Abstract This article examines the complex and often ambiguous relationship Michel Foucault maintained with phenomenology through his dialogue with Maurice Merleau‐Ponty from the early 1950s to the mid‐1960s. The analysis delineates Foucault's progressive displacement from an internal questioning of phenomenology toward his major archaeological investigations. This confrontation unfolds in three stages. Initially, Foucault explores the notion of the “world,” identifying a constitutive “ambiguity” in Merleau‐Ponty's thought, which strives to produce a genesis of the transcendental based on lived experience, itself conceived as an experience of the world. The Birth of the Clinic engages then in critical debate with the Phenomenology of Perception . Foucault's approach diverges from the ontological foundation of lived experience by historicizing medical perception. Finally, in The Order of Things , Foucault situates phenomenology itself within an archaeological framework. He aligns with Merleau‐Ponty's diagnosis of a crisis in human sciences but denounces once again phenomenology's constitutive ambiguity—the confusion of empirical and transcendental—as the philosophical foundation of modern episteme's instability, crystallized in the “empirico‐transcendental doublet” of Man.
Philippe Sabot (Thu,) studied this question.