He once claimed that the primary task of his generation was to flee Hegel. Foucault’s attitude towards Hegel was at best ambivalent, at worst hostile. Through the exploration of themes of power, freedom, and subjection in both thinkers’ work, I wish to complicate this philosophical order and suggest that in the realm of freedom, each thinker’s work can be used to modify and enrich the other. Indeed, the traditional conceptual, chronological narrative tells a story in which Foucault corrects Hegel’s system: Foucault denies the reconciliatory Hegelian view of a totalizing historical progression, and in doing so, takes us beyond the modern myth of progress and freedom to a place more accurately reflecting our ambivalent experience with modernity. One conventional way to read these two views are as the positions of a modern and a post-modern thinker respectively. Foucault’s dystopic vision, however, forces us to face the possibility that the attainment of freedom is a mere mirage, and exposes the way progress conceals subtle forms of unfreedom. Hegel claims we are progressing triumphantly towards a re-worked ideal of freedom to be concretely realized in a golden age of modernity.
How do we become subjects, and what does this process of subjection mean for our freedom? This paper will speak to this question through an exploration of the dynamic differences and similarities between the work of Hegel and Foucault.
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