Being and power: Heidegger and Foucault

Abstract At the heart of Heidegger's thought is the notion of being, and the same can be said of power in the works of Foucault. And, just as Heidegger offers a history of being, culminating in the technological understanding of being, in order to help us understand and overcome our current way of dealing with things as objects, Foucault analyses several regimes of power, culminating in modern bio‐power, in order to help us free ourselves from understanding ourselves as subjects. I argue that these parallels arise because Foucault's notion of power denotes the social aspect of what Heidegger calls the clearing. That is, while Heidegger is concerned with the coordination of everyday practices that makes possible the disclosure of all types of entities, Foucault is concerned with the practices that determine what, at any given time, it makes sense for people to do. Heidegger further claims that, since the Greeks, the clearing has been misunderstood. He calls this misunderstanding, which sees intelligibility as emanating from a highest being, onto‐theology. This corresponds to Foucault's claim that, from Plato on, people have had a mistaken conception of power as monarchical, that is, as imposed from above. Finally, both understand our current cultural condition as particularly dangerous because our practices are totalizing, and so are wiping out the marginal practices in terms of which our current understanding of being could be resisted, thereby removing the resources that could give rise to new understandings of being and of power. In the end, however, Heidegger and Foucault differ radically. Heidegger stresses that we can only preserve endangered practices by being open to the gathering power of things, while Foucault insists on the wilful and active resistance involved in transforming oneself into a work of art. Keywords: FoucaultHeideggerbeingpowerthingsselves