Radical Empiricism Revisited

Abstract

“Radical Empiricism Revisited” accomplishes a twofold task. In its early going, it raises questions concerning what arguably remains the most prominent force in continental philosophy and theory today: the radically empiricist, albeit also transcendentally inflected, projects of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze or Bruno Latour. After arguing that such empiricism, whatever its other merits, still trades on fairly standard Kantian frameworks for its own thinking, alternatives are explored. More novel, because more radically temporal (i.e., disappearing or evanescent), approaches are traced in the early writings of Jacques Derrida and, above all, in Michel Foucault’s first masterpiece, Folie et déraison: Histoire de folie à l’âge classique, on the basis of a different genealogy for transcendental questioning that follows Maurice Merleau-Ponty—a middle figure, to whom Deleuze was close—back to Edmund Husserl.