Ontology of the Present: Michel Foucault, Philosophy, and Subjectivity

This book offers a re-examination of Michel Foucault's philosophical project through his engagement with Immanuel Kant's question, What is Enlightenment? The book traces how Foucault transforms Kant's critical inquiry into a historically grounded ontology of the present - a philosophical attitude that seeks to diagnose it rather than explain it through an appeal to universals.
Bove situates Foucault's work within a broad intellectual constellation - from Formalism and Structuralist linguistics to the historiographical innovations of the Annales School, and from early anthropological debates to theories of subjectivity that have emerged out of Autonomist Marxism. She argues that Foucault's method is best understood as a practice of critique: a way of thinking historically about what we are and how we might be otherwise.
The book unfolds in three major parts. The first reconstructs Foucault's early epistemological foundations by examining his dialogue with Formalism, linguistics, and the historical turn of the Annales historians. The second explores his later investigations into technologies of the self, spirituality, and aesthetics of existence as déprise de soi, as they lay the foundations for a positive ontology of freedom. The final part connects these insights to contemporary theories of Autonomist Marxism, demonstrating how Foucault's thought remains indispensable for understanding power, production, and subjectivity in the 21st century.
Ultimately, Bove presents Foucault's ontology of the present not as a doctrine but as a critical ethos - a philosophical project that has the courage to interrogate our historical conditions and to imagine new forms of being.