Abstract

Foucault’s account of self-constitution in his late work offers strategic insights into how a subject can constitute themselves as a practical or transgressive subject but, fails to show how that subject can be constituted ethically. Foucault’s methodological commitment to reformulating transcendental conditions as historical conditions means that he cannot show how the subject can be constituted according to any binding normativity that could offer direction or orientation for that self-constitution. In his attempt to integrate Foucault and Heidegger, largely neglected in the secondary literature, Reiner Schürmann attributes this to Foucault’s failure to ‘step back’ to the transcendental level of Heidegger’s history of being, but does not develop this criticism any further. I argue that Schürmann’s interpretation and elaboration of Heidegger’s insights resonates with Foucault’s critical work in that it offers a non-foundational, ‘anarchic’ ontology that can provide a quasi-normative ground in the form of critical responsibilities, and that Schürmann’s account of the ultimate double bind of natality and mortality situates and contextualizes self-constitution in a way that corrects the overly voluntaristic emphasis on the freedom of self-transformation that has been widely criticized in Foucault’s work.