L'individu chez Hegel

Jacques Martin has long been known only through Louis Althusser's dedication in Pour Marx, where he acknowledged his debt to his friend about the concept of problematics. Martin's thesis on Hegel (Remarks on the Notion of the Individual in Hegel’s Philosophy), written in 1947 under the direction of Gaston Bachelard, reveals his importance to Althusser’s thought, but also to that of his other friend on rue d’Ulm, Michel Foucault. Martin’s text strongly interprets Hegel’s philosophy, showing that, before Marx, Hegel would have prefigured the critique of the bourgeois individual, but with this coupled reading of Hegel and Marx, he was able to uncover concepts and themes that would be decisive for French philosophy in the 1960s: the concepts of problematics and over-determination, the theme of transcendental history, the critique of the idealist reading of Hegelian dialectics. Jacques Martin’s thesis thus proves to be an essential part of the genesis of French philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century.