of a system of thought that wants to present itself as a science. It is the process that will allow a thought to be systematic without contradiction.’91 Indeed, he claims that the work as a whole ‘can be interpreted as a phenomenology of philosophical consciousness, as a description of this step towards integral knowledge, if at least we can accept the interpretation of absolute knowledge that we have attempted’.92
A brief discussion of Marx, and a contrast of Hegel with Husserl’s Ideas in the conclusion,93 are the extent of his explicit engagement with the literature after Hegel, though Foucault is clearly indebted to Hyppolite’s interpretation. The debates with which Hegel was involved are outlined, but for the most part this is an internal examination of Hegel’s work, largely but not exclusively through the Phenomenology. Foucault also makes reference to other works by Hegel including the Logic, Elements of the Philosophy of Right and the Encyclopaedia; his lecture courses;94 and the earlier writings which predate the Phenomenology, including theological texts from Hegel’s years in Berne and Frankfurt and writings from the Jena period.95 Except for Hyppolite’s translation of the Phenomenology, Foucault usually makes reference to the Leipzig edition of the Sämtliche Werke, with some other references for early works.96 Secondary literature draws on a wide range in French, German and English, notably including works by Hyppolite and Wahl,97 but also studies by Georg Lukács, Karl Löwith and Benedetto Croce.98 For phenomenology beyond Hegel himself, Foucault references Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Cartesian Meditations, and Experience and Judgment, as well as articles by Eugen Fink, Lévinas and Sartre.99 The reading is certainly extensive, though the referencing, at least in the draft preserved in the files, is somewhat slapdash. References are frequently incomplete or wrong; Kierkegaard’s name is misspelt as Kierkegaared, Kojève as Kogève, Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil as Erpatirung und Urteil, and even, astonishingly, his thesis director twice misspelt as ‘Hippolite’. These errors indicate that another hand was responsible for the typing of the text, and had to contend with Foucault’s often difficult handwriting.
It is an apprentice work, certainly, and one that bears strong marks of its supervisor. Among other things it is notable that Foucault does not discuss the master/slave dialectic, central to Kojève’s reading of the text, which was to become so influential following him. It is an important moment in Foucault’s intellectual development, and an astonishing piece of work for someone who was only twenty-two when it was completed in June 1949.100 While Foucault does not pursue the type of approach here in subsequent work, except perhaps the introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, there are some similarities to topics of later interest. In particular, the (contingent) nature of the transcendental and its conditions of possibility are here always historical, something with which Foucault will continue to be concerned in later work. Equally, the stress on the question of knowledge would be central to his work of the 1960s, culminating in The Archaeology of Knowledge, and continues into his work of the 1970s with the notion of power-knowledge. The reading undertaken finds its most immediate payoff in the lecture courses he would give in Paris and Lille in the first half of the 1950s, discussed in Chapter 2. This is especially so for the work on philosophical anthropology, which engages with German thought in detail, but also for his interest in the development of phenomenology in Husserl. However, the text is also notable for the complete absence of reference to Heidegger and Nietzsche, two key figures for his later intellectual development (see Chapter 5).101
Psychology
Alongside this work on philosophy, Foucault was also studying psychology. Foucault’s formal teachers included Lagache, who established the diploma in psychology at the Sorbonne and with Jacques Lacan formed the breakaway Société française de psychanalyse in 1953.102 Lacan pays tribute to Lagache’s work in Écrits, devoting a whole essay to him.103 Foucault also attended classes by the neurologist and psychiatrist Ajuriaguerra who was in 1975 elected to a chair at the Collège de France.104 Of course, not all the influences came from the classroom: Foucault was a voracious reader too. Georges Politzer’s 1928 work, Critique of the Foundations of Psychology, was certainly important.105 Politzer was a PCF theorist, executed by the Gestapo in 1942, who made one of the few PCF contributions to psychological theory.106 In the early 1920s Politzer was one of the members of the Philosophies group of whom Georges Friedmann, Norbert Guterman and Lefebvre were also members.107 Politzer translated Friedrich Schelling’s La Liberté humaine, to which Lefebvre contributed a long introduction – one of his first major publications – in 1926.108 Politzer is also known for La Crise de la psychologie contemporaine,109 and was influential to Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Laplanche.110
Politzer is critical of recent developments in psychology, with an explicit focus on Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams. His key innovation is to critique the distinction between manifest and latent contents of mental life,111 and to propose what he calls ‘concrete psychology’. For Politzer there is only one field of consciousness, and he therefore is strongly critical of Freud’s turn to abstraction, his metapsychology, especially in the light of his earlier promise of a more concrete work. Metapsychology detached psychology from empirical evidence, and Politzer is too much of a phenomenologist for that to be valid. ‘Metapsychology has lived its life, and the history of psychology is beginning.’112 Politzer is also critical of the scientific pretensions of modern psychology: ‘We need to understand that psychologists are scientists like evangelized wild tribes are Christian.’113 The Critique was intended to begin a three-volume study, Matériaux pour la Critique des fondements de psychologie,114 with ‘another volume on Gestalt theory, with a chapter on phenomenology’, and a third on ‘behaviourism and its different forms with a chapter on applied psychology’.115 While this work was cut short by his execution, it would be developed by many who followed his inspiration.
Politzer developed one approach to psychology, in contrast to Ignace Meyerson’s more historical approach.116 Defert claims that Foucault spent time with Meyerson from October 1951 (C 17/17; CH 40), which has been used to argue for the importance of Meyerson for Foucault’s work.117 However, a letter from Foucault to Meyerson from June 1953 requesting a first meeting challenges this chronology.118 A more balanced approach to this relation to contemporary currents in psychology can be found in the unpublished thesis of Alessandro de Lima Francisco.119 In addition, Defert recounts that Pierre Morichau-Beauchant, one of the first French psychoanalysts, and a family friend of the Foucaults, gave Foucault his collection of early psychoanalysis journals in October 1951, shortly before his death and just as Foucault began teaching (C 17/17).
Another key figure in Foucault’s knowledge of psychology was teaching outside the formal university system. While he was still based in Paris, Foucault attended Lacan’s seminar, which was held for two hours on Wednesdays from November to July.120 The seminar began in 1951, initially in Lacan’s living room, before moving to the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in late 1953. Lacan was fifty when the seminar began, and there was a lot of clinical and theoretical experience behind it. Lacan’s thesis On Paranoid Psychosis in Relationship to Personality had been published in 1932, and there were other early publications.121 Écrits begins with a text from 1936, but it is selected writings, not a complete works. As Lacan’s son-in-law and seminar editor, Jacques-Alain Miller, indicates, Lacan believed that his real work began around the time his seminar teaching began: writings before that were its ‘antecedents’.122 Hyppolite was an active participant in the 1953–4 seminar.123 Miller notes that Hyppolite was a regular attender, and ‘was quite open-minded at a time when other French philosophers found Lacan too difficult to understand’.124
It is worth underlining that Lacan’s
