Foucault on the origin of the world: Notes on “Phénoménologie et psychologie” (1953–1954)

Abstract In this essay, I explore what the manuscript Foucault wrote in 1953–1954, dedicated to the relationship, at least nominally, between phenomenology and psychology, tells us about the role classical phenomenology may have played in the genesis of his own distinctive historical methodology. His exploration of phenomenological methodology during this period reveals, I contend, one of the decisive keys to understanding the thought‐space ( Denkraum ) within which Foucault began to work out hisapproach to history. That space was defined by what Eugen Fink famously called the fundamental problem of phenomenology: the origin of the world ( der Ursprung der Welt ). Elaborating this problematic led Foucault to see how phenomenology was able to open up a domain of distinctly transcendental, as opposed to merely eidetic, inquiry into the very genesis of being in terms of the fundamental ontological structures of time and association. And yet, it was the timeless nature of these very same structures in Husserlian phenomenology that marked the impasse, I argue, that compelled Foucault to craft a historical methodology that retained the phenomenological breakthrough to the transcendental in its pursuit of the origin of the world, to the ontological as Foucault understands it in this text, but recognize, precisely in order to account for the dispersion that is history, that the transcendental must be integrated with that with which it would appear to be absolutely irreconcilable: the historical, a problematic that we can now see shaped Foucault's thought from early on and continued throughout his career.