“By examining Foucault’s writings on Kant and the concept of aesthetic judgment in the work of both philosophers, Hengehold reveals compelling connections between these pivotal thinkers. Reading Foucault through Kant, she offers a serious challenge to critics who would dismiss Foucault’s last works as a mere reduction of ethics to aesthetics. Hengehold’s elegant prose and meticulous scholarship add interest and depth to a very original analysis. Every Foucault scholar needs to read this book.” —Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond

Late in life, Foucault identified with “the critical tradition of Kant,” encouraging us to read both thinkers in new ways. Grounding modern knowledge in the limits of human reason engendered highly successful forms of political, social-scientific, and medical rationality as well as Kant’s Copernican turn. These limits achieved a concrete, manageable form in historical structures like the asylum, prison, and the sexual or racial human body. Such institutions built upon and shaped the aesthetic judgment of those considered “normal.”

Following Kant through all of Foucault’s major works, this book shows how bodies functioned as “problematic objects” in which the limits of post-Enlightenment European power and discourse were imaginatively figured and unified. It suggests ways that readers in a neoliberal political order can detach from the imaginative schemes vested in their bodies and experiment normatively with their own security needs.