Michel Foucault, The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”: Graduate Thesis in Philosophy, 1949 – ed. Christophe Bouton, trans. Emilio E. Feijóo, University of Chicago Press, August 2027
No cover yet, but good to see this translation scheduled for next year.
The first English translation of Foucault’s previously lost master’s thesis, itself an original contribution to the study of Hegel’s philosophy.
On June 11, 1949, a twenty-three-year-old Michel Foucault defended his master’s thesis in philosophy at the Sorbonne entitled The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Long considered a lost holy grail of French philosophy, the thesis was only recently rediscovered, and it is presented here in English for the first time.
In his master’s thesis, Foucault offers an original reading of Hegel that understands “absolute knowing,” the famous but enigmatic final figure of experience in the Phenomenology, as inextricably bound to time, language, and historical experience. Indeed, readers will discover how many of Foucault’s famous later concepts—the historical a priori, the episteme, and the limit-experience—are intimately rooted in his early, intense engagement with Hegel’s philosophy.
An introduction and critical apparatus provided by Hegel scholar Christophe Bouton traces previously unknown connections between the thesis and Foucault’s later masterpieces, particularly History of Madness and The Order of Things. Introducing a fundamental shift in our understanding of Foucault’s intellectual trajectory, this book is an essential text for anyone interested in Foucault, Hegel, and the dramatic evolution of twentieth-century continental philosophy.
Update: I should have mentioned that the French edition appeared in early 2024 – La constitution d’un transcendantal historique dans la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel: Mémoire du diplôme d’études supérieures de philosophie.
Pierre Macherey has written about this in a piece in Theory, Culture and Society – “Did Foucault Find a ‘Way Out’ of Hegel?“. trans. Susan Ruddick (requires subscription; but part of a theme issue on Foucault before the Collège de France which has some open access pieces).
I also discuss the thesis in The Early Foucault (Polity, 2021).
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-genealogy-of-genealogy-with-jason-josephson-storm/id1437997652?i=1000791314548
he continues this line of inquiry
“I take it that the section on alienated labor does an outstanding job getting at the concepts if not the terminology involved: objectification in labor becomes estranged when you have a lousy job and put your personality into a job and get minimum wage and a headache back. But that part wasn’t in the Landshut and Mayer edition of the Manuscripts, which meant it wasn’t in the Molitor edition Foucault was using, which is how I found myself needing to figure out the alienation/estrangement distinction in the part of the manuscripts that was included. Hence the Phenomenology.”