— Overview
Late in life Foucault described his lifelong philosophical work as an attempt to answer the problems of today. In a 1983 lecture he read Kant's essay What Is Enlightenment? as the first text of a philosophy that keeps asking about modernity. He placed himself not in an analytics of truth, but in an ontology of the present: no calendar and no map that would leap to an essence beyond time and space, only the concrete present, and the question of how one became who one is today.
— Contents and key concepts
A 1983 lecture, and a question Kant had already asked
Late in life Foucault described his lifelong philosophical work as an attempt to answer the problems of today. One of the great functions of modern philosophy, as he is quoted here, is to keep putting modernity itself in question. In a 1983 lecture he read Kant's essay What Is Enlightenment? as the first text of a philosophy that takes that repeated questioning as its task, and as the most important starting point for a modern philosophical attitude.
After Kant a critical tradition splits into an analytics of truth and an ontology of the present. Foucault places himself in the latter. The dates the discussion actually uses are few and clear: a birth in 1926 in Poitiers; a philosophy degree after the École normale supérieure in 1948; the History of Madness in the Classical Age in 1961; a chair in the history of thought at the Collège de France in 1970; a death in 1984.
Archaeology, genealogy, and a life without a borrowed map
The questions the account draws out are practical. What is this present, and who are we in it? How did I become who I am today? Instead of leaping, without a calendar or a map, to an essence beyond time and space, the work stays with the concrete present. Even the idea of essence, in this reading, is a historical construction. A historical-critical ontology of ourselves is what the work is for.
To do that work, the account distinguishes two analyses. Archaeology studies an episteme and a discourse, and shows the discontinuous regularities of knowledge; the books it names are The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. Genealogy studies the effects of truth, and the working of knowledge and power; the later work it names includes The History of Sexuality. The discussion is a first reading and a short reflection, not a new history of the 1970s. It leaves Foucault where he placed himself: in a critique of the present, with no borrowed calendar and no borrowed map.
Sources
- A summary of Foucault's thought, covering an ontology of the present, a 1983 reading of Kant's What Is Enlightenment?, and the difference between archaeology and genealogy.
Last updated: 14 November 2026
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