Grau und blau : Philosophie mit und nach Foucault

The paper argues that philosophizing in the tradition of Foucault’s critical approach can only be successful when not his diagnostic concepts are taken up but his historically oriented method and his sense for determining adequate objects of critique. It reconstructs this method as a threefold analysis of knowledge, power, and subjectivity shaped by nihilistic, nominalistic, and historicist imperatives. Beyond genealogy’s “grey” work of tracing the contingent emergence of present conditions, the paper emphasizes Foucault’s “blue” philosophical aim of uncovering the discursive systems that make certain truths rationally acceptable. Finally, it proposes political epistemology as a field in which this method can be fruitfully applied, outlining how a non-sovereign epistemology can address the socio-historical constitution of truth and contemporary forms of false-truth and ideology.