John Ransom wrote:
>
> At one point -- can't find the darn reference -- Foucault comments
> that
> his two favorite thinkers are Nietzsche and Heidegger, and that
> reading
> Nietzsche alone was bad enough, but that reading the two together was
> a
> real shock.
Foucault says (Dits et ecrits, IV, pp. 703 -- originally "Le retour de
la morale" in Les Nouvelles litte'raires, #2937, 28 July, 1984, pp.
36-41) that "Heidegger a tousjours e'te' pour moi le philosophe
essentiel. ... J'avais essaye' de lire Nietzsche dans les anne'es
cinquante, mais Nietzsche tout seul ne me disait rien! Tandis que
Nietzsche et Heidegger, ca a e'te' le choc philosophique!
My real question is what list colleagues make of the
> connection between H and F, and why F refers to his reading of H as
> producing a "shock." What kind of shock was it? The quotation above is
> employed as it mirrors similar comments Foucault makes in other
> places,
> such as "What is Enlightenment" and one or two other places where he
> criticizes the commitment to humanism.
I don't really know for sure, but I think that Heidegger was the one
who specifically thematized as a problem and hence taught Foucault what
it meant 'to think otherwise.' Armed with that philosophical lesson,
one can imagine that the return to Nietzsche was *much* richer for
Foucault. Reading Nietzsche in France in the 1950's, especially before
Heidegger's influence on Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, was to read not
so much a philosopher, but a writer, and next to Sade even
Nietzsche-qua-writer isn't very shocking!
Reg
>
> At one point -- can't find the darn reference -- Foucault comments
> that
> his two favorite thinkers are Nietzsche and Heidegger, and that
> reading
> Nietzsche alone was bad enough, but that reading the two together was
> a
> real shock.
Foucault says (Dits et ecrits, IV, pp. 703 -- originally "Le retour de
la morale" in Les Nouvelles litte'raires, #2937, 28 July, 1984, pp.
36-41) that "Heidegger a tousjours e'te' pour moi le philosophe
essentiel. ... J'avais essaye' de lire Nietzsche dans les anne'es
cinquante, mais Nietzsche tout seul ne me disait rien! Tandis que
Nietzsche et Heidegger, ca a e'te' le choc philosophique!
My real question is what list colleagues make of the
> connection between H and F, and why F refers to his reading of H as
> producing a "shock." What kind of shock was it? The quotation above is
> employed as it mirrors similar comments Foucault makes in other
> places,
> such as "What is Enlightenment" and one or two other places where he
> criticizes the commitment to humanism.
I don't really know for sure, but I think that Heidegger was the one
who specifically thematized as a problem and hence taught Foucault what
it meant 'to think otherwise.' Armed with that philosophical lesson,
one can imagine that the return to Nietzsche was *much* richer for
Foucault. Reading Nietzsche in France in the 1950's, especially before
Heidegger's influence on Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, was to read not
so much a philosopher, but a writer, and next to Sade even
Nietzsche-qua-writer isn't very shocking!
Reg