The dissertation turns to the thoughts of Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault in order to establish a comprehension on the relations that could be traced between the elements of subjectivity and politics. It will try to identify in Kant’s work the terms through which the modern subject was assimilated to a model of autonomy, which would be its only guarantee of fulfillment. He will be seen as a theorist of limits, authorizing the frontiers that separate what is human from what is not, doing it by minimizing politics to a technical instrumentality in favour of a universal ethics of law. By pointing to the impossibilities of this model, as well as to the insufficiency of a politics framed in these terms, the article will move, then, to a reading of Foucault’s oeuvre. Its author will be found negotiating at the frontiers, but, differently from Kant, refusing its stabilization through appeals to a universality. In this sense, his thought will be investigated in order to pin down which keys allow thinking about politics in less totalizing schemes, moving beyond the model of a rational subject identical to itself.