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the publication of Hyppolite’s French translation of the Phenomenology (the irst volume appearing in 1939 and the second in 1941) as well as his monumental commentary, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1946), was to mark Foucault throughout his subsequent career as it was this work of Hegel’s, above all others, that he was continually to employ as a kind of touchstone both against which and with which to think.

Foucault again came under the tutelage of Hyppolite at the École Normale Supérieure, where in 1947, in fulillment of the requirements for the second year Diplôme d’Études Supérieures, he is reported to have submitted a thesis entitled “The Constitution of a Transcendental in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.” The manuscript has not apparently survived, but the title alone indicates not only that Foucault’s engagement with the Phenomenology had continued and deepened but that what was to be one of the deining concerns of his own work – the status of the transcendental – began to take shape precisely in the conceptual space deined by Hegel’s thought.

Foucault pursued this concern with the genesis and structure of the transcendental to its roots in Kant’s thought in the translation, introduction, and notes for the latter’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798; French trans. 1964) that he prepared between 1959 and 1960 in Hamburg, under Hyppolite’s titular supervision at the Sorbonne (Foucault had actually worked alone on the project), as the complementary thesis to his principal thesis, “Madness and Unreason: The History of Madness in the Classical Age.” Hyppolite, recognizing that he was not competent to assess the principal thesis itself – as it was an exploration of the historical constitution and transformation of madness into mental illness – invited his colleague, the esteemed historian of medicine and science Georges Canguilhem, to serve as its rapporteur. In his report, Canguilhem found that the work brilliantly displayed what he called a “dialectical vigor” in its distinctive historical methodology, a vigor that he judged to have come, at least in part, from Foucault’s “sympathy with the Hegelian vision of history and from his familiarity with the Phenomenology of Spirit” (Canguilhem 1997, 26).

Now, if we turn from biography to the works themselves and the conceptual frameworks with which they operate, we can see that Hegel’s thought, and the Phenomenology in particular, continued to deine the very task of philosophy itself for Foucault throughout his career. This is especially evident if we consider three central problematics that Foucault sought to study – madness, knowledge, and subjectivity – and what is arguably the underlying methodological issue of his entire oeuvre: history.

The History of Madness (1961) contains sparse but decisive evidence of its author’s deep familiarity with the Phenomenology: the entirety of the study is framed in terms of the trajectory leading from the initial coninement of madness, by way of its delineation, in the classical age, from unreason (déraison) to its reemergence, in modernity,

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in the form of an alienation or contradiction at the very heart of reason itself. This last moment is embodied, Foucault argues, in Diderot’s igure of Rameau’s nephew, and the status of this character serves as a kind of grid through which Foucault constructs his historical account. Rameau’s nephew is also a pivotal character in the Phenomenology, as Hegel takes him as the exemplar of the extreme form of alienation that he named “derangement (Zerissenheit),” a nihilistic condition that, he contends, arose throughout European society at the juncture between the collapse of the medieval world of culture and the advent of the conlict between otherworldly faith and pure insight that was to deine the Enlightenment and its ultimate descent into the Terror. In this sense, History of Madness marks its proximity to Hegel precisely at that point at which it seeks to think against him by thinking that which exceeds the parameters of Hegel’s own analysis of madness, namely the ways in which the practices of division and classiication themselves not only created the condition of alienation to which they were purported to respond but ultimately conined alienation itself within the interiority of the subject, placed it at the very core of reason, and thereby gave birth to the supposedly liberating, more humane, coniguration of power-knowledge that became the science and practice of psychiatry. History of Madness thus proposes nothing less than to isolate the historical conditions under which Hegel’s own account of the history of modernity operates.

In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault shows that Hegelian phenomenology irst becomes possible as a distinctive form of knowledge by virtue of the mutation that he tracks between the historical a prioris (the grids of intelligibility) of the classical and the modern epochs. Foucault’s central thesis here is that, in the classical age, the period from the mid-seventeenth through the end of the eighteenth century, the rules under which genuine truth claims can be asserted and assessed permit the complete uniication of all knowledge, a universal mathesis. The mutation into modernity, Foucault demonstrates, is marked by the fracturing of this uniiability. One of the lines on which it breaks is that which separates the empirical and the transcendental. Modern philosophy still strives after the uniication of all knowledge, but it must do so in a way that addresses this breach. Accordingly, Foucault says, the need for the project of Hegelian phenomenology arises precisely at this juncture: it seeks to integrate the domain of the empirical within the interiority of consciousness in its process of revealing itself to itself, what Hegel called experience or spirit and what Foucault terms a “ield, at once, empirical and transcendental” (EOT, 248). In this sense, then, Foucault circumscribes the project of the Phenomenology by demonstrating it to be but one more manifestation of the dogmatic anthropological slumber from which we have only recently begun to awaken, a project at once still our own and yet no longer who we are.

Foucault returns to the question of the historical a priori under which the project of the Phenomenology becomes possible late in his career in the lecture course entitled The Hermeneutics of the Subject, which he delivered at the Collège de France

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in 1982. The lectures that year were devoted to an exploration of the relationship between subjectivity and truth. Speciically, they sought to identify the historical lines from which the distinctly modern subordination of subjectivity to truth descended: the requirement that one must irst prepare oneself in order to attain insight into the essence of reality or into the nature of knowledge. Foucault argues, through a subtle and extensive reading of ancient texts from Plato to Seneca, that the modern arrangement is a profound reconiguration of the relation as it was understood in the thought of classical and late antiquity, where truth is continually placed in service to self-transformation. The historical trajectory of the investigation is thus set, as it was in History of Madness, by the Phenomenology. But here it is not a speciic analysis or igure from this work that proves decisive; rather, as it was in The Order of Things, it is the very aim and methodology of the Phenomenology itself that is at issue, for the genealogy that Foucault traces shows this to be the ultimate culmination of the epistemological project of modernity and thus of gaining access to truth through the transformation of the subject of knowledge itself: the Phenomenology demands of its readers that they give themselves over to the logical and historical process of immanent self-examination that the work unfolds and, by so doing, they are able to establish that knowledge of truth (absolute knowing) is possible and what the content of such knowledge is. As such, Foucault situates the very project of the Phenomenology itself as the philosophical exemplar of the modern hermeneutical form of the care of the self (see ECF-HOS, 25–30, 486–487).

Underlying all of these problematics, however, is of course the issue of history: how is the past to be depicted? Canguilhem, as we saw, found in History of Madness a thinker that he took to be in full sympathy with the Hegelian vision of history. But it is perhaps here, more than anywhere else, that Foucault sought to think against Hegel and, in doing so, to take the full measure of what remained of Hegel in his own thought.

Hegel, beginning with the Phenomenology, famously insisted that the justiication of absolute knowing required a historical demonstration. The set of orientations and norms that silently deine and mold a social order, what Hegel called a “shape of a world,” together embody a conception of the very nature of reality itself, a truth claim that, as it is tested out by those leaving under its aegis and found lacking in some deinite respect, is historically transformed into a subsequent shape that incorporates what was found valid in the previous shape and alters what had failed. History is thus, for Hegel, the movement of determinate negation and, as such, it is essentially continuous and progressive. Furthermore, insofar as it culminates in the full accord of the shape of a world with the nature of reality itself, the very possibility of absolute knowing is established and, in this sense, the history at issue is fundamentally teleological as well.

For Foucault, the question of history was a matter of accounting for the historical shifts and breaks that archaeological excavation uncovers. Foucault consistently

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recognized that the rules governing the various discursive formations that he studied were nothing more than series of events possessing a variable, though tenuously stable, regularity; that they were a bare coherence of positions and sequences and nothing more. From his earliest mature writings, he sought to work out a theory of historical transformation that would account for the various levels at which a break or shift between historical a prioris occurs. He knew that to do so, to remain faithful to their fragile cohesiveness, required rejecting the conventional explanatory models – of creation (theological), of sense-giving acts (psychological), and of evolution (biological) – as these all sought to tether such a movement, in different ways, back to a set of ultimately determinative forces and processes that possess a unitary origin, which they continually unfold, and that proceed according to the inevitability of necessity (see EAK, Part IV, Chapter 5). But because the archaeological method only unearths the transcendental conditions that govern the formation of a discursive body, it is beyond its purview to account for what exactly produced such a rupture, what Foucault called the problem of “epistemological causality” (EOT, xiii).

Foucault held that, as assemblages of events, discursive formations are inherently material. Events, though themselves incorporeal, necessarily take effect in and through materiality. They are thus materially dispersed. Foucault therefore came to see that the problem of epistemological causality is a problem of how these dispersed constitutive elements are forged into interrelated networks and sequences. That is to say, how do events become regularized series and how does one discursive formation, one arrangement of regularized series, give way to another?

Foucault’s answer is that the materiality and contingent relationality of history, what he called its positivity, demands of historical investigation that it disavow both continuity and teleology as unwarranted presuppositions. Fidelity to the positivity of history requires instead a method that afirms events as random accidents, reversals, both small and large, and deviations of all kinds that history is populated by, sometimes discrete, sometimes intertwining, lines of descent, and that these lines sometimes forge determinate series that coalesce and erupt in speciic, fragile constellations. Such a view of history is necessarily concerned with historical materiality and, speciically, with the way in which this is shaped and molded in and through practices of regulation, control, discipline, and governance. To depict the past in all its positivity thus demands genealogy, for only such a methodology as this is capable of attending to the utter contingencies, discontinuities, and materialities that deine the historical ield.

Foucault’s proximity to and distance from Hegel is thus ultimately marked at the point of historical method, for in detaching genealogy from phenomenological history, Foucault sought nothing less than to think of discontinuity in relation to continuity without sacriicing the former to the latter. The question of how much of Hegel remains in the method of genealogy is the question, then, of to what extent the project of identifying historical shifts and breaks is predicated on a capacity to

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compare our present epoch with those that have preceded it. Insofar as prior ages remain in some sense our own, insofar as they have shaped us as we are and thereby remain intelligible to us, is not genealogy an examination that presupposes the very kind of continuities that it explicitly appears to reject?

Anti-Hegelianism, Foucault reminds us, may prove in the end to be nothing more than “one of his [Hegel’s] tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us” (EAK, 235).

Kevin Thompson

See Also

Experience

Finitude

History

Jean Hyppolite

Suggested Reading

Allen, Amy. 1998. “Foucault’s Debt to Hegel,” Philosophy Today 42:71–79.

Baugh, Bruce. 2003. French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, chap. 8.

Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Relections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, chap. 4.

1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Canguilhem, Georges. 1997. “Report from Mr. Canguilhem on the Manuscript Filed by Mr.

Michel Foucault, Director of the Institut Français of Hamburg, in Order to Obtain Permission to Print His Principal Thesis for the Doctor of Letters,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 23–27.

Cutrofello, Andrew. 1993. “A History of Reason in the Age of Insanity: The Deconstruction of Foucault in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” Owl of Minerva 25, no. 1:15–21.

D’Hondt, Jacques. 1986. “On Rupture and Destruction in History,” Clio 15, no. 4:345–358. Fillion, Réal. 2005. “Foucault after Hyppolite: Toward an A-Theistic Theodicy,” Southern

Journal of Philosophy 43, no. 1:79–93.

Lawlor, Leonard. 2003. Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Roth, Michael S. 1988. Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Afterword.

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and this demand in turn called for an inquiry into the human as the inite subject who represents. The analysis of representation led back to Kant and to a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of knowledge, but insofar as a human being is conditioned by biology, social and economic reality, and language, knowledge of the subject was found to depend in turn on knowledge of these further objective conditions. As Foucault describes it, this led to a luctuating movement between branches of inquiry while a ixed point on which the body of thought as a whole might rest remained out of reach.

The dificulty is centered on the initude of the human and led, as Foucault describes, to a call for an “analytic of initude,” a discourse addressing “a fundamental initude which rests on nothing but its own existence as a fact, and opens upon the positivity of all concrete limitation” (EOT, 315). In addition, this same discourse should deal directly with the concrete instances of initude in human existence, without referring them to some deeper underlying condition. But as long as what counted as knowledge was restricted to representations of objective reality, this would remain an impossible task. The account of knowledge would therefore have to change in order that acquiring knowledge of the conditions of representation not reopen the same question over again while at the same time also permitting it to address the positivity of concrete human existence. Phenomenology promised answers to these issues. Husserl had sought an adequate basis for the sciences in a more fundamental knowledge of the subject and had devised a methodology and a new conception of objectivity in order to achieve this. Moreover, it is easy to make the link from the analytic of initude as Foucault describes it here to the existential analytic that Heidegger carries out in Being and Time. This is directed precisely toward a determination of the essential initude of Dasein, which it inds in a temporal initude deined by Dasein’s relation to its own mortality and formalized in the account of the original temporality of Dasein in Division Two of Being and Time. What is clear for both Heidegger and Foucault is that the question of human initude, its relation to concrete human existence and to knowledge, cannot be addressed at an epistemological level alone and that an ontological relection is also required.

For Heidegger, the history of philosophy can be read as a forgetting of the question of Being as such, which he regarded as having been so concealed by the metaphysical tradition that philosophy had ceased to take it seriously as a question at all. Underpinning his call to remedy this neglect is the ontological difference between beings and Being. Whereas the question of what a thing is leads to an account of its essence, a consideration of essence itself leads to a quite different account of the conditions under which disclosure occurs at all. In this way, the most basic sense of what it means to be – to be anything at all – is disentangled from notions of objectivity and rethought as the question of Being as such. Since we are the beings engaged by this question, the disclosure of Being occurs in and through our existence. However, in Heidegger’s view, the philosophical tradition failed to inquire into this existence

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appropriately; for example, Descartes identiied the “I” simply as a thinking thing, and thereby placed it alongside things in the world, its being merely modiied by the addition of thinking. When Kant identiied the question “What is man?” as fundamental to philosophy, it seemed that this error may have been corrected and the way opened to a philosophical anthropology that could set thinking on a secure footing. However, Heidegger remained critical, arguing in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics that Kant did not deliver on this promise. In his analysis of transcendental imagination, Kant brought to light the importance of time in the formation of experience but did not pursue the inquiry far enough to uncover the temporal character of its foundation in the transcendental subject, which as a result remained obscure, leaving the inquiry into the Being of the subject incomplete. Moreover, Kant’s anthropological inquiries remained, for Heidegger, incomplete and poorly conceived: as they are concerned with the faculties of the soul, they cannot be simply empirical, yet as they do not engage what is for Heidegger the fundamental theme of transcendence, they cannot carry through their analyses suficiently to reveal the grounds of their own possibility, and the grounds of the possibility of metaphysics itself. Heidegger argues that an ontology of the subject as a subject and not as an empirical object requires an account of the temporal structure of the transcendental imagination (Heidegger 1990, 92); that is, the temporal structure of the synthetic activity by which intuitions are subsumed beneath concepts and our experience given structure and coherence.

Heidegger’s attention to the ontological structure of Dasein is a direct response to this problem. Recognizing the ontological difference, it treats the existence of Dasein as a form of disclosure through which Being is presented, and does so in such a way that neither Dasein nor Being is treated as an object of knowledge. Rather than limiting this clariication of the disclosure of Being to the way that we understand, reason, and perceive the world, Heidegger extended his analysis to include the practical aspect of our existence, the way our actions take shape around concerns and aims, the way we share our world with others, settle into familiar routines, and sometimes act with a freedom born out of a readiness to confront our basic existential condition. However, while Heidegger presents the existential analytic in Division One of Being and Time, it is in Division Two that the properly ontological aspect of the account comes to the fore, as it is here that Heidegger sets out his conception of original temporality that underpins the account of Dasein’s inite existence in Division One. The Being of Dasein is temporal in the sense that each of the fundamental modes by which it exists, and by which it discloses Being, has a temporal structure. Together, these constitute the original unity that is the ecstatic temporality of Dasein. Fundamental to Heidegger’s account is that Dasein’s temporality is more fundamental than our everyday sense of time and cannot be derived from it. While Heidegger provides a radical analytic of human initude (without any appeal to ininity or eternity), he accords a fundamental priority to the ontological dimension of Dasein’s concrete existence as that which is responsible for Dasein’s existence

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occurring as it does, and as that from which thinking must take its lead. Dasein is the site of the disclosure of Being, and the further thinking presses in its attempt to grasp the condition of Dasein as disclosive, rather than simply as disclosed, the further it is drawn toward the event of disclosure itself and to Being. From this perspective, making up for what was missing in Kant entails insisting that anthropology can never adequately become a grounds for philosophical thought, because the more fully such thinking engages with its true grounds, the further it moves from the terrain of anthropology.

Foucault rarely referred to Heidegger directly in his published work, but there are a number of passages where he appears to have Heidegger very much in mind. For the most part, these are critical in tone (though not too much need be read into this), but there is one more positive reference. In 1954, Foucault published an introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence, a study in existential psychiatry inluenced by Heidegger. The practice of Daseinanalysis it proposes and develops is indebted to the existential analytic of Dasein set out in Being and Time, and Foucault’s enthusiasm for Binswanger implies at least a degree of enthusiasm for Heidegger as well. There are passages in which Foucault praises an inquiry closely aligned to the existential analytic that Heidegger undertook in Being and Time, and in terms similar to those in which he appears to describe that analytic elsewhere. However, it is also clear that even at this early stage Foucault had serious reservations over the form of Heidegger’s inquiry. Explaining his interest in Binswanger, Foucault refers to the way Binswanger’s analysis of existence avoids any a priori distinction between ontology and anthropology (EDE, 32). This is in sharp contrast to Heidegger, for whom this distinction was fundamental, and anthropology remained compromised by its lack of a properly ontological basis, carrying over a conception of the human from the metaphysical tradition without submitting that conception to revision in the light of a renewed engagement with the question of Being as such. In this way, anthropology was, for Heidegger, to be ranked alongside biology, history, and political science as a science of the human based on a misconceived conidence in the ideal of objectivity. Foucault’s comments in the Introduction to Dream and Existence therefore seem to be explicitly antiphenomenological, in spite of the alignment with Heidegger implied elsewhere in the same text. Moreover, the true villain of the piece, standing in the wings, is Kant, who installed the distinction between positive science and transcendental philosophy at the heart of thinking, and who saw that the thinking subject cannot be disclosed as a subject through an empirical relection. Having refused the phenomenological approach, Foucault then also rules out both a “pre-critical” indifference to the distinction between the positive sciences and transcendental philosophy and a simple return to the anthropology that Kant proposed. He seems therefore to have left himself with little room to maneuver. A different solution is required, and he inds it in an interpretation of Kant’s anthropology that diverges sharply from that of Heidegger, yet does so through a