephalography experiments conducted by neuropsych-
iatrist Georges Verdeaux and his wife Jacqueline, as well as to observe
the introduction of the first neuroleptics at the hospital. His first book,
published in 1954 (Mental Illness and Personality), unfortunately often
neglected by Foucault critics, is precisely a book on mental illness and its
Marxist interpretation (Paltrinieri, 2016).
What link can be made between this young Foucault who was pas-
sionate about Rorschach, the meticulousness of his analyses on Husserl,
and the erudite reconstruction of the history of anthropology in the early
1950s? In a French cultural context that was passionate about the
anthropological problem (Bianco, 2013), around 1952–4 Foucault is
already questioning the subject, via the epistemological relationships
around the problem of ‘man’ at the intersection of the history of the
human sciences, the psychological disciplines, and anthropological dis-
course. The famous announcement, scandalous for the time, of the ‘death
of man’ in conclusion of The Order of Things (Foucault, 2002) remains
the horizon of this early course on anthropology and turns out to be the
result of a long and fully philosophical work on these questions on
the part of Foucault despite his coquetry in defining himself as a ‘non-
philosopher’. The archives kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France
reveal all the preparatory work, which lasted more than 15 years, for a
critique of the human sciences and their subject, including unpublished
manuscripts such as the one in question, unfinished dissertation projects,
and hundreds of reading notes on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, lan-
guage, human history, and scientific psychology (cf. in particular boxes
42 and 43 of the Foucault archives). As the course of the early 1950s
clearly shows, the conditions of possibility for the birth of psychological
discourse and the human sciences in general lie for Foucault in the long
history of philosophical anthropology which, by problematizing the
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

figure of man, goes from Descartes to Nietzsche. And only a critique of

this ‘anthropologized man’ can free both philosophy and psychology
from any essentialist presupposition on the position of subjectivity.
‘Psychology, under the pretext of an analysis of the concrete – phenom-
enology, under the pretext of a return to things – both converge towards
the most abstract thing: towards an essence of man valid in the field of
anthropological speculation’ (‘L’agressivité, l’angoisse et la magie’, box
46, Archives Foucault, BnF, NAF 28740, folder 4). For the young
Foucault, reflections on the major texts of philosophy and on the history
of anthropology and psychology lead to a unique project: to understand
what the ‘scientification’ of the human sciences owes to the construction
of man’s knowledge about himself, and how one could imagine a phil-
osophy beyond this psychologized man-subject.
The question on the choice of content for the anthropology course
then contains a second one. Why write a history of anthropology? At the
age of barely 26 to 28, Foucault traces a major path that begins with the
questioning of anthropology and is going to provide a direction for much
of his later work: a critique of the figure of man who would be both the
subject and the object of a philosophico-psychological truth. Through
this history of anthropological knowledge, a fundamental problem opens
up for Foucault: the critical kinship between a philosophy of the present
and the thought of man and his death. It is important to note that, in the
early 1950s, this problem already takes the form of a history of anthropo-
logical discourse. Foucault’s course contains (although Foucault does
not yet use the term) an archaeology of anthropology as the genealogy
of critical thought: an interrogation on what remains to be done by
philosophy in the present if we accept the affirmation that man, like
the Nietzschean God and in the same movement as him, has died and
been erased, ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault,
2002: 422).

The End of Anthropology: Nietzsche, for a New Critique

The man at the centre of this archaeology of anthropology ante litteram
is Foucault’s way of making a history of the scientific and philosophical
discourse of modernity. Already at the beginning of the 1950s, he turns to
the theme of anthropology as a means of posing a transversal question
regarding modern epistemological and critical space, as will become evi-
dent with The Order of Things (Foucault, 2002). His research is driven by
one fundamental background question: how can we still speak of truth if
man himself, the subject and object par excellence of this truth, falls
apart? It is therefore important to note that, as early as in this course,
the problematization of the subject-man goes hand in hand with a ques-
tioning of truth. Making the history of anthropology is also a way for
Foucault to ask himself how philosophy has radically become a
Sforzini 11

questioning of truth – promised or lost forever. From Descartes to Kant,

and from there to Nietzsche, the exploration of the space of true dis-
course and its subject takes not only the classical form: how to reach the
truth or what are its contents? but a more radical (and Nietzschean)
meaning: does truth really exist, and what does it mean for the subject
who desires and seeks it?
This complication of the subject and truth, through and beyond
anthropological knowledge, can be explored first by deepening and pro-
blematizing the question of critique in the early Foucault. According to
Foucault’s course notes, anthropology, as it was born in the 19th cen-
tury, implies a specific relationship between man and critique, made pos-
sible (but not fulfilled) by Kantian critical philosophy: if truth is
naturally open to man – if man is, so to speak, at home in truth – who
is that man who becomes the ‘householder’ of truth? In this relationship
between man and a critique specific to anthropology, there are indeed
two sides: man, who becomes for himself the bearer and content of truth;
and the critical operation, which changes its face once it is taken into this
anthropological movement. ‘What is critique?’, Foucault may already
ask. This is a crucial point if we keep in mind Foucault’s journey, and
he will pose this question in different ways over the years, until his death
in 1984 (Foucault, 1984, 2015). Once again, one can note the key import-
ance of this early course on anthropology in light of Foucault’s later
intellectual trajectory, particularly regarding its redefinition of the task
of thought for the present. Critique is, in fact, in the anthropological
current, the combination of Kantian critical philosophy (the determin-
ation of the a priori conditions of knowledge) and critique in a more
directly practical sense – moral, political, psychological: a work on con-
ventions and prejudices to find the heart of the truth of real man, his
forgotten nature, his most profound essence. These two meanings are not
far from a promise of transfiguration specific to Kantian thought itself as
the philosophy of Aufklärung, as a discourse of a new time and a new
world opening up to man. Even if the Kant of political writings is not yet
discussed by Foucault, the term Aufklärer with reference to the German
philosopher is actually used in this early Foucauldian course in a short
but essential reflection on the notion of critique. And Foucault will sig-
nificantly return to Kant the Aufklärer in some famous analyses towards
the end of his life (Foucault, 1984), stressing the difference between the
two legacies of Kantian critical thought: a transcendental critique of
knowledge on the one hand and a critique of the present as an ontology
of actuality on the other. ‘It is [. . .] the criticized man who must be the
basis of critique’ (ms 46, 1).
Importantly, Foucault already insisted in the 1950s that, at the begin-
ning of the modern age, there had been a fertile relationship between the
critique of man as a transcendental subject of knowledge and that of
concrete man, taken in all its historical and political depth (Vaccarino
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Bremner, 2019). Through Kant and after him, there is a passage from
critique to man, and from the a priori man to the real one. Marx is on the
horizon, with his revolutionary promise. The course on anthropology
contains some brief but enlightening analyses of Marx as the first phil-
osopher of the end of philosophy and the first philosopher of freedom.
Marx ‘has instituted a philosophical critique of the immediate, from
which the lesson has not yet been drawn’; ‘Marxism [. . .] is the most
compelling summoning [assignation] to philosophize otherwise’ (ms 46,
1). We can feel the echoes that these formulations find, in relation to the
development of the Foucauldian philosophical task and its determination
to ‘think differently’. A decisive path, which passes through the thought
of real revolution, emerges between the critique of man through anthro-
pology and the critique imagined by Foucault within his own present:
‘the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits
that we may go beyond’ (Foucault, 1984: 47). Foucault finds, in the
history of knowledge about man, a tangle of philosophy, critique, and
thought as a force for transformation in the present that is at the heart of
his conception of philosophical practice. In seeking to upset the acquired
patterns of philosophy, Foucault himself will develop a new critique that
goes beyond the analysis of the transcendental forms of faculties of
knowledge in the wake of Kant but ventures to ‘the limits’ of Western
culture and deconstructs once and for all, after the end of the dream of
transcendence as the horizon of meaning for man and his nature, the
Subject of philosophers and the Man of humanist anthropologies and
their claim to hold before them the ultimate meaning of the world.
Nietzsche is then the true fulfilment of the Kantian critical promise (as
Foucault states in his early course and in his complementary dissertation
some 10 years later). A real critique can only be the reactivation of the
de-anthropologizing and de-subjectivizing process opened by Nietzsche:

That which will be not be long in dying, that which is already dying
in us (and whose death bears our current language) is homo dialec-
ticus – that being of the outset, of the return and of time itself, the
animal that loses its truth and Ends it again illuminated, a stranger
to himself who becomes familiar once more. That man was the
sovereign subject and the dominated object of all the discourses
on man, and especially alienated man, that have been in circulation
for a long time. Luckily, their chatter is killing him. (Foucault,
2006b: 543)

It is therefore not surprising that the course on anthropology finds its

final part and focal point in Nietzschean thought (and some of its inter-
pretations). The course ends with the demonstration that the current
state of philosophy is the end of anthropology as both a critical achieve-
ment and the end of philosophy itself. This demonstration is articulated
Sforzini 13

in three passages, all three of which mobilize Nietzsche’s thought.

Foucault first emphasizes, at the end of the 19th century, the develop-
ment of evolutionism and psychologism: against the myths of Man–
Reason and the transcendentalism of rational knowledge, we discover
that the truth of man is to be found outside himself, in the animal and its
history (Darwin, used by Nietzsche) or in the unconscious and that which
in man escapes himself radically (Freud, prepared and undoubtedly
anticipated by Nietzschean thought). Nietzsche’s philosophy then
marks an inflection of the true meaning of critique, which no longer
poses the problem of the conditions of truth but asks more radically:
why truth itself? Why does man want the truth rather than the error? And
then what about the man himself who, of this truth, should be the maıˆtre?
Finally, Foucault remobilizes the Nietzschean theme of Dionysus as anti-
Anthropos: the idea that thought, like existence, is fundamentally
Dionysian and tragic, against any dialectic of sense, but that in this
absence of meaning lies at the bottom a jouissance that is at the same
time an abysmal void and the power to cross it.
The chronology established by Daniel Defert states that Foucault’s
encounter with Nietzsche’s thought would have taken place in the
1950s, more precisely from 1953 onwards (Defert, 2015: XLI), through
the mediation of thinkers such as Bataille and Blanchot (see also
Foucault, 2001: 246). The manuscript on anthropology contains a
great number of references to Nietzschean texts, and Foucault already
uses the German philosopher in a philosophical way for a precise critical
purpose: the reconstruction of the history of anthropology in Western
thought up to its point of rupture and impossibility. His working papers
and reading notes show an impressive amount of reflections on
Nietzschean books in the early 1950s, even suggesting that Foucault’s
encounter with Nietzsche, especially with the Nietzsche of The Birth of
Tragedy (Nietzsche, 1999), whose concepts are widely analysed in his
early notes, could have taken place before 1953. It is likely that
Foucault read Nietzsche through the mediation of Jaspers, whom he
had crossed in his research on the history of psychology and mental
illness. The first French translation of Jaspers’ book on Nietzsche is
from 1950 (Jaspers, 1997), confirming the chronology just outlined. It
is not surprising therefore that the course on anthropology ends precisely
with the Jaspersian interpretation of Nietzsche, next to Heidegger’s one.
Foucault traces then through Nietzsche the history of the ‘end of
anthropology’. Nietzsche’s philosophy at last brings ‘that proliferation
of the questioning of man to an end. For is not the death of God in effect
manifested in a doubly murderous gesture which, by putting an end to
the absolute, is at the same time the cause of the death of the man him-
self?’ (Foucault, 2008: 124). This ‘end of anthropology’ implies first of all
a return to the question of nature, which had been one of the reasons of
the impossibility of anthropological thought in the classical age, as
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

shown above. It is a return to nature that aims to bring man back to a

truth lying outside himself. The critical operation is no longer exercised
on the transcendental consciousness of man, but on man in his natural
existence. Anthropology, as a specific form of knowledge and truth pro-
duced by man on himself, becomes thus impossible. This passage is
embodied by Darwinian evolutionism: ‘Nature, which had served as
the implicit framework for Anthropology, suddenly leads man towards
natural forms of existence, where the field of Anthropology disappears’
(ms 46, 1). Man is no longer the realm of truth, the home of his own
truth; his truth is told elsewhere. But is this statement not a new natur-
alism? If we take seriously the assertion that man is an animal and his
history an evolution, would philosophy not be reduced to an exploration
of man’s instincts: a biologism or a psychologism as derivatives of
post-anthropology? This is obviously an open risk in the Nietzschean
philosophy of life, but Foucault wishes to emphasize that nature and
animals are used by Nietzsche as limit-points of thought: concepts
which have to become practical truths and existential attitudes.
Evolutionism is a ‘test of man’s future’ through animality as a horizon
and limit. The reference to a natural history is ‘the questioning of
anthropological comfort, the discovery of these multiplied horizons
which, before him and behind him, take man away from himself’
(ms 46, 1). Paradoxically, animality is then the truest and most radical
form of freedom for man: the ‘repetition’ taken up and assumed by man
of his freedom in what seems to deny it.
In the same way, psychology, in the Nietzschean sense, is not the
discovery of a true essence of man, but the testing of his freedom in
this search for essence. Psychology becomes a critical instrument when
it ceases to be an analysis of the soul and of consciousness and becomes
an interrogation of the multiple and heterogeneous mechanisms that
have given birth to soul and consciousness in the first place, constituting
the myths of a purely immaterial mind and an absolutely free will. True
psychology is then an ethical and political deconstruction of the soul as
‘the prison of the body’ (Foucault, 1995: 30), which thus unravels the
fundamental link between knowledge and truth. There is no natural
human desire for true knowledge, as Aristotle states at the beginning
of his Metaphysics (I, 1, 980a). Knowledge is in reality the intertwining
of needs, instincts, wills, whose composite issue is that which we call
truth. It is up to the philosopher ‘diagnostician’ of the present to recon-
struct the genealogies of this truth and to discover its hazardous and
material origins, just as it is up to the new philosopher-psychologist to
dispel the myths of the subject’s unity by reconstructing the plural his-
tories of formation of the self.
The critique of man and his desire to know is therefore even more
radical than a questioning of man’s truth: it is the problematization of
the truth itself and its epistemic and moral primacy. In other words,
Sforzini 15

Nietzsche reaches, according to Foucault, the tipping point from which

Kant’s critical enterprise transforms itself into anthropological criticism:
the critique of knowledge – illusions, errors, problems, forms of human
alienation – is replaced by the critique of man himself. According to
Nietzsche (read by Foucault), this critique of man has to be achieved
by questioning the forms of experience in which man originally formu-
lated the truth about himself and the world. It is the truth itself, there-
fore, the truth of Western philosophy and science, that is being called
into question. What seemed to be the most obvious statement (‘truth is
better than error’) emerges as a highly questionable prejudice, which has
its origins in historically determined power relations and moral judg-
ments. The fundamental philosophical enquiry will therefore not concern
truth as a universal and necessary dimension, but it will be the freedom to
raise the most radical question regarding truth itself: that of its essential
links with error, lies, and simulacra. The histories of man, truth, and
philosophy intersect to form a specific ‘theatre of truth’ (Sforzini,
2017), a scene of the true that is both a comedy and a tragedy. First of
all, there is ‘the comedy that makes the truth fool the philosopher, but
also the philosopher fool the truth’ (ms 46, 1), says Foucault, repeating
paragraph 25 of Beyond Good and Evil:

As if the ‘Truth’ were such a harmless and bungling little thing that
she needed defenders! [. . .] We have to be clear about what we will
be seeing: – only a satyr-play, only a satirical epilogue, only the
continuing proof that the long, real tragedy has come to an end
(assuming that every philosophy was originally a long tragedy –).
(Nietzsche, 2002: 26–7, emphasis in original)

What is this ‘long tragedy’ of philosophy? To quote Foucault:

This tragedy is the tragedy of the Greek people themselves, or

rather, like the tragedy of the Greek people, it is dance, it is
Dionysian delirium, it is drunkenness. It must go beyond the
truth to what is more primitive than the truth itself. Philosophy
must not be a search for truth, but the drawing of that point
where the origin of truth and the collapse of truth converge; or
that point where the reason of being is also nothingness. (ms 46, 1)

It is through this path, through a philosophy that reconnects with the

tragic dimension at the root of its long tragedy, that the philosopher will
be able to regain his true freedom: he will be Freigeist, as Nietzsche says,
a free spirit. For Foucault, this is a freedom that breaks with all pre-
determined truth, and which, precisely for this reason, will one day be
able to say: ‘with the truth, the truth of the truth’ (ms 46, 1). It is the
freedom of the ‘true’ man, which implies the greatest of sacrifices: the
16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

death (or better, the murder) of God. It would be very interesting, in my

opinion, to reread the latest Foucaultian analyses of parreˆsia precisely
through these Nietzschean concepts of ‘truthfulness’, ‘veridicity’ and ‘free
spirit’, as Foucault himself suggested in his 1983 lectures at the Collège
de France, The Government of Self and Others:

The parrhesiast, the person who uses parresia,  is the truthful man
(l’homme ve´ridique), that is to say, the person who has the courage
to risk telling the truth, and who risks this truth-telling in a pact
with himself, inasmuch as he is, precisely, the enunciator of the
truth. He is the truth-teller (le ve´ridique). And [. . .] it seems to me
that Nietzschean veridicity (ve´ridicite´) is a way of putting to work
this notion whose distant origin is found in the notion of parresia 
(truth-telling) as a risk for the person who states it, a risk accepted
by the person who states it. (Foucault, 2010: 66)

The ‘tragedy’ of philosophy, its original experience and lesson, is then the
theatre of the Dionysian, where man gets lost in his own enigma and
abandons any claim to access his own truth to become only a dance of
masks. Foucault’s very famous and very contested announcement of the
‘death of man’ in The Order of Things thus has a very long history in his
thought. The Nietzschean Dionysus is for Foucault, already at the begin-
ning of the 1950s, the overcoming of both the essential authenticity of
truth and man, through delirium, intoxication, and the fragmentation of
the self. In Nietzsche’s reading, Dionysus is the mask of the true, the
surface of his appearance under which the being exists only as an empty
space of nothingness. Anthropological and ontological critique overlap
under the name of the god of inebriation, in a disindividualizing experi-
ence: the acceptance of life in its appearance and in fieri dimension, the
intoxicated pleasure of the Menads losing their identity, the breach of
limits and the annihilation of oneself. Foucault finds in the Nietzschean
figure of Dionysus a way to raise a question that he already perceived as
fundamental in his philosophical present: how to conceive the possibility
of a non-anthropological thought, namely a philosophy of rupture and
not of interiority, of the dispersion of subjectivity and not of psycho-
logical identity? How can we think of ‘expe´riences limites’ (extreme
experiences) and desubjectivating practices, outside the intelligibility of
subjective intentionality?

Conclusion
Foucault’s early course on the history of anthropology anticipates and
deepens a number of central themes that will be taken up and reworked
in the Foucauldian texts of the 1960s: The History of Madness as well as
The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault, 2003), The Order of Things or his
Sforzini 17

literary essays – namely, the history of man and his promised end; the
question of the anthropological origin of truth in the modern age; the
sense of critique; the questioning of phenomenology and its presuppos-
itions; the search for experiences of self-disruption and desubjectivating
reformulations of Western relationships to the truth. Without trying to
reduce the complexity of Foucault’s philosophical trajectory, with all its
gaps and bifurcations, it is clearly necessary to rethink analyses of
Foucault as an archaeologist of knowledge in light of his long and
sophisticated early work – a rethinking that the progressive exploration
and publication of previously closed archives is making possible for
researchers today. The anthropological critique remains an essential
axis of this early work, constituting a philosophical counterpart to the
epistemological critique of psychology and of the human sciences that
Foucault develops during the same period. All of these intellectual pro-
jects are driven by one central concern that animates the work of the
young Foucault: he aims to understand what philosophy and the con-
temporary human sciences owe to the historical figure of man and its
embeddedness within a certain conception of true discourse, of which
he senses the collapse, opening up new paths for thinking about the
questions of the subject and truth. Throughout Foucault’s course on
anthropology, one is particularly struck by the deep Nietzschean root
of these problems of self-undoing experiences at the limits of truth,
developing alongside and probably in parallel with his study of authors
like Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, Roussel. Nietzsche – or better the
Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, even before the genealogist
Nietzsche – has been shaping Foucault’s philosophy from the beginning
through his critique of man, the human sciences, and traditional phil-
osophy, and his search for a theoretically and politically active thought
in his present. His course on anthropology thereby turns out to be a
course on the death of man and the end of traditional philosophy,
linking the subject to truth in the form of a discourse on his own
truth. It is a course on Nietzsche in which Foucault raises the question
that will guide all his research: what does it mean to be a philosopher
today, when all the traditional cultural and political landmarks seem to
be changing? Who is the true philosopher, and what is the meaning of
her/his practice?

Thus, in this critical space cleared by Nietzsche, in the form of the

Dionysian freedom of spirit, this implication of truth and man,
which since Kant has been the very problem of Anthropology, is
for the first time disentangled. This does not mean that man and
truth fall outside each other, into a relationship of otherness in
which the boundaries and familiarity of their contemporary home-
land are erased. – But only that they become enigmatic to each
other, that they can no longer rely on each other: that man can
18 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

no longer be the truth of the truth, nor the truth, the truth of man.
Man and truth are in constant retreat from each other: they are
opaque. (ms 46, 1)

ORCID iD
Arianna Sforzini https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9850-3527

Notes
1. In this article, I have chosen to use the term ‘Man’ to indicate the ‘human
being’ in general and to refer to it with the masculine gender (with some
exceptions). It seems to us that this reflects Foucault’s own position, which
does not question gender issues. Analysing the history of anthropology, phil-
osophy and the human sciences, this lack of gendered reflection actually
makes sense. As several feminist thinkers have demonstrated, the use of the
masculine gender as a universal denotation is the standard norm in the his-
tory of Western thought, but it is not insignificant. It has hidden several
forms of symbolic violence and buried the words of women behind a pre-
sumed and politically dense universality.
2. Such expressions as ‘inhabiting’ (habiter) or ‘dwelling’ (demeure), to be ‘at
home’ (chez soi) in the realm of truth, constitute clearly a Heideggerian echo
in Foucault’s analyses. The problem of the presence and status of Heidegger’s
philosophy in the early Foucault is a major question, for which the course on
anthropology offers some possible answers. Heidegger is actually the last
author cited, although only his interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy is
at stake. In particular, this course allows us to rethink the links between the
anthropological and ontological problems in the first Foucauldian philosoph-
ical researches. Due to space constraints, I will not be able to explore these
themes in the present article.
3. The relationship between Foucault’s thought and Kant’s philosophy is obvi-
ously a complex subject that goes throughout his intellectual production and
is impossible to reconstruct here in detail. I only point out that the Kantian
texts used in this early course are essentially Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View and Logic. Foucault’s analyses are thus in strong continuity
with those presented later in his complementary 1961 doctoral dissertation
(Foucault, 2008). The Kant of political writings is not yet discussed by
Foucault; the political issues will be at stake more than 20 years later in
the Foucauldian commentaries to Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’
(Foucault, 1984, 2010) and in the important 1978 text ‘What is Critique?’,
recently republished in a critical edition in French (Foucault, 2015; for an
English version, cf. Foucault, 2007).

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Arianna Sforzini is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the University of

Fribourg and teaches philosophy at Sciences Po Paris. She is a member
of the Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault, and has been an
Associated Researcher to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (2016–
19), a Post-doctoral Fellow for the ANR project ‘Foucault Fiches de
Lecture/Foucault’s Reading Notes’ (CNRS – ENS Lyon, 2018–20) and
a Post-graduate Fellow at ICI Berlin – Institute for Cultural Inquiry
(2016–17). She is the author of Les sce`nes de la ve´rite´. Michel Foucault
et le the´âtre (2017), Michel Foucault. Une pense´e du corps (2014), and the
co-editor of Foucault(s) (2017), Un demi-sie`cle d’Histoire de la folie
(2013), and Michel Foucault: e´thique et ve´rite´ (1980–1984) (2013).

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on
‘Foucault Before the Collège de France’, edited by Stuart Elden, Orazio
Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini.