of thinking, acting, and speaking, or attempt to connect such departures with
purportedly universal tendencies of society or history, he prefers to link the
limits described in genealogical terms to speciWc social transformations under
way in the present in which he wrote, such as those in relation to prisons,
sexuality, and sexual morality. His characterization of an ethos of enlighten-
ment is therefore progressivist in a non-teleological sense in which the
direction of progress can only be negatively deWned in terms of freedom
from past constraints.
Rorty misrepresents Foucault in attributing to him ‘‘the conviction that
we are too far gone for reform to work—that a convulsion is needed’’
(Rorty 1989 , 64 ). His suggestion that Foucault and other post-structuralist
thinkers yearn for a kind of autonomy that could never be embodied in
social institutions allows him to align them with a failed revolutionary
utopianism (Rorty 1989 , 65 ). However, this diagnosis relies on a misleading
contrast between those who remain in the grip of a Kantian conception of
freedom as an inner realm exempt from natural necessity and those who
view freedom only as the recognition of contingency (Rorty 1998 , 326 ). In
fact, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida share this conception of freedom as
the recognition of contingency, along with a commitment to the ever-
present possibility of agency within relations of power. This implies the
permanent possibility of resistance to forms of domination and exclusion,
which they each present, in diVerent ways, in terms of a relation to some-
thing like Kant’s unconditioned or Transcendental Idea: partially realized in
the ongoing process of pushing back the limits of what it is possible to do or
to be, but never Wnally or entirely achieved. It is for this reason that
Foucault refers to genealogical criticism of the present as ‘‘the undeWned
work of freedom’’ (Foucault 1997 , 316 ).
Deleuze expresses a similar view, by reference to Kant’s distinction between
the revolution in France and the enthusiasm aroused by its ideals throughout
Europe, when he distinguishes between the way in which revolutions turn out
historically and the ‘‘becoming-revolutionary’’ that is a permanent possibility
open to all. Like Foucault, he views this kind of individual and collective self-
transformation as our only way of ‘‘responding to what is intolerable,’’ where
the limits of what is intolerable are themselves historically determined and
subject to change (Deleuze 1995 , 171 ). Derrida, as I will show below, appeals
directly to concepts of an unconditioned justice, hospitality, forgiveness,
friendship, and so on in order to ensure the possibility of progress in the
negative sense of a rupture with present, conditioned expressions of those
post-structuralism and liberal pragmatism 131