Matthew
Rather late as a reply, but i've been away from e-mail for the past month.
I'm not at all sure this is old hat. To my mind (and i've said this before)
there is little of note on the Heidegger Foucault relation, but this
particular link has been noticed before, but not really explored. Somewhere
Derrida mentions this as a potential link between F and H ('Etre juste avec
Freud', translation in the Foucault and his Interlocutors book).
Heidegger says (somewhere) that the analysis of death in Being and Time was
written for the medical profession. I'm not sure therefore that Birth of the
Clinic is really a genealogy of Heidegger (that would imply that B&T drew on
medicine for its understanding of death, when i think it very clearly
doesn't). Rather i think that BC is in some ways an attempt to understand
how the modern notion of death and individuality - which i take H to be
challenging - arose. Maybe that's what you meant. In this case F is very
clearly working here - as elsewhere - in the wake of H.
BTW, I thought BC was not at all boring - on the contrary i thought it one
of F's most challenging and interesting books. Much of it is already
included in Histoire de la folie, and to my mind it's incomplete (the Rio
lectures of 1974 fill some key lacunae), but it seems to me much more
successful than Order of Things in terms of what it does. It's a temporally
and geographically bounded study (a good thing), very learned and
challenging. The stuff on the gaze pre-empts much of Discipline and Punish,
there's some good stuff on space, it interestingly parallels the Roussel
book, etc.
Best,
Stuart
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Matthew
King
Sent: 21 December 1999 15:57
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Foucault and Heidegger, again
Perhaps this is old hat to many, but anyway: this morning I read
Bernauer's article "Oedipus, Freud, Foucault", wherein he writes: "*The
Birth of the Clinic* argued that clinical medicine was the first sceince
of the individual. Integral to this science was the role of death as
constitutive of one's individuality and unique intelligibility, a status
that was the precondition for the extraordinary importance given by
historians to pathological anatomy in the development of a science of
medicine. Death and disease broke from metaphysical understandings and
became essential elements in the identity of the person." Holy Heidegger!,
I says to myself. I had read *Birth of the Clinic* before I read
Heidegger, and thought it was the most boring book I ever read. If
Bernauer casts it accurately, it's something of a genealogy of Heidegger--
which makes it rather more interesting indeed.
Matthew
---Matthew A. King---Department of Philosophy---York University, Toronto---
"I, too, aspire to see clearly, like a rifleman, with one eye shut;
I, too, aspire to think without assent. This is the ultimate
violence to which the modern intellectual is committed."
------------------------------(Philip Rieff)-------------------------------
Rather late as a reply, but i've been away from e-mail for the past month.
I'm not at all sure this is old hat. To my mind (and i've said this before)
there is little of note on the Heidegger Foucault relation, but this
particular link has been noticed before, but not really explored. Somewhere
Derrida mentions this as a potential link between F and H ('Etre juste avec
Freud', translation in the Foucault and his Interlocutors book).
Heidegger says (somewhere) that the analysis of death in Being and Time was
written for the medical profession. I'm not sure therefore that Birth of the
Clinic is really a genealogy of Heidegger (that would imply that B&T drew on
medicine for its understanding of death, when i think it very clearly
doesn't). Rather i think that BC is in some ways an attempt to understand
how the modern notion of death and individuality - which i take H to be
challenging - arose. Maybe that's what you meant. In this case F is very
clearly working here - as elsewhere - in the wake of H.
BTW, I thought BC was not at all boring - on the contrary i thought it one
of F's most challenging and interesting books. Much of it is already
included in Histoire de la folie, and to my mind it's incomplete (the Rio
lectures of 1974 fill some key lacunae), but it seems to me much more
successful than Order of Things in terms of what it does. It's a temporally
and geographically bounded study (a good thing), very learned and
challenging. The stuff on the gaze pre-empts much of Discipline and Punish,
there's some good stuff on space, it interestingly parallels the Roussel
book, etc.
Best,
Stuart
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Matthew
King
Sent: 21 December 1999 15:57
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Foucault and Heidegger, again
Perhaps this is old hat to many, but anyway: this morning I read
Bernauer's article "Oedipus, Freud, Foucault", wherein he writes: "*The
Birth of the Clinic* argued that clinical medicine was the first sceince
of the individual. Integral to this science was the role of death as
constitutive of one's individuality and unique intelligibility, a status
that was the precondition for the extraordinary importance given by
historians to pathological anatomy in the development of a science of
medicine. Death and disease broke from metaphysical understandings and
became essential elements in the identity of the person." Holy Heidegger!,
I says to myself. I had read *Birth of the Clinic* before I read
Heidegger, and thought it was the most boring book I ever read. If
Bernauer casts it accurately, it's something of a genealogy of Heidegger--
which makes it rather more interesting indeed.
Matthew
---Matthew A. King---Department of Philosophy---York University, Toronto---
"I, too, aspire to see clearly, like a rifleman, with one eye shut;
I, too, aspire to think without assent. This is the ultimate
violence to which the modern intellectual is committed."
------------------------------(Philip Rieff)-------------------------------