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Traditionally, Kant scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on the critical philosophy. Within the past decade studies on Kant’s other work – notably his late work – have led to a gradual shift in focus towards the limits or margins of his thought, including his

precritical writings, those texts that John Zammito describes as the ones where Kant’s “compass wobbled wildly from the telos of the critical philosophy we have ever since enshrined” (Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology 5). Indeed, following the attentive readings by Peter Fenves, David Clark, John Zammito, and Alix Cohen, new strands have emerged in Kant, including a “late Kant,” and what Karl Vorländer calls an “altogether different Kant”(158). It is this strand which I seek to take up, in order to disrupt this tidy parcelling out of either an early or a late, speculative Kant. In what follows, I argue – against the grain of these recent Kant studies – that Kant, raising the question of what man is and answering it in a certain way that places strict limits around man in the first two Critiques, then also foresees a certain Foucauldian end of man in the

ways: First, I disagree that Kant, having been interested in anthropology early in his career, regrettably puts it behind him, only to return to it in his very late work so as to secure its subordinate place in relation to the Critiques. Instead, I insist that Kant

maintains his anthropological interests throughout his work, beginning with the earliest

Universal Natural Historyand Theory of the Heavens [Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und

Theorie des Himmels] (1755). As this essay’s subtitle reveals, Essay on the Constitution

and Mechanical Origin of the Entire Universe, Treated in Accordance with Newtonian

Principles, Kant’s aim is to “discover the systematic factor which ties together the great

members of the created realm in the whole extent of infinity” (81/Ak1:221).However, Kant dips into discussions of “the inhabitants of the various planets” (82/Ak1:349) as part of his discussion on thinking about the correlation between planetary location and the density of bodies and how this affects thought:

The stuff, out of which the inhabitants of different planets as well as the animals

and plants on them, are built, should in general be lighter and of finer kind, and

the elasticity of the fibers together with the principal disposition of their build

should be all the more perfect, the farther they stand from the sun. (189/Ak1:358;

Kant’s emphasis)

While the Universal Natural History intends to take up “general laws of motion”

(92/Ak1:246), it ventures into discussions of human nature and other topics that fall under anthropology. The version of the history of the universe that this text ultimately offers is closer to what Derrida calls mondialisation, that process of understanding the

history of the monde [a world] that is open to what Victor Li calls “the event that cannot

developed by Derrida and Nancy, is unlike “globalization,” which imposes a liberal humanist narrative predicated on the symbolic figure of a globe with its spherical harmony and completeness.

Anthropological interests, in the above sense, murmur beneath the critical

philosophy and extend as far as the posthumously published Opus Postumum – a text that

Kant intended to be a physics that would ground his metaphysics, but that slips into speculative discussions on the open-endedness of humanity and the coming of “differently organized creatures, which, in turn, [give] place to others after their

destruction” (Opus 66-7/Ak21:214-5). I offer that the diverse domains and texts in Kant’s

anthropological corpus include: those concerned with speculative science, as found in the

Opus Postumum; cosmological and human history, such as in Universal Natural History

and Theory of the Heavens,Conjectural Beginning of Human History [Mutmaßlicher

Anfang der Menschengeschichte], Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim

[Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht] and Conflict of the

Faculties [Streit der Fakultäten]; anthropology as the study of society, as in

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht]

and his anthropology lectures [Vorlesungen über Anthropologie]; and Kant’s essays on

race, biology, and theories of nature, including Determination of the Concept of a Human

Race [Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace], Of the Different Races of Human

Beings [Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen] and his lectures on geography

[Physische Geographie] and pedagogy [Pädagogik]. Kant’s anthropological interests are

not limited to his lecture course or to the text that grew out of them, The Anthropology

1798 did introduce the distinction between pragmatic anthropology, defined as that which is concerned with what man ought to make of himself, and physiological anthropology, which is concerned with what nature makes of man (Lectures on Anthropology 48/Ak

25:470).18 I argue, however, that Kant’s anthropology is not what it claims to be; it is not the purported pragmatic discipline but is closer, in places, to a physiological

anthropology, evident in its curious inclusion of highly speculative topics such as aliens, or the ages best suited for writing poetry or studying science (to name but two examples). I want to suggest that “pragmatic anthropology,” as Kant coins his preferred brand, is a limiting definition of the discipline, an attempt to discipline what in actuality operates like a counterscience or what I want to call a “general anthropology,” terms which I will now unfold.

To see how the diverse domains across these texts fall under Kant’s anthropology requires a revised notion of anthropology itself, as a general anthropology – in Georges

Bataille’s sense of the term “general,” wherein a “general economy” includes what is typically expelled from a system or discourse, as is done in a “restricted economy.”19 Recognizing how some of Kant’s work actually is physiological anthropology helps us get beyond the limiting pragmatic definition of anthropology. This framing of Kant’s anthropology as a general economy brings me to my second point of disagreement with John Zammitp – and what is perhaps my most original contribution – namely, over what anthropology is to Kant. For Zammito, Kant’s emergent anthropology is only a

18 _{The first instance of “pragmatic anthropology” appears in the Lecture of the Winter Semester 1775-1776}

based on the transcriptions Friedländer, in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology, ed. Wood and Louden.

“discipline” in the sense of a discursive formation, or a “focus of questioning” like the “research programme” of Imre Lakatos or the “paradigm” of Thomas Kuhn (4). Against Zammito, I suggest that anthropology in Kant’s usage, as a subject he lectured on at the University of Königsberg for over two decades, is a discipline in Foucault’s definition in

The Archaeology of Knowledge as that which “constitut[es] bodies of knowledge and

organiz[es] them for institutional transmission” (178-9). Furthermore, I argue that for Kant anthropology is not a human science, as Zammito and Cohen suggest, but operates more closely to a “counterscience,” Foucault’s term for a science that “would appear to traverse, animate, and disturb the whole constituted field of the human sciences” (The

Order of Things 381), a current that “flow[s] in the opposite direction […] back to their

epistemological basis, and that […] ceaselessly ‘unmake[s]’ that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences” (379). A counterscience relates to the human sciences in a “relation that is strange, undefined, [...] and more fundamental than any relation of adjacency” (367). To disrupt the metaphor that Alix Cohen uses to describe Kant’s anthropology, that is of a “map-making venture” that shows “how we can reach [our] destination” (106-7), anthropology read as a

counterscience is a venture of creating folds and infolds so as to disrupt the ability to “find” man.20

20 _{Anthropology operates like a counterscience in Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, even}

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Kant’s Anthropology and the Question of the