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focuses on Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault. I confront these thinkers because they fully
challenged the idea of the free and independent subject, but in the face of what some call a
nihilistic determinacy, which I argue is also deployed as the idea of the people as conforming
masses, they retreated back to the idea of a self-constituting, heroic subject. In the wake of these
repeated retreats, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault left theories of alienation, powerlessness,
and conformity, which characterize a modern sense of the masses.
This project is important because these thinkers and the culmination of certain trajectories
of their thought in Foucault’s post-structural philosophy, resulted in a straightforward account of
power and history that should be a critical political tool embraced by political theorists. The
presence of “the masses” in their work, however, both contradicts certain tenets of this
straightforward post-modern approach and skews it toward an apolitical and dead-end attention
to subjectivity and “being.”
This paper outlines how Foucault’s development of post-structural thought both effaced
subjectivity by showing to what extent knowledge is determined and limited by unconscious
forces, and suggested what forms of subjectivity might escape these limits. Since Descartes the
idea of “doubt” or the question of human access to and control of knowledge has been central to
philosophy. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault each expanded the realm and force of “doubt”
or what Heidegger called the “unthought” in their analysis of modern society. What is important
for this study is how often, and perhaps how fundamentally, this problem of knowledge is seen as
a problem of the masses, or of modern mass society, so that the individual self is seen as better
off in isolation, solitary reflection, or pure rebellion. This slippage between the idea of the
“unthought” and the masses, has important effects on Foucault’s political theory.
To put the tension in more concrete terms, it is evident that Foucault was engaged in
political theory and not simply an epistemological account of man’s inability to know reality.
Convention