Focusing on the concrete reality of man-in-the-world is a more subtle way of reducing the transcendental to the empirical rather than a genuine solution.

It might seem that Husserl’s phenomenology has carried out the Kantian project of synthesizing man as object and as subject by radicalizing the Cartesian project; that is, by grounding our knowledge of empirical truths in the transcendental subject. The problem, however, is that, as Foucault sees it, the modern notion of man excludes Descartes’ idea of the cogito as a “sovereign transparency” of pure consciousness. Foucault’s key claim in the dense chapter 9, “Man and his doubles,” is that thoug