Repository | Book | Chapter

This is not about the "life and times" of either philosopher, though it is about their "times." Anyone familiar with the work of Foucault knows that such a foray into intellectual history would be inappropriate. Rather, I wish to examine what each has to say about the nature of time, especially about historical time. Both were historians of a sort, the one psychoanalytic and sociological (Sartre) and the other archaeological and genealogical (Foucault), and each expressed a distinctive understanding of historical temporality. Sartrean time is progressive and moral while that of Foucault is noncumulative and comparative. In fact, I shall argue that the latter is spatialized ("squared," if you will) in a sense that resists Hegelian-Marxist dialectic and forces us to view "history" from a unique perspective. Our examination of what these distinctive and seemingly contradictory positions reveal about the nature of history will also help to elucidate the phenomenological heritage of each.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9411-0_11

Full citation: