Being and Power in Heidegger and Foucault

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The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1989)Vol. XXVIII,Supplement

ON THE ORDERING O F THINGS:BEING AND POWERIN H EIDEGGER AND FOUCAULTHubert L. DreyfusUn iversity o f California,Berkeley

At the heart of Heideggers thought is the notion of being,and power is central in the works of Foucault. Yet there isa difference of emphasis from the start. The history of beinggives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand thepresent age and especially how in our modem world thingshave been turned into objects. Foucault wants to switchHeideggers focus on things to a focus on human beings andhow they became subjects.For Heidegger, it was through an increasing obsession with techn6 88the only way to arrive at an understandingof objects, that the West losttouch with being. Lets turn the question around and aek which techniquesand practices form the Western concept of the subject.Just as Heidegger offers a history of being, culminating inthe technological understanding of being, in order to help usunderstand and overcome our current way of dealing withobjects, Foucault offers what he calls a genealogy of regimesof power, culminating in modem bio-power, in order to saveus from being subjects.These rough parallels, which I will soon explain, suggestthat it might be illuminating to see how far the comparisonof Heidegger and Foucault can be pushed. To what extentdo Heideggers epochs of the history of being match Foucaultsregimes in the history of power? To what extent do these twohistories lead us to criticize our current cultural condition insimilar ways? How does each envisage resistance? Whatpositive response does each propose?Many readers of Heidegger think that his critique ofmodernity consists simply in pointing out that man has takencontrol of the planet and that everything is being broughtunder his domination. This is a banal conservative view.Happily it is not Heideggers. Heidegger did, indeed, hold fora time, like many current critics of the modern age, that manwas exploiting all beings for his own satisfaction. Indeed, aslate as 1940Heidegger seems to hold tha t from the beginning

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of modernity up to the present man is a subject in controland that the objectification of everything is the problem:Western history has now begun to enter into the completion of that periodwe call the modern, and which is defined by the fact that man becomesthe measure and the center of beings. Man is what lies at the bottom ofall beings; that is, in modem terms, at the bottom of all objectification andrepresentability.2

But already in 1938 Heidegger suspected that accounts interms of subjects and objects, and the analysis of the modernproblem as one of domination were superficial:Certainly the modem age has, as a consequence of the liberation of man,introduced subjectivism and individualism. But it remains just as certainthat no age before this one has produced a comparable objectivism and thatin no age before this has the non-individual, in the form of the collective,come to accept as having worth. Essential here is the necessary interplaybetween subjectivism and objectivism. It is precisely this reciprocalconditioning of one by the other tha t points back to events more profound.3And by 1942 he clearly holds that our technologicalunderstanding of being underlies the subject/objectdistinction: [Mlodern technology . . . accomplishes theunlimited self-assuring feasibility of everything . . . throughits irrestible transformation of everything into an object fora sub je~ t . ~But even this is not the final story. Technology at firstproduces and uses subjects controlling objects, but later it nolonger needs them. In his final analysis of technology,Heidegger is critical of those who, still caught in the subject/object picture, think that technology is dangerous because itembodies instrumental reason: The current conception oftechnology, according to which it is a means and a humanactivity, can . . . be called the instrumental andanthropological definition of technology.5 Moderntechnology is something completely different and thereforenew.6 The goal of technology Heidegger tells us, is more andmore flexibility and efficiency simply for its own sake.[ Elxpediting is always itself directed from the beginningtoward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on tothe maximum yield at the minimum e ~ pe ns e . ~Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand,indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call itstanding-reserve [B e ~ t a n d ] . ~84


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Heidegger seems to waver on the question whether, astechnology reaches its final stage, it will accentuate subjectsand objects or eliminate them.The subject-object elation thus reaches, for the first time, its pure relational,i.e., ordering, character in which both the subject and the object are suckedup as standing-reserves. That does not mean that the subject-object relationvanishes, but rather the opposite: it now attains to its most extremed ~ m i n a n c e . ~In the end, however, Heidegger seems clearly to hold thattechnology can treat people and things as resources to beenhanced without setting meaning-giving subjects overagainst objectified things. A year after the previous remarkabout subjects and objects reaching extreme dominance,Heidegger appears to retract his view about objects at least,in his observation that nature has become a system ofinformation10 and that a modem airliner is not an objectat all, but just a flexible and efficient cog in the transportationsystem.11 Heidegger concludes: Whatever stands by in thesense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against usas object.12Foucault too, in the social realm, went through a stage,expressed in Madness and Civilization,where he thought theproblem was that some men or classes dominated and excludedothers, and only later saw that exclusion, calling for theliberation of those repressed, was not the problem. Power isnot an instrument for exclusion which has fallen into thewrong hands; but a pressure towards ever greateroptimization. Thus Foucaults engages in an auto-critique:We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negativeterms: it excludes, it represses, it censors, it abstracts, it masks, itconceals.13At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representationof power has remained under the spell of monarchy.14The theory of sovereignty . . . does not allow for a calculation of power interms of the minimum expenditure for the maximum return.15This new form of power Foucault calls bio-power.It is a powerworking to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forcesunder it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and orderingthem, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit,or destroying them.lB

Foucault, however, does not seem to have followedHeideggers move beyond subjects and objects. He seems,rather, to have believed to the end that Christian and Freudian85


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confessional practices and their product, a subject thatexamines itself for its deep truth and a science of desire, arethe most important way bio-power proliferates in our culture.One side of Foucaults work shows that bodies can beindividualized and rendered docile without interiorization bytechniques such as the examination. But another side focuseson the interiorization produced by such technologies such asthe Christian and Freudian confessional and their product,a science of desire and a hermeneutic subject. Moreover,Foucault seems to view these subjectifying technologies asmore basic than the objectifying ones.[Tlhe West has managed. . .to bring us almost entirely. . .under the swayof a logic o f . . . desire. Whenever it is a question of knowing who we are,it is this logic that henceforth serves as our master key.

But if Heidegger is right, subjectification may well be goingthe way of objectification. Indeed, there are signs thatintrospection is becoming passe. Bio-power operates more andmore on life and on populations without the intervention ofsubjective meaning. Law provides a n interesting case. Signssaying Speed: 15miles per hour in school and housing areasare aimed at the drivers subjectivity, i.e., his sense of moralresponsibility and guilt. But now one increasingly finds speed-bumps on the road which bypass the drivers subjectivity toproduce conformity all the more efficiently. Likewise, no-faultinsurance has been found to be a more efficient way ofmanaging a population tha t is trying to develop responsibilityby assigning blame.In managing sexuality, the same development seems to betaking place. In California, at least, anti-Freudian sexcounselors claim that their science has shown that sex is ameaningless physiological function that can be optimized bysuitable techniques. Foucault saw this development on thelevel of society.[Olne had to speak of [sex] as of a thing to be not simply condemned ortolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for thegreater good of all, made to function accordingto an optimum.18But he does not follow up his insight. He may well have beenalluding to his neglect of this theme when he agreed withPaul Rabinow and me in an interview that after his longobsession with the subject he must return to writing hisgenealogy of bio-power.lgIn any case, in the last stage of their thinking both Heideggerand Foucault would agree that man as a subject/object doubleis being wiped out, but that this reveals a n underlying long-86


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term process, and so is not necessarily encouraging. Indeed,Heidegger and Foucault see us as caught in especiallydangerous practices which produce man only finally toeliminate him, as these practices reveal more and morenakedly a tendency toward the total ordering of all beings.Heidegger calls this final Understanding of beingtechnological and is concerned to show how it distorts ourunderstanding of localness and of things; Foucault calls itdisciplinary bio-powerand focuses primarily on how it affectsthe social order and the relations between human beings. Bothhold it determines our understanding of ourselves and leadsto a pervasive sense of distress. They agree that as theunderlying direction of ourcurrent practices is becoming clearour culture is facing the greatest danger in its history, for,while previous governing clearings were static and partial,leaving a certain leeway for the way things and human beingscould show up and be encountered, our current understandingis active and is progressively taking over every aspect of thenatural and social world.The Greeks had a relaxed attitude toward what they calledaphrodesia, and did not try to regulate it. The topdownorder of the medieval understanding of being and ofmonarchical power, while centralized, did not extend to alldetails of the world. And in the next stage juridical powerwas restricted tospecific laws. Only the modem understandingof beinglpower is bottom-up, leveling and totalizing.Heidegger emphasizes the totalization by calling it, followingEmst Jiinger, total mobilization, while Foucault includesboth totalizing and leveling by adapting GeorgesCanguilhems notion of normalization.Normalization is more than socialization into norms. Normsare necessary in any society. Normalization, however, isuniquely modem. A normalizing society is the historicaloutcome of a technology of power centered on life.20 In thisunderstanding which has emerged more and more clearlysince the Classical Age, norms are progressively brought tobear on all aspects of life by new methods of power whoseoperation is not ensured by right but by technique, not bypunishment but by control, not by law but bynormalization.21To understand how normalization works we have to bringFoucaults insight into the way the human sciences serve toextend social norms together with Heideggers account of thetechnological understanding of being underlying modemscience. To do that we need to spell out Heideggersunderstanding of research. Modem research isoriginal in that

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it is totalizing. In contrast to Aristotleian or medieval naturalhistory where one listed fabulous exceptions, monsters, etc.,among the results of empirical observation, since Galileo,scientific research has been based on the idea th at the scientistassumes there is one sys te m into which all of physical realitymust be made to fit.[Elvery procedure . . requires an open sphere in which it moves. And itis precisely the opening up of such a sphere that is the fundamental eventin research. This is accomplished through the projection within some realmof what is-in nature, for example-of a fixed ground plan of natural events.The projection sketches out in advance the manner in which the knowingprocedure must bind itself and adhereto the sphere opened up.22To understand what Heidegger means by research it helpsto look at Thomas Kuhns account of normal science in hisbook, The Structure o f Scientific Revo lutions. Normal scienceoperates by setting up a total interpretation of some regionof reality and then attempts to show tha t the anomalies tha temerge can be fitted into the general account. Normal scienceassumes beforehand th at the general plan is correct and thusthat the anomalies have no truth to tell-that in the end all

anomalies will be brought under the law.Normal science progresses precisely by producing and theneliminating anomalies. Foucault sees that our modern socialnorms, supposedly grounded in science, likewise produceanomalies (deviants) and then takes every deviant anddelinquent, every attempt to evade them, as occasions forfurther intervention to bring the anomalies under the scientificnorms.Normalization, according to Foucault, serves not only toobjectify, exclude, coerce or punish, but essentially to enhancelife. This is what leads us all to cooperate in extending thesepractices. Power creates docile bodies and self-analyzing, deepsubjects as further material for the human sciences whosegoal is ever greater welfare for all. It has become self evidentto us that everyone should get the most out of his or herpossibilities, and that the human sciences show us the wayto do this.I. The Danger

Both Heidegger and Foucault are clear that what is uniquelyoppressive in our current practices is not that they cause socialor ecological damage. Indeed, Heidegger goes so far as to seepredictions of technological disasters as part of the problem.88


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All attempts to reckon existing reality . . in terms of decline and loss. interms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technologicalbehavior.23For Foucault, our normalizing society would be even moreoppressive if it became even more permissive, pleasurable andproductive. Heidegger distinguishes the current problems oftechnology-ecological destruction, urbanization, deforesta-tion, nuclear danger, etc.-from the devastation that wouldresult if technology solved all our problems.What threatens man in his very nature is the willed view that man, by thepeaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies ofphysical nature, could render the human condition, mans being, tolerablefor everybody and happy in allThis is the greatest danger because:[Tlhe approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age couldso captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking maysomeday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.25

Their common critique of technology/bio-power does not,however, lead Heidegger or Foucault to oppose the use oftechnological devices, nor specific welfare practices. Heideggeris clear that it is the essence of technology, i.e., thetechnological understanding of being, not technology, thatcauses the distress we may feel. And Foucault does not thinkwe can or should leave behind the welfare society. He simplywants to weaken its grip.To understand what Heidegger and Foucault are proposing,we need an illustration of Heideggers obscure but importantdistinction between technology and the technologicalunderstanding of being. For such an example we can turnto Japan. In contemporary Japan a traditional, non-technological understanding of being exists alongside themost advanced high-tech production and consumption. We canthus see that the technological understanding of being canbe disassociated from technological devices.Heidegger uses and depends upon modem technologicaldevices, he does not advocate a return to the pretechnologicalworld of ancient Greece.It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be short-sightedto condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; theyeven challenge us to ever greater advances.26Foucault, like Heidegger, is, ofcourse, not opposed tomodemwelfare techniques. Paul Rabinow and I once asked him ifhe opposed welfare practices such as mass vaccinations. He

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answered, of course not. But he added that what he opposedwas a way of thinking that took the need for the proliferationof such techniques for granted and suppressed discussion ofthe social and personal costs such a procedure might have.Foucault is opposed to taking for granted that welfarepractices, based on the human sciences, should, in the nameof efficiency and optimization, be extended without criticalquestioning to all aspects of our lives.Likewise, Heidegger says that we should not assume thatit is a step forward to dam up the Rhine and turn it intoa source of flexible electric power, but one can imagine himsaying that that does not mean that we should oppose allhydro-electric stations. Heidegger says explicitly that weshould neither push forward technological efficiency as theonly value nor condemn it as the work of the devil. We should,presumably, in each case discuss the pros and cons. That iswhat Heidegger calls having a free relation to technology.It is only possible, however, if our culture succeeds in gettingover our technological understanding of being.11. WhatResists and Why

Both Heidegger and Foucault see what is endangered asat the same time a source of resistance. Heidegger holds thatthings can never be completely understood by the sciencesnor totally controlled by technology. Their resistance is notthe passive resistance of prime matter, but an activewithdrawal. Heidegger calls this function earth. Earth . . .shatters every attempt to penetrate into it. It causes everymerely calculating importunity upon it to turn into adestruction.27 This refusal of things to fit into some pre-ordained total plan, reveals things not just as anomalies butas the source of other ways of seeing. Just as for Kuhnanomalies sometimes contain a resistance that forces arevolution in science in which the anomaly is no longer ananomaly but the focus of a new truth, so for Heidegger theresistance intrinsic to things holds open the possibility of asaving breakdown of the total ground plan of modern culture.In one of his interviews Foucault seems to find in peoplea positive resistance to bio-power parallel to that Heideggerfinds in things:[TJhere is indeed always something in the social body, in classes, groupsand individuals themselves which in some sense escapes relationsof power,something which is by no means a more or less docile or reactive primalmatter, but rather a centrifugal movement, an inverse energy, a discharge.This . . . s not so much what stands outside relations of power as their limit,90


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their underside, their counter-stroke, that which responds to every advanceof power by a movement of disengagement.28For both Heidegger and Foucault these strange notionspresumably are meant to encourage us to pay attention towhat remains of the different, the local, and the recalcitrantin our current practices. What needs to be resisted are notparticular technologies nor particular strategies, not even thenatural sciences nor the human sciences, but rather ourtotalizing, normalizing understanding of being. Thus thecurrent understanding can only be resisted by first showingthat it is not inevitable-that it is just one interpretation ofwhat it is to be. Then one must strengthen practices whichhave escaped or successfully resisted the spread of technology/bio-power and so might become the elements of some differentunderstanding of being. Thus Foucault holds we must preservethe endangered marginal and local, and Heidegger says, Hereand now . . . n simple things . . . we may foster the rescuingpower in its inc~ease.2~Heidegger and Foucault are, however, faced with a dilemmaconcerning the status of these possibly saving marginalpractices. While dispersed, practices Heidegger would approve

such as backpacking into the wilderness, and Foucaultspractice of cosmopolitan friendship, escape totalization, butoffer little resistance to its further spread. If, however, onewere to focus on them and try to manage them, even in thename of a counter-tradition or resistance, they would risk beingtaken over and normalized. One cannot resist normalizingtotalization by introducing new universal principles orpolitical movements.Rather, thinking the history of being which led to ourtechnological understanding of being as standing reserve, forHeidegger, and giving a genealogy of power which leads uptobio-power, for Foucault, are meant to opena space for criticalquestioning by showingthat our understanding of reality neednot be defined by technology/bio-power-that we need not bedominated by the drive to optimize everything. Both thinkersseek to show that we had a different relation to beings oncewhich suggests that we could have other relations in the future.An understanding of our historical condition weakens the holdour current understanding has on us and makes possibledisengagement from the direction our practices are taking.

Heidegger in his last work distances the thinker from thephilosopher who argues for new cultural norms.[Tbe thinking in question remains unassuming because ita task is only ofa preparatory, not of a founding character. It is content with awakening

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a readiness in man for a possibility whose contour remains obscure, whosecoming remains uncertain.30Foucault, in a similar style of reflection, attempts to replacethe pretentions of the universal philosopher with the modestyof the specific intellectual. When asked about his positivistproposals for a better society, Foucault always said he wasnot a prophet. He was only trying to open up possibilitiesfor action where people now accepted limits supposedly basedon a given, fixed reality. My job is creating doors andwindows where there now are walls, he once remarked.Only when it comes to the difficult question, just why andhow, then, should we resist, do Heidegger and Foucault takequite different paths-each of which has its advantages anddrawbacks. Heidegger, unlike Foucault, has a n account of whythe technological understanding of being causes humandistress, from which perspective he can criticize the present.For Heidegger human beings, in this culture at least, havebeen defined from the start as receivers of the gift of anunderstanding of being. However, the sense that eachunderstanding of being is a gift was lost after pre-SocraticGreece and all subsequent understandings of being areattempts to replace it with a fixed account of reality groundedin some ultimate being, then in human beings, and finally,just in ordering for its own sake. Human beings who reflecton the original happening of receiving an understandingof being and on the epochs to which it gives rise, Heideggercalls thinkers. But all Western human beings, whether theyrealize it or not, share in the human essence formed in pre-Socratic Greece.This Heideggerian minimal account of our historicalessence is perfectly adapted to allowing a critique of thepresent without being the basis for new universal moral norms.The technological understanding of being has no place in itspractices for human receptivity. It covers up that there isanything outside eventual human control. Embracing thisdenial that all understanding of being is a gift produces adistortion of our essence which causes our distress.In the last analysis Foucault is more radical than Heidegger.Consistent with his opposition to all totalizing claimsconcerning how people should live their lives, he avoids anyaccount of what human beings essentially are and are calledto do, whether that be Nietzsches call to constant self-overcoming or Heideggers claim that being demands totalreceptivity. In the same interview in which he acknowledgeshis debt to Heidegger, Foucault asserts that The search for92


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a form of morality acceptable by everyone in the sense thateveryone would have to submit to it, seems catastrophic tome.31 Thus, although Foucault does at one point say thathe is attempting to be receptive to the problematizations inour current practices through which being offers itself ashaving to be thought,32he does not claim that in so doinghe is fulfilling his human essence. This, however, denies himany account of why bio-power should be felt as distressingand so be resisted. He nonetheless still engages in activeresistance to specific instances of normalizing bio-power.Since Foucault rejects the idea that man ha s any essence-even an historical one-which he must recover, and sincepower practices always lead to the exclusion of somepossibilities and the reinforcement of some conformity,Foucault assumes that each regime of power will have itsadvantages and its concomitant dangers, and that none willbe ideal. At each stage it is the job of the genealogist to loosenwhat is taken as fixed, and to resist specific cases ofdomination. This view of his role, Foucault calls his hyger-active pessimism.111.Heideggers Super-Passive OptimismIn their sense of distress and in their diagnosis of its sourcesHeidegger and Foucault are strikingly similar. ButHeideggers hopes for a better epoch are quite alien to Foucault.Heideggers stance might be called super-passive optimism.Since he thinks tha t what h as been lost is receptivity, he doesnot advocate active intervention. Rather, he advocatesGelassenheit. Thinking the history of being producesGelassenheit-opting out of the current understanding ofbeing. Of course, that alone will not bring about the sendingof a new clearing. All the thinker can do is join the poetsin an attempt to preserve the saving power of simple things.But just preserving non-technical practices, even if we coulddo it, would not give us what we need. Heidegger thinks thatour culture will be in distress until we find a new sense ofcommunity. He puts this need for community in the strangelanguage of the poet, Holderlin:[Our] era is defined by the gods failure to arrive, by the default of God.But the default of God . . . does not deny that the Christian relationshipwith God lives on in individuals and in the churches; still less does it assessthis relationship negatively.The default ofGodmeans that no god any longergathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and bysuch gathering disposes the worldshistory and mans sojourn in it.33

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This means that one cannot legislate a new understandingof being. For shared practices to give meaning to the livesof those whose practices they are, they must be focused,organized and held up to the practitioners. This function,which later Heidegger calls truth setting itself to work, canbe performed by what Heidegger calls a work of art. Heideggertakes as his illustration of a work of art working, the Greektemple. But he mentions several other examples of truthsetting itself to work: the nearness of the god (e.g., the HebrewCovenant), the sacrifice of a god (e.g., the Crucifixion), theact of a great political leader (e.g., Pericles), or the words ofa great thinker (e.g., Parmenides).

We could call such special objects cultural paradigms. Acultural paradigm focuses and collects the scattered practicesof a culture, unifies them into coherent possibilities for action,and holds them up to the people who can then act and relateto each other in terms of the exemplar. Aeschyluss Oresteiais an example. Aeschylus wanted to show the Athenians whatthey stood for. He did not want to state propositions or justifytheir beliefs. The last thing he wanted to do was to tell theAthenians their values. So he produced a drama in whichthey were participants-he presented his fellow citizens witha pageant, a ritual, a paradigm of their way of life. And indoing that he helped focus and preserve the practices of hisage.When we see that for later Heidegger only those practicesfocused in a paradigm can establish what it makes sense todo and what can count as true, we can see why he waspessimistic about reviving focal practices from the past. Forexample, Heidegger would surely reject Robert Bellahs andCharles Taylors suggestion that we revive Christiancommunities, and Greek republicanism. Heidegger would saythat we should, indeed, try to preserve such practices, but theycan only save us if they are radically transformed andintegrated into a new understanding of reality. Such practices,having now become marginal, have no truth and reveal noreality unless they can be taken up, transformed, andmanifested in a new shared paradigm. Such a new object orevent that grounds a new understanding of reality Heideggercalls a new god, and he holds tha t only such a god can saveus.34Once one sees what is needed, one also sees that there isnot much one can do about it. It is not something that canbe made the goal of a crash program like the moon flight-a paradigm of modem technological power. A new paradigmwould have to take up practices which are now on the margin

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of our culture and make them central, while de-emphasizingpractices now central to our cultural self-understanding. Itwould come as a surprise to the very people who participatedin it, and if it worked it would become an exemplar of a newunderstanding of what matters and how to act. There would,of course, be powerful forces tending to take it over andintegrate it into our technological practices, and if it failed,it would necessarily be measured by our current understandingof reality and so look ridiculous.A hint of what such a social transformation might looklike is offered by the music of the sixties. The Beatles, BobDylan, and other rock groups became for many the articulationof new understanding of what really mattered. This newunderstanding almost coalesced into a cultural paradigm inthe Woodstock Music Festival where people actually lived fora few days in a n understanding of being in which main-linecontemporary concerns with rationality, sobriety, willfulactivity, and flexible, efficient control were made marginaland subservient to Greek virtues such as nudity, enjoymentof nature, and dancing, along with a neglected Christianconcern with peace, passivity, ecstasy and love of onesneighbour without desire and exclusivity. Technology was notsmashed or denigrated but all the power of electroniccommunications was put at the service of the music whichalone really mattered.If enough people had recognized in Woodstock what theymost cared about and recognized that all the others sharedthis recognition, a new understanding of being would havebeen focused and stabilized. Of course, in retrospect we seethat the concerns of the Woodstock generation were not broadand deep enough to sustain a culture. Still we are left witha hint of how a new cultural paradigm would work, and therealization that we must preserve the endangered species ofpractices that remain in our culture in the hopes that oneday they will be pulled together in a new paradigm rich enoughand resistent enough to give new meaningful direction to ourlives. This is what I have called Heideggers super-passiveoptimism and it is quite alien to Foucaults hyper-activepessimism.If one sh ar es the Heidegger/Foucault diagnosis oftechnological bio-power, one will have to decide for oneselfwhich of the two stances to take. But in either case the goalwould be to free oneself from the current understanding ofbeing by understanding it as an historical interpretation, andto preserve the endangered practices that resist the currentmobilization or normalization of our world.

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NOTESMichel Foucault, Truth and Subjectivity, Howison Lecture, UniversityMartin Heidegger,Nietzsche, Volum eFour: Nihi l i sm, Harper & Row, 1982,Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture, in The QuestionMartin Heidegger, Hegels Concept of Experience, Harper & Row, 1970,Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, in The

of California, Berkeley, October 20, 1980.p. 28.Concerning Technology,Harper Colophon Books, 1977, p. 128.pp. 62-63.Question Concerning Technology, p. 5.

6 Zbid.Zbid., p. 15.8 Zbid., p. 17.9 Martin Heidegger, Science and Reflection, The Question ConcerningTechnology,p. 173.Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 23.Zbid., p. 17.12 Zbid.Michel Foucault, Discipline and Pu nish , Pantheon Books, 1977, p. 194.l4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexual i ty , The Uses of Pleasure, Volume

ZZ, Vintage Books, 1986, pp. 88-89.l5 Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, Power/Knowledge:Selected Interviewsand Other W ritings1972-1977 by M ichel Foucault ,ed. Colin Gordon, PantheonBooks, 1980, p. 105.l6 Michel Foucault, The History of SexuaZity, Volume Z, Vintage Books,

1980, p. 136.17 Zbid., p. 78.Zbid., p. 24.19 H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyo nd Structura lism and2o Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuali ty , Volume Z, p . 144.2l Zbid., p. 89.22 Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture, p. 118.23 Martin Heidegger, The Turning, Th e Question Concerning T echno logy,z 4 Martin Heidegger, What Are Poets For?, Poetry, Language, T hough t ,2 5 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thin king , Harper & Row, 1966, p. 56.26 Zbid., pp. 53-54.27 Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, Poetry, Language,

Hermeneutics, The University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 232.

p. 48.Harper & Row, 1971, p. 116.

Thought , p. 47.Michel Foucault, Power and Strategies, p. 138.29 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 33.30 Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,Basic W rit ings, Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 378-379.3 l Michel Foucault, LeRetour de la morale, interview conducted by GillesBarbadette, Les Nouvelles, June 28, 1984, translated as Final InterviewRari tan , Summer 1985,p. 37.3* Michel Foucault, The History of Sex uality , Volum e ZZ, p. 11.33 Martin Heidegger, What are Poets For?, Poetry, Language, Thou ght ,R4 Martin Heidegger, Only A God Can Save Us, Der Spiegel, May 31,p. 91.1976.

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Being and Power in Heidegger and Foucault

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