Foucault’s failed “death of man”: its structure, problems and relevance

The article clarifies Foucault’s thesis on “the death of man”, identifies its weaknesses and relevance today. The background of this thesis and the misconceptions in its interpretation are briefly written out. It is not about human as a subject, a biological species or a biosocial being, but about Man as a historical a priori, or a modern episteme formed at the turn of the XVIII–XIX centuries. As a transcendental condition, it determines the nature of modern forms of knowledge and thinking, for example, German idealism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and various kinds of naturalistic reductionisms. Human became possible thanks to the idea of transcendental finitude associated with Kant’s Copernican turn. However, his birth is associated with betrayal of the transcendental project — a mixture of the transcendental and empirical levels. The general structure of Man is a transcendence, defined on the basis of human sciences and their empirical objectivity. It is shown that, contrary to popular simplifying interpretations, the sciences of man are understood by Foucault specifically: they combine sciences (linguistics, social sciences, biology) with Man as a doubling. The stability and difficulty of overcoming a Person are set by the paradoxical nature of his structure, which mixes empirical and transcendental finiteness: empirical instances (language, labor, biological life) define a person in objective time, but are possible, like time, only thanks to the structure of cognition. A critique of Foucault’s idea of Man is given. Using the example of a cerebral subject identifying a personality with the brain, the relevance of a Person today is shown at least beyond philosophy in the concepts of subjects that rely on scientific knowledge and circulate in discourses and practices in the social space.