ABSTRACT
Foucault’s career has its roots in his years as a student at the École Normale Supérieure. There he studied philosophy under Jean Hyppolite and also came under the influence of the historian and philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. In Hyppolite he encountered a thinker who, with Alexander Kojève, draws Hegel’s thought into the French philosophic tradition. Hyppolite’s Hegel is not an enlightened philosopher who can affirm the identity of the rational and the real, and the “cunning” with which reason makes use of negativity, closure and death. On the contrary, he is the forerunner of those recent philosophic schools for whom desire and negativity provide history’s continuing and inescapable motor force. As Foucault was to put it in a commemoration address given after his teacher’s death: for Hyppolite, philosophical thought sketches out a field it can never cover (1969a, 132). An ambitious claim lies implicit in this-once we are permitted to think of a Hegel for whom reason and history can never merge, or, rather, for whom this merging (known as “totality”) is utopian rather than realizable, and for whom “reason” itself works not to resolution but as an ongoing process, then much European philosophy since Hegel’s time might exist as footnotes to the master. The anxiety of this influence was especially intense as, by the 1950s, Hyppolite, under the spell of Heidegger, was already able to articulate his position explicitly against both historicism and humanism.1 It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Foucault is haunted by this dark and non-totalizing dialect throughout his career though he comes to draw it into his own writing fully only when he conceives of his work as a “history of problematizations.”
