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Postcolonial Studies
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De-colonizing Foucault's historical

ontology: toward a postcolonial ethos
Sebastien Malette
Published online: 26 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Sebastien Malette (2012) De-colonizing Foucault's historical ontology: toward a
postcolonial ethos, Postcolonial Studies, 15:3, 369-387, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2012.759083

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 Postcolonial Studies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 3, 369
387

De-colonizing Foucault’s historical

ontology: toward a postcolonial ethos
SEBASTIEN MALETTE
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[. . .] many of our perplexities arise from the ways in which a space of possible
ideas has been formed.

Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology

Introduction
In his later work, Michel Foucault introduces the project of a ‘history of
subjectivity’ examining the ethical practices involved in the problem of
governing oneself and others.1 This project is described as deepening his
previous exploration of the ‘problem of government’, now focusing on the
processes of (self-)subjectivation arising through ethical practices.2 One of the
aims of this project is to encourage ‘practices of freedom’ in the face of ‘modes
of domination’ Foucault describes as blocking the reversibility of power-
relations mediated by ‘practices of the self’ and ‘practices of liberation’.3 This
invitation can be interpreted as the culmination of Foucault’s critical ethos,4
taking these ‘practices of freedom’ as key to the emergence of ‘strategic games
of liberation’ and a self-referential constructivism capable of disrupting modes
of domination ‘by freeing ‘‘ourselves from ourselves’’ by coming to see that
‘‘which has not always been,’’ that it could be otherwise’.5
It has been suggested that Foucault’s late turn to ethics could contribute to
the development of a postcolonial ethos.6 More precisely, it has been proposed
that Foucault’s work on ethics could facilitate the emergence of a postcolonial
ethos with the hope of opening new spaces of interrogation, this by rethinking
the scope of agency from the standpoint of practices ‘ineluctably bound up with
the historically and culturally specific disciplines through which a subject is
formed’.7 Moving beyond a debate mostly shaped as epistemological disputes
about the possibility and the power-relations involved in representing the
‘colonized’, Robert Nichols invites us to consider the ethical work of Foucault
as a possible answer to a number of ill-informed criticisms of Foucault’s
thought, as well as a source of inspiration to formulate a postcolonial ethos.
In this article, I suggest that we need to examine more carefully the
ontological assumptions supporting Foucault’s critical ethos, in particular the
notion of historical ontology. My contention with Foucault’s ontology
concerns one of its implications which ties up with his critical ethos: that
all that exists ineluctably exists within the scope of a historical ontology. For
# 2012 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2012.759083
 SEBASTIEN MALETTE

Foucault, the condition of possibility of Critique is expressed through this

idea that the ‘present’ is always more open than we think; that is against the
backdrop of a specific ontology positing that the fabric of reality is made of
historical events of finite and contingent nature.8 Foucault’s critical ethos can
therefore be understood against the backdrop of a historical ontology;9 that is
an ontology that posits the historical embeddedness of the various discursive
and non-discursive ‘practices’ shaping both our understanding of ‘self’ and
‘reality’.10 My argument is that Foucault’s ontology is running the risk of
relativizing the importance of all worldviews (except its own) as merely finite,
transient, and particular constructed narratives that may well restrict one’s
capacities to be or do otherwise than (culturally) prescribed.11 To be clear, my
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goal is not to work for or against Foucault, but rather through Foucault to
illustrate how our ontological assumptions can become the vehicle of
dominative and assimilative unsuspected tendencies, visible if we adopt a
postcolonial standpoint. My goal is to amend Foucault’s critical ethos from
the metaphysical implications of its historical ontology to articulate a
postcolonial ethos capable of negotiating what seem to us the necessary
conditions of possibility of Critique and freedom.
In this article, I will first examine Foucault’s notion of historical ontology
in relation to two difficulties. I will discuss Foucault’s critical ethos in relation
to its temporal character to show what I describe as an internal/external
tension at its core, to then suggest that two readings of Foucault’s ontology
are possible. From there, I will discuss the circularity affecting both these
readings, to finally argue that Foucault’s ontology must be stripped of an
aprioristic and assimilative tendency I describe in terms of a colonial logic.

Ontology and the critique of metaphysics

The notion of ontology is often met with high levels of suspicion.12 This
unpopularity can be explained, in part, by a history of dissatisfaction with
traditional metaphysics and its inability to ensure what is understood as
cumulative and progressive knowledge. Often associated with scholastic
metaphysics, the domain of traditional ontology has been progressively
dismissed by the sway of new criteria of cognitive success demanding
empirical experiments, falsifications and technological concrete applications.
Our modern sensibilities would now prefer the pragmatic and relativistic
inputs of compartmentalized and goal-oriented epistemologies and meth-
odologies over grand claims about the nature of reality we often cannot
confirm or deny using the privileged method of justification/validation of
knowledge adopted by our modern cultures, namely the scientific method.
Known as a vocal critic of modernity, Michel Foucault nevertheless
embraces its dismissive attitude toward traditional questions of metaphysics,
while simultaneously criticizing the metaphysical elements still plaguing
modern philosophy.13 Foucault is openly hostile to metaphysical speculations,
especially the formulations of aprioristic, universalistic or transcendental
arguments.14 In The Order of Discourse, Foucault criticizes metaphysics as the
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 DE-COLONIZING FOUCAULT’S HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY

pursuit of some lost origin, a-temporal essence, a unitary perfection,

transcendental theories of the subject, and univocal definitions or corre-
spondences between words and things.15 More specifically, Foucault ex-
presses his intention to avoid the pitfalls of Hegelian, Husserlian or
Heideggerian phenomenology, accused of grounding transcendentally the
possibility of the subject and Critique.16 By exposing the presence of
epistemic rules that precede both our consciousness and the objects we
pretend to know, Foucault’s archaeological method rejects the idea of an
original Nature, Subject or Universal Spirit waiting to be discovered.17
Moreover, Foucault casts off any universal and/or supra-historical truth we
could access from an aprioristic standpoint; a critique reiterated in both his
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genealogical and ethical work exploring respectively the productive aspects of

power and the possibilities for self-constituting ethical relations.18

Foucault’s critical project: historical ontology

Yet Michel Foucault uses the notion of ‘ontology’, even coining the term
‘historical ontology’ to describe his research.19 The question is why? Why did
Foucault use such a metaphysically-loaded concept? What can the combina-
tion of ‘historical ontology’ possibly mean? And how can we understand the
relationship between Foucault’s ‘historical ontology’ and his critical project?
To better understand the notion of ‘historical ontology’ it is important to
situate this concept within Foucault’s wider critique of the possibility of
knowledge at a fundamental level; a critique, which, despite the ‘positivistic’
outlook associated with its historical framework, remains equally hostile to
the idea that ‘the question of the condition of possibility of knowledge could
find a purely empirical answer’.20 This important precision articulated by
Beatrice Han helps us to understand the complex relationship between
Foucault’s treatment of history and its positivistic dimension. This relation-
ship can be understood as an ontological via media, which combines Kant’s
attempt to ground our knowledge on the basis of human finitude, while
rejecting the transcendentalism of such finitude on the basis of its historical
condition.21 By adopting simultaneously the notion of finitude in terms of
aprioristic positivity, while rejecting the teleological, deterministic or
universalistic laws ruling over such condition, Foucault wishes to avoid
both the empiricist and idealist reductionism. In simple terms, historical
ontology attempts to take the metaphysics out of ontology, without relapsing
into a crude version of empiricism.
For Foucault, this means abandoning the Kantian project aiming at
making man’s limitations this new a priori foundational ‘in the sense that any
epistemic content will have to be mediated through them to be known at
all’.22 It means that knowledge is always spatially and historically enframed
(yet not necessarily determined), which is different from suggesting that space
and time are aprioristic categories framing the intuitions by which we
apprehend empirical reality. This idea, which can be found in the Preface to
The Birth of the Clinic under the term ‘historical a priori’, constitutes the
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 SEBASTIEN MALETTE

baseline of a critique aiming at pre-empting any attempt to claim an a priori

perspective to secure a universal epistemic ground.23 It would be within this
particular framework that Foucault articulates the three axes of his
genealogical research he recapitulates as the axes of Knowledge, Power and
Moral/Ethics. All three dimensions, Foucault insists in 1983, are described as
having been always present in his work, although sometimes in a confused
manner.24 At the centre of his recapitulation, the concept of historical
ontology plays a central role:

First a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we

constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a historical ontology of
ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as
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subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to

ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.’25

Historical ontology as critical ethos

But how are we to understand the relationship between Foucault’s ‘historical
ontology’ and his critical ethos? What exactly is the purpose of conducting
genealogical research under the scope of historical ontology? James Tully
offers a succinct and comprehensive answer to this complex question:

The telos of questioning a limit of our thought and action in the present*a form of
our subjectivity*in Foucault’s philosophy is to open up the possibility of thinking
and acting differently. It comprises of two distinct exercises. Historical studies are
undertaken to bring to light the two kinds of limit: to show that what is taken for
granted in the form of the subject in question has a history and has been otherwise;
and to show ‘in what is given to be universal, necessary and obligatory, what place
occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary
constraint’. These studies thus enable us ‘to free ourselves from ourselves,’ from
this form of subjectivity, by coming to see that ‘that-which-is has not always been,’
that it could be otherwise, by showing how in Western cultures people have
recognised themselves differently, so to ‘alter one’s way of looking at things’.26

In this passage, Tully highlights the role played by a critical ethos we can
understand as a specific way of positioning ourselves toward our entangle-
ments with problems of knowledge and ethical relations. More precisely,
Tully’s description emphasizes the role of a specific way of undertaking
historical research, aiming at opening a vertical space of interrogations
showing the non-necessity and non-universality of what we know to be
fundamentally and/or objectively ‘true’ about ourselves, others and reality.
This passage also reveals how Foucault is using historical research to
problematize the ‘limits’ by which we relate to the problem of being, not
only as a fundamental problem of correspondence and objectivity, but also as
the problem of ‘being’ with oneself and others which Foucault describes in
terms of ethical and political modalities.
Tully’s description helps us to clarify the relationship between Foucault’s
historical ontology and his critical ethos in at least two ways. First, it shows
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 DE-COLONIZING FOUCAULT’S HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY

how Foucault expends the question of Being (or ontology) beyond its
classical acceptation as a branch of metaphysics broadly defined as the
philosophical exploration of what we might consider the first or most general
principles of reality. Foucault’s ontology is not merely a theory of being, but
implicates a critical ethos which verticality invites us to problematize at an
epistemic, political and ethical level what we believe to be true, apodictic,
universal or necessary about our understanding of reality, other and
ourselves. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Tully’s description reveals
just how important is the temporal character of Foucault’s thought by
highlighting the central role of Foucault’s historical methodology and his
conception of a historicized self.
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The temporal character of Foucault: modern temporality and its doubles

Although central to his work, this temporal character remains largely under-
theorized by the scholars who adopt a Foucaultian style of Critique. Many
have reconstructed, expended or better-explained the critical implications of
adopting a historical ontology, but no one seems particularly worried by the
metaphysical assumptions supporting its temporal aspects.
Breaking up this theoretical silence, David Couzen Hoy describes the
temporal character of Foucault’s thought in terms of a ‘modern temporality’,
produced ‘through the conflict that results when the closure that the
materiality of the past would impose on the present is opened up by the
processes of desubjectification’.27 Characterized as difficult to grasp because
it can ‘be found in so many aspects of his work’, Hoy connects this temporal
character with the introduction of elements of contingency and mobility that
would open up subjectification processes.28 Where Hoy’s description insists
on struggles and ‘processes of desubjectification’, highlighting perhaps a
missing aspect in Tully’s passage quoted above, his own description can be
problematized from the standpoint of the productive dimensions of power-
relations at the capillarity level of individuals problematizing their own
conduct through ‘practices of freedom’, which are not solely limited to
‘practices of desubjectification’ and ‘struggles’, but also processes by which
individuals ‘subjectify’ themselves while adopting self-shaping practices in
relation to notions such as freedom, spirituality, truth and self-care. To
describe the temporal character of Foucault’s thought merely as an
epiphenomenon of struggles, understood as the condition of possibility for
desubjectification processes, is to forget the self-subjectifying and self-
reflective aspects introduced in Foucault’s work on ethics. It is to forget
that what we can understand as ‘modern temporality’ is not only a
structuralizing phenomenon working objectively or from the ‘outside’, but
also a specific way to understand what temporality might be for individuals
negotiating de-subjectification and re-subjectification processes within this
‘modern’ temporal framework, or not.
This is not to suggest that Hoy’s description of ‘modern temporality’
cannot find any justification in Foucault’s work. It is rather to suggest that
373
 SEBASTIEN MALETTE

based on Foucault’s later work on ethics, we are invited to formulate a much

more complex answer to this issue; one that perhaps needs to renounce the
project of justifying our capacity to ‘be otherwise’ via the evocation of
external condition(s) of possibility alone. But doing so immediately generates
a paradoxical position: acknowledging the presence of an internal aspect
involved in self-subjectifying processes would basically re-inscribe the
dualistic tension found in Kant’s anthropological consecration of the Modern
Man (both subject and object of his knowledge) which Foucault paradoxi-
cally enjoins us to surpass at the end of Les mots et Les choses.29 It places us
as both object and subject of our own making. Yet, not endorsing this
internal aspect not only contradicts Foucault’s later work on ethics, but leaves
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us with the problem of external determinism when it comes to the formation

of the Self, which undermines not only the meaning of its freedom, but opens
the door to principles expressed in universalistic and reductionist terms (for
instance ‘struggles’). It is indeed by introducing an internal or self-reflecting
aspect about the capacity to ‘be otherwise’ at the level of individuals who are
self-problematizing their own conduct, that Foucault’s ethical work intro-
duces an element of contingency capable of slipping away from any attempt
to explain or predict the shaping of our freedoms (or conducts) in aprioristic,
universal or apodictic terms. By contrasting Hoy’s description of the
temporal character of Foucault’s thought with this later development found
in Foucault’s ethical work, we can shed light on what appears to be an
irreconcilable tension in his philosophical project.

Ontology and practices: double reading

But the ethical dimension of Foucault’s work is not the only source of
complication when it comes to discussing the temporal character of
Foucault’s thought. This character is further complicated by the ontological,
methodological and ethical/critical overlaps found in Foucault’s thinking.
The boundaries between these levels of analysis are indeed often blurry,
making it difficult to capture their implications in respect to the temporal
character of Foucault’s thought. At least two readings of the relationship
between the ontological, methodological and ethical/critical level are
possible: one that insists on the structuralizing effects of historical time itself,
the other on the contingent nature of the notion of practices itself.
On the one hand, it can be argued that (1) the underlying systematicity and
coherency of Foucault’s critical project is primarily assured by a given
historicity made of contingent events, acting as a quasi-aprioristic ontological
framework30 (the ontological dimension); (2) this ontological framework
would allow Foucault to account for both the positivity of discursive and
non-discursive practices and the epistemological possibility of cross-examin-
ing different modes of knowledge (episteme), without giving the impression
that he needs any transcendental or a-historical universal principles to do so
(the methodological/epistemological dimension); (3) this methodology, in
turn, supports the formulation of a critical ethos problematizing the various
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 DE-COLONIZING FOUCAULT’S HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY

modes of domination that attempt to negate or freeze the ontological state of

contingency outlined in Foucault’s later work (the ethical dimension).
Presented as such, a clear ontological precedence is given to the temporal
structures of historical time. Here the temporal character of Foucault’s thought
poses the condition of possibility of both his methodologies (archaeology,
genealogy and problematization) and the formulation of his critical ethos. On
the methodological level, it does so by assuming that both levels of ‘practices’
(discursive and non-discursive), as well as their respective levels of analysis,
emerge within a common ontological framework: historical temporality. It
furthermore allows Foucault to introduce a critical analysis that allegedly
avoids the formulation of metaphysical commitments by subsuming the
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universal, apodictic or transcendental arguments to their own particular

historical conditions of emergence. It finally enables Foucault to sidestep the
problem of historical determinism, if we agree that historical temporality
certainly frames our experiences at an ontological level, yet without imposing
any finality or pre-given direction to it, hence the suggestion found in his
critical ethos that the future is more open than we think.31
On the other hand, it is also possible to read Foucault’s ontology by
reversing the order given to the structures of historical time in favour of
‘practices’. This second reading would reconstruct Foucault’s philosophical
project less from the standpoint of its inner coherency and systematicity, than
from the philosophical developments following unexpected difficulties and
criticisms, which, in this case, have provoked the introduction of the notion of
‘practices’ (discursive and non-discursive).
Among these difficulties, we can find Foucault’s initial emphasis on a
language of perception found in The Birth of the Clinic, leading to the
problem of locating the origin of these perceptions between two equally
unsatisfactory solutions, namely the empirical (the body) or the transcen-
dental (consciousness); a difficulty which eventually leads Foucault to
abandon the language of perception altogether (found for instance in
Foucault’s epistemology of seeing), privileging instead a strict historical
analysis of the relations between words and things, and the epistemic
configurations by which different experiences of ‘order’ emerge.32 This
displacement, however, only pressed Foucault to account for the ontological
distinction his methodology presupposes between ‘words’ and ‘things’, that is
their autonomous existence and the mysterious ‘void’ from which language
speaks. An even more radical form of historico-nominalism is then
articulated in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), in which the notion of
‘things’ is traded for that of ‘objects’ produced by discourses (i.e. discursive
practices). By circumscribing the positive contours of discursive formations
which belong to given historical periods, Foucault’s archaeological method
tracks and contrasts the epistemological rules and regularities (episteme) that
govern what statements are understood as ‘true’ or ‘false’, rules and
regularities which also shape social and political behaviours to various
extents.
At this point, two criticisms formulated against Foucault’s critical project
can be said to have triggered the introduction of the notion of ‘practices’.
375
 SEBASTIEN MALETTE

Formulated by Le Cercle d’Epistémologie, the first one asks how can Foucault
engage critically an episteme without reintroducing an absolute or a-historical
form of knowledge?33 Tweaked otherwise: how can Foucault avoid the charge
of historical circularity that would make the use of our critical abilities the
mere product of their own historical conditioning? The second criticism,
attributed mainly to Habermas responding to Foucault’s genealogical
readjustment, claims that by subsuming the condition of possibility of
Critique to relations of power, Foucault is incapable of providing a moral
reason as to why we should resist or strive to be any ‘different’.34
The notion of ‘practices’ plays a key role in Foucault’s responses to these
criticisms by introducing an irreducible element of contingency both at the
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level of the condition of emergence of knowledge formations, and at the level of

power-relations, which reversibility is described as inherently connected to our
‘practices’. On the level of the condition of emergence of knowledge
formations, it is first important to understand that the positivity Foucault
attributes to ‘historical events’ has nothing to do with the establishment of their
historical objectivity. For Foucault, historical records offer ‘discursive traces’
refracting the historical embeddedness of a ‘present’ that can be made
uncomfortable with its certainties via the realization that past ‘events’ could
have been otherwise. Far from implying historical determinism, reflective
analyses on the basis of a historical material would reveal the open and
malleable nature of our ‘present’, hence the possibility of its critique and
transformation without the need to step ‘outside’ history. But here we also need
to understand that these ‘reflective analyses’ are themselves ‘practices’, which
are contingent, not only because they could have been otherwise due to their
fundamental historical nature, but because ‘practices’ are ultimately emerging
through power-relations which exceed the capacity of any overarching
rationality to predict their future actualization in terms of apodictic laws.
‘Practices’ can always potentially refuse, transform, adopt or divert any given
finality that the experience of consciousness and knowledge would emerge.35
The concept of ‘practice’ also plays a central role in Foucault’s later work
on ethics, which can be interpreted as answering the critique of moral
paralysis that allegedly affects his genealogical notion of power/knowledge. It
can be suggested that the notion of ‘practices of freedom’ is introduced as a
means to break free from the alleged circularity of power/knowledge, accused
of providing no normative standpoint to escape the circular return of
domination. By undertaking the task of caring for oneself through ethical
practices (contingent for the reasons mentioned above) described as
inherently connected to the care of others, it is suggested that the dominative
tendencies present in any knowledge/power formation could be resisted by an
ethics based on ‘practices of the self’, making obsolete sweeping moral
doctrines formulated in terms of universal, aprioristic and abstract ration-
alities. Answering the critique of Habermas (and others), the ethical work of
Foucault suggests that there is no need to frame our freedoms by elaborating
normative principles that supersede our capacity ‘to be otherwise’, except at
the peril of jeopardizing precisely our freedoms which are always and already
in ‘practices’, both responding and creating the particularities of their
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 DE-COLONIZING FOUCAULT’S HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY

emergence.36 Interpreted this way, our ‘practices’ are not emerging within the
framework of a historical ontology, but rather ontologies are always and
already in ‘practice’. In other words, our understandings of reality would be
derivative of ‘practices’, not the other way round.
As we can see, at least two readings of Foucault’s critical project are
possible. More precisely, two readings each insisting on a different principle
to explain why there is a fundamental and irreducible element of contingency
within our knowledge/power/ethical modalities can be found in Foucault’s
critical project: one that insists on the temporal structure of history, the other
on the notion of ‘practices’ itself. When reading Foucault, one has the clear
impression that his concept of historical ontology attributes a state of
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ontological contingency and finitude to all beings via the structure of

historical time itself. On the other hand, it is also possible to reverse the order
between ontology and practices, making Foucault’s genealogical work itself a
contingent practice.
Both interpretations, however, lead to paradoxical difficulties. On the one
hand, in order to claim that the structure of historical time bears the qualities
of finitude, contingency and transiency (within which ‘practices’ would then
emerge), one must formulate an aprioristic, apodictic and universal argument
to do so*something Foucault precisely hopes to dismiss via the use of
historical ontology. On the other hand, in order to posit ‘practices’ as both
anterior and the cause of our ontologies (including historical ontologies), one
must posit the notion of ‘practice’ as an a-historical and causa sui ontological
principle, a solution way too transcendental for Foucault. It therefore appears
that Foucault’s ontology is trapped within a circular argumentation that
reintroduces the paradoxical and metaphysical status of historical ontology
as soon as he posits the historical character of our ‘practices’.

‘Foucault’ and the problem of (neo)colonial ontology

The circularity affecting Foucault’s ontology not only reveals the paradoxical
status and metaphysical underpinning of Foucault’s ontology; it also high-
lights the risk of a hegemonic and assimilative tendency affecting not only
the core of Foucault’s critical ethos, but also the various projects drawing
their inspiration from it, including Robert Nichols’s project to formulate a
postcolonial ethos.
Of course, accusing Nichols’s project of concealing a neo-colonial agenda
would be both extreme and unfair. After all, Nichols’s project is rather well-
intentioned: to open new spaces to problematize ‘agency’ based on the
standpoint of practices ‘ineluctably bound up with the historically and
culturally specific disciplines through which a subject is formed’.37 Nichols is
suggesting that we generate a different ‘Foucault’ beyond the standpoint of a
politics of textuality, epistemological questions and representations that
mostly ignores Foucault’s late work on ethics. Considering Foucault’s late
work on ethics, it is suggested, could have precisely answered the laments of
Said or Spivak (among others) that too little room has been provided in
377
 SEBASTIEN MALETTE

Foucault’s thought to ‘the self-reflective activities of subaltern subjects’.38 In

particular, Nichols demands that we go beyond ‘Foucault’ as a problem of
knowledge in relation to postcolonialism.39
What I am suggesting is not that we dismiss the work of Nichols, but that
we open up a single assumption we find in his invitation to formulate a
postcolonial ethos, responsible for his description of ‘practices’ as ‘ineluctably
bound up with the historically and culturally specific disciplines through
which a subject is formed’. As I hope my article has illustrated thus far, this
association between practices and historicity is more complex than one might
assume. It might be a modest contribution, but I believe that interrogating
this assumption can help us to diagnose what I see as a broader hegemonic
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and assimilative tendency in the ways in which we construe our under-

standing of Critique following the work of Michel Foucault, which lead in
this case to the formulation of a postcolonial ethos.40
But first let me clarify my own usage of the terms ‘colonialism’ and
‘postcolonialism’, as these terms prove to be polysemic. I am not referring to
colonialism only as an occupation of land (first by Force then by Law), nor as
the implementation of a Western governmentality into non-Western societies
through technologies and rationalities targeting both individuals and
populations, but also as a process operating at the deeper level of our
metaphysical and ontological assumptions, as well as our understanding of
what to be critical is. What I wish to underscore by using the term ‘colonizing
ontology’ is that both the metaphysical imagination of the colonizer and the
colonized are trapped within the specifics of colonizing settings, which, as
modes of domination, aim at preventing them from accessing their imagina-
tion in a postcolonial fashion. It does so by colonizing the specific ways in
which the notion of Critique itself ought to be understood, this by controlling
the way in which we understand the conditions of possibility of Critique, which
include the ontological and metaphysical language(s) one is using (i.e. the
adoption of a realist, constructivist, nominalist or historical ontology, all in
agreement to cast off the existence of spiritual entities at the root of animist
cultures as nonsensical), as well as the direction needed for our imagination to
renew itself (i.e. the normative goal of gaining always more freedom and
reinventing oneself).
My reference to postcolonialism is therefore not limited to a historical
period, a political movement or a literature genre. By referring explicitly to an
ethos, I am rather describing a transformative philosophical attitude aiming,
in this particular case, at encouraging ‘colonizers’ to be preoccupied first and
foremost with the task of de-colonizing themselves from what implicates them
as ‘colonizers’ at the level of their metaphysical assumptions, including their
conception of Critique by which they define themselves and others,
cognitively, ethically and politically. Worrying about ourselves as ‘colonizers’,
and making an effort to think how we can transform the part we play as such,
rather than trying to better enounce for all parties involved what are the
conditions of possibility to be genuinely free and critical, is the type of
disposition I place under the term postcolonialism ethos. Hence, for the
colonizers, whose first step is to recognize themselves as such, what I mean by
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adopting a postcolonial ethos can be described in terms of self-reflective

‘practices’, as suggested by Foucault in his later work on ethics, minus the
metaphysical implications of his historical ontology.
To effectively strip ‘Foucault’ of the metaphysical implications linked with
his historical ontology, we must first address the aprioristic and universal
assumption that all that exists is framed by its own historicity. In other words,
we must address the metaphysical assumption that all experiences are
universally and aprioristically framed by their own historicity. One can
certainly understand (and even praise) Foucault’s willingness to move beyond
the transcendental reification of the Subject, History and Progress through
such ontological assumption: by wanting to get rid of the transcendental ‘I-
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ness’ that haunts modern philosophy at least since Kant (if not Descartes),
Foucault’s strategy has been to externalize the axiomatic tendency we find at
the heart of the modern episteme, which, in subsequent leaps, went from
freeing itself from onto-theological tutelage by grounding the possibility of
knowledge in the Subject alone (as the fundamental axiom of all knowledge),
to the adoption of a postmodernist metaphysics holding the temporal
structure of historicity (rather than the Subject) as that by which we can
free ourselves from the manacles of both modern subjectivism and the
residual of aprioristic formulations. In other words, Foucault has externalized
the Archimedean consecration of the Cartesian/Kantian Subject by evoking
an external element, historicity, which frames the Subject in terms of finitude,
location, transiency and contingency, making impossible its universal and
aprioristic consecration. From this set-up has emerged the task of the
genealogist to think such historicity in order to expose the contingency of our
modes of thinking, while positioning our ‘will power’ vertical to itself as a
potential source of creation for an undetermined future via the notion of
‘practice’.
Of course, as I have already discussed, it can be argued that historical
ontology should be understood first and foremost as a genealogical ‘practice’,
which makes no claim about the metaphysical or objective structures of
temporality as such. The ‘practice’ of doing genealogical work would introduce
an element of contingency, making any universal or aprioristic claims about the
‘true’ nature of historical time impossible. Making universalistic and aprioristic
claims would be impossible, not because of the structures of historical time
itself, but rather because the descriptions of the structures of temporality
assumed by the genealogist can always be otherwise due to their ontological
grounding in unpredictable ‘acts of will’. But again, this would turn the notion
of ‘practices’ into an a-historical self-explanatory principle no more acceptable
to Foucault who insists on the thoroughly historical character of just about
anything (including ‘practices’). Moreover, we can see that the relationship
between Foucault’s historical ontology and his ‘ontology of praxis’ leads to a
circular argument: ‘practices’ are contingent because they are fundamentally
historical (historical ontology), and ‘historical ontology’ is fundamentally
contingent because it is a ‘practice’.
It is this circular, universalizing and aprioristic character that affects both
Foucault’s historical ontology and his ‘ontology of praxis’ which I see as
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problematic from the standpoint of the postcolonial ethos. On the one hand,
positing that anything that exists must exist historically is still to posit a
universal and aprioristic metaphysical argument formulated as ‘self-evident’:
it is still to posit a metaphysical Archè by which Foucault grounds
ontologically the condition of possibility of our self-reflecting capacities
(although always heterogeneous), our critical abilities and our possibilities to
do otherwise in a ‘present’ Foucault desperately needs to portray as ‘open’ if
he wants to avoid the peril of a deterministic dead-end to his encouragement
to resist the closure of domination. On the other hand, Foucault’s ‘ontology
of praxis’ involves similar difficulties. ‘Practices’ are either described as
fundamentally contingent because of their historical nature (which brings us
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back to our critique of historical ontology), or they are described as

contingent because of their inherent reversible nature.
In both cases, however, Foucault’s critical ethos only reintroduces a
universalistic and aprioristic formulation of the conditions of possibility
supporting an irreducible state of contingency, finitude and transience (or
reversibility); a universalistic and aprioristic formulation camouflaged
through a circular cross-reference between practices and historical ontology.
Foucault’s ontology thus reproduces the colonial logic by generating a
discourse that arrogates the conditions of possibility of Critique and freedom
at an ontological level. As such, it remains framed by a strong monologist,
assimilative and totalizing tendency inherent to the continuation and
reproduction of the cultural logic of colonialism, which operates by short-
circuiting the ways in which other people may understand themselves outside
the ontological parameters that support historical ontology. Foucault’s
ontology forces us to accept that all worldviews and the stories they tell are
primarily historical artifacts, thus finite, transient and only contingent. All
but one: the story that makes all others merely historical, finite, and transient
narrative constructions: historical ontology. Foucault’s ontology therefore
risks facilitating, rather than hindering, subtle forms of cultural assimilation
or domination by capturing at an ontological level the conditions of
possibility for freedom and Critique.
Of course, it can be argued that cultural narratives can also enable or
facilitate the capacity to reinvent oneself, and that no narrative or social
structure can completely foreclose the morphing capacities of individuals or
societies to transform. In both cases, however, the ontological existence of
cultural narratives and their ‘regimes of truth’ are ultimately subsumed by
Foucault under the ethical task of preventing domination by reinventing
oneself through indefinable and unpredictable ‘practices of freedom’. By
weaving this ‘thin’ normative goal through an ontological argument,
Foucault’s critical ethos not only risks imposing a normative goal shaped
by the dissemination of a specific culture distinctively obsessed by values such
as freedom, resistance and innovation in the context of large institutional
infrastructures (mostly refracting the legacy of political and economical
liberalism), but also skips the important task of negotiating our deep-seated
assumptions about the nature of reality.
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If we agree that even our understandings of time and historicity have been
conditioned by numerous cultural inputs,41 we cannot claim that our
understanding of historicity corresponds to objective reality. This is not to
say that holding metaphysical beliefs about the nature of time or reality is
something wrong per se. On the contrary, it seems quite inevitable to assume
some kind of metaphysical assumptions when it comes to our understanding/
description of the world.42 But to posit our metaphysical beliefs as universally
and apodictically true on the basis of their self-evidence is precisely one of the
most enduring traits of what I describe as the ‘cultural logic of colonialism’*a
logic that operates first by making us believe that its own ontological assessment
of the world carries the weight of certainty and self-evidence, to then justify the
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actions needed to impose its cultural view on other societal entities.

This logic can be described as asserting a specific point of view about reality
in a self-contained and self-referential manner (i.e. a first principle), to
gradually impose itself on what it considers alien via more or less subtle
processes of assimilation. This assimilative logic can be mediated through the
supremacy of the Universal over the Particular, or just the opposite. Such logic
may even be carried through the pre-eminence we often give to freedom before
any given cultural identities, as if the latter was only a reality in relation to the
former. As such, we should be aware that the rise of a critical culture in which
we are obliged to be free à la Foucault is perhaps one of the subtlest tools of the
advanced neocolonial governmentality currently spreading.43
Making explicit our metaphysical assumptions in order to negotiate their
formulations and implications openly with holders of different worldviews
who may not share these assumptions could be a good first step to move
beyond the grip of a colonial ontology. By doing so, we could minimize the risk
of epistemic violence and subtle modes of domination working through our
understanding of reality at a fundamental level. To do so, the formulation of a
postcolonial ethos should be stripped of its critical tendency aiming at
delineating beforehand the conditions of possibility to be genuinely free or
critical (either from an ontological or epistemological standpoint). We do not
have to assume beforehand that our ‘practices’ are ineluctably bound to
anything at all or any idea in particular, besides perhaps their relational
aspects, which precisely ask for open negotiations when it comes to their
meanings or modulations. As ‘ontological colonizers’, we must learn to let go
of our profound desires to control, if not the course of History itself, the
metaphysical meanings we attribute to the experience of historical temporality.
While I agree that Foucault’s later work on ethics can certainly be helpful in
formulating a postcolonial ethos, it must first be stripped of the assimilative
and totalizing metaphysical tendencies still lingering in its historical ontology,
testimony of its post-Enlightenment rather than beyond-Enlightenment status.

Acknowledgements
This research has been supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

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Notes
1
Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel
Foucault’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 12, 1987; A I Davidson, ‘Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the
History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought’, in G Gutting (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p 127. See Foucault in ‘The Subject and Power’ (‘Le
sujet et le pouvoir’, in Dits et Écrits, vol 2: 1976
1988, Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001): ‘The ideas which
I would like to discuss here represent neither a theory nor a methodology. I would like to say, first of all,
what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the
phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has
been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.’
Translation in P Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader, New York: Vintage Books, 2010 [1984]. Italics are
mine.
2
M Foucault, ‘Subjectivité et vérité’, in Dits et Écrits, vol 2, p 1033. On the complex relationship
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between notions of governmentality, ethics, freedom and ‘care of the self’, see M Foucault, ‘L’éthique
du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’, in Dits et Écrits, vol 2: ‘The ethic of care for the self as a
practice of freedom: an interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984’: ‘[...] I do not think that
the only point of possible resistance to political power*understand of course, as a state of
domination*lies in the relationship of self to self. I say that governmentality implies the relationship
of self to self, which means exactly that, in the idea of governmentality, I am aiming at the totality of
practices, by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which
individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other. It is free individuals who try to control,
to determine, to delimit the liberty of others and, in order to do that, they dispose of certain
instruments to govern others. That rests indeed on freedom, on the relationship of self to self and the
relationship to the other. [...].’ Translation in Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of
Freedom’, pp 130
131.
3
Here I use the distinction made by James Tully between ‘practices of the self’ and ‘practices of
liberation’: ‘Practices of liberation refer either to the strategic games of liberty agents play together in a
practical system or the more individual ‘‘practices of the self’’ an agent applies to himself or herself’
(James Tully, ‘To think and act differently: comparing critical ethos and critical theory,’ in James Tully,
Public Philosophy in a New Key. Volume 1. Democracy and Civic Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008, p 78.). If no explicit distinction is made, I refer to both of these dimensions when
I use the term ‘practices of freedom’. On the difference between the notions of ‘power relations’ and
‘domination’, see Foucault, ‘L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’: ‘[...] That is where
the idea of domination must be introduced. The analyses I have been trying to make have to do
essentially with the relationships of power. I understand by that something other than the states of
domination. The relationships of power have an extremely wide extension in human relations. There is a
whole network of relationships of power, which can operate between individuals, in the bosom of the
family, in an educational relationship, in the political body, etc. This analysis of relations of power
constitutes a very complex field; it sometimes meets what we can call facts or states of domination, in
which the relations of power, instead of being variable and allowing different partners a strategy which
alters them, find themselves firmly set and congealed. When an individual or a social group manages to
block a field of relations of power, to render them impassive and invariable and to prevent all
reversibility of movement*by means of instruments which can be economic as well as political or
military*we are facing what can be called a state of domination. [...] Liberation opens up new
relationships of power, which have to be controlled by practices of liberty.’ Translation in Foucault, ‘The
Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, p 114.
4
The concept of ethos is a complex notion that merges together both a specific way of conceiving critique
and a particular attitude or way of behaving towards oneself and others. On the notion of ‘critical ethos’
in relation to ‘historical ontology’, see Foucault in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (M Foucault, Qu’est-ce que
Les Lumières?’ (1984), in Dits et Écrits, vol 2; translation in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader). On the
definition of ethos as a mode of being and behaving, and on the relationship between ‘freedom’ and
‘ethos’ see Foucault, ‘L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’: ‘The Greeks, in fact,
considered this freedom as a problem and the freedom of the individual as an ethical problem. But ethical
in the sense that Greeks could understand. Ethos was the deportment and the way to behave. It was the
subject’s mode of being and a certain manner of acting visible to others. One’s ethos was seen by his dress,
by his bearing, by his gait, by the poise with which he reacts to events, etc. For them, that is the concrete
expression of liberty.’ Translation in Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’,

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p 117. See also the interesting assertion by Foucault from the same text: ‘Liberty is the ontological
condition of ethics. But ethics is the deliberate form assumed by liberty’ (p 115). Italics are mine.
5
Tully, vol. 1, 2008, pp 76
77. See David Owen’s description of autonomy as ‘the activity of self-
construction’, showing the rapprochement between Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s thought contra
Habermas: ‘By contrast [with Habermas], the Nietzschean trajectory of thought articulates the
relationship between autonomy and critique in terms of a thinking of autonomy as the activity of self-
construction which locates critique as the specification of the form of this activity. In this context, we
may attempt to grasp Foucault’s conception of ‘the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of
ourselves in our autonomy.’ D Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the
Ambivalence of Reason, London: Routledge, 1994, p 161. Italics are mine.
6
Robert Nichols, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Discourse of Foucault: Survey of a Field of
Problematization’, Foucault Studies 9, 2010, pp 114
144.
7
Nichols 2010, p 33.
8
Foucault, Tully 2008, pp 76
83, Owen, Maturity and Modernity, pp 160
162.
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9
P Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire; suivi de Foucault révolutionne l’histoire, Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1979; M Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology, London:
Routledge, 1994; I Hacking, Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
10
As David Owen summarizes it: ‘The actual ways in which we constitute ourselves as subjects of
knowledge govern the ways in which we can reflect on others and ourselves and, thereby, define a field of
possible ways of acting on others and ourselves; while, at the same time, the actual ways in which we act
on others and ourselves govern the possible ways in which we can constitute ourselves as subject of
knowledge. Viewed in this way, Foucault’s project of historical ontology may be situated as a mode of
accounting for the emergence and development of the structures of recognition constitutive of our
subjectivity through a tracing of the movement from fields of possibility to patterns of actuality in the
interplay of structures of consciousness and structures of the will.’ Owen, Maturity and Modernity, p
156. Italics are mine.
11
This seems to be at least the conclusion reached by Sergei Prozorov, making an exemplary use of
Foucault’s critical methodology to attack identity politics and other cultural diagrammatic ‘enframing’.
See S Prozorov, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
12
The term ‘ontology’ is often used in diverse ways and with different connotations. Etymologically
speaking, the term ‘ontology’ refers to a conjunction of the Greek words on to (‘what is’) and logos
(‘reason or discourse’). The term ontology can therefore be loosely translated as ‘rational discourse on
what is’ (or Being). As a discipline, ontology refers to a branch of metaphysics that is broadly defined as
the philosophical exploration of what we might consider the first or most general principles of reality. In
its classical formulation, ontology came to designate the part of philosophy that studies the first causes
and principles of physics, the study of ‘beings qua beings’, influenced in this definition by the seminal
work of Aristotle. Ontology remains an unpopular topic despite recent and often excellent attempts to
explore the ontological assumptions held by canonical philosophers (J Coujou, Philosophie politique et
ontologie: remarques sur la fonction de l’ontologie dans la constitution de la pensée politique, 2 vols, Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2006), or to rethink materialism, Marxism or the usual dichotomies informing Western
thinking (C Strathausen, A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009; D H Coole, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; J Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). For an interesting explanation as to why ontology is still an
obscure notion to many, see Ian Hacking’s opening remarks in Historical Ontology, pp. 1
2.
13
Subject to many discussions, it has been debated that Foucault might in fact be a successor to modernity
rather than its radical antithesis. According to Foucault, Kant expresses the space of a quintessential
interrogation characterizing modernity in his appeal to use of our own reason (against dogmas), while
developing an analysis of the conditions under which it is legitimate to claim what can be known, done
and hoped. For Foucault this interrogation is the first one to place itself at the vertical of its own
historicity or actuality, opening the possibility to interrogate rational thought, not only its nature, but
also its history. The critical project of Foucault through the notion of historical ontology can thus be
considered as a philosophical ‘successor’ of the Enlightenment rather than its antithesis. See M Mahon,
Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject, Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1992, p 181.
14
Foucault has often been described as a postmodern thinker, associated with a group of thinkers known
for their radical critique of objectivity, truth and abstract reason, the teleological approach of history,
universalizing grand narratives, the notion of scientific progress, the a priori subject as source of
meaning, authenticity and authority. Yet his work has been convincingly described as framed by a

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modern philosophical gridding, in particular the problem of Kant’s anthropological consecration of the
Modern Man, which bears direct influence on the formulation of historical ontology (B Han, Foucault’s
Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, Atopia, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002).
15
Owen, Maturity and Modernity, p 147. See also Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Rabinow,
The Foucault Reader.
16
M Foucault, L’Ordre du Discours, Paris: Gallimard, 1971, pp 49
50, 76
77. Foucault declares: ‘Husserl
and Heidegger bring up for discussion again all our knowledge and its foundations, but they do this by
beginning from that which is original. This analysis takes place, however, at the expense of any
articulated historical content. Instead, what I liked in Nietzsche is the attempt to bring up for discussion
again the fundamental concept of knowledge, of morals, and of metaphysics by appealing to a historical
analysis of the positivistic type, without going back to origin’ (M Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews,
1966
84, trans John Johnston, ed Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semiotext[e], 1989, p 77; quoted in
Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, p 102; my italics). This comment should not be interpreted as a
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negation of the intellectual debt and many similarities characterizing Foucault’s work in relation to
Heidegger. See A Milchman and A Rosenberg (eds) Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters,
Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003.
17
A cautionary note for the philosophers of analytical obedience: this does not mean that Foucault rejects
the possibility of predicating universal or even aprioristic judgements when they occur within the
context of justification of the various ‘regimes of truth’, based upon the acceptance of specific premises
and logical implications (which is not the same thing as saying that the Universal actually exists as a
thing). Within the limits of contexts of justification, premises that are posited as self-evident, aprioristic
or universal are certainly possible, and may even prove useful to the resolution of specific problems (i.e.
mathematical problems). Foucault’s treatment of ontology rather targets the context of emergence and
effectiveness that exceeds the framework of rules and regularities found within these ‘regimes of truths’
we often mistakenly hold to be fundamental at an ontological level. This is not to say that nothing can
be said about ‘reality’ either. As David Couzens Hoy puts it, Foucault’s methodological nominalism
‘does not entail that universals do not have real effects. [...] From a fictitious relation, Foucault
maintains, a real subjection can be born’ (D C Hoy, The Times of Our Lives: A Critical History of
Temporality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p 235). In other words, Foucault is less concerned with
the truth or falsity of universal statements than with modes of domination, described as lacking the
possibility of any reversal or contestation. Foucault’s concern with universality is thus mainly political,
not analytical, and certainly not ontological in the classical sense of the term.
18
See Foucault in ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, showing the consistency of his
critique of the aprioristic way in which phenomenology formulates its theory of the Subject:

Q: But you have always ‘refused’ that we speak to you about the subject in general?MF: No I had not
‘refused.’ I perhaps had some formulations which were inadequate. What I refused was precisely that
you first of all set up a theory of the subject*as could be done in phenomenology and in
existentialism*and that, beginning from the theory of the subject, you come to pose the question of
knowing, for example, how such and such a form of knowledge was possible. What I wanted to know
was how the subject constituted himself, in such and such a determined form, as a mad subject or as a
normal subject, through a certain number of practices which were games of truth, applications of
power, etc. I had to reject a certain a priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis of the
relationships which can exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject
and games of truth, practices of power and so forth.
19
Foucault, ‘L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’, p 1212.
20
Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, p 42.
21
Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, p 41.
22
B Han, ‘Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude’, in A Milchman and A Rosenberg (eds),
Foucault and Heidegger. Critical encounters, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003, p 128. See
Foucault in ‘What is Enlightenment?’: ‘[...] that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search
for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that
have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking,
saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a
metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological*
and not transcendental*in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all
knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate
what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the

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sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know;
but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer
being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that
has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the
undefined work of freedom’ (in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp 45
46).
23
B Han, ‘Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude’, p 129. As Ian Hacking suggests: ‘Foucault
regularly historicized Kant. He did not think of the constitution of moral agents as something that is
universalizable, apt for all rational beings. On the contrary, we constitute ourselves at a place and time,
using materials that have a distinctive and historically formed organization. The genealogy to be
unraveled is how we, as peoples in civilizations with histories, have become moral agents, through
constituting ourselves as moral agents in quite specific, local, historical ways’ (Hacking, Historical
Ontology, p 4).
24
The temporal character of Foucault’s thought can be observed in The Order of Things under the form of
‘episteme’ (M Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines, Paris:
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Gallimard, 1966); in the Archaeology of Knowledge under the form of his notion of ‘historical a priori’
(M Foucault, L’Archéologie du Savoir, Bibliothèque des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard, 1969); and
in his genealogical work under the form of ‘historical ontology’ and ‘problematization’(1975
84). In
other words, it can be suggested that the temporal character of Foucault’s thought has shaped
Foucault’s exploration of the problem of the conditions of possibility of knowledge (savoir); his
exploration of the problem of the transformation of knowledge (as episteme); and his examination of
the problem of the internalizations of various power/knowledge and ethical practices (truth/subject),
which are posited as always historically and spatially situated.
25
Quoted by Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, p 1. See Foucault, ‘L’éthique du souci de soi
comme pratique de la liberté’, p 1212, for the French version. Italics are mine.
26
Tully 2008, pp 76
77.
27
Hoy, The Times of Our Lives, p 208. In Hoy’s words: ‘The thoroughly temporal character of Foucault’s
thought is difficult to see at first because it can be found in so many aspects of his work. Although as an
archaeological or descriptive historian he concerns himself with making philosophical points by
studying the past, as a genealogical or critical historian he writes the ‘‘history of the present’’’ (p 208).
28
Hoy, The Times of Our Lives, p 208.
29
Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses.
30
I use the term ‘quasi’ here to highlight that Foucault’s usage of history/historicity resists*in principle*
any aprioristic explanatory principles, because, following Nietzsche, our knowledge of our history is
itself based on contingent events/practices that make precisely any attempts to ground the knowledge of
any particular history on aprioristic fundamentals impossible (see Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp
76
101). I later contest this argument by suggesting that Foucault’s genealogical view of history still
contains a universalistic and aprioristic basis operating by his turning of historical contingency into an
aprioristic and universalistic ontological principle.
31
As Nietzsche put it before him, only that which has no history can be defined in an eternal and self-
referential manner: anything else will be chewed by the passage of time (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the
Genealogy of Morality, Keith Ansell Pearson (ed) and Carol Diethe (trans), Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007, p 53). In other words, only that which has no history can be ‘true’ from a
universal and objective standpoint*which amounts to virtually nothing if we concede that everything
we know of must emerge historically. The same premise*but in reverse*can be seen in Foucault’s
historical ontology: anything that exists is necessarily bounded to its own historical embeddedness,
leading to the similar consequence that nothing can be held to be eternally or universally true, including
our beliefs in the existence of a ‘human nature’, a transcendental subject, or the unfolding of an
Absolute Knowledge, Progress or Subject in History.
32
Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses; Han, Foucault’s Critical Project.
33
See ‘On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle’ (M Foucault, ‘Sur
l‘archéologie des sciences humaines. Réponse au Cercle d‘épistémologie’, in Dits et Écrits, vol 1: 1955

1976; translated in Theoretical Practice 3
4, 1971; revised translation in M Foucault, The Essential
Works, vol. 1: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed James D Faubion, London: Penguin, 1998).
34
Owen, Maturity and Modernity, p 160. As David Owen mentions, Habermas (J Habermas, The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1987), Fraser (N Fraser, Unruly Practices:
Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, London: Polity, 1989), Taylor (C Taylor,
‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, Political Theory 12, 1984, pp 152
183) and Dews (P Dews, Logics of
Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, London: Verso, 1987),

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among others, have all focused their criticism of Foucault’s work around similar claims (Owen, Maturity
and Modernity, p 235, n 41 of ch 8).
35
It is as such that the concept of practices came to play a central role in the Archaeology of Knowledge
(1969), where Foucault discusses the need for a new political analysis of knowledge [savoir] that would
supplement the study of episteme by examining the struggles, tactics and decisions shaping the practices
and knowledge giving rise to societal and emancipation theories (p 255). Announcing his genealogical
shift, the conditions of possibility of knowledge are described as emerging through ‘practices’, which are
not only ‘context-bound’ from the standpoint of their historicity, but also context-bound from the
standpoint of power dynamics consubstantial to the production of knowledge; dynamics which
Foucault later explores under the scope of a microphysics of power in Discipline and Punish (1976),
shifting toward an analysis of the productive dimension of power under the notion of biopower in the
first book of History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (1976).
36
J Tully, ‘To Think and Act Differently’, in S Ashenden and D Owen (eds), Foucault contra Habermas,
London: Sage, 1999.
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37
Nichols, 2010.
38
Nichols, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Discourse of Foucault’, p 134.
39
Of course, Nichols’s criticism would have to be nuanced by the body of work that already takes
Foucault beyond this point, using, for instance, the notion of governmentality. Among others, we can
count the work of Peter Pels and Tania Murray Li on Western governmentality and colonialism,
Anthony Anghie exploring the relationship between colonial enterprises and the creation of
international laws, and David Scott on ‘colonial governmentality’ (P Pels, ‘The Anthropology
of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality’, Annual Review of
Anthropology 26, 1997, pp 163
183; T Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, And the
Practice of Politics, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007; A Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, And the
Making of International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; James C Scott, ‘Colonial
Governmentality’, in J X Inda, Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, And Life
Politics, Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005, pp 23
50). Nichols’s criticism still stands, however, to the
extent that although many governmentality scholars go beyond the problem of knowledge production
in archaeological terms, rare are those who have expanded their research to the ethical dimensions.
Governmentality scholars, for the most part, stay within the confines of Foucault’s ‘microphysics of
power’ and his notion of biopower which they argue has been implemented in colonized societies.
40
Many thinkers have used Foucault’s critical ethos to investigate the constitution of modern subjectivity
through various disciplinary mechanisms (M Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern
Society, London: Sage, 1999), the development of biopower in modern societies as a mode of control,
regulation and standardization of both the individual and populations (N Rose, Governing the Soul,
London: Routledge, 1989; Power of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999; The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedecine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-
First Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), the rise of political economy, and statistics,
in generating new ways to regulate our behaviours (T M Porter, Trust in Number: The Pursuit of
Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), the emergence of
risks and insurance rationalities boxing what are normal/abnormal behaviours (F Ewald, ‘Insurance
and Risk’, in G Burchell, C Gordon and P Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect, Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), global governmentality processes and the rise of environmental
rationalities of government (W Larner and W Walters, Global Governmentality: Governing International
Spaces, London: Routledge, 2004; R D Lipschutz, Globalization, Governmentality and Global Politics,
New York: Routledge, 2005; T Luke, ‘Environmentality as Green Governmentality’, in E Darier (ed),
Discourses of Environment, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999; P Rutherford, ‘The Entry of Life into History’ and
‘Ecological Modernization and Environmental Risk’, in Darier, Discourses of Environment.
41
For instance the lasting influence of the Christian doctrine of Creation when it comes to our cultural
understanding of linear temporality, bearer of the metaphysical qualities of finitude, contingency and
corruptibility (versus God standing outside time and the corruptibility of creation), or its metaphysical
decision, which, by positioning God’s will as both external and foundational to Nature, has contributed
to shape this ongoing tension between Nature viewed as determined versus the expression of divine or
human will, viewed as irreducible to any form of determinism (see M B Foster, ‘The Christian Doctrine
of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science’, Mind 43(172), 1934, pp 446
468; ‘Christian
Theology and Modern Science of Nature (I.)’, Mind 44(176), 1935, pp 439
466; ‘Christian Theology
and Modern Science of Nature (II.)’, Mind 45(177), 1936, pp 1
27, for an excellent introduction to
these matters).

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42
Any mode of knowledge, any science, is based on a number of presuppositions that cannot themselves
be fully demonstrated empirically, hence their metaphysical status.
43
A good example of such advanced liberal rationality can be seen in the work of Sergei Prozorov who
advocates for a radical dissociation between Foucault’s ontology of freedom and all forms of identity
politics (Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty, 2007). Although one can certainly agree that adopting a
fixed identity can be problematic for its essentialist and possibly dominative implications, it should also
be noticed that deploying a negative form of universalism under the blanket of undetermined freedom
and perpetual resistance can also serve to propagate subtle modes of assimilation, relaying well the
perpetuation of advanced liberal societies thriving on the constant renewal of malleable and
ungrounded identities defined in terms of their shifting needs and desires, here compatible with
homogenized modes of capitalistic accumulation and consumption.
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