Intellectual Vigilance. Foucault and the (post-)foundations of critique

This paper functions as both an introduction to the German debate around Foucault’s model of critique and the questions of normativity surrounding it as well as presenting one possible interpretation of critique at the intersection of Foucault’s writing and his intellectual activism. Foucault’s model of critique has been and can be used or criticised productively in contexts of normative political theory. To properly capture Foucault’s critical project it is necessary to focus on the insights of governmentality studies and their normative abstinence when criticising, his turn towards the ethical and practices of the self like parrhesia, but also his activism as a public intellectual, with all of these notions always situated in the tension of particular and universal.