Abstract
This article aims at showing that in spite of Michel Foucault’s violent rejection of phenomenology, this discipline never ceased to bear a crucial significance for his archaeological and genealogical analyses, in that it can be construed as a symptom indicating the most serious challenge that the contemporary philosophy has to meet: thinking together Experience and Knowledge. The author intends to prove, by resorting to the Marxian concept of ‘objectively necessary appearance’, that Foucault’s main opposition to phenomenology stems from his original conception of the theory as a sort of experiment made by the philosopher on himself and on his own historical a priori.
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Notes
For the two following paragraphs, I am greatly indebted to a very pertinent article by Philippe Sabot (see Sabot 2006). Needless to say, the possible monstrosities added to his decisive account are all mine.
My translation.
This is my translation of a remark that Foucault made during an interview with P. Caruso (see Foucault 1994a, p.106).
Not innocently, I guess, Foucault uses the French word “foyers (d’expérience)”, a notion afflicted with an annoying ambiguity, since it can mean the source of something, or its core (“le foyer” is literally the hearth, hence by derivation the home), as well as its point of convergence (the focus). This lexical choice leaves us in the dark as regards Foucault’s concept of experience here: is it the vital core from which knowledge, norms and modes of existence are engendered, or rather the fake unity into which they seemingly converge?
I paraphrased and summarized in my last two sentences the ultimate paragraph of Foucault 2005, p.487. My point of view is that this assumption applies not only to Hegelian, but also to Husserlian phenomenology.
I am not entirely comfortable with the translation here. The French goes literally: “for our mode of being as modern subjects”, which is slightly different from a syntactical point of view, and perhaps conceptually as well.
To sustain fully this argument, I would have to demonstrate that this objective-unconscious appearance is precisely what Louis Althusser calls an ideology, that is to say, not a set of representations, but a coherent system of material practices and behaviours.
Foucault 1994b. For the following quotations, I will use my own translation of this interview.
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Legrand, S. “As Close as Possible to the Unlivable”: (Michel Foucault and Phenomenology). SOPHIA 47, 281–291 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-008-0077-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-008-0077-0