Editorial

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Although Michel Foucault is often read as an anti-phenomenologist, the recent publication of the so-called Lille manuscripts from the 1950s shows Foucault’s strong interest in phenomenology in general and in Edmund Husserl’s philosophy in particular. This interest is reflected, among other things, in the concept of experience that runs through Foucault’s entire early work and reappears in his later writings. I argue that Foucault’s concept of limit-experience, as he develops it in his archaeological phase in History of Madness, shows traces of his early reading of Husserl. To demonstrate this, I turn to the manuscript Phénoménologie et psychologie from 1953/54, which is explicitly dedicated to Husserl’s philosophy. I examine the concept of experience that Foucault develops there on the basis of three motifs, namely the relationship between psychological and mythical experience, the connection between lived experience and epistemology, and the contrast between philosophical experience and limit-experience (or limit situation, as Karl Jaspers would call it). Drawing on this analysis, I show that Foucault not only had a profound knowledge of Husserl’s philosophy, but that phenomenological traces can still be found in the concept of limit-experience at the beginning of Foucault’s archaeological phase. This makes it plausible, I claim, to speak of an early, phenomenologically inspired phase in Foucault’s thinking.