The Early Foucault

Stuart Elden

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509525997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

It was not until 1961 that Foucault published his first major book, History of Madness. He had already been working as an academic for a decade, teaching in Lille and Paris, writing, organizing cultural programmes and lecturing in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg. Although he published little in this period, Foucault wrote much more, some of which has been preserved and only recently become available to researchers.

Drawing on archives in France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the USA, this is the most detailed study yet of Foucault's early career. It recounts his debt to teachers including Louis Althusser, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl; his diploma thesis on Hegel; and his early teaching career. It explores his initial encounters with Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Dumézil, and analyses his sustained reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Also included are detailed discussions of his translations of Ludwig Binswanger, Victor von Weizsäcker, and Immanuel Kant; his clinical work with Georges and Jacqueline Verdeaux; and his cultural work outside of France.

Investigating how Foucault came to write History of Madness, Stuart Elden shows this great thinker's deep engagement with phenomenology, anthropology and psychology. An outstanding, meticulous work of intellectual history, The Early Foucault sheds new light on the formation of a major twentieth-century figure.

1
Studying Philosophy and Psychology in Paris

Foucault moved to the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris in 1945 shortly after the war ended, where he was briefly taught by Hyppolite. Foucault studied philosophy, history and literature in French, German, English, Latin and Greek, reading widely in classical texts. This was the khâgne class to prepare for the concours entrance exam for the ENS. Foucault had failed that exam in 1945 while still studying in Poitiers, but passed in 1946.¹ He had also support from Maurice Rat, a family friend who taught at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and had passed the agrégation in grammar in 1919.² Foucault entered the ENS in Autumn 1946 and over the next several years he attended lectures both at its rue d’Ulm site and at the nearby Sorbonne. Foucault was awarded a licence in philosophy in 1948 and one in psychology in 1949. He also received a diplôme in general psychology from the Paris Institut de Psychologie in 1949.³ At the ENS Foucault was taught by Jean Beaufret, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Merleau-Ponty and, from 1948, Louis Althusser. At the Sorbonne he attended classes by Daniel Lagache and Julian Ajuriaguerra on psychiatric science; Henri Gouhier, Merleau-Ponty, Wahl and Hyppolite on philosophy.⁴ While he also read his teachers’ work, much of their importance comes from the classes they taught. Years later, Lagache was on Foucault’s thesis jury, Gouhier its chair, Hyppolite the rapporteur for his second thesis (see Chapter 8).

Philosophy and its History

Beaufret taught widely across the history of philosophy. He is best known as the recipient of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, sent in response to questions Beaufret posed in 1946.⁵ He is the author of the four-volume Dialogues avec Heidegger,⁶ and known for his long introduction and translation of Parmenides’ poem, often known as ‘On Nature’.⁷ However, Beaufret apparently never taught a course on Heidegger, thinking his thought could not be summarized.⁸ Instead his teaching covered Plato and Aristotle; Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza; Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Husserl.⁹ Heidegger’s thought does influence much of Beaufret’s teaching: with the exception of Spinoza, these figures were the focus of most of Heidegger’s own teaching career. Foucault kept notes on what appear to be lectures by Beaufret on Kant and Spinoza.¹⁰ Beaufret eventually taught a short course on Heidegger’s Being and Time at a lycée in 1972.¹¹ Beaufret fought for France in the war, escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp, and joined the resistance. He has been criticized for his uncritical attitude to Heidegger’s Nazi past and for his own alleged anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.¹²

Desanti was a philosopher of mathematics, a student of Jean Cavaillès, but also a phenomenologist, Spinoza scholar and a member of the PCF until 1956.¹³ When Jacques Derrida finally submitted his Doctorat d’État in 1980, based on publications, it was directed by Desanti. Derrida’s original supervisor had been Hyppolite, but that thesis was never completed.¹⁴ Gouhier mainly worked on French philosophy between Descartes and Bergson, and it seems Foucault attended lectures by him on both.¹⁵ Gouhier was also an authority on the theatre, and also helped to edit works by Maine de Biran, Auguste Comte and Henri Bergson’s lectures.¹⁶ He was the supervisor of Pierre Bourdieu’s dissertation on Leibniz, a translation and commentary on the Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum cartesianorum.¹⁷ In 1978 Gouhier would invite Foucault to a lecture to the Société française de philosophie only published after Foucault’s death, known as ‘What is Critique?’¹⁸

These figures gave Foucault a broad education in philosophy, but central to his subsequent development was Wahl, a wide-ranging philosopher and historian of philosophy, who worked especially on Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger. He wrote a key work for the French engagement with Hegel in 1929 and a major, 750-page study of Kierkegaard in 1938, one of the first French engagements with existentialism.¹⁹ His Human Existence and Transcendence was published in 1944 but, unlike Jean-Paul Sartre’s work from the previous year, has only recently been translated.²⁰ Wahl was also significant in terms of his engagement with Anglophone work, a textbook on French philosophy, and a general introduction on Philosophies of Existence.²¹ Wahl ran the Collège philosophique at which Derrida presented ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ in 1963; and would invite Foucault to give the ‘What is an Author?’ lecture to the Société française de philosophie in 1969.²²

Crucially for Foucault, Wahl taught on Heidegger from the mid 1940s through the 1950s. Derrida recalls that Heidegger was very much a presence at the ENS due to Beaufret and Hyppolite.²³ But Wahl’s Sorbonne courses did much more. They were based on both on his reading of published texts, but also his knowledge of Heidegger’s courses of the 1920s and 1930s.²⁴ Despite some reports, Wahl did not attend lectures himself, noting in a letter to Heidegger of December 1937 that he ‘would love to meet with you one day. But all sorts of obstacles stand in the way at present.’²⁵ Foremost among those obstacles was his Jewish heritage, which meant he left Europe during the war. But Wahl certainly had access to notes from Heidegger’s courses.

Wahl’s introductory course from January to June 1946 discussed Being and Time, but also Heidegger’s work on Kant and his discussion of truth, which as Jean Montenot notes closely parallels Heidegger’s own 1928–9 course at the University of Freiburg Einleitung in die Philosophie [Introductio...