[THIS PENULTIMATE VERSION MAY DIFFER IN MINOR WAYS FROM THE PUBLISHED VERSION. PLEASE DO NO QUOTE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION] Is Early Foucault A Historian? History, history and the Analytic of Finitude

There has been and still is much debate in the literature as to whether Foucault is (or not) a historian (as opposed to being a philosopher). When he became famous through the publication of The Order of Things, in 1966, many historians of ideas immediately attacked him for the alleged inaccuracy or mistaken character of his analyses1. At the same time, the French philosophical establishment rejected him for being too historical in his approach, to the extent that when the first large Foucault Colloquium was held in Paris in 1988, its (pro-Foucaldian) organisers felt that the title best suited to characterise and defend his work was “Michel Foucault Philosophe”2. Perhaps the latest example of this debate is the recent set of exchanges between G. Gutting and myself about my book, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical. While I read the Order of Things as trying to provide a philosophical analysis of the successive historical a priori in Europe, Gutting claims that “The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things are both primarily works of history, not philosophy in the traditional sense. In them, Foucault is concerned with forging a new approach to historical analysis but not with the metaquestion of how to understand or justify this approach philosophically”3. I certainly agree with Gutting that Foucault’s analyses have a strong historical tenor: the bone of contention, however, concerns the way in which this historical element should be construed. In my view, The Order of Things attempts to re-interpret the Kantian critical project by providing what might be called a “transcendental history”4 of the conditions of possibility of knowledge in the West. By contrast, Gutting argues that he is an historian in the French tradition of the history of sciences (in particular G. Canguilhem) and thus preoccupied with empirical objects only. As suggested by Gutting’s above remark about Foucault’s methodology, this debate has consequences for the conception of philosophy which should be attributed to the latter (and on whether he should be seen as a philosopher at all): while Gutting sees any form of transcendentalism as a mistake (thus on my account Foucault would have “lapsed into transcendentalism”, Gutting: §12), I argue that although Foucault strongly criticised the subject-based forms of transcendental philosophy (in particular Husserl’s phenomenology), one of the most interesting aspects of his work, and part of what makes it specifically philosophical5, was precisely his attempt to historicise the transcendental and rethink it in a non subjective way.