Kant con Baudelaire. L’estetica dell’esistenza in Michel Foucault, fra esperienza del limite e artificio

Central to Michel Foucault’s reflection on the status of the Enlightenment, the Kantian notion of critique expresses the philosophical attitude of modernity, understood as an ethical and political relation to the present. The question of actuality as belonging of philosophy to its own time is discussed by Foucault in Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?, a famous commentary on Kant’s pamphlet, which in the American version, What is Enlightenment, includes a reference to a text by Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne. This contribution will read the relationship between Kant and Baudelaire in Foucault’s last intervention according to a double meaning: as the reverse of the archaeological enquiry into the limits of experience, placed by Foucault already in the 1960s at the center of Kant’s modern episteme; as the complement of the philosophical ethos on which the negative determinations of the exit (issue) and of the reflexive indocility (indocilité réfléchie) insist. These forms shape the processes of subjectivation discussed by Foucault in his last studies on sexuality and the hermeneutics of the subject.