In his untimely meditations “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” written in 1873, Nietzsche confronts Hegel’s philosophy of history, introducing the strong element of contingency into the historical account, and begins to develop a genealogical method that would come to fruition in On the Genealogy of Morals a few years later (1887). Foucault developed his method of genealogy in conversation with both Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s writings. In this segment, we explore Hegel’s philosophy of history through the inversions that Nietzsche and Foucault operated on it.
Core Readings
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, in three volumes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892)
G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction: Reason in History. Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World (1822-1828 and 1830-1831 versions), trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” (1873).
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989).
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche: Cours, conférences et travaux, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2024).
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” p. 136-156, in Foucault, Dits et Écrits 1954-1988, Tome II 1970-1975, text no. 84, eds. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 76-101, in Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
Foucault, L’ordre du discours. Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France, prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
Additional Readings
Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010)
Bernard E. Harcourt, “On Critical Genealogy,” Contemporary Political Theory (2024), https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00715-y.
Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013).
Jean Hyppolite, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire de Hegel (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983 [1948]); Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, trans. Bond Harris and Jacqueline Bouchard Spurlock (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996).
Daniele Lorenzini, “On Possibilising Genealogy,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (2019), OnlineFirst: https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1712227.
Pierre Macherey, “Did Foucault Find a ‘Way Out’ of Hegel?” Theory, Culture & Society, 40(1-2), 19-36 (2022), available at https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221084903.
Martin Saar, Genealogie als Kritik: Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault (Frankfurt: Campus, 2007).