L’eredità dell’Illuminismo : Foucault lettore della risposta kantiana sull’Aufklärung

This article focuses on Michel Foucault’s critical reflection on the legacy of Enlightenment, developed between 1978 and 1984 in his reading of Kant’s Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? The article aims at showing how Foucault tranforms the question of Aufklärung into the problem of a critical relation to our present. From Kant’s way of interpreting this event, it is possible to inherit a conception of philosophy as an “ontology of our present”, a critical exercise consisting in questioning our current time and transforming our historical being. What Foucault suggests, it is the possibility of a legacy of Aufklärung understood as a practice of immanent critique of the historical configuration of power, truth and subjectivation that shaped our way of being.