Michel Foucault, who had been his PhD student as well as his successor at the Collège de France, said of Jean Hyppolite: “In this voice, which never ceased to pick itself up as if it were meditating within its own movement, we did not only perceive the voice of a professor; we heard something of the voice of Hegel, and perhaps the voice of philosophy itself”. My main question today is: What are the words of this philosophy? This presentation is divided into two parts. 1. Firstly, I will go back …
Read moreMichel Foucault, who had been his PhD student as well as his successor at the Collège de France, said of Jean Hyppolite: “In this voice, which never ceased to pick itself up as if it were meditating within its own movement, we did not only perceive the voice of a professor; we heard something of the voice of Hegel, and perhaps the voice of philosophy itself”. My main question today is: What are the words of this philosophy? This presentation is divided into two parts. 1. Firstly, I will go back to the philosophical context surrounding the reception of Hegel in France since its beginning. My aim is to understand Hyppolite’s position in the debates and controversy of the 1930s and 1940s from a historical point of view. 2. Secondly, I will study and comment on some of Hyppolite’s articles and lectures. I intend to confine my discussion to the intellectual production that comes after Genesis and Structure, which is Hyppolite’s first monograph. I will therefore deliberately leave aside his second major work, Logic et Existence. I wish to highlight some of Hyppolite’s philosophical contributions to the nature of self-consciousness. I will start with the more political, social, and historical texts that are related to the dialectic of the struggle for recognition. Then, I’ll examine some theses that are related to the nature of individual subjectivity, in particular the problem of the unconscious, language, and alienation.
