Abstract
In an interview, “The Return of Morality,” Michel Foucault candidly suggests the extraordinary influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger on his thinking. Moreover, it is precisely reading them together that was the genuine stakes: “Nietzsche and Heidegger: that was a philosophical shock!” It is curious, despite this most overt of statements on a fundamental orientation to thinking, that so few commentators on Foucault have engaged explicitly with this genealogy. Given Foucault’s (again) stated reluctance to cite Heidegger at all and reference Nietzsche seldom, we need to conceive of a genealogical exploration implicitly rather than through overt reference. This paper aims at engaging Foucault’s 1978-79 Collège de France lecture series, The Birth of Biopolitics, in relation to a close reading of Heidegger’s 1943 lecture “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead.” In this lecture, Heidegger negotiates the biological in Nietzsche’s understanding of power, as well as a fundamental understanding of the essence of “subjectness” in secureness, in the sense of insuring oneself (Sicherheit, Versicherung). Our aim it to engage in a correlative reading of the Foucault text in terms of the pivotal understanding of the coincident emergence of biopower and what Foucault terms “apparatuses of security.”
