Foucault after hyppolite: Toward an a-theistic theodicy

Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 79-93

  Fillion, Réal ^a  

^a Universite of Sudbury   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950523360     PISSN: 00384283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2005.tb01944.x     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2003)
2. Jean Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Rieder, 1929)
3. Baugh, French Hegel, 2
4. Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language" in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridon Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 215
5. According to his biographer, D. Eribon, a young eighteen-year-old Foucault freshly arrived in Paris would have fallen under the spell of Hyppolite and philosophy because of their ability to make sense of history. Cf. D. Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 34
6. Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrll, 1963), 12
7. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 457. And in the last paragraph Hegel says: "this is the true Theodicea, the justification of God in History."
8. Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," 236
9. On Foucault's impact on historical writing, cf. Paul Veyne, "Foucault Revolutionizes History," trans. Catherine Porter in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
10. Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3 (New York; The New Press, 2000), 224
11. Cf. François Furet, In the Workshop of History, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)
12. Jean Hyppolite, Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of History, trans. B. Harris and J. B. Spurlock (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 49
13. Michel Foucault, "Jean Hyppolite, 1907-1968," Dits et écrits, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 780, my translation
14. Foucault, "Discourse on Language."
15. Foucault, "Titres et travaux," Dits et écrits, vol. 1, p. 842
16. An a-theistic theodicy also suggests that, although we cannot be concerned with God's justice (which of course is the etymological significance of the word theodicy), the concern with justice does not automatically devolve to "Man" or human justice. Rather the concern is with the structural and systematic deployment of justices understood historically. As Foucault puts it: "Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination" ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 378)
17. Leonard Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 12
18. Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, translated by L. Lawlor and A. Sen (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997)
19. Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy, 12
20. Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, 176
21. Such a focus, according to Lawlor, characterizes all of what he calls "the great French philosophy from the Sixties" (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze), with as its principal problem: "how to conceive, within immanence, the difference between logic and existence (the Logos and time), structure and genesis, thought and experience, the said and the unsaid, monument and soul, philosophy and non-philosophy" (Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy, 12)
22. Foucault, ed., Hommage á Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971)
23. G. Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 12
24. Hegel, The Philosophy of History
25. as quoted in Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History (London: Routledge, 2000), 199. McCarney provides a good discussion of Hegel's "theodicy" in the final chapter of this work, 195-220
26. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 382
27. "Truth and Power" in Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, 116