The Fonds Foucault at the Bibliothèque Nationale contains an envelope entitled "Heidegger sur Nietzsche", containing notes on Foucault's reading of Heidegger in the early 1950s. These are the notes referred to in the "last interview", in which Foucault's discovery of Heidegger in 1950-52 was the first vector in his reading of Nietzsche (1953). After recalling the trajectory of the Foucault student, we analyzed the reading files, based on the inventory drawn up in 2016 by David Simonetta, ATER of the History of Medieval Philosophy chair, distinguishing three sets: "Works", "Definitions" and "Quotations". For the "Works" folder, we have drawn up a table of the system (175 sheets strong), including the title given by Foucault to Heidegger's work, its date, the date of the original (German) publication, the date of the French translation with indication of the translator, and the number of sheets filled in by Foucault. With four exceptions, all the texts in Foucault's "Œuvres" folder post-date the Second World War; all, without exception, belong to the "Second Heidegger" period. Only the text on Hölderlin is taken from the selection of works published in 1938 by Henri Corbin under the general title Qu'est-ce que la métaphysique? containing the translation of extracts from Sein und Zeit (1927). With the exception of Joseph Rovan's translation of the Briefe über Humanismus, this is the only edition published before 1950-1952. The Briefe itself, represented by 22 leaves, looks more like a translation-paraphrase made directly by Foucault himself on the German original than a simple note-taking. Corbin's volume is massively present in the "Citations" section. We then proposed three observations. The first focused on Paul Veyne's reading of Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1930), and more specifically on a supposedly Heideggerian aspect of Foucault's "last" text ("Life: Experience and Science"): the assertion that "life has led, with man, to a living being that never quite finds its place, a living being that is doomed to wander and to err endlessly". On this basis, we posed the problem of the relationship between history and truth, and evoked two Heideggerian parallels: "every epoch of universal history is an epoch of wandering" and "error is the essential domain of history". The theme of wandering and error places the question of truth at the heart of the Foucault-Heidegger relationship. One avenue of research: the mediation of Jean Hyppolite.
The second hour dealt with the Second Observation: Gilles Deleuze and Was heisst denken? At the same time as Foucault was taking his notes, Heidegger was back teaching at the University of Freiburg, with a lecture entitled: Qu'appelle-t-on penser? This is the question that Deleuze sees as central to the Foucault-Heidegger relationship. It is also the fundamental question of Penser au Moyen Âge. After remarks on the call of thought and the "silent voice of Being" according to Heidegger, we evoked some of Hans Blumenberg's theses in Light as a Metaphor of Truth on what distinguishes the world of the Bible, a world of listening and obedience, from the Greek world of seeing and light. Was heisst denken? the May 1952 lecture translated and published on March1, 1953 in the Mercure de France with a "Note en manière d'Introduction" by Jean Hyppolite, was one of the young Foucault's readings, and the importance of Hyppolite's note and his teaching on "Logic" in its dual Hegelian and Heideggerian dimensions for Foucault's work of appropriation in the early 1950s has been underlined. Returning to the opposition of light and voice, we evoked an example of the medieval encounter of the two universes: the theory of the Call of the Good(advocatio boni) of Dionysius the Areopagite and its revival in John Scotus Erigena through the fusion between the idea of the "Clamor of the Good" and that of the "Creative Voice of God", by reading a passage from the Periphyseon (II, 24, 580C-D).
