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From Foucault to Heidegger a One-Way Ticket?

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Truth and Singularity

Part of the book series: Phaenomenologica ((PHAE,volume 155))

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Abstract

Dasein, Heidegger says, stands in the truth. And not only that: it stands equi-primordially both in the truth and the untruth. Or in a later formulation on which the‘Turning’has already stamped its seal: the untruth is‘older’or‘more primordial’than the truth itself, Dasein must be in the untruth in order to be in the truth. Mendel, on the other hand, as we read in Foucault, lies outside the truth: what he says gets lost in the tumultuous space of a “wild exteriority,” where those are referred whose speech does not conform to the rules which the “discursive police” of their discipline set down2.

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Notes

  1. See the introduction by A. De Waelhens en W. Biemel to their translation of Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (M. Heidegger, De l’essence de la vérité, Louvain/Paris,Nau-welaerts/Vrin, 1948, pp. 44-5). For the difference with Being and Time, see BT § 44b.

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  2. For Foucault’s discussion of Mendel see his ‘The Order of Discourse’ (ODis, pp. 60-1).

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  3. ‘Le retour de la morale’, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 28/6-5/7 1984, p. 40.

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  4. M. Foucault, ‘Réponse à une question’, Esprit, 1968 (36:5), p. 863.

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  5. Ibid. and AK, pp. 44-5, 118-9.

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  6. On the episteme of the Renaissance: OT, pp. 17-45; p. 39 on Aldrovandi.

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  7. M. Foucault, Naissance de la clinique. Une archéologie du regard médical, Paris, P.U.F., 1983, p. 171.

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  8. AK, pp. 67, 110 and ‘Réponse à une question’, l.c., p. 861.

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  9. M. Merleau-Ponty, PP, p. 176 and the allusion to this passage in OT, p. XVIII.

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  10. AK, p. 209: “These positivities are not so much limitations imposed on the initiative of the subjects as the field in which that initiative is articulated (without however, constituting its centre)…”.

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  11. M. Foucault, Truth and Power’ (1977), in ID., Power/ Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings (1972–1977), (ed. C. Gordon), New York, Pantheon Books, 1980, p. 132.

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  12. For this notion of an ‘inner author’ cf. my ‘Can Genealogy Be Critical? A Somewhat Unromantic Look at Nietzsche and Foucault’, Man and World, 1990(23), pp. 441-52, esp. the second section: ‘Where is the author?’. I there define the ‘internal author’ as “that instance in a text which closes a problematic that tries to break through” (p. 445). My Michel Foucault. Genealogy as Critique (London/New York, Verso, 1995) consequently locates the inner author ‘Foucault’ in the quotation marks he puts around’ sciences’ or around words like’ soul’. I sometimes tend to stress this difference between the inner author and his problematic, be it Foucault or someone else, by putting his name between quotation marks (as I already did when speaking of ‘Heidegger’s’ decision in the previous chapter).

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  13. M. Foucault, Résumé des cours. 1970–1982, Paris, Gallimard, 1989, p. 14.

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  14. See the lectures of the 21st and 28th of January 1976, published in German as Vom Licht des Krieges zur Geburt des Geschichte, Berlin, Merve, 1986 and now also available in the recently published full lecture course “Il faut défendre la société”. Cours au Collège de France (1975–1976) (ed. by M. Bertani and A. Fontana), Paris, Gallimard/Seuil, 1997.

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  15. ‘Truth and Power’, loc. cit., p. 133: “It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power), but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time. The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness or ideology; it is truth itself. Hence the importance of Nietzsche”.

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  16. Résumé des cours, o.c., p. 14.

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  17. S. Ijsseling, ‘Nietzsche en de Rhetorica’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 1973 (35:4), p. 798.

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  18. For such a critique see P. Dews, ‘The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault’, in M. GANE (ed.), Towards a Critique of Foucault, London/New York, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 82.

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  19. Paul Veyne uses this expression in his sympathetic description of Foucault’s project: ‘Foucault révolutionne l’histoire’, in P. Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire, Paris, Seuil, 1978, p. 204.

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  20. M. Foucault, ‘Introduction’, in Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, New York, Pantheon Books, 1980, p. XIII.

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  21. For expressions such as “the body in itself” which one can find in Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish) and La volonté de savoir (The History of Sexuality: Volume I) (though not in the English translations!) see my Genealogy as Critique, pp. 122 ff.

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  22. The qualification ‘conservative’ is not meant to have a political connotation here.

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  23. Cf. M. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Piatons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet (Freiburg Lectures, winter semester 1931/32), GA 34, pp. 172-3.

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  24. I follow here J.-Fr. Courtine, ‘Phénoménologie et vérité’, in F. VOLPI e.a., Heideggeret l’idée de la phénoménologie (Phaenomenologica 108), Dordrecht/Boston/London, Kluwer, 1988, pp. 81-106.

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  25. Cf. ‘Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B16)’, in ID., Early Greek Thinking. The Dawn of Western Philosophy, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1984, pp. 113 ff. and GA34, pp. 92-3.

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  26. ‘auf einem Weg des Entbergens bringen’ is an expression Heidegger frequently uses in his essay on ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (in Basic Writings, New York, Harper & Row, 1977).

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  27. As in the previous chapter, the ‘a’ in “essance” refers to the verbal character of Heidegger’s “Wesen”.

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  28. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987, p. 153.

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  29. Vier Seminare, Frankfurt a. M., Vittorio Klostermann, 1977, p. 125 (= GA15:387).

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  30. Ibid., p. 124 (=GA 15: 386).

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  31. Cf. ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’: “The lumen naturalle, the light of reason, (…), does concern the clearing, but so little does it form it that it needs it in order to be able to illuminate what is present in the clearing” (Basic Writings, o.c., p. 386 — transi. modified).

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  32. Grundfragen der Philosophic Ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logif” (Freiburg Lectures, winter semester 1937/38), GA 45, p. 44.

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  33. ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, in W. Barrett and H. D. Acken (eds.), Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. An Anthology. Vol. II, New York, Random House, 1962, p. 269 (transl, modified).

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  34. ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’, in M. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, Norwich, Souvenir Press, 1975, p. 102.

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  35. Parmenides (Freiburg Lectures, winter semester 1942/43), GA 54, p. 225: “weil im Offenen des Seins allein auch das Unverborgene des Seienden erscheinen kann und erscheint, hält sich der Mensch zunächst, und unversehens dann ständig, nur an das Seiende. Er vergißt das Sein und lernt in solchem Vergessen nur das eine: die Verkennung des Seins und die Entfremdung gegen das Offene”.

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  36. Cf. GA 34, pp. 323-4: “Unser Fragen nach dem Wesen der Wahrheit ist kein überflüssiger Nachtrag, sondern das Vortragen unseres Wollens und Daseins in ganz andere Bahnen und Bezirke. Dieser Wandel des Wesens der Wahrheit ist aber nicht die bloβe Abänderung einer Begriffsbestimmung (…), sondern dieser Wandel des Wesens der Wahrheit is die Umwälzung des ganzen menschlichen Seins, an deren Beginn wir stehen” (text from 1931-2); and GA 45, p. 214: “In der hier gestellten Wahrheitsfrage gilt es nicht nur eine Abänderung des bisherigen Begriffes der Wahrheit, nicht eine Ergänzung der geläufigen Vorstellung, es gilt eine Verwandelung des Menschseins selbst (…) die Verrückung des Menschseins aus seinem bisherigen Standort — oder besser seiner Standortlosigheit— in den Grund seines Wesens, der Gründer und Wahrer der Wahrheit des Seyns zu werden (…)” (text from 1937–8).

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  37. Heidegger himself uses the word ‘decay’ (Verfall), e.g. in GA 34, p. 181: “auf dem Wege eines Verfallens (ist) der Begriff des ‘Denkens’ und der‘ratio’ entstanden”, and passim in GA 45, GA 54. I will return to the difficulties and peculiarities which characterize Heidegger’s use of this expression.

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  38. In what follows I comment GA 45, pp. 100-12 and passim.

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  39. Compare, for example, what is said on GA 45, p. 99 with the remark on the next page where Heidegger evokes an age “in which the conception of truth as correctness was still foreign to the Greeks; in which rather the original experience of truth as unconcealedness held its sway”. It seems as if the introduction of homoiosis not only has been possible on the basis of this original experience of truth, but that it also corrupted this experience. With homoiosis we have the beginning of a series of de iure superfluous supplements to an original experience of truth that (de iure again) also could have existed without these supplements and indeed have. At the same time, however, Heidegger seems to be trying to link this corruption of the origin to its “corruptibility” (see my comments in the preceding paragraph).

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  40. GA 45, p. 139 and ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in M. HEIDEGGER, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York, Harper & Row, 1977, p. 131.

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  41. ‘The Age of the World Picture’, p. 132.

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  42. For this characterisation of mimesis as ‘appearance in another place’: S. IJSSELING, Mimesis. On Appearing and Being (transi. H. IJsseling — J. Bloechl), Kampen (The Netherlands), Kok Pharos, 1997, which includes an essay on ‘Heidegger and Mimesis’ (pp. 59-77).

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  43. Cf. Der Satzvom Grund,Pfullingen, Neske, 1986, p. 88: ‘UnserVernehmenist in sich ein Entsprechen’.

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  44. ‘La pauvreté de l’Homo humanus ou l’homme sans facultés’ is the title of the second part of M. Haar’s brilliant book on Heidegger et l’essence de l’homme, Grenoble, Millon, 1990.

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  45. GA 45, p. 118 where Heidegger explains that the Greek ‘kai’ should be taken here in an explicative sense: “im Sinne von ‘und das will sagen’”.

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  46. For what is at stake in such ‘Violence’, see chapter 4 below.

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  47. This seems to be the problem Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe discusses in ‘Typographie’ (in ID., Mimesis des articulations, s.l., Aubier Flammarion, 1975, pp. 165-270).

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  48. ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, o.c., pp. 297 ff.

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  49. E.g. ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking, New York, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 48: “Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world ”.

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  50. For Foucault the ‘appearance’ of homosexuality cannot be viewed as a ‘pro-duction’ but as a production (see my analysis in Genealogy as Critique, chapter 3).

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  51. The End of Philosophy’, l.c., p. 390.

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  52. For these expressions: GA 45, pp. 37, 48 and passim. For Hegel/Heidegger: M. Haar, Le chant de la tern. Heidegger et les assises de l’histoire de l’être, Paris, Editions de l’Herne, 1985, pp. 141-60.

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  53. Cf. also J. Caputo), ‘Demythologizing Heidegger:Aletheia and the History of Being’, Review of Metaphysics, 1988 (41), pp. 519-46.

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  54. Time and Being’, in M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, New York, Harper & Row, 1972, pp. 12-3.

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  55. ’summary of a Seminar on the Lecture “Time and Being”’, in On Time and Being, p. 36.

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  56. Identity and Difference, New York, Harper & Row, 1974, p. 64.

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  57. ‘The End of Philosophy’, l.c., p. 391.

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  58. ’summary of a Seminar on the Lecture “Time and Being”’, p. 30.

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  59. Time and Being’, l.c., p. 8 and Vier Seminare, p. 102 (GA 15: 364).

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  60. I follow here Die Seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus (1944/6), in Nietzsche Bd. II, Pfullingen, 1961, pp. 335-98 (English transl in: Nietzsche Vol. IV, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1982, pp. 197-250, in particular p. 246).

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  61. ‘On the Essence of Truth, in Basic Wntings, o.c., pp. 132 ff.

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  62. Cf. J.-L. Chrétien, ‘La réserve de l’être’, in Cahier de l’Herne. Heidegger, Paris, L'Herne (Biblio/Essais), 1983, pp. 233-60. In what follows I comment on §§ 6 and 7 of Of the Essence of Truth.

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  63. ‘Memorial Address’, l.c., p. 55.

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  64. Vier Seminare, o.c., p. 100 (GA 15:362).

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  65. R. Bernet, l.c., p. 262.

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  66. ‘Memorial Address’, l.c., pp. 56 and 54 (henceforth MA).

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  67. Der Satz vom Grund, p. 101 and passim.

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  68. Ibid., p. 188 (my transi.).

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  69. In rendering “Sätze”, which is, of course, strictly untranslatable (it could among other things also mean “bounces”),by “movements” (in the musical sense of the term) — I follow R. Lilly in his translation of The Pnnciple of Reason (Bloomington/Indianapolis, Indiana U.P., 1991, p. 113).

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  70. I borrow this image from my colleague H. DE DIJN,’ spinoza: rationalist én mysticus?’, De Uil van Minerva, 1989–90 (6:1), p. 42.

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  71. ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, l.c., p. 308.

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  1. Rudi Visker
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Visker, R. (1999). From Foucault to Heidegger a One-Way Ticket?. In: Truth and Singularity. Phaenomenologica, vol 155. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4467-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4467-4_3

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