Giorgi Vachnadze, The Phenomenological Panopticon and the Historical a Priori: Towards a Genealogy of the Transcendental Subject, Epoché, Issue #37 February 2021
A teleological conception of history begins with Hegel and terminates with Foucault. The following text will not concern itself with Hegel and the Hegelian interpretation of history, it will not be an extensive analysis of the notion of historical teleology, nor will it attempt to discuss every thinker who has used this notion. Neither will it attempt to lay down a comprehensive history nor theory of the Subject. Instead, we will focus on a comparison between the historical and philosophical methodologies of Edmund Husserl and Michel Foucault, and their respective theories of the Subject, while extending the antagonism between the two thinkers into a critique of phenomenology and the phenomenological subject as an instance of what Foucault terms governmentality.