‘First, Hyppolite gave up Hegel’s claim that philosophy could culminate in a “totality” that synthesized and reconciled all oppositions, and instead presented philosophy, as, Foucault says, Husserl did , as “an endless task, against the background of an infinite horizon”. Second, Hyppolite replaced the finality of absolute knowledge with the idea of “continuous recommencement”, thereby transferring “the Hegelian theme of the end of self-consciousness into to one interrogation” (recalling Kierkegaard’s category of repetition). Third, rather than absorbing all non-philosophical experience and knowledge into the absolutes final philosophical synthesis , Hyppolite , in the manner of Bergson “reestablish[ed] the contact with the non-philosophical” in a non-reductive manner. Fourth, the irreducibility of the non-philosophical led Hyppolite to look back, like Fichte rather than Hegel, to the question of how philosophy might find its beginning in the non-philosophical. Specifically, (and this is the last alteration), Hyppolite invoked the challenge of Marx, and asked , “if philosophy must begin as absolute discourse, then what of history and what is the beginning which starts out with a singular individual, within a society and a social class, and in the midst of struggle?” This invocation of the “singular individual” also refers to the fixed point of French philosophy throughout the twentieth century, the irreducibility of the free individual, which had always stood as the fundamental obstacle to a French appropriation of Hegel’s thought.'