Regaining the subject: Foucault and the frankfurt school on critical subjectivity

Abstract

In his article “Regaining the Subject: Foucault and the Frankfurt School on Critical Subjectivity” Miguel Alirangues sketches a possible meeting place in which two currents of critical thought (Adorno and Horkheimer, on the one hand, and Foucault, on the other) can come into dialogue. Without these two currents and, more crucially, without the dialogue between them, as he points out, we cannot today think of political antagonism towards the social structures of domination and therefore we cannot think of praxis and agency. The essay proceeds as follows: firstly, the author notes the places in which Foucault spoke of his relationship with the Frankfurt School, and the limits of his reading. He then addresses some relevant contributions regarding this relationship from the side of Critical Theory to propose a common ground between Foucault and the first generation of the Frankfurt School with respect to truth and subjectivity. Thus, he tries to bring Foucault closer to the positions of a rereading of the Frankfurt School. The intention is to provide some textual references that may show us today how this confluence may be of benefit to us when developing a conception of critical subjectivity.