Despite Foucault’s claim in his final interview that his ‘whole philosophical development’ was determined by his reading of Heidegger, to date little has been published exploring the relationship between these thinkers. Undoubtedly, the primary reason for this silence is the seeming impossibility of reconciling Foucault and Heidegger’s work. Indeed, in key respects, we could hardly imagine two more different philosophers. Heidegger seeks to recover a primordial sense of being that he believes has been lost through the history of the West. (...) Foucault pursues an entirely contrary trajectory, calling into question both the primordial status of forms of thought and experience, and the transcendental closure of philosophical-historical narratives. Heidegger’s work is focused on a single question (the question of being), developing a single way into this question. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Heidegger and the History of Truth Foucault and the History of Truth: First Pass Foucault and the History of Truth: Second Pass References.

Attempts to resolve the question of Foucault's relationship to Heidegger usually look for points of substantive correlation between them: the coincidence of being and power, the meaning of truth, technology, ethics, and so on. Taking seriously Foucault's claim in his final interview that he uses Heidegger as an 'instrument of thought', this paper looks for a correlation in practice. The argument focuses on a structural isomorphism between Heidegger's concept of the fourfold event (Ereignis) of being and later Foucault's critique of (...) 'problematization' (problématique). This isomorphism, I argue, indicates a covert philosophical confrontation between Foucault and Heidegger, which was determinative for Foucault in the period of the turn to ethics (1976-84). This is a confrontation over the meaning of the 'event of thought'. Such an interpretation not only permits a literal reading of Foucault's comments regarding Heidegger in his final interview, but also casts the developments in Foucault's later work in a fascinating new light. Foucault's critique of problematization, on this view, is founded in an historicized version of Heideggerian 'other' thinking, and pivots on a ontologically tempered enactment of the Heideggerian turn (Kehre). (shrink)

Foucault notoriously suggests that his historical analyses are fictions. Commentators typically interpret this claim in a negative light to mean that Foucault's works are not, strictly speaking, true. In this paper, I present a positive interpretation of Foucault's claim, basing my argument on a hitherto marginalized aspect of his work: the experience-book. An experience-book is defined as a use of fiction in the practice of critique with desubjectifying effects. My argument for this interpretation proceeds in three steps. First, to prepare (...) a preliminary account of Foucault's concept of fiction and its effects, I look at Blanchot's ontological interpretation of the work of literature in The Space of Literature. Blanchot, I suggest, provides a template for understanding Foucault's concept of the experience-book. Second, I identify traces of Blanchot's concept of fiction in Foucault's study of Jules Verne, Behind the Fable. I argue that Foucault's critique of fiction, in this paper, anticipates and prefigures his later use of fiction in the practice of critique. Third, pursuing this intuition, I develop an interpretation of Discipline and Punish understood as a use of fiction and experience-book. This interpretation provides a new, immanent perspective on Foucault's critique, and mitigates the epistemological skepticism of the claim that his works are fictions. (shrink)