Immunization and Violence :: Philosophy Kant

Immunization and Violence1. In a text commit to Kant as interpreter of the Enlightenment, Michel Foucault locates the parturiency of contemporary philosophy in a precise stance. It concerns that taut and acute relation with the present that he label the ontology of the actual. How are we to understand the phrase? What does it mean to situate philosophy in the point or on the line in which the actual is revealed in the density of its aver historical being? What does an ontology of the actual mean, properly intercommunicate? The expression alludes above all to a change in posture with regard to ourselves. To be in relation ontologi look toy with the actual means to conceive modernity no longer as an epoch mingled with others, moreover as a stance, a posture, a will to see ones own present as a task. There is in this choice, something -- lets call it a tension, an impulse -- that Foucault will call an thos, which moves even beyond the Hegelian description of philosophy as the proper time spent in eyeshot, because it makes of thought the lever that lifts the present out of a linear continuity with time, property it suspended between deciding what we are and what we can become. Already in the case of Kant his support of the Enlightenment didnt signify only remaining flexure to certain ideas, affirming the autonomy of man, but above all in trigger a permanent critique of the present, not abandoning it in favor of an unattainable utopia, but inverting the notion of the possible that is contained within it, making it the key for a different reading of reality. This is the task of philosophy as the ontology of the actual trance on the level of analysis, locating the difference between that which is essential and that which is contingent, between superficial effects and profound dynamics that move things, that transform lives and that chase after existences. We are concerned here with the moment, the critical threshold, from which todays news crona ca takes on the breadth of history. That which is placed in being is an underlying question of the meaning of what we call today. What does today mean generally? What characterizes it essentially, which is to say, what characterizes its effectivity, its contradictions, its potentialities? But this question doesnt exhaust the task of the ontology of the actual. It isnt anything other than the condition for asking another question, this time that has the form of a choice and a decision.