Foucault’s Revolving Door of Rationality: Normativity and the Play of Perspectives

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ABSTRACT This paper argues for a reading of Michel Foucault’s works that draws on an expansive concept of normativity and places Foucault’s project in a broader framework. It is argued that the distinction between the normative and the non-normative fails to grasp what is most significant in Foucault’s work. This distinction should be replaced by a broader understanding of normativity permeating all social practices. However, in order to retain the sound intuition of two distinct moments within critical thought, this broader understanding must be complemented with a view of the entwined perspectives of participant and observer, both thoroughly permeated by normativity. However, there is a tension between these perspectives which both Foucault and critics such as Jürgen Habermas recognise as intensified in modernity. This intensification is manifest as instability, an ever-present possibility of shifting between perspectives that seems to demand resolution. Taking the fundamental norm motivating Foucault’s work as “the undefined work of freedom” the paper considers how this norm guides Foucault’s work by affirming this play of perspectives or “revolving door of rationality” in a way that marks a fundamental difference from his critics.