The Early Foucault. Stuart Elden
failure seems to have led to a major depressive episode, including a spell in an institution, where Althusser helped him to get better treatment and housing.201 However, he did spend three weeks in Göttingen in August 1950, at the Fridtjof Nansen Haus as part of an international study programme.202 He returned to study at the ENS, and retook the agrégation in 1951. The jury included Hyppolite, Davy, and Canguilhem again served as president. This time Foucault drew ‘sexuality’ for the first oral component, added to the list by Canguilhem. After the event, Foucault formally complained, apparently outraged by this unsuitable topic, ironically so, given his own extensive work on the theme in his later career.203 Like Verret, Foucault passed the agrégation on this second attempt, placed second in the philosophy cohort.204
Notes
1 1. Some of Foucault’s notes and notebooks from Lycée Henri-IV are in BNF NAF28803 (8); ones from Poitiers in boxes 7 and 9–12.
2 2. Rat gave Foucault his own preparatory notebooks, which are in BNF NAF28803 (13).
3 3. C 15–16/14–15; Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Paris: Fayard, 1994, 233. BNF NAF28803 (7), folder 2 has the certificate, dated 4 July 1949. See Programme et conditions d’admission et de l’enseignement à institut de psychologie, Paris: Vuibert, 1949.
4 4. C 14–15/13–14; Eribon, Michel Foucault, 59–62/31–3; Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, ch. 2; DE#281 IV, 53–54; EW III 252–53. Some of his notes are preserved in BNF NAF2830 (38). On the ENS at this time, see Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, ch. 3.
5 5. The famous ‘letter’ was a substantial essay, published as a book and later collected in Wegmarken (GA9, 313–64); trans. Frank Capuzzi in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 239–76. See also the initial letter sent by Heidegger to Beaufret, 23 November 1945, in Questions III et IV, trans. Jean Beaufret et al., Paris: Gallimard, 1990, 129–30.
6 6. Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger, Paris: Minuit, 4 vols, 1973–85. Only the first is translated: Dialogue with Heidegger: Greek Philosophy, trans. Mark Sinclair, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
7 7. Jean Beaufret, Le Poème de Parménide, Paris, PUF, 1955.
8 8. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, ‘Introduction’, in French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception, Albany: SUNY Press, 2008, 1–22, 6. On the links more generally, see Pierre Jacerne, ‘The Thoughtful Dialogue between Martin Heidegger and Jean Beaufret: A New Way of Doing Philosophy’, 59–72.
9 9. Jean Beaufret, Leçons de philosophie (1): Philosophie grecque, le rationalisme classique and Leçons de philosophie (2): Idéalisme allemande et philosophie contemporaine, ed. Philippe Fouillaron, Paris: Seuil, 1998.
10 10. BNF NAF28730 (38), folder 3.
11 11. Beaufret, ‘Qu’est-ce-que Sein und Zeit?’, Leçons de philosophie (2), 361–74.
12 12. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden, London: HarperCollins, 1993, 8–9.
13 13. A biography can be found at http://institutdesanti.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?rubrique2&periode=30. Foucault briefly mentions him in DE#281 IV, 53–43; EW III, 252–3. His notes from classes attended are mainly in BNF NAF28730 (38), folder 1.
14 14. Jacques Derrida, ‘Ponctuations: Le temps de la thèse’, Du droit à la philosophie, Paris: Galilée, 1990, 439–59; ‘Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis’, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 113–28. See Benoît Peeters, Derrida, Paris: Flammarion, 2010, 391–2; Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown, Cambridge: Polity, 2013, 316.
15 15. See BNF NAF28730 (38). Among other works, see Henri Gouhier, La pensée religieuse de Descartes, Paris: Vrin, 1924; Études d’histoire de la philosophie française, Hildesheim: Olms, 1976.
16 16. Henri Gouhier, Le Théâtre et l’existence, Paris: Aubier, 1952; Henri Bergson, Œuvres, ed. André Robinet, introduced by Henri Gouhier, Paris: PUF, 1963.
17 17. Derek Robbins, ‘Pierre Bourdieu, 1930–2002’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19 (3), 2002, 113–16, 113.
18 18. The critical edition is Qu’est-ce que la critique, suivie de La culture de soi, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud et Daniele Lorenzini, Paris: Vrin, 2015, 33–80; the English translation is of an earlier version: The Politics of Truth, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007, 41–81.
19 19. Jean Wahl, La Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, Paris: PUF, 2nd edn, 1951 [1929]; Études kierkegaardiennes, Paris: F. Aubiuer, 1938.
20 20. Jean Wahl, Existence humaine et transcendence, Neuchatel: Baconnière, 1944; Human Existence and Transcendence, ed. and trans. William C. Hackett, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. See also Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Ian Alexander Moore, New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. The introductions to these translations are good guides to his work. See also Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France 1927–1961, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005, 84–7.
21 21. Jean Wahl, Tableau de la philosophie française, Paris: Fontaine, 1946; Les Philosophes de l’existence, Paris: Armand Colin, 1959; Philosophies of Existence: An Introduction to the Basic Thought of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Sartre, trans. F. M. Lory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
22 22. These lectures are discussed in Elden, The Archaeology of Foucault.
23 23. Michael Sprinker, ‘Politics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, The Althusserian Legacy, London: Verso, 1993, 183–231, 191.
24 24. Jean Wahl, Heidegger I, Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, [1952], 94 n. 1, mentions the analysis of boredom in Heidegger’s 1929/30 course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (GA29/30), trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. See Les Philosophies de l’existence, 102; Philosophies of Existence, 68.
25 25. Compare backcover of Jean Wahl, Introduction à la pensée de Heidegger: Cours donnés en Sorbonne de janvier à juin 1946, Paris: Le livre de poche, 1998, with ‘Appendix: Jean Wahl’s Letter to Martin Heidegger, December 12, 1937’, in Wahl, Transcendence and the Concrete, 213–15, 215. The original of the letter is in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, 75.6908/2. The same conclusion is reached by Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France I: Récit, Paris: Albin Michel, 2001, 95 n. 55.
26 26. Jean Montenot, ‘Avant-propos’, in Wahl, Introduction à la pensée de Heidegger, 7–12, 7; Janicaud, Heidegger en France I, 94–5. Editorial notes specify these links in some detail.
27 27. Janicaud, Heidegger en France I, 95.
28 28. Defert OE I, xxxviii.
29 29. Montenot, ‘Avant-propos’, 11. In Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France II: Entretiens, Paris: Albin Michel, 2001, 11, Axelos says he attended two or three courses by Wahl, but that he found them unsatisfactory, and he began reading Heidegger himself.
30 30. Jean Wahl, L’Idée d’être chez Heidegger, Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1951; La pensée de Heidegger et la poésie de Hölderlin, Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1952. For dating, see Claire Paulhan, Fonds Jean Wahl inventaire, IMEC, 2004, 6–7.
31 31. Baring, The Young Derrida, 104–105.
32 32. I.e. Wahl, L’Idée d’être chez Heidegger, 47.
33 33. Walter Biemel, Le Concept de monde chez Heidegger, Paris: Vrin, 2nd edn, 2015 [1950]; Henri Birault, ‘Existence et vérité d’après Heidegger’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 56 (1), 1951, 35–87.
34 34.