On the map: Comments on Stuart Elden's Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History

References to Heidegger appear only infrequently in Foucault’s work. Yet Heidegger is there both at the beginning of Foucault’s career—in the context of Foucault’s introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Dreams and Existence—and also towards the end—in a well-known late interview in which he tells us that, for him, “Heidegger was always ... the essential philosopher.” The question of the relation between Heidegger and Foucault is clearly an important one, and there are certainly a number of points at which their ideas may be thought to intersect, but, until recently, the question had not been the subject of any close examination. While a number of writers had made claims concerning the relationship, mostly arguing against the idea of any significant influence, little detailed work had been done. Stuart Elden’s book, Mapping the Present, goes a long way toward rectifying this omission. Although Elden’s work is not historical or biographical in focus—he does not attempt to track particular lines of influence as these may be documented in specific references or incidents—he nevertheless develops a reading of Heidegger and Foucault that allows us to see the work of these two thinkers as standing in very close proximity—so much so that the work of the one appears in certain significant respects to be almost a continuation, though with important differences, of the work of the other. Elden’s book comprises five chapters, of which three focus on Heidegger and two on Foucault. The discussion of Heidegger is organized along more or less chronological lines: chapter one deals with Being and Time; chapter two with the shifts in Heidegger’s thinking that occur in his engagement with Hölderlin and Nietzsche; chapter three with Heidegger’s essays on art and technology. The chapters on Foucault are arranged analytically rather than chronologically: chapter four takes up certain key ideas in Foucault’s work, notably the ideas of archaeology and genealogy, and of limit and power, recasting them in the light of the reading of Heidegger articulated in the preceding chapters; chapter five applies the analytical framework so developed to a number of Foucault’s own writings and to his account of modern disciplinary practice within the hospital, the prison and elsewhere.