Foucault's Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience

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Foucault's philosophical relationship to Heidegger is the subject of continuing academic debate. To date, no comprehensive interpretation of this relationship has emerged. This book provides a groundbreaking new approach to Foucault and Heidegger's relationship, based in an original approach to the problem itself. Rather than explore points of similarity between these thinkers, the book identifies a Heideggerian style, or practice, of thinking in Foucault's work, which first emerges in his early studies of madness and literature. Through a series of penetrating studies, Foucault's Heidegger shows how this philosophical practice informs the content and objectives of Foucault's critical writings to the end of his career. This argument clarifies the central role of transformative experience in Foucault's work. In addition to establishing the nature of Foucault's engagement with Heidegger, it provides a new perspective on the role of 'fiction' in Foucault's critique, and revitalizes our conception of Foucault's status as a philosopher.






Foucault's Heidegger will be a landmark in Foucault studies, the first comprehensive account of Foucault's relationship to Heidegger in print. As such, it will be a key reference for future debates on this matter and discussions of Foucault's work generally.

Reviews

"I was impressed with...Rayner's treatment of the difference between Being and beings. I do not think I have seen a clearer, more succinct explanation." -Notre Dame Philosophical Review -- C. G. Prado
"This book is the definitive volume on the connection between the twentieth century's most original philosopher and the most influential French scholar of the late twentieth century. The book thus measures up to its back-cover blurb: it is a landmark and key reference. Moreover, there is an element beyond this, which . . . I believe is very valuable in itself, that flagged by the book's subtitle, "Philosophy and Transformative Experience". In the sections where he fails in my view to convincingly link Foucault to Heidegger, Rayner nevertheless produces an interesting and original reading of Foucault's philosophy." -Critical Horizons -- Mark Kelly
"Timothy Rayner has written an important book on a topic that has not been explored in great depth thus far: the profound impact of Martin Heidegger on Foucault's thinking over the course of more than thirty years, from the early 1950's to his death in 1984...Timothy Rayner's Foucault's Heidegger, through its thesis that Foucault's search for a transformative practice, for an experience that transgresses the prevail-ing games of truth, power relations, and modes of subjectivity, is closely linked to Heidegger's own philosophical project and constitutes a link in a chain of thinking that seeks to construct a viable anti-world." -Alan Milchman, Foucault Studies, February 2009

Author Bio

Timothy Rayner is Honorary Research Associate in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He has published articles in a number of leading philosophy journals, including Radical Philosophy, International Journal for Philosophical Studies and Continental Philosophy Review.