Foucault and Nietzsche: A Critical Encounter 9781474247399, 9781474247412, 9781474247382

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Foucault, Nietzsche, and the History of Truth
2. Nietzsche and Foucault’s “Will to Know”
3. “We Are Experiments”: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Passion of Knowledge
4. Nietzsche and Foucault: Modalities of Appropriating the World for an Art of Living
5. Foucault and Nietzsche: Sisyphus and Dionysus
6. Truth and Becoming Beyond the Liberal Regime
7. Twice Removed: Foucault’s Critique of Nietzsche’s Genealogical Method
8. The Religion of Power: Between Nietzsche and Foucault
9. Nietzsche and Foucault on Power: From Honneth’s Critique to a New Model of Recognition
Note on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Foucault and Nietzsche

Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Presents cutting-edge scholarship in the field of modern European thought. The wholly original arguments, perspectives and research findings in titles in this series make it an important and stimulating resource for students and academics from across the discipline. Breathing with Luce Irigaray, edited by Lenart Skof and Emily A. Holmes Deleuze and Art, Anne Sauvagnargues Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization, Jakub Zdebik Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative, Christopher Norris Desire in Ashes: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano Early Phenomenology, edited by Brian Harding and Michael R. Kelly Egalitarian Moments, Devin Zane Shaw Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries, Ivan Boldyrev Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anarchist Philosophy, William L. Remley Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France, Johannes Angermuller Gadamer’s Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics, John Arthos Heidegger, History and the Holocaust, Mahon O’Brien Heidegger and the Emergence of the Question of Being, Jesús Adrián Escudero Hegel and Resistance, edited by Rebecca Comay and Bart Zantvoort Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality, Susi Ferrarello Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy, Patrice Haynes Language and Being, Duane Williams Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy, Bryan A. Smyth Mortal Thought: Hölderlin and Philosophy, James Luchte Nietzsche and Political Thought, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity, Helmut Heit Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy: Badiou’s Dispute with Lyotard, Matthew R. McLennan The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling, Christopher Yates Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-War France, Tom Eyers Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani

Foucault and Nietzsche A Critical Encounter Edited by Alan Rosenberg and Joseph Westfall

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright to the collection © Alan Rosenberg and Joseph Westfall, 2018 Alan Rosenberg and Joseph Westfall have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rosenberg, Alan, 1939– editor. Title: Foucault and Nietzsche : a critical encounter / edited by Alan Rosenberg and Joseph Westfall. Description: New York : Bloomsbury, 2018. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017049074 | ISBN 9781474247399 (hardback) | ISBN9781474247405 (epub ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. Classification: LCC B2430.F724 F58537 2017 | DDC 194–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049074 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4739-9 PB: 978-1-3501-2670-1 ePDF: 978-1-4742-4738-2 ePub: 978-1-4742-4740-5 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Alan Rosenberg and Joseph Westfall 1 Foucault, Nietzsche, and the History of Truth Paul Patton 2 Nietzsche and Foucault’s “Will to Know” Alan D. Schrift 3 “We Are Experiments”: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Passion of Knowledge Keith Ansell-Pearson 4 Nietzsche and Foucault: Modalities of Appropriating the World for an Art of Living Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg 5 Foucault and Nietzsche: Sisyphus and Dionysus Michael Ure and Federico Testa 6 Truth and Becoming Beyond the Liberal Regime Jill E. Hargis 7 Twice Removed: Foucault’s Critique of Nietzsche’s Genealogical Method Brian Lightbody 8 The Religion of Power: Between Nietzsche and Foucault Jim Urpeth 9 Nietzsche and Foucault on Power: From Honneth’s Critique to a New Model of Recognition João Constâncio and Marta Faustino Note on Contributors Index

vi 1 35 59 79 99 127 151 167 183 203 227 231

Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank a number of people whose participation, cooperation, and collaboration have made this work possible. We would like to thank Sarin Marchetti, Alan Milchman, and Morris Rabinowitz for reading draft versions of the Introduction and making many helpful, insightful comments. Although any errors remain our responsibility, we owe much of what is good in the Introduction to Sarin, Morris, and Alan. We would also like to thank the University of Houston–Downtown for an Organized Research and Creative Activities grant, which funded a course release that made possible very valuable time free from other responsibilities at a crucial stage of this project. And we owe a debt of gratitude to everyone at Bloomsbury, but especially Frankie Mace, whose interest, attention, patience, and advice have helped us see the book through to completion. Finally, and most importantly, however, we would like to thank each of the contributors to this volume. Your work on Nietzsche and Foucault—both here and elsewhere—has deeply informed our understanding of both thinkers. You are among the very best, as scholars and as colleagues, and we are happy to have had the opportunity to work with and learn from each one of you.

Introduction Alan Rosenberg and Joseph Westfall

I am simply a Nietzschean, and try as far as possible, on a certain number of issues, to see with the help of Nietzsche’s texts—but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless Nietzschean!)—what can be done in this or that domain. I attempt nothing else, but that I try to do well.1 Despite the obvious interrelation between Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche—as well as the fact that many of the same individuals who have pursued a study of one of them in depth have, at some point or another, likewise studied the other—it remains the case that there are relatively few comparative scholarly assessments of Nietzsche and Foucault (relative, that is, to the overwhelming quantity of works written on either Foucault or Nietzsche). There are occasional journal articles—including the recent work of some of the authors gathered here—such as those by Keith Ansell-Pearson,2 Jill Hargis,3 Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg,4 Alan Schrift,5 and Michael Ure,6 And there are some excellent monographs, including Michael Mahon’s Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy,7 Brian Lightbody’s two-volume Philosophical Genealogy,8 Gary Shapiro’s Archaeologies of Vision,9 and David Owen’s Maturity and Modernity10 among them. There are a number of writers and scholars doing interesting and rigorous work on Nietzsche, on Foucault, and occasionally on Nietzsche and Foucault—but their work appears independently, their publications in different bindings or different journals from different presses, and this leaves the scholar interested in the Nietzsche–Foucault relationship without any single resource. The present volume constitutes (as far as we are aware) the first collection of essays on both Foucault and Nietzsche to appear in the English language. Nietzsche and Foucault are widely read in a number of academic disciplines and, as such and in light of the high caliber and diversity of interests of the esteemed contributors whose work appears in these chapters, we believe this volume can serve as a valuable resource to anyone—student or scholar, Nietzschean, Foucauldian,

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or readers new to either or both—interested in Foucault’s Nietzscheanism, Nietzsche’s intellectual influence on Foucault, or the crucial and fruitful differences between Foucault and Nietzsche that force us to read neither one nor the other, but both, together, always. To approach the space between Foucault and Nietzsche, where they both might stand, and to articulate one perspective—their own—in the interstice, is a formidable task, but one each of the authors whose work is collected here has managed in an exemplary fashion, not only in this volume but in their prior work as well. The work is a collaborative one, to be sure, but a collaboration that is no less surely characterized on occasion by disagreement—as both Nietzsche and Foucault would have it. If Nietzsche is right that knowledge and truth are only accessible, to whatever extent they are accessible, in the gathering of as many different perspectives on the matter at hand, as many different eyes, as is possible,11 then we might not be wrong in believing that the best possible book on these two thinkers in particular would be a fragmentary, divided, even combative collaboration of the sort we have here—an agonism, as it were. None of us will resolve the question of the precise nature of Foucault’s relationship to Nietzsche once and for all, here or elsewhere; that question likely cannot—perhaps even should not—be resolved once and for all. But the most fruitful philosophical engagements are seldom those that solve all the problems; they are, in fact, whether the work of one or multiple authors, those that help the reader to identify the best, most troubling, most enduring questions. In this volume, such questions abound. There is no escaping the conclusion that, of all the philosophical and literary influences on the work of Michel Foucault, one of the most striking, the most intriguing, the most lasting, as well as the most challenging is the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Readers of Nietzsche and Foucault, both within the Continental philosophical tradition and without, can catalog the many overlapping interests, the comparable styles and ways of thinking, the preoccupation with similar problems and questions. Such a catalog would be interesting and useful. But if the goal were simply to see the impact and influence of Nietzsche on Foucault, it is unnecessary: one only need to read Foucault. In his writings, Foucault not only mirrors and parallels Nietzschean themes and conclusions: he explicitly takes them up, telling us he is doing so, and encourages us in the belief that his project has an interesting and important relationship to Nietzsche’s. Most directly, in his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault adapts and adopts Nietzsche’s singular notion of “genealogy” to his own twentiethcentury purposes, producing not only one of the most provocative readings of

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Nietzsche to that point, but revising and revitalizing Nietzschean genealogy into a distinctly Foucauldian notion. There are numerous examples of philosophical influence in the history of European thought—from Plato and Aristotle to Aristotle and Aquinas, Descartes and Husserl to Husserl and Heidegger—but few provide us with such an intricate and enthusiastically embraced constellation of overlappings, disagreements, appropriations, and revisions as does the case of Nietzsche-influencing-Foucault/Foucault-reading-Nietzsche. We take this to be largely uncontroversial. Foucault’s debt to Nietzsche is, it would seem, obvious to just about everyone who reads either of these thinkers—and doubly so to anyone reading them both. This is not to say, however, that the precise nature of the relationship between the two is a matter on which their readers agree. There are some definitional and translational problems to be addressed: Nietzsche’s German vocabulary does not always match up neatly with Foucault’s French. Other sorts of questions must also be answered: Do Foucault’s efforts to elucidate genealogy ultimately diverge from their Nietzschean source? Does Nietzsche’s conception of history lend itself more completely to Foucault’s project, headed in the direction of poststructuralism—or to another project altogether, something more like phenomenology or Critical Theory? Or both? Or neither? Those of us who know these two titans of insight and ambiguity know well that, despite our best efforts, we will not reach agreement on all (if any) of these points. We must make the effort—and the authors in this volume have made the effort—not to answer the question of the relationship between Nietzsche and Foucault once and for all, but instead to offer one perspective on one or more facets of that relationship: a singular point of view. As Nietzsche notes, one must know how to “use the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge.”12 Or, following Foucault in the epigraph above, to use (and abuse?) these thinkers, Nietzsche and Foucault, employing them both with and against each other and themselves in a cooperative antagonism or antagonistic cooperation, paying tribute to each of them in a manner they might both appreciate—or, at the very least, recognize as something like their own. The importance of such a project is evident, we think, which makes the uniqueness of this volume in the scholarly literature on these two philosophers even more significant. No comparable collection of comparative essays has yet been published. Foucault insists that he is “simply” a Nietzschean—but there is nothing simple about Foucault’s Nietzscheanism, or even about Foucault’s Nietzsche. This complicates things for the scholar seeking to understand both of them in their relationship to each other. And things are further complicated by the fact that, for Foucault (as, it seems safe to say, for Nietzsche himself), there is not

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necessarily one reading of Nietzsche or one version of Nietzscheanism with which to contend. As Foucault notes, “There is not just one Nietzscheanism. One cannot say there is a true Nietzscheanism and that this one is truer than the other.”13 Foucault’s ultimate stance on the role and significance of Nietzsche for philosophy—and thinking in general—seems itself to be a profoundly Nietzschean, perspectival one. Continuing in this vein, Foucault compares his work to that of another French philosopher for whom Nietzsche plays an essential role, Gilles Deleuze: But those who found Nietzsche a tool more than 25 years ago, to change their position in regard to the body of philosophical thought ruled by one of phenomenology and Marxism, have nothing to do with those who use Nietzsche today. Gilles Deleuze wrote a powerful book about Nietzsche and Nietzsche is present in his work in general, but without noisy reference and without the desire to flaunt Nietzsche’s banner for a rhetorical or political effect. It is impressive that someone like Deleuze simply turned to Nietzsche and took him seriously. I also wanted to do that: what serious use can one make of Nietzsche? I gave a lecture about Nietzsche and have written a little about him. The only honor I accord him, weakly, was naming the first part of The History of Sexuality “The Will to Knowledge.”14

More important to Foucault than what particular use Deleuze or he himself has made of Nietzsche is the fact that, instead of proclaiming themselves Nietzscheans and sharing the “Good News,” both simply use Nietzsche—or try to find a use for Nietzsche. This is a fascinating distinction, and one altogether lost on many so-called Nietzscheans: Nietzsche’s significance in philosophy, for Foucault, is not that of yet another master seeking disciples. Quite the contrary, in fact, if there is anything Nietzschean to the figure of Zarathustra at the end of Book I of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil only. And why would you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me, but what if your reverence falls down some day? Beware that you are not killed by a statue! You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra! You are my believers, but what matter all believers! You had not yet sought yourselves, then you found me. All believers do this; that’s why all faith amounts to so little. Now I  bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.15

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Truly to find Zarathustra—to learn from him, to benefit from his teachings, to put him to use—one must relinquish whatever pleasure one takes in being a “Zarathustran”; the most Zarathustran thing Zarathustra has ever done is seek out and find himself. Likewise, Zarathustra counsels—and Nietzsche through him—that readers moved by what they have read in Zarathustra (or elsewhere) seek not Zarathustra, but themselves. As Nietzsche himself notes in The Gay Science, “What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?”16 Foucault seems to touch upon this peculiar understanding of the relationship between a student and his teacher when, in the passage quoted above, he suggests that, like Deleuze, he has sought not to understand or to proclaim Nietzsche but to make serious use of Nietzsche. One finds Nietzsche in Foucault, but Foucault is at his most Nietzschean (Foucault thinks), not where Nietzsche’s name rises to the surface of Foucault’s writings, but instead where—in those writings—Foucault uses Nietzsche to find himself. And Foucault does seem to find himself—to find the philosopher or the author we call “Foucault,” to construct Foucauldianism—in or by way of his reading, interpretation, and appropriation of Nietzsche. As Nietzsche notes in Beyond Good and Evil, “Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”17 Philosophy is, for Nietzsche, always also a personal endeavor: “In the philosopher . . . there is nothing whatever that is impersonal.”18 And the significance of the personal (and personality) to philosophy is reflected in Foucault’s notion of philosophy as “essayistic”: The “essay”—which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication—is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an “ascesis,” askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.19

Whatever the philosopher does, the philosopher is both wholly present and transformed in the doing. In a very important sense, it is only in their philosophies that we will find our Nietzsche and our Foucault. It seems that the starting point for any comparative study of these two thinkers ought to be to begin with their own starting point—that is, the point from which we could say that both thinkers start out, philosophically, despite their frequently divergent paths therefrom. Often heralded as one of Nietzsche’s great conclusions, his repeated assertion that “God is dead” is better understood as the foundation for all the rest of Nietzsche’s thinking: it is only after the death of God

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that even something like The Birth of Tragedy might make sense. For this reason, Nietzsche only ever refers to the death of God in the past tense, as a fait accompli, an irreversible matter of fact. It is in this vein that he has Zarathustra remark, after having spoken on the mountainside with the old man, “Could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!”20 Likewise, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche notes that, “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.”21 Whether in woods or in caves, those who wish to avoid the fact of the death of God can do so for centuries, perhaps even for millennia. But their belief in a living God, that is, a (Christian) metaphysics that lends meaning to life by way of necessary dependence upon an otherworld, is not simply a matter of faith or differing opinions: it is a refusal, a willful blindness. The reason some choose to blind themselves to the death of God is, Nietzsche indicates, a result of the fact that it is none other than God’s former believers who are ultimately responsible for God’s death. As Nietzsche’s madman cries in the streets of the parable, “Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him— you and I. All of us are his murderers.”22 Unable to understand and unable to bear the consequences of our deed, we fail to acknowledge it: “This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”23 But what are these consequences? In the parable of the madman, Nietzsche notes that, “Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”24 One possibility is that, after the death of God, human beings will overcome themselves to become something greater and more godlike than they were before. Another possibility, however, is that we will not engage in this selfovercoming: we will cower, and stagnate, and grow ever weaker and smaller. This possibility is the possibility of what Zarathustra calls “the last man,” for whom everything is the same and everything is ultimately valueless and meaningless, and nothing overwhelms or inspires awe. In fact, it is this tendency within us toward the small and shameful that, late in Zarathustra, Nietzsche suggests might have undermined the cultural power—the force and life—of God in the first place. In the figure of the Ugliest Human Being, Nietzsche depicts the ultimate consequence of allowing ourselves to take the all-too-easy path toward the last man, toward becoming something “shaped like a human but scarcely like

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a human, something unspeakable.” Overwhelmed with pity for such a person, Zarathustra collapses—but then says:  “I recognize you alright . . . You are the murderer of God! Let me go. / You could not bear the one who saw you—who saw you always and through and through, you ugliest human being! You took revenge on this witness!”25 The death of God shows us that the way forward (if there is a way forward) for humanity is a forked path: either something more or something less than we were. In neither case can what we were survive, and the death of God is thus the death of man, also. It is with this framework in mind that Foucault situates Nietzsche in the history of ideas: The Nietzschian enterprise can be understood as at last bringing that proliferation of the questioning of man to an end. For is not the death of God in effect manifested in a doubly murderous gesture which, by putting an end to the absolute, is at the same time the cause of the death of man himself? For man, in his finitude, is not distinguishable from the infinite of which he is both the negation and the harbinger; it is in the death of man that the death of God is realized.26

Man is responsible for the death of God, and at the same time, the death of God implies the end of man—in killing God, man brings about the end of the way the human subject has historically been constituted as “man.” Importantly, for Foucault, the end of man is not easily repaired, and man is not easily replaced, by the invention of the Übermensch. Not even Nietzsche seems to conceive of the Übermensch as a simple stopgap of this sort. Rather, when God dies, what is left is nothing—a fundamental absence. Thus, the Übermensch is not what results from the death of God: rather, the end of man is what results from the death of God. The absence is a doubleabsence, since where we believed God once was there is nothing, and where we believed we stood, believing in God, there is also nothing. As Foucault contextualizes, the notion of the death of God does not have the same meaning in Hegel, Feuerbach and Nietzsche. For Hegel, Reason takes the place of God, and it is the human spirit that develops little by little; for Feuerbach, God is the illusion that alienates Man, but once rid of this illusion, it is Man who comes to realize his liberty; finally, for Nietzsche, the death of God signifies the end of metaphysics, but God is not replaced by man, and the space remains empty.27

This empty space could result in an absolutely destructive nihilism, as Nietzsche feared and warned, and neither Nietzsche nor Foucault has been free from accusations of nihilism. But Foucault makes his understanding of the

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interrelationship of these important Nietzschean concepts—the death of God, the end of man, the last man, the Übermensch—clear, and clarifies precisely the extent to which he begins with Nietzsche, when he notes, “We are indeed the last man in the Nietzschean sense of the term, and the superman will be whoever can overcome the absence of God and the absence of man in the same gesture of overtaking.”28 We have then, between Foucault and Nietzsche, a shared diagnosis of the cultural and psychological situations of humanity in the West; a shared recognition of self-overcoming (or -overtaking) as the essential next step; and a shared acknowledgment of the tenuousness of any possible future for humanity after the death of God. Understood in a Nietzschean way, the philosopher has a significant role to play in the diagnosis, the overcoming, and the construction of a future for both Nietzsche and Foucault. As Foucault notes, for Nietzsche, the philosopher was someone who diagnosed the state of thought. We can envisage, moreover, two kinds of philosopher: the kind who opens up new avenues of thought, such as Heidegger, and the kind who in a sense plays the role of an archaeologist, studying the space in which thought unfolds, as well as the conditions of that thought, its mode of constitution.29

It is to this second, unambiguously Foucauldian possibility that we must turn ourselves now. At the heart of the relationship between Foucault and Nietzsche is the notion of genealogy, and much of the comparative work on these two figures (including Foucault’s own) focuses in on this idea. Foucault begins with what he calls “archaeology,” only coming to describe his own project as genealogical later. And Nietzsche never describes his own philosophical method as a “genealogy,”30 aside from the ambiguous reference in the title of his On the Genealogy of Morality, criticizing in fact those he dubs “genealogists” in that book and elsewhere. But taking the term in a less textually specific sense, more generally and as it is frequently used by later philosophers, there is certainly something genealogical about Nietzsche’s mature writings—culminating in the Genealogy’s multiply genealogical study of the history of moralities in the European West and its consequences for the very idea of ethical valuation and transvaluation. In any case, it seems fair to say that, despite Nietzsche’s rejection of “genealogy” as applying to his own work, Foucault is not entirely wrong to suggest that the philosophical notion of genealogy which Foucault and others employ has a Nietzschean origin. Foucault’s practice of genealogy has its origins not only in his reading of Nietzsche, but also in his own prior practice of archaeology. The differences

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are subtle, in some cases even inconsequential, but a rough distinction might note that, for Foucault, archaeology involves the discovery and elucidation of discontinuities and differences in the development of ideas and practices, without necessarily relating them causally, interpreting, or evaluating them31; genealogy, on the other hand, and following Nietzsche, is perfectly willing to interpret and evaluate causes. From archaeology, we can really only learn how the fact of historical differences in ideas and practices undermines any one idea’s or practice’s claim to naturalness or necessity. From genealogy, however, we can derive a socio-politico-cultural project. Nietzsche is understood (by Foucault and others) to initiate the genealogical method in European thought, but he does not seem to have practiced anything resembling Foucauldian archaeology at all. Foucault understands his own genealogical project as having three distinct (albeit related) movements or domains, schematically identified as truth, power, and ethics. As he notes: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.32

Elsewhere, Foucault characterizes the same threefold division in different terms: as an explanation of the ways in which he tries, over the course of his writings, to “create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.”33 In that vein, Foucault notes that there have been “three modes of objectification” with which he has dealt. The first, “the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences”; second, “the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call ‘dividing practices.’ The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others”; and third, “the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject.”34 This division corresponds more or less directly to the more schematic one, above, with the domain of truth or knowledge corresponding to the ways in which human beings objectify themselves in scientific discourses, the domain of power corresponding to the ways in which human beings objectify themselves through division within the self or between self and other, and the domain of ethics corresponding to the ways in which human beings objectify themselves by turning themselves into subjects. In addition, these correspond quite nicely with three central elements of

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Nietzsche’s thought: the will to truth, the will to power, and self-overcoming or the imperative (cribbed from Pindar) to “become who you are.”35 In Foucault, the first of these (the domain or axis of truth) is characteristic primarily of much of Foucault’s earlier work, the second (the domain or axis of power) of the middle works, and the third (the domain or axis of ethics), of his later and last works. As Foucault himself explains, “All three were present, albeit in a somewhat confused fashion, in Madness and Civilization. The truth axis was studied in The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things. The power axis was studied in Discipline and Punish, and the ethical axis in The History of Sexuality.”36 Naturally, as applied to the whole Foucauldian corpus, these divisions are neither strictly chronological nor mutually exclusive. And it is worth noting that Foucault only sets this division forth during the last phase of his authorship, and thus that the neat, tripartite schema might not have been apparent from the very beginning—that is, Foucault may have written early works without any clear sense for what developments were to come. Still, the divisions make sense of Foucault’s philosophical project and of the Foucauldian corpus, and thus this description of his work seems a good basis upon which to consider Foucault’s relationship to other thinkers, including Nietzsche. As the authors of the essays in this volume make transparently clear, Nietzsche plays some role in Foucault’s work from the very start—and to the very end. Thus, we will briefly consider here how and where we might find Nietzsche in each of these three Foucauldian domains.

Truth and knowledge When Foucault writes of these three domains, he is always writing of the means by which he has investigated the methods human beings have used to come to think—and construct—themselves as selves. This is most obvious in the case of the domain of ethics, which is, as Foucault describes and defines it, the way in which one turns oneself into a subject. But this is no less true of the other two domains, and there are strong Nietzschean resonances—if not explicit debts to Nietzsche—in each of the three. Although these are interrelated and sometimes simultaneous movements, it remains the case that they appear in Foucault (both as instantiated over the course of his authorship as well as in the reflective formulation he gives them in his own accounts of his work) chronologically developmentally; that is, Foucault begins his work on the self in the domain of truth, moving through the domain of power into the domain of ethics, as we have already seen.

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A genealogy engaged with the domain of truth seeks fundamentally to dig up the various and changing ways in which human beings (and human societies, human cultures) have constructed a notion of subjectivity or selfhood in relation to the pursuit of knowledge. For Nietzsche, most of the history of European culture—almost everything after the death of Greek tragedy in Socrates, and certainly everything “modern”—is characterized by the very particular conception of the self as a knower, whether in the form of the soul in Plato or in Christianity, the “thinking thing” in Descartes, or the “transcendental unity of apperception” in Kant. Such conceptions of the self reject embodiment as an essential characteristic of human identity, and identify living well with knowing more. Nietzsche calls this impulse in human beings the “will to truth,” and he more often than not associates it with the Socratic impulse in Western culture—with philosophy as it is customarily practiced—but it seems a more apt description of the Hegelianism, the scientism, and the positivism of Nietzsche’s own day. In part to replace it, Nietzsche suggests the contrary: “Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum ‘know thyself,’ but as if there hovered before them the commandment:  will a self and thou shalt become a self.”37 In any case, Nietzsche’s description of his contemporaries, as seeking to know the truth as a means of being their highest selves, and his diagnosis—“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers”38—resonate with the critiques of Western culture we find in other post- or anti-Hegelian philosophers: in Schopenhauer, in Kierkegaard, in Marx, in Freud. And, in some of his earliest efforts to account for this phenomenon in history, Foucault also picks up this critique. Both Nietzsche and Foucault are reformulating how the Greeks have been understood regarding the notion of self.39 For neither is it enough to adhere strictly to the dictum, “know yourself ” (customarily ascribed both to Socrates and the Delphic Oracle): whereas Nietzsche augments “know yourself ” with the suggestion that we will a self,40 Foucault notes that, even for the Greeks, it was never enough merely to know oneself—one needed to engage in care of self, as well. Foucault sees the will to truth as tied intimately to the construction of subjectivity characteristic of the scientific, industrial, individualistic, and increasingly democratic nineteenth century: by way of objectifying truth in the acquisition and possession of knowledge, an individual can come to understand him- or herself as a knower, as a self who knows, and in this way participate in the construction of him- or herself as a self. The so-called human sciences—history, psychology, sociology, economics, and most of all, anthropology—have such self-construction as their established goal. And Western, social-scientific culture

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has a great deal invested in maintaining at least the illusion of the possibility of success in this endeavor. Foucault writes: In various forms, this theme has played a constant role since the nineteenth century: to preserve, against all decentrings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin figures of anthropology and humanism. Against the decentring operated by Marx—by the historical analysis of the relations of production, economic determinations, and the class struggle—it gave place, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to the search for a total history, in which all the differences of a society might be reduced to a single form, to the organization of a world-view, to the establishment of a system of values, to a coherent type of civilization. To the decentring operated by the Nietzschean genealogy, it opposed the search for an original foundation that would make rationality the telos of mankind, and link the whole history of thought to the preservation of this rationality, to the maintenance of this teleology, and to the ever necessary return to this foundation.41

For Foucault, then, it is not just that the nineteenth century has at its cultural core a commitment to truth as object, and knowledge as subjectivizing objectification of that truth42; in addition, Foucault perceives Nietzsche as (largely unsuccessfully) opposed to that commitment, and opposed methodologically rather than theoretically—that is, by way of genealogy. In a somewhat more poetic vein, Foucault rearticulates the goal of that nineteenth-century cultural commitment to the will to truth; he notes that, “The great dream of an end to History is the utopia of causal systems of thought, just as the dream of the world’s beginnings was the utopia of the classifying systems of thought.”43 To understand oneself as a self in terms of one’s capacity for knowledge of the truth is, ultimately, to situate oneself essentially as one link in a causal chain extending from the beginning to the end of time—to weave oneself as knower into the dynamic fabric of the knowable-becoming-known. According to Foucault, the scientific and industrial-technological arrangement of society, pursuing truth and producing knowers, stabilizes and endures—until it meets an essential challenge (and reinvigoration?) in Nietzsche: This arrangement maintained its firm grip on thought for a long while; and Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, made it glow into brightness again for the last time by setting fire to it. He took the end of time and transformed it into the death of God and the odyssey of the last man; he took up anthropological finitude once again, but in order to use it as a basis for the prodigious leap of the superman; he took up once again the great continuous chain of History, but in order to bend it round into the infinity of the eternal return. It is in vain that the death of God, the imminence of the superman, and

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the promise and terror of the great year take up once more, as it were term by term, the elements that are arranged in nineteenth-century thought and form its archaeological framework. The fact remains that they sent all these stable forms up in flames, that they used their charred remains to draw strange and perhaps impossible faces; and by a light that may be either—we do not yet know which—the reviving flame of the last great fire or an indication of the dawn, we see the emergence of what may perhaps be the space of contemporary thought. It was Nietzsche, in any case, who burned for us, even before we were born, the intermingled promises of the dialectic and anthropology.44

While Foucault artfully describes Nietzsche as ideological arsonist, it remains importantly the case that he stops short of endorsing a Nietzschean view of truth and subjectivity here. Whereas Nietzsche’s genealogy (as Foucault admits) works to undermine the will to truth, Foucault’s genealogy—despite its Nietzschean inspiration—offers something more like a mere account of the shift, from Cartesian or Kantian modernity into Nietzschean “postmodernity,” from the Hegelian to the Nietzschean nineteenth centuries. Foucault will, in the end, side with Nietzsche in his opposition to the will to truth as a ground for selfhood— but to do so, for Foucault, is to join the domain of truth with the domain of ethics, by way of the domain of power.

Power Among the most famous and influential notions Nietzsche ever discussed, is the will to power—an idea that has its origins in some important ways in the writings of Hegel and Schopenhauer, but which Nietzsche puts to singular and significant purpose. Power is also central to Foucault’s project, and it is in questions about power that we often find work comparing the two thinkers being done. Much of the Nietzschean discourse of power, as well as much of the post–World War II scholarship on Nietzsche, is dedicated to clarifying that Nietzsche almost never uses the term “power” (Macht) to indicate what we might call “political power” or “dominion over others.” Instead, power in the Nietzschean sense has to do with improvement, growth, expansion, and selfovercoming—almost exclusively in psychological and existential rather than political or metaphysical terms—and the will to power, then, is the drive to seek out a higher self to become, to become more than one already is, or, to use Zarathustra’s terms, to bring together one’s self-hatred and self-love in pursuit of the Übermensch.45

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Power is likewise easily misunderstood, and similarly frequently explained, in the work of Foucault. As is widely noted, for Foucault, questions of power are always questions of power relations—power, dynamically rather than statically, understood—and thus, for Foucault, power is always already relational in nature. While Foucault is far more open than Nietzsche is to the socio-political senses of “power” (pouvoir), and both frequently discusses such matters himself as well as serving as a resource for such discussions, he nevertheless wishes for his readers to be clear that this is by no means the only sense in which he means the term. There are essential differences between the peculiar instantiation of power as violence or domination, and power understood more generally: In itself the exercise of power is not violence; nor is it a consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.46

While “the bringing into play of power relations does not exclude the use of violence,” it remains distinct therefrom.47 Violation, domination, the manufacturing of consent: as far as Foucault is concerned, these are all specific instances of the general phenomenon of power, but power is always something more than these. That said, power, for Foucault, is almost certainly a more relational concept than it is for Nietzsche—which is simply to say that, for Foucault, the notion of power always implies a relationship between individuals, or between individuals and institutions. There is no such thing as “power in the abstract.” Thus, power is for Foucault always implicative of a real relation. He explains: The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures.48

Thus, significantly, Foucault follows Nietzsche in noting that there is no such thing as power in itself; power is only ever in the relationships between actions— and, specifically, in the modification of some actions by other actions. Thus, Foucault notes, it follows that, “When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterizes these actions by the government of men by other men—in the broadest sense

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of the term—one includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free.”49 Contrary to the popular conception of power and the powerful as opposed to and oppressive of freedom, Foucault teaches us here that power—at least, his notion of power— presupposes freedom. Even in the case of those least able to give unhindered expression to their will, the so-called powerless, Foucault asserts that they are free—and are powerless (or oppressed by “the powerful”) only to the extent that they are free. Thus, what we might take to be the traditional model in the human or social sciences, of power as that which deprives the powerless of their freedom, is fundamentally false. All individuals subject to power—whether they might be what are commonly known as the powerful or the powerless— can only be subject to power insofar as they are free. Foucault writes, then, not so much of power as of power relations, of power understood as the relations of power. Like all relations, power is not static, established in one way, once and for all. Rather, power-as-relation is a dynamic sense of power, the ultimate outcomes for individuals as well as states and institutions both unknowable and unpredictable. On this model, it makes little sense to conceive of freedom as the static property of political liberty, as again it is conceived in the social-scientific culture of the West; freedom, too, must be perceived as a dynamic quality grounded not in some essential identity or authenticity but in the relations of power themselves. Hence, Foucault notes, “Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an ‘agonism’—of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.”50 We can begin to see here both how Foucault might understand the domain of power as one means by way of which the subject is constituted—via the dynamic power relation of freedom—as well as how Foucault’s inherently relational conception of power ultimately dovetails with Nietzsche’s more individualistic conception, by way of the construction of the self in a field of competition, contests, or struggle: will to power as agon. Reconceiving of the will to power as freedom in the Foucauldian sense of an “agonism,” we can begin to see a relational aspect to Nietzsche’s understanding of power—and a clearer connection to Foucault’s understanding of power as a means by way of which selves are constructed—in Zarathustra’s agonistic understanding of friendship. “At least be my enemy!”—Thus speaks true respect that does not dare to ask for friendship.

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Alan Rosenberg and Joseph Westfall If one wants a friend, then one must also want to wage war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be able to be an enemy. One should honor the enemy even in one’s friend. Can you step up to your friend without stepping over him? In one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him in heart when you resist him.51

On the Nietzschean/Zarathustran understanding of power (and the will to power), it is precisely by way of relations between oneself and those closest to one (one’s friends and enemies) that one’s identity is formed and best expressed. Whereas Foucault seems simply to observe that power relations result in a perpetual agonism, Nietzsche advocates for such an agonism outright. This remains true when, for Nietzsche (as later for Freud), the agonism52 is completely internalized within a single subject: We adopt the same attitude towards the “enemy within”: there too we have spiritualized enmity, there too we have grasped its value. One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions; one remains young only on condition the soul does not relax, does not long for peace . . . Nothing has grown more alien to us than that desideratum of former times “peace of soul,” the Christian desideratum; nothing arouses less envy in us than the moral cow and the fat contentment of the good conscience . . . One has renounced grand life when one renounces war.53

While Foucault asks us to recognize that power relations are dynamic, and thus that the agonistic relationships that form between individuals are perpetual, unavoidable, and, ultimately, productive of subjectivity, Nietzsche commands us to go to war—with morality, Christianity, with one another, with ourselves. Despite the significant difference in tone, however, both thinkers recognize—Foucault following Nietzsche—that power’s role in the project of self-production (or self-fashioning) is in the maintenance of struggle, competition, transgression, contradiction. Conceiving of power (or the will to power) as the opening up of a space—between persons or within oneself— wherein an unending struggle between competing forces can occur is, ultimately, at the heart of becoming a self. And while Foucault maintains a more social or interpersonal conception of power than Nietzsche does, that is not to say that Foucault makes no place for the internal agon Nietzsche describes. For Foucault, however, the struggle within oneself—the struggle that we might say, for Nietzsche, is one’s self—lies not in the domain of power, but in the domain of ethics.

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Ethics For Foucault, the ethical domain is composed of four essentially interrelated moments or elements, aspects of the project of ethics which, for Foucault as for Nietzsche, is existential and processual rather than teleological or rule-based. Ethics in Foucault’s sense is internally, rather than externally, directed. He writes that ethics is “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, rapport à soi” and it is insofar as it is understood as such a self-relationship that ethics “determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions.”54 While such language might seem to open Foucault up to the charge that he has abandoned others in his thoughts on ethics, nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the fact that there is much in Foucault’s ethical thinking that is organized around “care of self,” we must understand that notion in its full Foucauldian context. Ethics, for Foucault, is nothing like traditional formulations of “ethics,” the academic subfield of philosophy. Foucauldian ethics is always originally a concern with and practice of self-fashioning rather than the discovery or construction of principles by which to judge actions or persons good or evil. But self-fashioning, all on its own—what Foucault elsewhere calls the “techne of the self ”55—is still not enough, still leaves our understanding of Foucault’s complex point of view on what he calls ethics incomplete. As he notes, What I want to show is that the general Greek problem was not techne of the self, it was the techne of life, the techne tou biou, how to live. It’s quite clear from Socrates to Seneca or Pliny, . . . the problem was which techne do I have to use in order to live as well as I ought to live. And I think that one of the main evolutions in ancient culture has been that this techne tou biou became more and more a techne of the self. A Greek citizen of the fifth or fourth century would have felt that his techne for life was to take care of the city, of his companions. But for Seneca, for instance, the problem is to take care of himself . . . Greek ethics is centered on a problem of personal choice, of aesthetics of existence. The idea of the bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is something which fascinates me. The idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure. All that is very interesting.56

Thus, with Foucault, we can see something of a telescoping series of concerns: at the outermost and most general level, we have the techne of life, what Foucault sometimes calls, emphasizing its aesthetic dimension, “the art of living” or “the

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art of existence”; this encompasses but is not equivalent with or even replaced by the far more self-oriented practice of self-fashioning, the techne of self. Care of self, which is (alongside self-knowledge) one expression of the techne of self, is—both historically and in Foucault—largely unconcerned with ethical matters. But situating care of self and self-fashioning within a broader art of existence, as Foucault does, allows us to see that the question of taking “care of the city, of [one’s] companions,” is not foreign to Foucault’s thinking. Foucault’s ethics merely incorporates such concerns at a different level. Thus, each of the four elements that compose Foucauldian ethics—“ethical substance,” “the mode of subjection,” “ethical work,” and “the telos”—is best understood in terms of this other-oriented and other-aware, self-constituting self-relation. The first element of Foucault’s ethics—what he calls “the determination of ethical substance”—is “the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct.”57 Here, the individual is focused not on the fulfillment of any particular moral principle or ethical obligation to another, but rather, on understanding what it is within one’s self that, properly cultivated, would enable one to become the sort of person capable of being ethical. It is not so much a question of becoming that ethical being—that is the third element—but the identification of the ethical (or preethical, proto-ethical) elements of the self within oneself. The second element—“the mode of subjection (mode d’assujettissement)”—is, Foucault writes, “the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice.”58 The effort here is to identify the particular way in which one relates oneself to the universal moral codes, which is to say, to clarify one’s motivation and intent in striving to be good. Foucault gives the example of marital fidelity, and of the individual who understands him- or herself to be morally obligated to remain faithful to his or her spouse: One can, for example, practice conjugal fidelity and comply with the precept that imposes it, because one acknowledges oneself to be a member of the group that accepts it, declares adherence to it out loud, and silently preserves it as a custom. But one can practice it, too, because one regards oneself as an heir to a spiritual tradition that one has the responsibility of maintaining or reviving; one can also practice fidelity in response to an appeal, by offering oneself as an example, or by seeking to give one’s personal life a form that answers to criteria of brilliance, beauty, nobility, or perfection.59

In an exceptionally innovative (and ultimately, uniquely Foucauldian) way, Foucault here demonstrates both the fact that there are manifold grounds for

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adhering to moral principles as moral principles, such that there are multiple reasons one might believe oneself to be good in behaving, or constraining one’s behavior, in a particular way. This element of Foucault’s ethics is not a matter of deciding whether to remain faithful (or not); it is a matter of understanding what it is that makes remaining faithful (or not) an obligatory ethical concern— for oneself, in particular. The third element, the “elaboration of ethical work (travail éthique) that one performs on oneself,” is the continuation of the second element understood as having roots in the first element, the ethical substance. It is the “attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one’s behavior.”60 These are, famously, what Foucault is referring to when he discusses ascetic practices, or “technologies” of the self.61 This effort to become the sort of being capable of genuinely ethical behavior is in some ways at the heart of ancient Greek sexual ethics, which is the central concern of The Use of Pleasure (the second volume in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality), where these ideas are worked out most fully. And one can certainly see the Greek roots of Foucault’s ascetics in the deep resonances, even when conceived in a very general way, between Foucauldian ethics and ancient Greek concerns about self-mastery, self-possession, and self-control. Finally, the fourth element of Foucault’s ethics has to do with the goal of ethical behavior as enacted in the life of a particular individual:  as he notes, “an action is not only moral in itself, in its singularity; it is also moral in its circumstantial integration and by virtue of the place it occupies in a pattern of conduct.”62 Which is to say that, for Foucault, ethical actions have a kind of twofold ethicity: they are, on the one hand, ethical insofar as they are instances of an individual self ’s relationship to the particular moral principles by which that individual strives to live, but they are also, on the other hand, ethical insofar as they contribute to the goodness of the individual in general. If it is good not to lie, any particular instance of truth-telling is good not only because it instantiates a moral principle in action, but also because, by telling the truth in this particular instance, the truth-teller continues the work of becoming a good person. In general, then, for Foucault, ethics is not (simply) a matter of ascertaining the quality of one’s actions in light of or according to a set of moral principles or standards. Rather, ethics has to do with the ways in which a human being becomes a subject, fashions or creates him- or herself as a subject, the way in which a human being relates to him- or herself as a self. In at least its broad outlines, this is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power, actualized through the ongoing process of continual self-overcoming. Foucault does not appropriate a Nietzschean language for his conception of ethics, however,

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favoring his own relational terms to Nietzsche’s processual (and sometimes teleological) ones. A genealogy engaged with the domain of ethics, then, seeks to understand the various and changing methods and means human beings have used to come into relationship with themselves and to understand themselves as selves in that relation. “I’m writing a genealogy of ethics,” Foucault says, “The genealogy of the subject of ethical actions, or the genealogy of desire as an ethical problem.”63 Again, since ethics, for Foucault, has to do with the construction or formulation of the self, a genealogy of “the subject of ethical actions” is not an inquiry into moral agency so much as the attempt to uncover the ways in which certain constructions of the self inform a self ’s capacity to formulate itself as a self; a “genealogy of desire as an ethical problem” is not a moral analysis of temperance or moderation, but an interrogation of the history of ways of situating desire alongside the concept of the self, whether as necessary for or antithetical to a “proper” conception of selfhood (e.g., desire as problematic for the proper construction of the self for the Greeks, full of both sinful and salvific potential for the medieval Christian, more or less irrelevant to the scientific modern conception of selfhood, etc.). Which is to say, among other things, that a genealogy of ethics is not a genealogy of morality, exactly. Nietzsche’s project in On the Genealogy of Morality— insofar as it is a genealogical project—is, like Foucault’s ethics, the effort to undermine absolutist moralities by demonstrating that their claims to truth are always historically situated and in fact have relatively recent origins. Nietzsche explicitly sets out to discover “the value of our values,”64 which is, despite its original and antiphilosophical character, more or less in line with the philosophical tradition of ethics as it is generally understood. That said, what Nietzsche seems to us ultimately to recommend in the Genealogy—neither slave morality nor master morality, but the creation of a new tablet of values—is very much in line with the general Foucauldian theme of ethics as (self-)creation. For Nietzsche, to create “new tablets of values”65 is in fact to become, or to have become, some new kind of subject, superior to and transcendent of one’s prior self. Thus, while Nietzsche may not have envisioned his Genealogy as engaged in an excavation of modes of self-fashioning, he would nevertheless agree with Foucault that no so-called absolute is without a history, and that this is equally applicable in the theoretical, social, and psychological realms. Foucault makes the nature of his debt to Nietzsche’s pregenealogical ethics plain in an interview wherein he is asked directly about the relationship between his thoughts on self-creation and Nietzsche’s conception of the self as a work of

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art in The Gay Science. As Nietzsche writes, in what seems a sort of poetic foreshadowing of Foucault’s more schematically expressed vision, To “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste! It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own.66

If only after having read Foucault, one can begin to see here, already in Nietzsche, echoes of the Greeks, and prefigurings of Foucault’s own understanding of ethics as composed of the four elements noted above—the determination of ethical substance (“those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature”), the mode of subjection (“and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason”), ethical work (“through long practice and daily work at it”), and the telos (“it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable,” “it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small”). Which is not to suggest that Foucault had this passage, or even Nietzsche at all, in mind:  merely to note that both men seem to have found something of what each takes to be true of selfhood in the Greeks. Pushing this point even further, we see, in a telling exchange, how Foucault distinguishes his view from that of Sartrean existentialism: M.F. . . . it is interesting to see that Sartre refers the work of creation to a certain relation to oneself—the author to himself—which has the form of authenticity or inauthenticity. I would like to say exactly the contrary: we should not have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity.

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Q. That sounds like Nietzsche’s observation in The Gay Science that one should create one’s life by giving style to it through long practice and daily work [no. 290]. M.F. Yes. My view is much closer to Nietzsche’s than to Sartre’s.67

Foucault here suggests—or accepts the interviewer’s suggestion—that his notion of ethics, of self coming into relationship with itself, has a significantly aesthetic dimension: that is, that the way in which one enters into relationship with oneself is at least in part a question of creativity and style. His objection to Sartre is that the notion of authenticity so central to existentialism grounds all creative activity in a kind of moral responsibility (the infamous Sartrean “anguish”), to which that self-fashioning creativity is thereafter necessarily bound. Nietzsche offers no such binding ground in his account of self-creation, and on this crucial point, Foucault is decidedly Nietzschean. As he notes, early in The Use of Pleasure: But in raising this very general question, and in directing it to Greek and GrecoRoman culture, it occurred to me that this problematization was linked to a group of practices that have been of unquestionable importance in our societies: I am referring to what might be called “the arts of existence.” What I mean by the phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.68

Here, we see again the unification or overlap of centrally Nietzschean and Foucauldian concerns: ancient Greek culture, ethics, and aesthetics. And here we see again the very particular sense in which Foucault incorporates his notion of askēsis, of “ascetic” practices or technologies of self, into his ethical view. In addition to the literal Greek sense of training or exercise, then, Foucauldian ascetic practice is also something very much like self-development—or self-care. Care of self is an ancient notion, Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman, as Foucault teaches us in his later genealogies—in particular, the three volumes of The History of Sexuality. It is also a notion that comes to characterize Foucault’s own attitude toward self-fashioning and ascetic practice, and it lies at the origin of the distinctively Foucauldian notion of ethics: “The care of the self is ethical in itself,” he writes, “but it implies complex relationships with others insofar as this ēthos of freedom is also a way of caring for others.”69 Foucault moves from an art of living to care of self, through ethics, to a self-fashioning that is neither selfish nor self-enclosed but entirely open to and interdependent upon others: the

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fashioning of self in a context of ethical relatedness. In this turn toward others— not the abstraction philosophers sometimes refer to as “the Other,” but, it seems for Foucault, real, particular others—Foucault instantiates a traditionally ethical concern which only makes infrequent appearances in Nietzsche. While it would be unfair to describe Nietzsche as propagating a self-interested hatred of (or even indifference to) others in his work, it remains the case that he is most strongly committed to and identified with a conception of the self that requires us to assert our antagonism, not only toward others but also toward ourselves, as we are. Such self-criticism, as we see in Zarathustra,70 is a necessary prerequisite for the antagonism between and within selves that Nietzsche promotes as productive of any new self, including (perhaps especially) the Übermensch. Rarely is there any indication in Nietzsche—besides Zarathustra’s own aborted and ultimately misguided attempts to woo disciples—that other people ought to figure into one’s own efforts to overcome oneself, except insofar as the overcoming of humanity itself would entail their overcoming. It is thus in this way that we might see Foucault going beyond Nietzsche ethically, insofar as Foucault’s ethics incorporates care for others as a component or implication of care for the self. We might say that, between the domains of power and ethics in Foucault, we can see a dynamic relationship develop between agon and care, our relationships with others thus simultaneously and perpetually characterized by opposition and identification. In Nietzsche, to identify with the other is to see how, in opposing them and seeking to overcome them we might also begin to overcome ourselves. This is the ethical import of Zarathustra’s identification of the friend with the enemy, and the idea that our enemies do us a great service in providing us with an opportunity better to know, and thus better to overcome, ourselves—that, as enemies, we could do more for each other than we ever could have done as friends. Such devoted “enemyship” itself requires a tremendous self-discipline, much more so than would settling for the stagnant satisfactions of ordinary friendship, and in this sense Nietzsche, too, must make room for a kind of askēsis. When it comes to ethics, as with power (and, as we have seen, with knowledge as well), what we find is neither that Foucault and Nietzsche are on the very same page, nor that their disagreements are so profound as to constitute absolute difference, but instead that the same elements—the same ideas, terms, practices—occur in both, although quite often very differently conceived and organized. Most of the time, this is due to the historical influence that Nietzsche exerts over Foucault, but sometimes it seems due instead to the coincidence of independent and original inquiries. Whatever the case, we find in the relationship between Nietzsche and Foucault the same

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agonism both Foucault and Nietzsche see occurring between the best of friends, the worst of enemies—and within the self itself, a difference within sameness, a similarity most potently, if paradoxically, characterized by difference. This is thus a relationship most fruitfully explored from as many different perspectives as possible—gathered together and focused in what is more or less the same direction. What follows in this book is divided into nine chapters, each authored by outstanding Foucault and Nietzsche scholars from around the world, each in some ways very different from all of the others. Bringing their work together in this way allows us to see very clearly both differences in approach, method, perspective, and interpretation, as well as the significant common threads, interests, and concerns. Each chapter stands forth with more independence and is more fully itself, we think, by virtue of standing in relationship to the others. In Chapter  1, “Foucault, Nietzsche, and the History of Truth,” Paul Patton examines what is, for Foucault, the equivalence of the history of the will to know and the history of truth. Patton demonstrates that this equivalence has its origins in Foucault’s treatment of the will to know in lectures he gave in the early 1970s, wherein he consistently refers back to Nietzsche. He argues that, although Foucault is doing something in some ways related to Nietzsche, significant discrepancies between Nietzsche’s view of truth and Foucault’s position in the 1970s exist. In a number of texts, Nietzsche engages in the “de-implication” of truth and knowledge, Patton writes, such that “to know,” for Nietzsche, is not always “to know the truth.” Nietzsche further suggests—in anticipation of Foucault—that an inquiry into knowledge is always already an inquiry into the knowing subject. Knowledge thus does not have a necessary relationship to truth, for Nietzsche, but instead a necessary relationship to the will of the knower—and knowledge thus becomes an expression of the will to power. Patton shows how Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche in terms of will to power in these lectures misses some of the depth and richness of Nietzsche’s views—a depth and richness that transcends the limited understanding of power in this period of Foucault’s development. He ultimately suggests that further inquiry must explore how Foucault—with his interest in ascetic practices—might respond to what Nietzsche calls “the feeling of power.” In Chapter  2, “Nietzsche and Foucault’s ‘Will to Know,’ ” Alan D.  Schrift makes the case that it is Nietzsche’s account of knowledge which most directly informs Foucault’s development as a thinker, and which comes to expression both, specifically, in the account of the construction of the modern subject in Discipline and Punish, as well as across his corpus more generally. He argues persuasively that Foucault maintains a distinction between the subject (and “the

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death of the subject”) and man (and “the end of man”), such that, while the modern notion of man as a metaphysically or ontologically privileged being, occupying a place reserved in earlier eras for God, is untenable, the subject— as a construction or function of society and power relations—remains. Schrift thus situates his reading of Foucault in contrast to some traditional interpretations, which locate his interest in subjectivity squarely within poststructuralism. Rather, Schrift argues, Foucault is much more profitably—and accurately—read in relation to Nietzsche and his recognition of the historicity of reason and the subject. This ultimately enables Foucault, on Schift’s reading, to connect knowledge and power in those ways necessary to make both Discipline and Punish, as well as the later project on The History of Sexuality, possible. In Chapter 3, “ ‘We Are Experiments’: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Passion of Knowledge,” Keith Ansell-Pearson explores Nietzsche’s notion of the “passion of knowledge,” which informs his understanding of the union of the affective and the intellectual in Nietzsche’s conception of knowledge itself. All knowledge for Nietzsche, according to Ansell-Pearson, is motivated by passion. The result is something very Foucauldian: a conception of knowledge that cannot rest; it is ever changing, ever growing as the self changes and grows. This requires us to abandon the traditional Western notion of knowledge as a static acquisition, and replace it with a Nietzschean understanding of knowledge as experimentation. Ansell-Pearson argues that, specifically in Dawn, Nietzsche calls us to experiment with changing ways of life. He sees this call as answered by Foucault, and reads Foucault’s enactment of Nietzsche’s passion as fundamental to the overcoming of the metaphysical conception of the human being which Foucault understands as “the end of man.” In Chapter 4, “Nietzsche and Foucault: Modalities of Appropriating the World for an Art of Living,” Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg suggest that we ought to take seriously what Nietzsche has to say about reading and writing, about how he wishes to be read. If we do so, then we find there a renewed approach to what, following Alexander Nehamas, Milchman and Rosenberg call an “art of living.” This art of living requires fidelity to the undecidability and ambiguity, the openness and aporia, of human existence, in general, and of the writings of Nietzsche and Foucault, in particular. Thus, Milchman and Rosenberg conclude, we are not asked to read either of these dangerous thinkers in order to understand or to know the truth: rather, each demands of us that, in reading his work, we open ourselves to the possibility of becoming something new. The precise nature of our new selves, however, neither is nor can be predetermined by any philosopher.

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In Chapter  5, “Foucault and Nietzsche:  Sisyphus and Dionysus,” Michael Ure and Federico Testa provide a comparison of the two thinkers in terms of Nietzsche’s depiction of the philosopher as a kind of physician. The model has its roots in Hellenistic philosophy, which Ure and Testa show informs not only Nietzsche’s use of it, but Foucault’s practice of philosophy as well—itself inspired by his own thoughts on Greek and Hellenistic cultures. Both Nietzsche and Foucault take from their different encounters with Hellenistic philosophy a central interest in askēsis, but, Ure and Testa argue, to different ends: while Nietzsche suggests one ought to engage in a somewhat stoical amor fati and, in a Dionysian spirit, subjugate the desire for things to be other than they are within oneself, Foucault asks us to cultivate an unceasingly critical attitude toward our culture, a Sisyphean project of always seeking an improved state of affairs in culture and society by refusing ever to settle for the status quo, whatever the status quo. In Chapter 6, “Truth and Becoming beyond the Liberal Regime,” Jill E. Hargis examines the relationship in both Foucault and Nietzsche between critiques of liberalism and the advocacy for and empowerment of the individual. Hargis notes that both Nietzsche and Foucault make pointed criticisms of the liberal politics of their eras. Both ultimately rely for independence from such political and social frameworks, however, upon the central theoretical and practical support of political liberalism:  the individual. Both thinkers, by way of their practices of genealogy and care of the self, demonstrate the relationship between power structures and identity and meaning. Hargis concludes, however, that neither Nietzsche’s nor Foucault’s emphasis on the individual acting alone in the face of such power structures is enough to ground resistance to those structures’ disempowering and dehumanizing effects. What would be needed, she suggests, is some notion of communal or political action. In Chapter 7, “Twice Removed: Foucault’s Critique of Nietzsche’s Genealogical Method,” Brian Lightbody examines genealogy in the works of Nietzsche and Foucault. In particular, Lightbody explains the role of the body in Nietzsche’s genealogy—and how Nietzsche’s notion of the body ossifies over the course of his authorship, becoming something essentialist and, ultimately, antigenealogical. Lightbody then shows how Foucault attempts to resolve this problem in Nietzsche by way of his renewed conceptions of both genealogy and the body, only to have problems of his own arise along the way. Ultimately, Lightbody argues, rereading Foucault in terms of the Lamarckian notion of the milieu provides a way for readers of Foucault to escape the seeming incoherence in Foucault’s view of the body, giving us a means for reappropriating what can be saved of Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy, as well.

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In Chapter 8, “The Religion of Power: Between Nietzsche and Foucault,” Jim Urpeth lays the groundwork for a new conception of religion after the death of God—after, and unendorsed by, but deeply reliant upon both Nietzsche and Foucault. For Urpeth, the primary objection to orthodox religion—especially Christianity—that Nietzsche and Foucault pose has to do with the privileging of the otherworldly and transcendent over the immanent, physical world. Nietzsche’s criticism of the otherworldliness of all metaphysical systems is widely known; but in identifying the upshot of Nietzsche’s critique of religion as an insistence upon the reality of the physical, Urpeth centralizes the novelty of Nietzsche’s account of the relationship between religion and power, which opens a further dialogue between Nietzsche and Foucault on religion. Founded upon Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s criticisms and genealogies of religion, Urpeth suggests a Nietzschean-Foucauldian “re-naturalization” of religion, an attempt to divorce religion from the transcendent and otherworldly and reinscribe the relationship between religion and power exclusively within the natural domain. In this way, he focuses religion—in this new, post-Nietzschean/post-Foucauldian sense—on the physical, the affective, the libidinal, the sexual, and even the “perverse,” and treats the will to power as religious immanence. In Chapter 9, “Nietzsche and Foucault on Power: From Honneth’s Critique to a New Model of Recognition,” João Constâncio and Marta Faustino examine Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s views on power, in light of Axel Honneth’s assertion that the two thinkers have the same conception of power. Honneth argues that both Nietzsche and Foucault fail to acknowledge the role of recognition in grounding social interaction, and thus both Nietzsche and Foucault espouse antisocial conceptions of power. Constâncio and Faustino suggest, however, that a reexamination of Nietzsche’s psychological approach to philosophy makes possible a conception of reciprocal recognition. They show how, for Nietzsche, power is never merely “brute force”—an individualizing conception of power— but instead, as in Foucault, power is for Nietzsche always already grounded in the recognition of power relations and interactions. If this is the case, then Nietzsche evades Honneth’s criticism. Likewise, turning to Honneth’s critique of Foucault, Constâncio and Faustino see an overreliance upon Foucault’s early interest in “technologies of power,” with its emphasis on social dominance, rather than his later, more complex understanding of “technologies of the self ” which are rooted in interpersonal recognition. In this way, they carefully and exhaustively demonstrate the incompleteness and incorrectness of Honneth’s readings of Nietzsche and Foucault, as well as lay the ground for an anti-Hegelian conception of power and society.

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Notes 1 Michel Foucault, “The Return of Morality,” trans. John Johnston, in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–84, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1989), p. 471. 2 Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Care of Self in Dawn: On Nietzsche’s Resistance to Biopolitical Modernity,” in Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), pp. 269–86. 3 Jill Hargis, “From Demonization of the Masses to Democratic Practice in the Work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault,” Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences 34.4 (2011), pp. 373–92. 4 Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg “ The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault,” Parrhesia 2 (2007), pp. 44–65. 5 Alan Schrift, “Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and the Subject of Radical Democracy,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.1 (2010), pp. 151–61. 6 Michael Ure, “Senecan Moods: Foucault and Nietzsche on the Art of the Self,” Foucault Studies 4 (2007), pp. 19–52. 7 Michael Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject (Albany : SUNY Press, 1992). 8 Brian Lightbody, Philosophical Genealogy: An Epistemological Reconstruction of Nietzsche and Foucault’s Genealogical Method, 2 vols. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010 and 2011). 9 Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 10 David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (New York: Routledge, 1994). 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 87 (III.12). 12 Ibid. 13 Michel Foucault, “How Much Does It Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth,” trans. Mia Foret and Marion Martius, in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext[e], 1989), p. 356. 14 Ibid. 15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 59 (I, “On the Bestowing Virtue,” 3). 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 215 (III: 248).

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17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 13 (“Prejudices,” 6). 18 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 14 (“Prejudices,” 6). 19 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 9. 20 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 5 (I, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 2). 21 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 167 (III: 108). 22 Ibid., p. 181 (III: 125). 23 Ibid., p. 182 (III: 125). 24 Ibid., p. 181 (III: 125). 25 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, pp. 213–14 (IV: “The Ugliest Human Being”). 26 Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2008), p. 124. 27 Michel Foucault, “Philosophy and the Death of God,” in Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 85. 28 Ibid., p. 86. 29 Ibid. 30 While it would be useful to offer clear, precise, and brief definitions of these two terms—“archaeology” and “genealogy”—in their Foucauldian senses, as with so much in Foucault, the meanings of the terms are both complex and ambiguous, and they appear to evolve over the course of Foucault’s authorship. In lieu of oversimplification, but still in the service of definition, we suggest the reader wishing for greater clarity about these terms seek out any of the discussions of the terms’ histories and meanings in Foucault. A good place to start, we think, is the entries for “Archaeology” (by Gary Gutting) and “Genealogy” (by Charles E. Scott) in The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, ed. Leonard Lawler and John Nale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 31 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), especially the Introduction (pp. 3–17) and Part IV (pp. 135–95). See also Gary Gutting, “Michel Foucault,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/ foucault/. 32 Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault: 1954–84, Vol. 1 (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 262. 33 Michel Foucault, “Why Study Power: The Question of the Subject,” in “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 208. 34 Foucault, “Why Study Power,” p. 208.

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35 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 219 (III: 270). In Kaufmann’s translation, the relevant phrase is “become the person you are”; it also appears in the subtitle of Ecce Homo, “How One Becomes What One Is.” 36 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” pp. 262–3. 37 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 294 (“Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” 366). 38 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 3 (Preface, 1). 39 The Greeks would naturally have said “the self,” but this is essentialist language. Both Nietzsche and Foucault are anti-essentialists in their own ways, for whom self is not a given reality to be known, but something to be deconstructed. As such, we have preferred the more apt and simpler “self ” to “the self,” even in places where the latter feels more in line with common usage. 40 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 294 (“Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” 366). 41 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, pp. 12–13. 42 The distinction between truth and knowledge in Foucault and Nietzsche is explored at greater length in the contributions of Paul Patton, Alan Schrift, and Keith AnsellPearson in this volume (Chapters 1, 2, and 3, respectively). 43 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 263. 44 Ibid. 45 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, pp. 7–8 (I, “Prologue,” 4). 46 Michel Foucault, “How Is Power Exercised?” trans. Leslie Sawyer, in “The Subject and Power,” p. 220. 47 Ibid. 48 Foucault, “How Is Power Exercised?” p. 219. 49 Ibid., p. 221. 50 Ibid., p. 222. 51 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 40 (I, “On the Friend”). 52 For a more nuanced discussion of agonism and power in Nietzsche, one might look to his brief, unpublished “preface,” Homer’s Contest. See Nietzsche, Genealogy, pp. 174–81. 53 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 54 (“Morality as Anti-Nature,” 3). 54 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” p. 263. 55 See footnote 39, with regard to the use of “self ” versus “the self ” in Foucault, and the reasons for our preference for eliminating the definite article. 56 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” p. 235.

Introduction 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70

31

Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid. Ibid. For a more schematic account, see Bob Robinson, “Michel Foucault: Ethics,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/fouc-eth/ (accessed June 7, 2016). Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 27–8. Ibid., p. 266. Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 5 (“Preface,” 3). Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 14 (I, “Prologue,” 9). Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 232 (III: 290). Reading this passage as a Nietzschean articulation of the impetus behind much of both Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s work on the question of self-fashioning, Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg identify how the initially destructive leads to the constructive— whether in terms of Foucault’s “refusal” or Nietzsche’s “untimeliness”—in the creation of an art of living. See Milchman and Rosenberg’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 4). Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” p. 262. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 10–11. Ibid., p. 287. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, pp. 7–9 (I, “Prologue,” 4).

Bibliography Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “Care of Self in Dawn: On Nietzsche’s Resistance to Bio-political Modernity.” In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, edited by Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll, 269–86. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Foucault, Michel. “How Much Does It Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth,” translated by Mia Foret and Marion Martius. In Foucault Live: Collected Interview, 1961–1984, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 348–62. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989. Foucault, Michel. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. Foucault, Michel. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 253–80. New York: New Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994.

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Foucault, Michel. “Philosophy and the Death of God” In Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault, edited by Jeremy R. Carrette, 85–6. New York: Routledge, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “The Return of Morality,” translated by John Johnston. In Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 465–73. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–26. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Gutting, Gary. “Michel Foucault.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 ed.), edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/ entries/foucault/. Hargis, Jill. “From Demonization of the Masses to Democratic Practice in the Work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault.” Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences 34.4 (2011), 373–92. Lawlor, Leonard, and John Nale, eds. The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Lightbody, Brian. Philosophical Genealogy: An Epistemological Reconstruction of Nietzsche and Foucault’s Genealogical Method. 2 vols. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010 and 2011. Mahon, Michael. Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject. Albany : SUNY Press, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 2003. Owen, David. Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason. New York: Routledge, 1994. Robinson, Bob. “Michel Foucault: Ethics.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. www.iep.utm.edu/fouc-eth/ (accessed June 7, 2016). Rosenberg, Alan, and Alan Milchman. “The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault.” Parrhesia 2 (2007), 44–65.

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Schrift, Alan. “Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and the Subject of Radical Democracy.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.1 (2010), 151–61. Shapiro, Gary. Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Ure, Michael. “Senecan Moods: Foucault and Nietzsche on the Art of the Self.” Foucault Studies 4 (2007), 19–52.

1

Foucault, Nietzsche, and the History of Truth Paul Patton

Introduction By the end of the 1960s, in the course of methodological reflections on his earlier studies of the history of certain kinds of empirical knowledge, Foucault had developed a novel approach to the history of discourse. Rather than seeking to retrace the modifications and permutations of knowledge in a given domain, he sought to identify the underlying discursive formations or “positivities” that enabled the emergence of new kinds and new contents of knowledge. His long response to questions from the Paris Epistemology Circle, published in 1968, distinguished two “heteromorphous systems” that might be considered conditions of possibility of a given science.1 The first was internal to the science in question and included “the formal and semantic rules” that determined whether a statement belongs to the science. These “conditions of scientificity” defined “the conditions of the science as a science.”2 The second system was concerned with “the possibility of a science in its historical existence” and involved the conditions that defined the discursive formation on the basis of which a science could emerge: the domain of its objects, the concepts it develops and deploys, the kinds of statement it uses, and so on. The study of these latter conditions in relation to a given science involved “the field of its actual history” rather than “science in the successive displacement of its internal structures.”3 Much of this text found its way into The Archaeology of Knowledge published in French the following year.4 Here the distinction between these two ways of studying the “conditions of possibility” of empirical knowledge took the form of a terminological distinction between savoir and connaissance.5 In these terms, the early modern knowledges of language, economic processes, and living beings that Foucault described in The Order of Things would be instances of connaissance elaborated on the basis of the savoir that characterized the

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classical episteme. The elements that identified a particular discursive formation, such as the rules in accordance with which it formed objects, concepts, particular kinds of statement, and particular theoretical choices, were defined as the knowledge (savoir) that was “indispensable to the constitution of a science, although . . . not necessarily destined to give rise to one.”6 The definition of discursive formations or positivities in terms of these elements enabled Foucault to distinguish different thresholds of complexity that in turn corresponded to different approaches to the history of science and different ways of considering the opposition between truth and error that is implied in any science. However, it was not until his Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France in December 1970 that Foucault began to refer to the history of systems of discourse (savoir) as a history of the will to know or, simply, a history of truth.7 A  further issue that only emerged in the course of his 1970–71 lectures concerned the manner in which different philosophical conceptions of knowledge represented the will to know.8 It was only at this point, when philosophical representations of the will to know became an explicit object of reflection for Foucault, that he began to discuss Nietzsche’s views on truth and knowledge. The external, archaeological history of knowledge that became the history or “morphology” of the will to know was developed independently of any reference to Nietzsche in Foucault’s published work. He had, however, long been a serious reader and sometimes teacher of Nietzsche’s philosophy.9 He devoted one whole lecture and part of another in the 1970–71 course to the discussion of Nietzsche. He reprised this material in a lecture in Montréal later in 1971 and again in lectures on “Truth and Juridical Forms” in Rio de Janeiro in 1973.10 In this chapter, I  examine Foucault’s presentation of the projected history of the will to know and its relation to Nietzsche in these lectures. I suggest that, while he found some passages in Nietzsche that were useful for distinguishing the will to know and the will to truth, and others that were useful for the larger project of an external or “political” history of truth, there were also gaps and discrepancies in the attempts to align this project with Nietzsche’s own inquiries into the origins of knowledge and the value of truth.

The history of the will to know In his Inaugural Lecture in December 1970, Foucault suggested that the distinction between truth and falsehood might be regarded as one of the systems

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of exclusion that defined the order of discourse in modern Western societies, alongside others such as the distinction between reason and madness, or the different prohibitions that govern who can speak about what and under what conditions, especially in the highly charged fields of politics and sexuality. He acknowledged the apparent implausibility of suggesting that the constraints on true discourse were of the same order as other apparently arbitrary, contingent, and variable systems of exclusion. Certainly, “at the level of individual propositions within a given discourse, the division between the true and the false is neither arbitrary, nor modifiable, nor institutional, nor violent.”11 Nevertheless, he suggests, if we pose the question at another level, not in respect of individual propositions but in relation to “the will to truth that has survived across so many centuries of European history, if we ask what has been in its most general form the kind of division that has governed our will to know,” then we can indeed identify something like a system of exclusion.12 By way of example of a modification in the form of knowledge, he points to the difference between what counted as truth in the discourse of the Greek poets of the sixth century bce and what counted as truth for Plato and others a century later. In the first case, truth was assured by the fact that a discourse was spoken by one who had the right to do so, and that it was uttered in accordance with the appropriate rituals. In the second, truth was dependent on the proposition itself, its meaning, its form, and its relation to its object. Between Hesiod and Plato, a new division of the will to knowledge emerged: “true discourse was no longer precious and desirable because it was no longer tied to the exercise of power.”13 Foucault alludes to further modifications in the Western will to truth, such as those epochal shifts that marked the emergence and then the displacement of the representational savoir associated with the classical episteme. The first occurred at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when there was a shift from reading natural signs to observation, from commentary to verification. The second took place in the nineteenth century when the classical episteme gave way to modern humanist and historical forms of knowledge. These three moments of historical modification are singled out toward the end of the lecture as the immediate foci of Foucault’s research and described as “three cuts in the morphology of our will to know.”14 It is as though, from Plato onward, “the will to truth had its own history, which was not that of constraining truths but that of the history of fields of objects to be known, the history of the functions and positions of the knowing subject, the history of the material, technical and instrumental investments of knowledge.”15

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The first lecture of Foucault’s course one week later begins with the following declaration: THE WILL TO KNOW is the title I would like to give to this year’s lectures. To tell the truth, I think I could also have given this title to most of the historical analyses I have carried out up until now. It could also describe those I would now like to undertake. I think all these analyses—past or still to come—could be seen as something like so many “fragments for a morphology of the will to know.”16

In the context of spelling out the theme of the lectures to come, he referred back to the suggestion in his Inaugural Lecture that the will to truth might be considered a system of exclusion to some extent analogous to the division between rational and mad discourse. One of his aims is to see whether “the will to truth is not as profoundly historical as any other system of exclusion.”17 This implies seeing the will to truth as no less arbitrary with respect to its origins, no less subject to modification, no less bound up with particular institutional networks, and no less bound up with “real struggles and relations of domination” than the other systems of exclusion that have characterized Western European culture. Foucault summarizes the stakes of this project in terms of being able to see —whether, through the history of true discourses, we can bring to light the history of a certain will to the true or false, the history of a certain will to posit the interdependent system of truth and falsity; —whether, second, we can show that this historical, singular, and ever renewed activation of the system of truth and falsity forms the central episode of a certain will to know peculiar to our civilization; —and, finally, whether we can articulate this will to know, which has taken the form of a will to truth, not on a subject or on an anonymous force but on real systems of domination.18 The first point indicates that when he speaks of the will to truth, he does not mean the preference for truth or indeed the peculiar value attached to truth that Nietzsche sought to problematize.19 Rather, he means the more fundamental will that imposes the dichotomy between truth and error as the defining feature of all knowledge. This point along with the second raises the question of the relation between the will to truth and the will to know in Western culture. Briefly, he sees the will to truth as a particular historical form of the will to know, one that emerged in ancient Greece in the transition from Hesiod to Plato referred to earlier, and that assumed canonical form in Aristotle.

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The difference between the will to know and the will to truth is not unrelated to the distinction between savoir and connaissance mentioned earlier. Thus, at the beginning of the third lecture, Foucault redescribes the projected history of the will to know by asking whether it would be possible to write a history “that would be addressed to the events of knowledge-savoir and to the effect of knowledge-connaissance internal to those events.”20 The exclusion of the Sophists that is fundamental to the conceptions of knowledge that emerged in Plato and Aristotle provides an example of “an event of knowledge-savoir which gave rise to a certain type of assertion of the truth and to a certain effect of knowledgeconnaissance which then became [the] normative form.”21 Aristotle in particular developed the idea of a discourse of truth defined in opposition to that of the Sophists that has been the basis of European philosophy ever since: And if we accept that science had its origin within philosophical discourse, we can see what is at stake in the problem posed. The act that, by exclusion, defined an outside of philosophical discourse and tied philosophy and truth together in a certain mode, must in fact characterize our will to know. It is that act that has to be uncovered.22

Breaking the link between knowledge and truth so that it becomes possible to conceive of the will to truth as a particular historical form of the will to know is one of the crucial stakes in Foucault’s projected history of the will to know. He is explicit on the need for this separation in the second lecture when he comments on the Kantian dilemma that confronts anyone who purports to tell the truth of knowledge from outside, as it were. Such a project implies an account of the history and relativity of forms of knowledge to the conditions that make them possible. As such, it would be open to the dilemma that philosophers ever since Kant routinely pose to relativist accounts of knowledge: but is this a true account? The resulting self-contradiction is inevitable unless “we get rid of the affiliation of truth and knowledge; unless knowing is not by nature, destination, or origin knowing the truth.”23 It is this “de-implication” of truth and knowledge that Foucault finds in Nietzsche and that serves as a “guiding thread” for his analysis of the will to know.24 The third and final point above suggests the complexity of Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between the history of the will to know and the politics of truth. His question whether it is possible to articulate the will to know with social processes of struggle and domination points to the important role of the yet-to-be-fully-articulated concept of power in this project. In addition, his question whether the history of the will to know can be related to “real systems

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of domination” rather than to a subject points to the manner in which the history of the will to know implies a history of the subjects of knowledge. It is clear from his earlier reflections on the archaeology of knowledge that one of the sources of Foucault’s project is the search for a different approach to the Marxist problem of the relationship between knowledge and social relations. While he does not elaborate on the Marxist provenance of his project in the Collège de France lectures, the first of the 1973 lectures on “Truth and Juridical Forms” begins with this problem. He notes that French academic Marxism suffers the “very serious defect” of assuming a traditional philosophical conception of the subject of knowledge as unchanged and unchanging throughout history. Social relations and economic conditions are imposed on this subject, but only in the negative form of an obstacle or impediment to its access to the truth. The Marxist concept of ideology expresses this relationship between the subject and external political or economic conditions: “Ideology is the mark, the stigma of these political or economic conditions of existence on a subject of knowledge who rightfully should be open to truth.”25 Foucault wants to show that political and economic conditions are not merely obstacles for the subject of knowledge but “the means by which subjects of knowledge are formed, and hence are truth relations.”26 That is why the history of the will to know implies a reworking of the theory of the subject. For the most part, throughout the history of Western philosophy up until Nietzsche, it was assumed that the human subject possessed an innate affinity with the truth, that it was destined and equipped to access the reality of things in general.27 Foucault’s aim in these lectures is to outline an answer to the Marxist problem of knowledge that shows not only how social relations may give rise to new domains of knowledge but also how they give rise to new subjects of knowledge: “The subject of knowledge itself has a history; the relation of the subject to the object; or, more clearly, truth itself has a history.”28 As noted earlier, in the Lectures on the Will to Know Foucault proposed to pursue the history of the will to know in two ways: first, by means of specific historical investigations that would examine particular kinds of knowledge and the modifications they introduced into the will to know; second, by asking whether it might be possible “to establish a theory of the will to know that could serve as the basis for the historical analyses.”29 In accordance with this second approach, the lectures start with a discussion of two examples of the way in which the will to know has been dealt with in philosophy: Aristotle and Nietzsche. He begins with the opening lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which may be translated into Standard English as follows: “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness,

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they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight.”30 Foucault provides a detailed analysis of this passage, the theses implicit in it, and the argument that supports each of them, often found elsewhere in Aristotle’s texts. The point of this analysis is to show, first, that the passage relies on a conception of sensation as knowledge, where knowledge means access to the reality of things. Second, he argues that it is the fact that it produces knowledge that makes sensation pleasurable, and that this pleasure is not related to the usefulness of the knowledge in question. It is rather a specific kind of pleasure (agapēsis) produced by knowledge that has no end other than itself and that is a peculiar aptitude of human beings. Aristotle’s assertion that man naturally desires to know and that this desire is already foreshadowed in the pleasure of sensation excludes from his philosophical conception other kinds of knowledge such as the transgressive, fearsome knowledge found in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, or the worldly knowledge of the Sophists designed to win an argument rather than establish a truth. It even excludes the innate knowledge expressed in memory that we find in Plato. In this manner, Foucault suggests, Aristotle manages to ensure that the will to know is not founded on anything other than the precondition of knowledge itself; to ensure that the desire to know is enveloped entirely within knowledge; to ensure that knowledge has already absorbed it from the start and that, on its first appearance, it thus gives it its place, its law, and the principle of its movement.31

It follows that the subject of desire and the subject of knowledge are one and the same and that the desire to know has no condition outside or beyond knowledge itself. It also follows that knowledge and the desire to know is tied to truth: sensation is knowledge because it gives access to the specific qualities of things. Foucault summarizes the outcome of this analysis of Aristotle’s text as having shown that there were two operations at work in this apparently simple account of a natural desire to know: one that reintroduced knowledge at the very source of this desire and one that introduced truth as a third element between desire and knowledge. All the arguments and proofs found in Aristotle’s other texts, and by which this triple displacement can be justified, presuppose that sensation and its pleasure are connected with truth.32

The significance of Aristotle for Foucault’s larger project is that he provides an example, and an important source, of that consolidation of the will to know around the will to truth that has been characteristic of Western thought ever since. Not until Nietzsche do we find a philosopher capable of thinking outside

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this particular configuration in which the will to know is so firmly bound up with truth. He serves as Foucault’s example of a philosophy that “de-implicates” knowledge and truth. In Nietzsche we find an entirely different conception of the will to know, freed from “the form and law of knowledge.”33

The invention of knowledge and truth At the end of his Montréal lecture on Nietzsche, Foucault contrasts these two very different conceptions of the will to know by suggesting that, in the case of Aristotle, the will to know presupposes the existence of knowledge in sensation and also that knowledge involves a relation to truth. In the case of Nietzsche, by contrast, Foucault suggests that knowledge is “an illusory effect of the fraudulent assertion of truth” and that the will to know derives from a will to power that ultimately establishes a relationship of “reciprocal cruelty and destruction between knowledge and truth.”34 His characterization of Nietzsche’s views on knowledge and truth relies on remarks from The Will to Power, as well as The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morality. However, in this lecture as in “Truth and Juridical Forms,” Foucault begins with the opening sentence of Nietzsche’s 1873 text, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” which suggests in the manner of a fable or a fairy tale that “in some remote corner of the universe . . . there was once a star on which some clever animals invented knowledge.”35 He takes the assertion that knowledge is an invention to imply a fundamental break with the Western philosophical tradition: it implies that knowledge is not inherent either in human nature or in the relation between human subjects and the world. Because there is no prior commitment to the unity and sovereignty of the knowing subject, Nietzsche “seems to present a break with the oldest and most firmly established tradition of Western philosophy.”36 There is no “knowledge instinct” but rather a range of instincts derived from the will to power that, as a consequence, give rise to various kinds of knowledge. Knowledge is the result of a “struggle of instincts, partial selves, violence, and desires.”37 Whereas the dominant tradition in philosophy places freedom at the heart of the relationship between the will and the truth, for Nietzsche the relationship is one of violence. Foucault takes this shift to imply the possibility of radically rethinking the history of science and the manner in which we might establish connections between science and particular forms of society.38 In addition, the assertion that knowledge is invented implies that there is no affinity or resemblance between knowledge and the world. There is no prior

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model or divine prototype of knowledge, so it cannot be the product of anything resembling Platonic reminiscence. Nor is knowledge in any way “joined to the structure of the world as a reading, a decipherment, a perception or a self-evidence.”39 Foucault cites Nietzsche’s suggestion in The Gay Science that we should be wary of thinking that the world is orderly and law-governed rather than disorderly and chaotic, in order to suggest that there is no “natural” reason for nature to be known.40 However, he goes beyond anything Nietzsche says in this passage in suggesting that, if there is no natural continuity between knowledge and things known, “There can only be a relation of violence, domination, power and force, a relation of violation.”41 On this point, the lecture on Nietzsche echoes the suggestion in Foucault’s Inaugural Lecture that discourse is “a violence that we do to things.”42 Foucault suggests that both dimensions of Nietzsche’s break with tradition— the repudiation of belief in a unitary and stable subject of knowledge along with the rejection of the idea that knowledge provides access to the fundamental nature of being—relate to the manner in which he “de-implicates” knowledge and truth. Knowledge cannot be supposed to be necessarily directed at truth, nor truth the essence of knowledge. The importance of Nietzsche for the history of the will to know is summed up in the claim that, on his view, “knowledge was invented, but truth was invented even later.”43 This disarticulation of knowledge and truth is explored by means of three questions: first, what kind or kinds of knowledge existed before knowledge came to mean knowledge of the truth? From what kind of knowledge did truth emerge “in a secondary, aleatory, nonessential way”?44 Second, Foucault asks, how was truth invented, “what turn of events made it possible?”45 Third and finally, he asks, what becomes of knowledge once it comes to mean knowledge of the truth? And what happens to truth once it has become the defining feature of knowledge? Is it something that we can understand in historical terms so that it would be possible to recount its history? And if the answer to this question is positive, will there be an end to truth such that we might conceive of a new form of “knowledge without truth”?46 Foucault outlines possible responses to these questions in the latter part of his Montréal lecture. However, these responses are incomplete and disconnected. They are often confined to preparatory remarks that do not exhaust the possible responses in Nietzsche’s texts, remarkable as much for the passages they do not consider as for those they do. One notable omission is the explicit outline of a possible genealogy of the will to truth in The Gay Science (“How We, Too, Are Still Pious”). Nietzsche begins with the widespread presumption that conviction, belief, or faith has no place in science. Science is concerned with

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knowledge, with what can be proven to be true or false, not with conviction. At most we might allow a role for methodological convictions or what Kant called “regulative fictions,” such as the rule that hypotheses must be tested or the idea that every event has a cause. But, Nietzsche asks, does not this mean that “a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction”?47 This plausible conclusion seems to support the presumption with which he began, namely that convictions as such have no place in science. At this point, Nietzsche asks, is there not a prior conviction that must be in place before the scientific enterprise can even get underway, namely the conviction that truth is important, that it is worthwhile to try to establish the truth and falsity of claims about the world? We need to appreciate, first, that this is a necessary presupposition of the scientific enterprise, and, second, that, to the extent that it is, “science, too, rests on a faith; there simply is no ‘presuppositionless’ science.”48 Nietzsche then raises further questions about this “unconditional will to truth” as he calls it, this conviction that truth is important. What is the conviction exactly? Is it a will not to allow oneself to be deceived, or is it a will not to deceive? What is the difference between these two ways of understanding the conviction in question? In the first place, it is the difference between being acted on and acting. In the second, it is the difference between a prudential and a moral principle. The will not to be deceived is unconvincing as a prudential principle because it is often in our interests to be deceived and because we do not know enough in advance to be able to say with conviction that we would rather not be deceived. Thus, Nietzsche concludes, the faith in science, which after all undeniably exists, cannot owe its origin to such a calculus of utility; rather it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of “the will to truth” or “truth at any price” is proved to it constantly.49

The only alternative then is to interpret the conviction that underpins science as “I will not deceive, not even myself,” and with that, Nietzsche concludes, “we stand on moral ground.”50 In turn, this raises the question:  from whence comes this moral conviction? In particular, why when “life” constantly indulges in semblance, deception, simulation, and delusion should humans embark on this moral path of nondeception? Nietzsche offers the outline of an answer that parallels his analysis of morality and the primary nihilism involved in the location of ultimate value in another world in On the Genealogy of Morality. Like the Platonist and the Christian nihilist, the believer in truth and the value of truthfulness affirms “another world than that of life, nature and history,” thereby

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negating this world and denying its status as ultimate reality. In short, Nietzsche argues that science too is founded upon a primary nihilism: it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests— . . . even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine.51

Finally, Nietzsche asks: what if this faith too became unbelievable? How would it affect our view of human knowledge? His earlier appeal to the idea of a nonmoral conception of knowledge in “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” suggests one possible response.52 So too does the suggestion that in its present most adventurous forms, the drive for knowledge has become conscious of the fact that it does not attain the being or reality of things in themselves, but only another layer of appearance. In The Gay Science (entitled “The Consciousness of Appearance”), Nietzsche presents all human knowledge as a production of “appearances” that must be understood in the absence of any contrast with essences: knowledge is “the highest means to sustain the universality of dreaming.”53 Foucault elaborates this Nietzschean thought by suggesting that knowledge neither destroys appearance by reference to a reality underneath, nor remains trapped in mere or existing appearances:  it goes beyond existing appearances but only in the name of some new appearance:  knowledge “is what indefinitely constitutes the newness of appearance in the breach in appearance.”54

The subject and power In response to the question what kinds of knowledge existed before knowledge became identified with truth, Foucault outlines two possible answers, both of which are based on the idea that knowledge is an expression of the will to power. He takes the suggestion in Daybreak that reverence for the secrets of things is one method for the advancement of knowledge to point to the possibility of a knowledge that does not operate in the space of representation of the essence of things but in the space of “the secret, of prohibition, of unveiling, of transgression.”55 He takes passages from On The Genealogy of Morality that emphasize the role of asceticism and the manner in which the will to know confronts earlier forms of knowledge that serve human preservation and flourishing to suggest another form of knowledge prior to the will to truth, namely “violent and useful

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knowledge that serves life.”56 Implicit in this plurality of responses is the idea that there is no such thing as knowledge in itself, there is no single ideal or essence of knowledge.57 In turn, this implies that there is no single, stable relation between the subject and object of knowledge that is the foundation of knowledge. Rather, this relation and indeed the subject of knowledge itself are produced within the different forms of knowledge. Foucault insists above all on the relations of violence and domination that characterize knowledge according to Nietzsche: not only the interpretative violence done to things but the self-inflicted, ascetic violence wrought upon the knowing subject. For example, he notes Nietzsche’s suggestion in Daybreak that, even though the invention of knowledge implied resistance to the illusory truths that made it possible for people to survive and flourish in relative ignorance, it has become a passion that some modern Europeans could not imagine giving up:  “our drive for knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or the happiness of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful for us!”58 However, what he focuses on in this passage is not the passion for knowledge but the pleasure of renunciation, the malice directed at “the happiness of a strong, firmly rooted delusion.”59 Similarly, when he elaborates on the nature of Nietzsche’s break with the tradition by pointing to the very different relation he establishes between truth and the will, Foucault stresses the violence of this relation. He cites passages from Nietzsche’s late notebooks that identify truth as another manifestation of the will to power, in particular the following passage from Notebook 9, 1887: “Truth” is not . . . something that exists and has to be found, discovered, but something that must be created and that provides a name for a certain processus, even more, for a will to do violence to the facts, endlessly: introducing truth into the facts, by a processus in infinitum, an active determination, not the becoming conscious of a reality that is firm and determined in itself. It is one of the names of the “will to power.”60

Traditionally, the relationship is one in which the will has only to allow the truth to appear. In order to do this, the will must be pure, disinterested, and free from any particularity. The fundamental relation between will and truth is one of freedom: “The will must be free to be able to give access to the truth.”61 For Nietzsche, by contrast, the relation is not one of freedom but of violence. Truth is attained by the will only on the basis of its “singular characteristics and its most precise determinations, and in the form of constraint and domination.”62

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In the same manner, in his discussion of the subject of knowledge, Foucault emphasizes the internal struggle and violence in the relationship between instincts that produces knowledge. As he puts it in “Truth and Juridical Forms”: “Something is produced because the instincts meet, fight one another, and at the end of their battles finally reach a compromise. That something is knowledge.”63 He presents knowledge as a mere “surface outcome” overlaid on the confrontation between instincts that gives rise to knowledge. Foucault’s comment here is strongly reminiscent of Deleuze’s analysis of sense or events, following the Stoics, as surface effects produced in language but hovering over the material reality of bodies and states of affairs, “like a mist over the prairie.”64 In a similar fashion, Foucault says that knowledge is like “a luminescence, a spreading light,” produced by mechanisms of a completely different order. He cites Nietzsche in suggesting that knowledge is like “a spark between two swords,” which is an effect of the clash of metal but not itself something made of metal.65 In both his Montréal lecture and “Truth and Juridical Forms,” Foucault cites The Gay Science (“What Knowing Means”), which comments on the contrast that Spinoza draws between laughing at, lamenting over or despising human nature and its affects and seeking to understand them.66 Nietzsche insists that this apparent contrast is merely superficial and that understanding is an outcome of these unconscious instincts or drives; it is the manner in which we become aware of them. Sometimes, we become aware of them as the result of an accommodation, appeasement or some kind of justice and contract between the warring drives. However, for Nietzsche such episodes of reconciliation are only the outcome best known to philosophers, those adepts of the “relatively mildest and calmest type of thought.”67 His focus in this passage is the conception of knowledge and its relation to the other drives expressed in Spinoza’s remarks, rather than any general account of the origin of knowledge. Yet Foucault draws precisely such a general view of the relation between the various drives and of the source of knowledge from this passage. He concludes that knowledge is not the outcome of a benign relation to things external to the subject but the result of malice. It is not a matter of “recognizing oneself in things” but of protecting oneself from them, deprecating or wanting to destroy them.68 In “Truth and Juridical Forms” he notes that knowledge is the result of a temporary hiatus in an ongoing war between these drives, concluding that: “At the center, at the root of knowledge, Nietzsche places something like hatred, struggle, power relations.”69 Finally, following Nietzsche’s suggestion that the philosopher is the least likely to appreciate the true nature of

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knowledge, he suggests that if we truly wish to understand knowledge and how it comes about We must look not to philosophers but to politicians—we need to understand what the relations of struggle and power are. One can understand what knowledge consists of only by examining these relations of struggle and power, the manner in which things and men hate one another, fight one another, and try to dominate one another, to exercise power relations over one another.70

Foucault acknowledges here that he offers a partial reading of Nietzsche’s views on knowledge. He responds to a possible objection that amounts to saying that it is his own “obsession with finding power relations everywhere” that has made him believe that Nietzsche also says that there is a political dimension to the history of truth.71 His somewhat defensive reply accepts that he chose The Gay Science in relation to his own interests and insists that he did not purport to show that this was the only Nietzschean conception of knowledge. Rather, he only sought to show that there are in Nietzsche’s writings “a certain number of elements that afford us a model for a historical analysis of what I would call the politics of truth.”72 He does go on to suggest that this political conception of knowledge does enable us to make sense of some of the things that Nietzsche says about knowledge, for example that there is no “knowledge in itself ” or that knowledge is always perspectival. The perspectival character of knowledge derives not from the limitations of human nature but from the “polemical and strategic character of knowledge”:  “One can speak of the perspectival character of knowledge because there is a battle, and knowledge is the result of this battle.”73 The stakes of this reading are clear: it enables Foucault to find in Nietzsche “an effective introduction to the political history of knowledge.”74 It is doubtful, however, whether Foucault’s conclusion regarding the political relations of power and struggle in society is justified by these references to Nietzsche. It is at best a partial understanding of Nietzsche’s conception of power and the will to power as this applies to human drives. We should remember that, at this stage of this thinking about power, Foucault remained fully in the grip of the “war model” that he later questioned and finally abandoned in favor of a conception of power as action on the action of others.75 The conception of power as essentially a matter of conflict and struggle between competing forces is not only inadequate for understanding the nature of political power, but also fails to do justice to Nietzsche’s understanding of human forms of the will to power. For Nietzsche, antagonistic relations between particular forces, drives or other forms of life are

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not the essence of power in its animal forms. It is rather that, “Every animal . . . instinctively strives for an optimum of favourable conditions under which it can express all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power.”76 The feeling of power is explicitly invoked in Nietzsche’s analyses of a variety of human actions and attitudes in Daybreak.77 Its importance derives from the fact that human beings, to a greater degree than all other living things, are conscious of their actions. They act in the light of particular ways of understanding the meaning, goals and content of their actions. This implies that there is an inescapable interpretative element in all human action. Moreover, since human beings are affected by their own actions, it follows that when an action is misdirected or blocked they experience a feeling of impotence or powerlessness; when it succeeds, or is believed to have succeeded, they experience a feeling of power. Nietzsche considers this capacity for the feeling of power so important that he asserts in Daybreak that “the means discovered for creating this feeling almost constitute the history of culture.”78 The feeling of power features in Nietzsche’s discussion of the role that asceticism plays in the development of knowledge in Beyond Good and Evil. In paragraph 229 he suggests that “almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty.”79 There is an element of cruelty in every wanting-to-know because this implies resisting other impulses such as the desire to affirm, to love or to worship. As a consequence, the would-be subject of knowledge is “an artist of cruelty and the agent of its transfiguration.”80 Beyond Good and Evil elaborates this conception of the subjective basis of knowledge by presenting the forms of human will—“the commanding element (whatever it is) that is generally called ‘spirit’ ”—as no less a manifestation of will to power than any other human drive.81 It “wants to dominate itself and its surroundings, and to feel its domination”; it “aims at growth, or, more particularly, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increasing strength.”82 These are precisely the terms in which Nietzsche defines the will to power of complex creatures such as the human animal. The will of the would-be subject of knowledge, the knower, shares these characteristics with other “spiritual” drives, such as “yea-saying and approval of ignorance,” the will to deceive and occasionally the will to be deceived.83 All of these “wills” are expressions of power. The “sublime tendency of the knower” must especially resist the will to deceive, this “will to appearances, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to surfaces.”84 The “intellectual conscience and taste” of the free spirit, which is no less governed by the imperative of growth and achieving the feeling of its own power, practices “a type of cruelty” against these wills to deception, masks and surfaces.85

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The conclusion to this passage states something like an aim or goal for the free thinking spirit that is Nietzsche’s alter ego, namely To translate humanity back into nature; to gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations and incidental meanings that have been scribbled and drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far; to make sure that, from now on, the human being will stand before the human being, just as he already stands before the rest of nature today, hardened by the discipline of science.86

Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche on knowledge takes no account of such aims. While it endorses the idea that the will to know depends on a certain kind of asceticism, a “malice turned also toward the one who knows” it makes no mention of the role of the feeling of power in those who seek knowledge. Nor does he discuss the means of achieving this feeling among those free thinkers committed to an ideal of knowledge freed from the constraints of the metaphysical faith that has up to now sustained the will to truth.87 Perhaps this is the direction that he would have needed to follow to find Nietzsche’s answer to the question whether there might be a “future without truth.”88 Or perhaps it is at this point that Foucault’s concern with the history of truth parts company with Nietzsche’s concern with the value of truth.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5

I am grateful to Vanessa Lemm for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle” was first published in Cahiers pour l’analyse, 9 (Summer 1968). The English translation appears in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. 297–342. Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” p. 326. Ibid. Stuart Elden notes that Foucault had completed a draft of The Archaeology in the summer of 1967, so it is likely that the “Response to the Epistemology Circle” was drawn from the same material. See S. Elden, Foucault: The Birth of Power (London: Polity, 2017), p. 8. The English translation includes the following comment by Foucault on his use of these terms: “By connaissance I mean the relation of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it. Savoir refers to the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to connaissance and for this or that enunciation to be formulated.” Michel Foucault, The

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8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

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Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), p. 15n. 2. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 182. In this Inaugural Lecture, Foucault speaks of the will to knowledge and will to truth almost interchangeably. See Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1971), pp. 16–22; Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 216–19. See Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971, ed. Daniel Defert, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 4–5 and 24–5. Daniel Defert mentions a letter from July 16, 1967, in which Foucault offers a reason for his long-held fascination with Nietzsche: “A morphology of the will to know in European civilization, which has been neglected in favor of the will to power.” Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 266. The December 23, 1970, Nietzsche lecture at the Collège de France was lost but replaced in Lectures on the Will to Know by a lecture given at McGill University in April 1971. The discussion of Nietzsche on knowledge and truth in this lecture is repeated in the first of five lectures delivered at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in May 1973, published as “Truth and Juridical Forms” in Michel Foucault, Power. Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 1–89. Foucault, L’ordre du discours, p. 16; The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 218. Translation modified. Ibid. Foucault, L’ordre du discours, pp. 17–18; The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 218. Foucault, L’ordre du discours, p. 65; The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 232. Translation modified. Foucault, L’ordre du discours, p. 19; The Archaelogy of Knowledge, p. 219. Translation modified. In the first lecture of his course the following week, he mentioned further examples: the particular kind of knowledge of economic processes established from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and the knowledge of sexuality between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 1). In the latter case, as he later explained in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, a distinctive form of knowledge of sexual desire was produced in relation to the ritual and relationship of the confession. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 4. “Granted we will truth: why not untruth instead?” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 5.

52 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

Paul Patton Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 32. Ibid. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., pp. 26–7. Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 15. Ibid. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze identifies as the first presupposition of the dogmatic image of thought that predominates in philosophy from Plato to Kant the idea that “there is a natural capacity for thought endowed with a talent for truth or an affinity with the true.” Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 131. Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 2. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 2. Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 155. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, pp. 15–16. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 218. Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 253. Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 10. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 25. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 203. Nietzsche urges us to be beware of thinking of the world as a living being, or as a machine, or as any kind of orderly system: “The total character of the world, by contrast, is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Naukhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 109. Foucault does not ask about the status of this characterization of the world: is it a form of knowledge and if so what form? Or is it merely a repudiation of all claims to know the true nature of things? Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 9. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 229. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 206. Ibid., p. 207.

Foucault, Nietzsche, and the History of Truth 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

53 54

55 56 57

58

59 60

61

53

Ibid. Ibid. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 200. Ibid. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid. Ibid. Nietzsche cites this passage in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith AnsellPearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 119. See in particular the discussion of the “free intellect” in the concluding section of “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” See also the comments in Human, All Too Human about the type of man who lives “as in nature” and who “continues to live only so as to know better.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 30. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 64. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 205. This phrase recalls Deleuze’s gloss on the creation of new values according to Nietzsche: “the new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 208. Ibid., p. 209. Foucault cites the injunction in On the Genealogy of Morality to “be wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge,’ let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ ‘absolute spirituality,’ ‘knowledge as such’ ” (p. 92). Friedrich Nietzsche. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 184. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 205. Ibid., p. 214. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 257–8. Compare the 1887 passage with the Cambridge English translation, which makes no mention of doing violence to the facts: “Truth is thus not something that’s there and must be found out, discovered, but something that must be made and that provides the name for a process—or rather for a will to overcome, a will that left to itself has no end: inserting truth as a process in infinitum, an active determining, not a becoming conscious of something that is ‘in itself ’ fixed and determinate.” Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, p. 155. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 215.

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62 Ibid. 63 Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 8. 64 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 5 and 24. 65 Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 8, does not give the source of this phrase, but perhaps he alludes to the following passage from Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: “The things in whose definiteness and endurance narrow human minds, like animal minds, believe have no real existence. They are but the flash and spark of drawn swords, the quick radiance of victory in the struggle of the opposites.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington: Regnery, 1962), p. 55. 66 “Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! says Spinoza as simply and sublimely as is his wont. Yet in the final analysis, what is this intelligere other than the way we become sensible of the other three? A result of the different and conflicting impulses to laugh, lament and curse?” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 185. Nietzsche cites Spinoza’s Political Treatise: “So when I applied my mind to Politics . . . I took great pains not to laugh at human actions, or mourn them, or curse them, but only to understand them.” B. Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, vols I and II (Complete Digital Edition), ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 1922. Spinoza drew a similar distinction in the Preface to Book 3 of the Ethics, where he wrote that most of those who have written about the affects and men’s way of living conceive man in nature as “a dominion within a dominion” and attribute the cause of human impotence to some “vice of human nature which they therefore bewail, or laugh at, or disdain, or (as usually happens) curse.” After identifying Descartes as another who thought that the human mind can have absolute dominion over its affects, he continued: “For now I wish to return to those who prefer to curse or laugh at the affects and actions of men, rather than to understand them.” Spinoza, Collected Works, p. 702. 67 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 186. 68 Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, pp. 204–5. 69 Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 12. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., p. 13. 72 Ibid., p. 15. He comments that Nietzsche allows him to establish a model that is helpful in pursuing the object of these lectures, namely “the problem of the formation of a certain number of domains of knowledge on the basis of the relations of force and the political relations in society.” 73 Ibid., p. 14. 74 Ibid., p. 13.

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75 Foucault identifies the “war-repression” schema in terms of which he approached the analysis of power in the opening lecture of his 1975–6 course “Society Must Be Defended.” For details on his self-criticism and the evolution of his conception of power, see my “From Resistance to Government: Foucault’s Lectures 1976– 1979,” in A Companion to Foucault, ed. C. Falzon, T. O’Leary, and J. Sawicki (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), pp. 172–88. 76 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 109. Translation modified. 77 For examples, see my “Nietzsche on Power and Democracy circa 1876–1881,” in Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Manuel Knoll and Barry Stocker (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), pp. 93–111; “Nietzsche, Genealogy and Justice,” in Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 7–22; and “Nietzsche on Rights, Power and the Feeling of Power,” in Nietzsche, Power, and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, ed. Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 471–90. 78 Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 19. 79 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 120. 80 Ibid., p. 121. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., p. 122. 83 Compare the remarks here about the spirit’s “occasional will to be deceived” and its “not quite harmless will to deceive other spirits” with Nietzsche’s account of the emergence of the will to truth in The Gay Science, p. 344. 84 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 122. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., p. 123. Compare the type of spirit imagined by Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human. 87 Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 205. 88 Ibid., p. 207.

Bibliography Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense, edited by Constantin Boundas, translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Elden, S. Foucault: The Birth of Power. London: Polity, 2017.

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Foucault, Michel. Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971, edited by Daniel Defert, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Foucault, Michel. Power. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion. New York: New Press, 2000. Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion. New York: New Press, 1998. Foucault, Michel. Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion. New York: New Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1978. Foucault, Michel. L’ordre du discours. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1971. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, translated by A. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock, 1970. Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1969. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Writings from the Early Notebooks, edited by Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, translated by Ladislaus Löb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rüdiger Bittner, translated by Kate Sturge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, translated by Marianne Cowan. Washington: Regnery, 1962. Patton, Paul. “Nietzsche on Power and Democracy circa 1876–1881.” In Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, edited by Manuel Knoll and Barry Stocker, 93–111. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. Patton, Paul. “From Resistance to Government: Foucault’s Lectures 1976–1979.” In A Companion to Foucault, edited by C. Falzon, T. O’Leary, and J. Sawicki, 172–88. Oxford: Blackwell, 2013.

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Patton, Paul. “Nietzsche, Genealogy and Justice.” In Nietzsche and Political Thought, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, 7–22. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Patton, Paul. “Nietzsche on Rights, Power and the Feeling of Power.” In Nietzsche, Power, and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, edited by Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt, 471–90. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Spinoza, B. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volumes I and II (Complete Digital Edition), edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

2

Nietzsche and Foucault’s “Will to Know” Alan D. Schrift

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” It would have been possible, and perhaps more honest, to cite only one name, that of Nietzsche, because what I say here won’t mean anything if it isn’t connected to Nietzsche’s work, which seems to me to be the best, the most effective, the most pertinent of the models that one can draw upon. In Nietzsche, one finds a type of discourse that undertakes a historical analysis of the formation of the subject itself, a historical analysis of the birth of a certain type of knowledge [savoir]—without ever granting the preexistence of a subject of knowledge [connaissance]. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms” Michel Foucault opened his first lecture course as a professor at the Collège de France in 1970–71 on “La Volonté de Savoir”—“The Will to Know”1—on December 9, 1970, with the following remark: The will to know is the title I would like to give to this year’s lectures. To tell the truth, I think I could also have given this title to most of the historical analyses I have carried out up until now. It could also describe those I would now like to undertake. I think all these analyses—past or still to come—could be seen as something like so many “fragments for a morphology of the will to know.”2

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The task he set himself for the second lecture, the following week, was to break the philosophical affiliation between knowledge (savoir) and truth. This affiliation he traced briefly in Aristotle, Kant, and Spinoza before turning to Nietzsche, whose works he framed as committed to getting rid of this affiliation. Unfortunately, most of the pages of Foucault’s manuscript for this second lecture that addressed Nietzsche were removed and subsequently lost, but the editors of the lecture series note that “the main points are found in a lecture” Foucault gave on Nietzsche at McGill University in April 1971.3 In his lecture at McGill, following his discussion of Nietzsche’s account of knowledge, Foucault remarked that such an analysis makes it possible: —to speak of sign and interpretation, of their inseparability, without reference to a phenomenology; —to speak of signs without reference to any “structuralism”; —to speak of interpretation without reference to an original subject; —to connect up analyses of systems of signs with the analysis of forms of violence and domination; —to think knowledge as an historical process before any problematic of the truth, and more fundamentally than in the subject-object relation.4 In what follows, I  will argue that this comment amounts to an acknowledgment that the analysis of Nietzsche’s account of knowledge made it possible for Foucault—to paraphrase the subtitle of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo—to become what he is. The first three of these possibilities opened up by Nietzsche’s analysis of knowledge, I will argue, are at work in Foucault’s critique of Kant in both his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology and The Order of Things, the two works that show Foucault speaking of signs and interpretation without reference to phenomenology, structuralism, or an originating subject. The fourth possibility will be shown to be a guiding theme in Foucault’s analysis of discipline and the construction of the modern subject in Discipline and Punish. And the fifth possibility, I will suggest, is not only a guiding theme of the entire lecture course on “The Will to Know” but, more significantly, is a guiding theme in each of Foucault’s works, from History of Madness through the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality. While Foucault is often read as sympathetic with if not an active advocate of the structuralist rhetoric of the “death of the subject,” a more careful reading shows him to be thinking less about the subject’s death and more about the question of how the modern subject has been constructed. That is to say, a distinction must be drawn between the “end of man” and the “death of the subject.”

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It may well be the case that Foucault’s early work, most notably The Order of Things, engages in thinking the end of man, as we can see, for example, in the closing pages of The Order of Things when he draws this conclusion concerning Nietzsche: Rather than the death of God—or, rather, in the wake of that death and in profound correlation with it—what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man’s face in laughter, and the return of masks; it is the scattering of the profound stream of time by which he felt himself carried along and whose pressure he suspected in the very being of things; it is the identity of the Return of the Same with the absolute dispersion of man.5

There is no question that the subject named “man” in philosophical discourse, from Descartes’ Archimedean cogito to Kant’s autonomous rational moral self, is a concept toward which Foucault has little sympathy. But what Foucault names by “man” is not what he means by “subject.” Even in the 1960s, in the essay “What Is an Author?,” which is often regarded as one of his most structuralist, antihumanist works, Foucault’s challenge to the existential-phenomenological subject’s epistemic and discursive privileging is not conjoined with an attempt to eliminate the subject entirely. Instead, Foucault analyzes the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse and power. And what this means, he writes, is that the old question, so important to the phenomenologists and existentialists, “How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning?” should be replaced with more complex and less individualistic questions like “How, under what conditions and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?”6 When pressed on this point by sociologist Lucien Goldmann in the discussion that followed his initial presentation of “What Is an Author?” to the Société Française de Philosophie in February 1969, Foucault responded: I have not made an analysis of the subject here, I made an analysis of the author. If I had delivered a lecture on the subject, I would probably have analyzed it in the same way as a subject-function, that is, made the analysis of the conditions under which it is possible that an individual fulfills the function of the subject. It would still be necessary to specify in which field the subject is a subject, and of what (of speech, of desire, of economic process, etc.). There is no absolute subject.7

What this means, and what has been misunderstood by many of Foucault’s critics, is that his so-called antihumanism was not a rejection of the human or the

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subject per se; it was instead an assault on the philosophically modern idea that sought to remove man from the natural world and to place him in a position of epistemic, metaphysical, and moral privilege that earlier thought had set aside for God. This explains why Foucault ends The Order of Things by associating the “death of God” with the “end of man,” as the citation above suggests. It was also, perhaps, a way to indicate where Foucault stood in the debate taking place at the time over the place of the subject among the authors associated with the journal Cahiers de l’Analyse. As Peter Hallward has noted, although this journal was the creation of students of Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure, most of these students ended up siding with Jacques Lacan’s attempt to reconfigure the notion of the subject insofar as Lacan claimed that some “notion of the subject is indispensable,”8 rather than with Althusser’s attempt to eliminate the subject as the product of ideology.9 Thinking about where the subject comes from, and how it functions, is perhaps the unifying feature of Foucault’s thought, underlying the transitions between his archaeological, genealogical, and ethical periods. Foucault himself seemed to realize this by the end of his career, as his attention turned specifically to sexuality and the construction of the ethical subject, when he noted that the question of assujettissement or subjectivation—the transformation of human beings into subjects of knowledge, subjects of power, and subjects to themselves—had been “the general theme of [his] research.”10 This is reflected as well in the titles Foucault gave to two of his late courses at the Collège de France: “Subjectivity and Truth” (1980–81) and “The Hermeneutic of the Subject” (1981–2). And in a late interview, when asked about the structure of his “genealogy project,” Foucault responded by describing what he conceives as the three domains of genealogy: First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.11

His work is less an antihumanism than an attempt to think humanism and the subject after the end of (modern) man. Far from being a thinker of the “death of the subject,” Foucault simply refuses to accept the subject as given, as the foundation for ethical or rational thinking. The subject is, instead, something that has been historically created, and Foucault’s work, in its entirety, is engaged in analyzing the various ways that human beings are transformed into subjects, whether subjects of knowledge, of power, of sexuality, or of ethics.12

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While Foucault had a tendency to read his current research interests into his earlier work,13 there can be little question that he was consistently engaged with rethinking the question of the subject, and this interest in the subject reveals the central place occupied by Nietzsche in his thinking.14 Foucault first read Nietzsche in 1953, having been led to him by his reading of Bataille, and as he would remark later, “curious as it may seem,” he read Nietzsche “from a perspective of inquiry into the history of knowledge—the history of reason.”15 It was, in other words, not his interrogation of power but his effort to “elaborate a history of rationality,” which he claimed was “the problem of the nineteenth century,” that first led him to Nietzsche.16 Reading Nietzsche became, for Foucault, the point of rupture (la fracture) that made possible one of the decisive events that mark the emergence of poststructuralist philosophy insofar as Nietzsche showed the way beyond the phenomenological, transhistorical subject. Nietzsche showed, in Foucault’s words, that “There is a history of the subject just as there is a history of reason.” At the same time, Nietzsche also demonstrated to Foucault that “we can never demand that the history of reason unfold as a first and founding act of the rationalist subject.”17 It is Nietzsche’s disclosure of the history of the subject, the history of reason, and the interrelations of these two histories that reveal themselves in the history of the will to know that dominate Foucault’s early, archaeological works, works that Foucault himself acknowledged owe “more to Nietzschean genealogy than to structuralism properly so called.”18 To understand what these works owe to Nietzsche, we need only look at the way Foucault deploys Nietzsche first in his thèse complémentaire, “Introduction à l’Anthropologie de Kant,” and again when he returns to many of the same themes in The Order of Things. In his thèse, which accompanied his translation into French of Kant’s Anthropologie, Foucault provides an account of the place of Kant’s Anthropology in relation to the three Critiques as well as the Opus Postumum. The key to this relation is articulated in Kant’s Logic, where the three questions that guide the Critical Philosophy— “What can I know?” “What should I do?” “What may I hope for?”—now appear along with a fourth: “Was ist der Mensch?” (“What Is Man?”). This fourth question, Foucault tells us, “gathers [the first three] together in a single frame of reference,”19 which is to say that the answer to the questions of metaphysics, morality, and religion are, for Kant, ultimately to be found in anthropology. According to Foucault, Kant thereby sets the agenda for all subsequent philosophy insofar as the entire problematic of post-Kantian philosophy can be located in the interrogation of human finitude, which Foucault understands in terms of Kant positioning man as synthesis of God and world. Such an

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understanding explains Nietzsche’s surprising appearance in an “Introduction” to Kant’s Anthropology insofar as Nietzsche also positions a being—but a being other than “man”—as the synthesis this time not of God and world but of values and Earth. Foucault thus closes his “Introduction à l’Anthropologie de Kant” with the following sentence: “The trajectory of the question Was ist der Mensch? in the field of philosophy reaches its end in the response which both challenges and disarms it: der Übermensch.”20 Working out this trajectory of the question “What is man?” is the central theme of The Order of Things, a text in which Nietzsche figures prominently. In the first place, Nietzsche is credited with initiating the attempt—“to which,” Foucault writes, “contemporary thought is dedicated”—to go beyond “man”: Perhaps we should see the first attempt at this uprooting of Anthropology . . . in the Nietzschean experience: by means of a philological critique, by means of a certain form of biologism, Nietzsche rediscovered the point at which man and God belong to one another, at which the death of the second is synonymous with the disappearance of the first, and at which the promise of the superhuman signifies first and foremost the imminence of the death of man.21

As already noted above, “man” here should not be equated with the concept “subject”; instead, “man” here functions as a technical term for a certain conceptual determination of human being, one that names that “strange empiricotranscendental doublet,” the analysis of which takes place at the transcendental levels of the biological and historico-cultural conditions which make empirical knowledge possible. “Man” thus names that conceptual foundation which serves to center the increasingly disorganized representations of the classical epistēmē and that, as such, comes to be the privileged object of philosophical anthropology.22 While this foundational concept has been privileged in the discourse of the human sciences since Kant, it is not the subject but only one historical construction of the concept “subject,” a construction the beginning of whose end Foucault locates in the announcement of the Übermensch which, insofar as it functions in Nietzsche’s texts as the other to both man and God, heralds both of their ends.23 Nietzsche’s waking us from Kant’s anthropological slumber is tied to Foucault’s broader view of Nietzsche in The Order of Things as the precursor of the epistēmē of the twentieth century, the epistēmē that erupted with the question of language as “an enigmatic multiplicity that must be mastered.”24 For Foucault, it was “Nietzsche the philologist” who first connected “the philosophical task with a radical reflection upon language”25; it was Nietzsche, in the

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words of the McGill lecture, who showed us how to speak of signs without reference to either phenomenology or structuralism and how to engage in “interpretation without reference to an original subject.”26 It was Nietzsche, in other words, who showed how we could interpret a culture’s morality by analyzing the etymology and evolution of its moral terminology (e.g., in the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality). And it was Nietzsche who suggested that we examine a language’s rules of grammar in order to discover the source of its speakers’ metaphysics. It is language itself, and not the subject “Descartes,” that provides the evidence that a verb—thinking—requires a subject—a thinker— and it is a prejudice of language that leads to the metaphysical error of adding a doer to the deed (see, for example, Beyond Good and Evil [17], and On the Genealogy of Morality [I, 13]). This deflated subject makes it possible for Foucault to connect, as his fourth point in the McGill lecture noted, “analyses of systems of signs with the analysis of forms of violence and domination”; more to point, it is the account of the subject that appears in On the Genealogy of Morality that inspires Foucault’s two great genealogical works, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume One. Nietzsche’s analysis in On the Genealogy of Morality (Essay I, 13) focuses not on the valorization of origins (Ursprung) but on a critical analysis of the conditions of the subject’s emergence (Entstehung) and descent (Herkunft). Pursuing this genealogy, Nietzsche locates the subject not as a metaphysical given but as a historical construct whose conditions of emergence are far from innocent. In the Genealogy’s First Essay, the “subject” is shown to be a superfluous postulation of a “ ‘being’ behind doing,” a “doer” fictionally added to the deed. But while Nietzsche had already drawn a metaphysical conclusion from this point in Beyond Good and Evil (17), in the Genealogy, Nietzsche goes on to make a moral, if not political argument that the belief in this postulate of a fixed subject is exploited by slave morality not only to convince the strong that they are free to be weak—and therefore are accountable for their failure to be weak. In addition, it convinces the weak that they are, in reality, strong and should therefore take pride in having freely chosen to be weak by having chosen to refrain from acting. Nietzsche writes that “the subject (or, to speak in more popular terms, the soul) . . . enabled the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, to interpret weakness itself as freedom, and their being thus-and-such as a merit.”27 For this reason, Nietzsche directs his genealogical gaze to the life-negating uses made of the principle of subjectivity in the service of a “hangman’s metaphysics” that invented the concept of the responsible subject in order to hold it accountable and judge it guilty (see Twilight of the Idols VI, 7).

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What stands at the foundation of this hangman’s metaphysics, as Nietzsche’s argument in On the Genealogy of Morality makes clear, is that the substantive doer behind the deeds is the subject—the soul—whose fixed identity cannot be escaped. What must be noted here, and what Foucault will develop, is that from Nietzsche’s perspective, any fixed notion of identity, whether national, racial, ethnic, or gender identity, is problematic not only when imposed by those who view the recipient of the identification as other. From this Nietzschean perspective, the prison of identity is no less oppressive when it is self-imposed by those who participate in the identification. And, as we will soon see, from Foucault’s account of the regime of discipline, this very distinction between identity as a self-imposition or as an imposition by another becomes far more difficult to maintain. It is this Nietzschean account of the subject that inspires Foucault to link the modern form of power with subjects and subjection: It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.28

Foucault’s task in Discipline and Punish, his most Nietzschean text, is to draw attention to the mechanisms of discipline that emerged with the birth of the prison, mechanisms that at the same time construct the modern subject.29 To accomplish this task, Foucault charts the transformation from punishment as a public spectacle in which the force of the sovereign is imposed on the body of the criminal in a way that both exacts a measure of compensation to the state and also serves as a lesson to the public, to punishment as a political tactic that seeks to change behavior. To do so charts the transformation from punishment as imposed upon a body to punishment as a technique that works through the mediation of the soul to subject and train the body.30 Reversing the traditional understanding of the relationship between body and soul, Foucault claims that “the soul is the prison of the body,”31 and so to tell the story of the birth of the prison will be at the same time to provide “a genealogy of the modern ‘soul’ ”32 not as an illusion or product of ideology but born out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint. This noncorporal soul is not a substance, but it is also, like the soul of Christian theology, not merely a fiction. Just as Nietzsche had argued, in On the Genealogy of Morality, that the Christian soul, while a constructed fiction, could and did have very real effects, Foucault claims that the modern soul is “real” insofar as “it is the element in which are articulated the

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effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power.”33 What is important to note here, and what brings us back to the lectures on “The Will to Know,” is the intimate link between power and knowledge. As Foucault ominously notes, this constructed soul/subject is an “effect and instrument of a political anatomy” that inhabits the object which the human sciences seek to know—modern man—and who is “already in himself the effect of a subjection [assujettissement] much more profound than himself.”34 The link between power and the will to know that runs through Discipline and Punish is a major focus of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1972–3 on The Punitive Society. There, for example, when talking about the prison form, Foucault argues that it is both an architectural form and a social form: “the prison as social form, that is to say as form according to which power is exercised within a society—the way in which power extracts the knowledge it needs in order to be exercised and the form in which, on the basis of this knowledge, it distributes orders, prescriptions.”35 And, lest there be any doubt regarding the Nietzschean inspiration behind linking this will to know with the exercise of power, Foucault makes clear this thoroughly Nietzschean genealogy in his lectures the following May at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro titled “Truth and Juridical Forms.” There Foucault closes the second of five lectures by noting that with Plato “began a great Western myth: that there is an antinomy between knowledge and power. If there is knowledge, it must renounce power.” He continues: This great myth needs to be dispelled. It is this myth which Nietzsche began to demolish by showing in the numerous texts already cited, that, behind all knowledge [savoir], behind all attainment of knowledge [connaissance], what is involved is a struggle for power. Political power is not absent from knowledge, it is woven together with it.36

Foucault’s second lecture in Rio was devoted to a reading, deeply informed by the recently published Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, of Sophocles’ Oedipus as “representative and in a sense the founding instance of a definite type of relation between power and knowledge [savoir], between political power and knowledge [connaissance], from which our civilization is not yet emancipated.”37 The first lecture, on the other hand, was devoted almost entirely to Nietzsche, who Foucault argues provides a new “history of truth” that challenges the classical philosophical “history of truth as it is constructed on the basis of the history

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of the sciences,” in which the truth is there waiting to be discovered.38 The key to Nietzsche’s alternative history of truth Foucault locates in his use of the word “invention,” “Erfindung,” which Nietzsche always uses, according to Foucault, “with a polemical meaning and intention.”39 Invention is Nietzsche’s polemical alternative to “origin,” “Ursprung,” insofar as invention places knowledge and truth in the realm of the creation of the new rather than the discovery of what was already there. The focus on invention sets the stage, according to Foucault, for Nietzsche’s “important double break with the tradition of Western philosophy.”40 The first break involves the utter heterogeneity between knowledge and the objects of knowledge. Nietzsche casts doubt on the philosophical assurance between our knowledge of the world and the things in the world that we presume to know. This is one of the consequences of the death of God insofar as God served, as we see clearly in Descartes’s affirmation of the existence of God, as the grounds for this assurance insofar as God would not allow us to be so entirely deceived. And as Nietzsche suggests in The Gay Science, it is time now to get rid of the shadows of God and acknowledge that “The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.”41 The second break, which we already saw Foucault noting in The Order of Things, is that along with God, Nietzsche announces the disappearance of “the subject in its unity and its sovereignty.”42 While one might assume that positioning knowledge as an act of creation would support the idea of a sovereign subject of knowledge, for Nietzsche it does in fact the opposite insofar as the subject’s invention of knowledge is not the consequence of sovereign acts of will but instead the consequence of instincts and perspectives. When Nietzsche speaks of the perspectival character of knowledge, he is pointing to the fact that there is knowledge only in the form of a certain number of actions that are different from one another and multifarious in their essence— actions by which the human being violently takes hold of a certain number of things, reacts to a certain number of situations, and subjects them to relations of force. The perspectival character of knowledge derives not from human nature but always from the polemical and strategic character of knowledge. One can speak of the perspectival character of knowledge because there is a battle, and knowledge is the result of this battle.43

Knowledge and truth are thus the results of strategy, of strategic invention that takes place “on the basis of the relations of force and the political relations in society.”44 This is to say, for Foucault, as for Nietzsche, the will to know is instrumental: we

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are motivated by the will to know insofar as knowledge is to be put in the service of power.45 And here we see Foucault developing the fifth point referred to in the opening citation: to think knowledge as a historical process. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, Foucault argues, the criminal is transformed from a body to be tortured into an object to be known. Where the judicial system of the eighteenth century had no interest in knowing what motivated a criminal to commit a crime, a half-century later the law sought to judge not only the crime but the criminal’s soul, which is to say that the judicial process now sought to discover not only what he did but why did he do it? And to do so required the construction of the modern subject as an object to be studied and known, which is why Discipline and Punish is not only a “history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge” but also “a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex form from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications, and rules.”46 The name Foucault gives to this complex form is “discipline,” and through an analysis of disciplinary practices, Foucault seeks to show “in what way a specific mode of subjection [assujettissement] was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status,”47 while at the same time allowing the study of the history of systems of punishment to proceed as a “ ‘political economy’ of the body” which treats the body as “directly involved in a political field [insofar as] power relations have an immediate hold on it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, emit signs.”48 This political investment is intimately bound up with the body’s economic utility: the body becomes a useful force only if it is a productive body. But productivity alone is insufficient for economic utility, as the body must be both productive and subjected. Contrary to the simplistic Marxian account, subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence and ideology; there is, rather, a complex “micro-physics of power” that works to discipline the body physically, but more subtly than with brute violence.49 And so we return to the prison, whose task is discipline and whose power works both negatively (correction) and positively (making more useful). It is because Foucault is constantly attentive to the effects of Nietzsche’s will to know creating knowledge in service to power that Discipline and Punish returns constantly to the relations between knowledge and power and thoroughly repudiates the traditional philosophical assumption that knowledge exists independent of the corrupting effects of power and its interests. “Power,” says Foucault, “produces knowledge . . . power and knowledge directly imply one another,” and where there is one, there will be the other.50 Because power and knowledge directly implicate one another, power–knowledge relations,

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Foucault’s central thesis is that the birth of the prison was accompanied by the emergence of discipline as a new technology of power that seeks to create a body that is both useful and intelligible, manipulable and analyzable.52 Which is to say, disciplinary power works to produce bodies that are docile, “that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.”53 Such bodies would, of course, be beneficial to the ever-expanding forces of capitalist production, but that in itself is not Foucault’s focus. Instead, he turns to the ways that “discipline ‘makes’ individuals,” namely by means of hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination.54 Through various procedures that compare, that rank, that hierarchize, that judge, that select or exclude, that, in all senses of the word, examine, the modern individual acts less as a subject required to obey the law and more as one who is required to conform to the norm. The norm, and the range of normality that surrounds it, are enforced first and foremost through the functioning of various examinations that operate within the school, the military, the hospital, or the factory. Normalization both homogenizes and individualizes by establishing an ideal and, through ongoing examination, marking departures from the idealized norm and thereby introducing, “as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences.”55 This individualization, Foucault shows, will be documented—whether in the medical case study, the military, school, or prison record—and the various techniques of documentation that accompany the processes of examination play a major role in making the individual into a “case.”56 What Foucault concludes from his analysis of the normalizing function played by the mechanisms of discipline in the construction of the modern individual is that in addition to the negative terms with which power has been traditionally described (exclusion, repression, censorship, etc.), we must also acknowledge the productivity of power: “it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.”57 That is to say, the modern individual is what

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he or she is by virtue of its comparison with, conformity to, and differentiation from the norm, and it is this individual’s individuality itself that is produced and known through the disciplinary power that examines and judges it. It is therefore not surprising, Foucault concludes, “that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.”58 Together these disciplinary machines deploy the techniques of a power–knowledge regime that produce and distribute individuals around a norm, all the while making sure that departures from this norm are identified in order to be corrected. What began as a model for incarceration ends as a power–knowledge regime that Foucault calls the carceral system, a disciplinary society that is governed no longer by laws but by norms. We have become a society of judges, and, Foucault writes, “The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social-worker’judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.”59 The panoptic functioning of this new power to judge has given rise to the extension of the examination from specialized institutions (the school, the hospital) to the whole of society. By means of constant and omnipresent examination, the disciplinary power of the carceral system required the involvement of definite relations of knowledge in relations of power; it called for a technique of overlapping subjectivation [assujettissement] and objectification; it brought with it new procedures of individualization. The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation.60

While most discussions of Discipline and Punish draw attention to the exercises of power operating within a disciplinary, carceral society, Foucault’s constant return to the new forms of knowledge made possible within this society makes it clear that, as indicated in the fifth point mentioned in the McGill lecture, his genealogy of the modern subject is equally committed to demonstrating both that knowledge is a historical process and that the mobilization of the will to know always operates in the service of power. It also makes clear, again returning to this fifth point, that knowledge appears prior to the truth and may appear even if there is no truth. Which is to say that Foucault follows Nietzsche’s separating knowledge from truth and in fact deflating the truth. For Nietzsche,

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questions of value are not questions of truth, which is to say that values are created and chosen not because they are true but because they enhance life. That is why different kinds of life—what Nietzsche would regard as different human types—need and affirm different kinds of value. The same is, of course, true of norms: they are determined not because they are true but because they allow certain judgments to be made. And Foucault makes clear that we can have knowledge of the norms and can make judgments as to how near or far an individual approximates the norm without ever raising the question of truth. The justification for emphasizing the production of knowledge in Discipline and Punish as prior to, and in fact constitutive of the production of truth, which is displayed just as clearly in Foucault’s next book, the first volume of The History of Sexuality (whose French subtitle, to say it again, was in fact La Volonté de Savoir/The Will to Know) brings us back to Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know. As Daniel Defert, the editor of this volume of Foucault’s lectures, has noted, what these lectures reveal is that when Foucault provides what appear to be a series of lectures devoted almost entirely to Greek history, what he is in fact presenting is a “total new approach of philosophy. [The] question of truth [is] not an epistemological question but a deeply political question, which we can interpret if we depart from justice and not from science.”61 That is to say, what Foucault’s first lecture course reveals in recounting the history of the Greek judicial tribunal is the production of the truth of justice. And, as is made clear in both the first and last sessions of the first lecture course, this reveals the “usefulness” of the Nietzschean model rather than the Aristotelian model. Where the Aristotelian model of the will to know, which is to say the model that has dominated classical philosophy, presumes that truth preexists knowledge and the “will to know (savoir) is nothing other than curiosity,” the Nietzschean model is something entirely different. The Nietzschean model, moreover, claims that the Will to know is not originally linked to the Truth: it claims that the Will to know composes illusions, fabricates lies, accumulates errors, and is deployed in a space of fiction where the truth itself is only an effect. It claims, furthermore, that the Will to know is not given in the form of subjectivity and that the subject is only a kind of product of the Will to know, in the double game of the Will to power and to truth. Finally, for Nietzsche, the Will to know does not assume the preexistence of a knowledge already there; truth is not given in advance; it is produced as an event.62

By way of conclusion, let me simply note that this “Nietzschean model,” for anyone who cares to look, is operating in all of Foucault’s works, which together

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disclose a series of events, each motivated by a historically specific will to know, that involve the production of the truth of madness, the truth of illness, the truths of the human sciences, of the criminal, of the sexual subject, and, in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, of the self.63

Notes 1 Readers will recognize that this title reappears in 1976 as the subtitle of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Where the English translation was published with the title The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, the French text appeared with the title Histoire de la sexualité 1. La Volonté de Savoir. Insofar as Foucault’s entire intellectual trajectory can be viewed as an examination of this “will to knowledge,” this “volonté de savoir,” the erasure of the subtitle of his 1976 text is particularly unfortunate. 2 Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, ed. Daniel Defert, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 1. 3 Ibid., p. 28n. 4 Ibid., pp. 213–14. 5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books 1970), p. 385. 6 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: New Press, 2003), p. 390. 7 Michel Foucault, discussion following presentation of “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (“What Is an Author?”), in Dits et Écrits, Tome 1: 1954–69, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 818. Interestingly, Jacques Derrida made a very similar response to a similar question posed to him following his presentation of “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966 on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structural Controversy.” When pressed by the existentialistleaning literary critic Serge Doubrovsky about the “death of the subject,” Derrida replied: “The subject is absolutely indispensable. I don’t destroy the subject; I situate it. I believe that at a certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific discourse, one cannot get along without the notion of the subject. It is a question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions.” Jacques Derrida, from the discussion following “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” trans. Richard Macksey, in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p. 271.

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8 Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 429. 9 See Peter Hallward’s Introduction to Concept and Form, Volume One: Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 29–44. Foucault’s work was well known to those associated with the Cahiers, many of whom were also members of the Cercle d’Épistémologie (Epistemology Circle), and issues of the Cahiers bore the subtitle “Travaux du Cercle d’Épistémologie de l’École Normale Supérieure.” In 1968, issue 9 of the Cahiers—“Genealogy of the Sciences”—published Foucault’s response to questions posed to him by members of the Cercle d’Épistémologie; see “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle,” in The Essential Foucault, pp. 392–422. 10 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in The Essential Foucault, p. 127. 11 Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in The Essential Foucault, p. 110. 12 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” pp. 126–7. 13 Cf. “When I think back now, I ask myself what else I was talking about, in Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic, but power,” Foucault, “Truth and Power,” p. 115; cf. also the following: “If I wanted to pose and drape myself in a slightly fictional style, I would say that this has always been my problem: the effects of power and the production of ‘truth,’ ” Michel Foucault, “Power and Sex,” trans. David J. Parent, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 119. 14 This and the following few paragraphs are drawn from my essay on Nietzsche in The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, ed. Leonard Lawlor and John Nale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 662–8. 15 Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” in The Essential Foucault, p. 84 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Michel Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” trans. Robert Hurley, in The Essential Works of Foucault. 1954–1984. Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), p. 294. 19 Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs (New York: Semiotext[e], 2008), p. 74. 20 Ibid., p. 124. 21 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 342. Translation altered. 22 Ibid., pp. 312–13. 23 See Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, p. 124.

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24 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 305. 25 Ibid. 26 It should be recalled here that Foucault’s first published work on Nietzsche, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” his contribution to the conference on Nietzsche at Royaumont in 1964, concentrated on the “techniques of interpretation” that he finds in Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Here Foucault notes that they each reject the semiological focus on the sign, emphasizing instead the infinite task of interpretation. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in Nietzsche: Cahiers du Royaumont (Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1964), pp. 183–92; English translation by Alan D. Schrift in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Gayle L. Ormiston (Albany : SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 59–67. 27 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 46. 28 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 130. 29 Some of the following few paragraphs are drawn from my essay on Discipline and Punish, published in A Companion to Foucault, ed. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), pp. 137–53. 30 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 23. 31 Ibid., p. 30. 32 Ibid., p. 29. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 30. 35 Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–73, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 227. 36 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” trans. Robert Hurley, in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1988. Vol. 3: Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 32. Nietzsche’s texts cited or referred to by Foucault are “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (the initial epigraph above), The Gay Science §§109, 333, 353, On the Genealogy of Morality I 14, III 12, and a passage from the French edition of La Volonté de puissance, which is found in Kritische Studienausgabe 13, 14[122]/The Will to Power §625. 37 Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 17. 38 Ibid., p. 4. 39 Ibid., p. 6. 40 Ibid., p. 9. 41 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 168. 42 Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 10.

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43 Ibid., p. 14. 44 Ibid., p. 15. 45 This point is highlighted by James Faubion in his contribution to the first seminar on Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, “Foucault 13/13,” organized by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, held during the 2015–16 academic year. Faubion was one of the invited speakers at the session on Lessons on the Will to Know (1970–1971), held Monday, September 14, 2015. Videos of the seminars can be viewed at http://web.law.columbia.edu/foucault1313/multimedia (accessed February 26, 2016); Faubion’s comments on this point come around the fortyeighth minute of the recording of the seminar on The Will to Know. 46 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 23. 47 Ibid., p. 24. 48 Ibid., p. 25. 49 Ibid., p. 26. It should be noted that Foucault concluded his first lecture in Rio by contrasting his account of Nietzsche on the politics of truth with “a certain academic conception of Marxism” that focused on the “cumbersome notion of ideology.” Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” p. 15. 50 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 25. 51 Ibid., pp. 27–8. 52 Ibid., p. 136. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., p. 170. 55 Ibid., p. 184. 56 Ibid., pp. 189 and 191. 57 Ibid., p. 194. 58 Ibid., p. 228. 59 Ibid., p. 304. 60 Ibid., p. 305. 61 Daniel Defert, “Seminar with Daniel Defert: ‘Reflections on Foucault’s Will to Know,’ ” which took place at the University of Chicago, April 30, 2013. https:// vimeo.com/65643362 (accessed March 5, 2016). 62 Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, pp. 197–8. 63 Before concluding, I want to raise a final topic related to what Foucault is doing in his first lecture course on the will to know that would require a significant amount of space to address in detail, namely, the indirect dialogue—his name is never mentioned—that Foucault engages in with Heidegger in these lectures. Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche, first published in German in 1961, were translated into French by Pierre Klossowski, a friend of Foucault’s, in 1971, and it is entirely possible that Foucault had access to Klossowski’s translation prior to its publication.

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But Foucault was, by 1970–71, familiar with Heidegger’s writings on Nietzsche that had been published already. Daniel Defert, in his essay on the context of Foucault’s lecture course, suggests that Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, a book that Foucault appreciated enormously, was his attempt to surreptitiously rewrite Being and Time “on the basis of Nietzschean ontology.” Defert in Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, p. 270. Defert also suggests that Foucault is responding to Heidegger’s Nietzsche in his lecture course. In The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, Heidegger writes: “In the question of what knowledge is, we are basically asking about truth and its essence . . . Here, what is true means what is . . . The question about the essence of knowledge, as the question about what is true and truth, is a question about beings.” Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Frank A. Capuzzi, and David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 24. A more different understanding than Foucault’s of Nietzsche’s views on truth and knowledge than the one offered here by Heidegger is hard to imagine. But developing that argument in detail is a project for another time.

Bibliography Defert, Daniel. “Seminar with Daniel Defert: ‘Reflections on Foucault’s Will to Know.’ ” https://vimeo.com/65643362 (accessed March 5, 2016). Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Translated by Richard Macksey, In The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, 247–65. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. Falzon, Christopher, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki, eds. A Companion to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell, 2013. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Foucault, Michel. Dits et Écrits, Tome 1: 1954–1969, edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Foucault, Michel. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, translated by Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008. Foucault, Michel. Lectures on the Will to Know, edited by Daniel Defert, translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” In Nietzsche: Cahiers du Royaumont. Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1964. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” Translated by Alan D. Schrift. In Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, edited by Alan D. Schrift and Gayle L. Ormiston, 59–67. Albany : SUNY Press, 1990.

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Foucault, Michel. “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle.” In The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, 392–422. New York: New Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “On the Genealogy of Ethics.” In The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, 102–25. New York: New Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “On the Ways of Writing History.” Translated by Robert Hurley. In The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, 279–95. New York: New Press, 1998. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Foucault, Michel. “Power and Sex.” Translated by David J. Parent. In Politics, Philosophy, Culture, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, 110–24. New York: Routledge, 1988. Foucault, Michel. The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–73, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Foucault, Michel. “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.” In The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, 80–101. New York: New Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” In The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, 126–44. New York: New Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Juridical Forms.” Translated by Robert Hurley. In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1988, Vol. 3: Power, edited by James D. Faubion, 1–89. New York: New Press, 2000. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” In The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, 300–18. New York: New Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, 377–91. New York: New Press, 2003. Hallward, Peter, and Knox Peden, eds. Concept and Form, Volume One: Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. London: Verso, 2012. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: Volume 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, translated by Joan Stambaugh, Frank A. Capuzzi, and David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. Lawlor, Leonard, and John Nale, eds. The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.

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“We Are Experiments” Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Passion of Knowledge Keith Ansell-Pearson

The passion for knowledge can come to a tragic end: are you scared? As much as with any passion!—Usually, however, you scholars are without passion, instead you have got accustomed to your boredom!1 We may experiment with ourselves! Indeed, humanity can do so with itself! The greatest sacrifices to knowledge have not yet been made.2

Introduction In a note from the end of 1880, Nietzsche writes that without the passions the world is reduced to being simply “quantity and line and law and nonsense,” presenting us with “the most repulsive and presumptuous paradox.”3 By the time of Dawn (1881) the pursuit of knowledge has become a passion for him, if not the overriding one. For Marco Brusotti this new emphasis represents a far-reaching break with the ideal of moderation and repose of soul espoused in Human, All Too Human: “The concept of the ‘passion of knowledge’ . . . marks a clear turn in his interpretation of the free spirit. Dawn is the book in which this turn takes place.”4 Although this may exaggerate the difference between the texts, according to Paul Franco in a recent appreciation of the texts of the middle period—is not the free spirit in Dawn characterized by detachment, moderation, and mildness?—it does indicate an important change in Nietzsche’s outlook.5 He is surely right when he notes that while references to the moderating effect of knowledge are still to be found in Dawn, what catches our attention most is this appeal to the passion of knowledge. As he eloquently puts it: “There is nothing utilitarian or bourgeois about the quest for knowledge for Nietzsche, and this gives his appropriation of the Enlightenment its peculiar, one might say romantic quality.

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He celebrates an Enlightenment that has been deepened by the experience of Tristan and Isolde.”6 Knowledge is not simply an idle activity for Nietzsche but something to be pursued as a “passion” and requiring a cheerfulness or serenity in the face of its highs and lows, its ecstasies and disappointments. As he will express it in The Gay Science, life itself is to be treated as “an experiment of the seeker for knowledge,” and not as a duty, a calamity, or a piece of trickery.7 Knowledge for some can be a diversion or a form of leisure, but for the passionate seeker it offers “a world of dangers and victories,” one in which “heroic feelings” can find places to dance and play. With the principle of “life as a means to knowledge” lodged in one’s heart, it is possible to live both boldly and gaily, and to laugh gaily too: “who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?”8 Nietzsche regards the drive for knowledge as young and raw, and compared to the older and more richly developed drives, it is ugly and offensive (which all drives have been at some point in their development). However, he confides that he wishes to treat it as a passion, “as something with which the individual soul can work side by side, so that it can look back on the world in a helpful and conciliatory fashion: in the meantime, we need a non-ascetic renunciation of the world again!”9 Nietzsche places the passion of knowledge in the service of a philosophical project that aims at disabusing humanity of its consoling fictions—for example, concerning the uniqueness of its origins and destiny—and encouraging it to pursue new truths and a new kind of philosophical wisdom. Through new and refined practices of observation and self-observation, we—as human beings largely unknown to ourselves—can become our own experiments. We are to become strangers to our ordinary and habitual selves, viewing ourselves afresh as experiments of living and feeling and of knowledge. For Nietzsche “the human being” is a bloodless fiction, and “society” is a general concept.10 As Foucault puts it in his reflections on the passion of knowledge, the critical task is to break with accustomed habits of knowing and perceiving, so that one has the chance to become something different than what one’s history has conditioned one to be, to think and perceive differently. For Foucault this gives us, in fact, a definition of philosophical activity today, which consists in the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself. Instead of legitimating what is already known, the task is to think differently, and this is an essential part of philosophical activity conceived as an askēsis.11 Foucault ultimately places this ascesis in the service of a care of self. There is not space here for me to show that this is also at work in Nietzsche, including in Dawn. Instead I shall focus on the theme of experimentation and Nietzsche’s

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conception of philosophy, especially his concern with the character of knowledge and what is involved in its practice as a passion. We shall see in the final section of the essay how some key aspects of this project of knowledge have inspired Foucault.

The passion of knowledge Throughout his corpus Nietzsche presents his readers with various riddles of knowledge, such as the well-known opening to the Genealogy of Morality: we are knowers who are unknown to ourselves. Is the passion of knowledge also a riddle? That Nietzsche appears to be dealing with a riddle is evident from the following note: The passion for knowledge sees itself as the purpose of existence—if it denies purposes, it sees itself as the most valuable result of all accidents. Will it deny the value? It cannot claim to be the highest pleasure? But to search for that? To design the being most capable of pleasure, as means and task of this passion? To heighten the senses and the pride, and the thirst, etc.12

In this deeply enigmatic passage Nietzsche acknowledges that although the passion of knowledge refutes the doctrine that existence has a purpose, it comes to see itself as the end of existence and identifies value in this in spite of it being a total accident in evolution. If this is the case, then it follows that a most difficult task presents itself, namely, how to bring into existence the being that is “most capable of pleasure” with respect to this new passion and as both means and task. Is this not the very project of Nietzsche’s free-spirit middle period outlined in essence? In 1881 Nietzsche makes an important discovery: he has a precursor! He is not to feel completely isolated and alone in his great task as a teacher of humanity. This precursor is, of course, Spinoza. Indeed, a Spinozist inspiration hovers over the first sketch of the eternal recurrence of the same drafted in the summer of 1881 and which, like The Ethics, is a plan for a book in five parts, culminating in a meditation on beatitude.13 In a letter to his friend Franz Overbeck postmarked July 30, 1881, on the eve of the experience of the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche enumerates the points of doctrine he shares with Spinoza, such as the denial of free will, of a moral world order, and of evil, and also mentions the task of “making knowledge the most powerful affect” (die Erkenntniß zum mächtigsten Affekt zu machen).14 In a note Nietzsche also writes on Spinoza and

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himself as follows: “Spinoza: We are only determined in our actions by desires and affects. Knowledge must be an affect in order to be a motive. I say: it must be a passion to be a motive.”15 Nietzsche first writes of the passion of knowledge (Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis) in his published writings in Dawn. In aphorism 429 of the text he notes that the drive to knowledge has become so strongly rooted in us that we cannot now want happiness without knowledge. Knowledge has become a deep-rooted passion that shrinks at no sacrifice. Indeed, such is now our passion for knowledge that even the prospect of humanity perishing of this passion does not exert any real influence on us. Edwin Curley has argued that to speak of knowledge as affect (or passion) is probably inexact from Spinoza’s point of view since it is not clear that Spinoza would count knowledge as an affect at all.16 Certainly Spinoza ascribes to knowledge a great power over the things he would count as affects, while recognizing that human power over the affects is limited:  the power of knowledge is not absolute. This raises the question:  why does Nietzsche want knowledge to be practiced as a “passion”? It seems that this passion is an intrinsic part of what it is for Nietzsche to practice the new science he outlines for his reader, “the gay science” in which there is a fusion of the affective and the cognitive. More than this, we can say the “passion” is bound up for Nietzsche with the new sacrifice we moderns are willing to make: “Knowledge has been transformed into a passion in us that does not shrink from any sacrifice and, at bottom, fears nothing but its own extinction.”17 Even the thought that humanity may be destroyed by this passion does not deter us and instead we feel elevated by it:  we attain a new sublime with the sacrifices we are now prepared to make on account of the passion of knowledge.18 Indeed, in Dawn Nietzsche notes that it is human sacrifices that have hitherto exalted (erhoben) and elevated (gehoben) people most. He thus refers to a “self-sacrificing humanity” that would now sacrifice itself to knowledge, especially knowledge of truth, as the sole goal “prodigious enough to be worthy of such a sacrifice” and simply “because for truth no sacrifice is too great.”19 What is the character of Nietzsche’s investment in the passion of knowledge, which is clearly a curious passion? What hopes and expectations did he have with respect to practices of knowledge? One thing can be said for sure:  with his attachment to the passion of knowledge Nietzsche wanted to become a different kind of philosopher to Schopenhauer, one less hemmed in by the fears and frailties of personality and genuinely open to the world and its enigmas. Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche will not cling to the need of metaphysics and the need for a metaphysical “system.” Indeed, Nietzsche deliberately cultivates

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the passion of knowledge contra Schopenhauer whom he regards as superficial in psychological matters: “he neither enjoyed himself much nor suffered much; a thinker should beware of becoming harsh: where would he get his material from then. His passion for knowledge was not great enough for him to suffer on its behalf: he barricaded himself in. His pride, too, was greater than his thirst for knowledge, in revoking, he feared for his reputation.”20 Franco has rightly argued that although Nietzsche rejects Schopenhauer’s ideal of pure, will-less knowing, he is defending the life of knowledge and science, including their contemplative aspects. However, for Nietzsche contemplation “does not mean passive reception but active, passionate experimentation.”21 This is why Nietzsche advises in his middle period the prudent management of the passions: such management is necessary if they are to be employed for the sake of knowledge. Again, Franco puts it well: “knowledge does not involve eliminating the affects or passions— that would be to castrate the intellect—but it does require that one be able to control the affects or passions so that one can deploy them in a productive way.”22 According to Robert Hull, Nietzsche’s love of knowledge is part of “an ongoing therapeutic praxis” designed to work against the seductions of philosophical and epistemological rhetoric, and this resistance may explain “why he also enlists a fresh vocabulary to express himself, one free of the hazardous emotional baggage of traditional philosophy.”23 As part of this search, Nietzsche gives the impression of wishing to reduce all passions with their “raptures and convulsions”24 to their minimum articulation. Nietzsche speaks of their conquest, mastery, and overcoming and at this time he adopts Christ as a model. In an imitation of Christ, for example, he admonishes us not to judge but to be just.25 In The Wanderer and His Shadow he writes of the “spiritually joyful, luminous and honest (aufrichtigen) human being” that has overcome its passions, while in aphorism 37 of the same text he invites his reader to “work honestly (redlich) together” on the task of “transforming the passions (Leidenschaften) of mankind one and all into joys (Freudenschaften).” In The Wanderer and his Shadow Nietzsche makes it clear that he regards the overcoming of the passions as a means and not an end in itself: the aim is to overcome them so as to enter into possession of the most fertile ground. Nietzsche’s primary commitment is to experimentation in which the love of knowledge gives humanity the right to self-experimentation. He invites us to replace the dream of immortality with a new sobriety toward existence, as this aphorism makes clear: “With regard to knowledge (Erkenntniss) the most useful accomplishment is perhaps: that the belief in the immortality of the soul has been abandoned. Now humanity is allowed to wait; now it no longer needs to rush

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headlong into things and choke down half-examined ideas as formerly it was forced to do. For in those days the salvation of poor ‘eternal souls’ depended on the extent of their knowledge acquired during a short lifetime; they had to make a decision overnight—‘knowledge’ took on a dreadful importance.”26 Nietzsche argues that we are now in a new situation with regard to knowledge and as a result we can conquer anew our courage for making mistakes, for experimentation, and for accepting things provisionally. Without the sanction of the old moralities and religions, individuals and entire generations “can now fix their eyes on tasks of a vastness that would to earlier ages have seemed madness.”27 What a strange and curious passion the passion of knowledge is! It operates like an unrequited love, it presents tasks that run ahead of humanity that then has to prove equal to it, and we may perish of it as experiments. In a note from 1880 Nietzsche seems sure that we shall meet our demise with this peculiar passion: Yes, we shall be destroyed by this passion! But that is not an argument against it. Otherwise, death would be an argument against the life of an individual. We must be destroyed, as humans and as humankind! Christianity showed the only way, through extinction and the denial of all coarse drives. Through the renunciation of action, of hatred of loving, we get to that point on the path of passion for knowledge. Contented spectators—until nothing more is to be seen! Despise us for that reason, you who act! We shall take a look at your contempt—: go away from us, from humankind, from thing-ness, from becoming—28

I have noted the affinity Nietzsche experienced with Spinoza. However, as Yirmiyahu Yovel points out, there are important differences between Spinoza and Nietzsche in their conceptions of knowledge. For Spinoza the immediate affective tone of knowledge is joy (a feeling of the enhanced power of life), whereas in Nietzsche the painful nature of knowledge is repeatedly stressed (indeed, Nietzsche measures the worth of a person by how much “truth” they can bear and endure). For Nietzsche, then, knowledge—in the sense of critical enlightenment and disillusionment—is a source of suffering and primarily a temptation to despair, and this means that the gay science, or joyful knowledge, is “a task and goal,” not the “normal outcome.”29 In a revealing note from 1880 Nietzsche writes: People have warbled on to me about the serene happiness of knowledge—but I have not found it, indeed, I despise it, now I know the bliss of unhappiness of knowledge. Am I ever bored? Always anxious, heart throbbing with expectation or disappointment! I bless this misery, it enriches the world thereby! In doing so, I take the slowest of strides and slurp down these bittersweet delicacies.30

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For Nietzsche the pursuit of knowledge must have its hazards and dangers, and this sentiment deeply informs the project of the gay science in which life appears as an experiment for the seeker of knowledge and that rarely, if ever, disappoints. As he expresses it in a note from 1881: “I no longer want any knowledge without danger: let there always be the treacherous sea or the merciless high mountains around the seeker of knowledge.”31 There is a need to relinquish the fictions that humanity consoles itself with and to live free both of the assumptions of metaphysics and the presumptions of morality. Such assumptions include the ideas of permanent substance, of equal things, and of enduring things; the presumptions include the idea that there is a single moral-making morality and that we are originary centers of free willing agency, free to operate without the bounds of fate and circumstance. Michael Ure has shown the extent to which there is a therapeutic dimension to Nietzsche’s philosophical practice at this time and, I would contend, that informs his conception of the passion of knowledge. The basic idea is that we need to give up on the idea of majestic plenitude since many of the pathologies of the soul stem from the loss of this plenitude. There is an array of consolations that need to be critically probed since they reproduce this problem of narcissistic loss, and indeed, this is the main problem Nietzsche locates at the heart of the gay science and his philosophy of the morning: can humanity live free of the narcissism that has accompanied its evolution? This means that Nietzsche is never engaged in “a purely aesthetic program of self-fashioning” but rather instead elaborates a philosophical therapy, involving a work of the self upon itself, that is “designed to address these narcissistic excesses and pathologies.”32 In Dawn Nietzsche wittily draws on the myth of Oedipus to make his point: You wish to take responsibility for everything! Only not for your dreams! What miserable frailty, what poverty in the courage of your convictions! Nothing is more your own than your dreams! Nothing more your work! Content, form, duration, actor, spectator—in these comedies you yourselves are everything! And this is just the place in yourselves you shun and are ashamed of, and even Oedipus, the wise Oedipus, knew how to derive consolation from the idea that we cannot do anything about what it is we dream! I conclude from this: that the vast majority of human beings must be aware that they have abhorrent dreams. Were it otherwise: how greatly this nocturnal poeticizing would have been plundered to bolster human arrogance!—Do I have to add that wise Oedipus was right, that we really aren’t responsible for our dreams, but no more for our waking hours either, and that the doctrine of free will has as its mother and father human pride and the human feeling of power?33

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Dawn and knowledge In Dawn Nietzsche has a great deal to say about knowledge: about what it is, about the challenges and difficulties it presents, and about its future directions. Much of what he has to say, however, is elusive and highly enigmatic. In aphorism 45, entitled “A Tragic Ending for Knowledge,” he notes that it is human sacrifice that has traditionally served as the means of producing exaltation; this sacrifice has elevated and exalted the human being. What if mankind were to now sacrifice itself: to whom would it make the sacrifice? Nietzsche suggests that it would be the knowledge of truth since only here could the goal be said to be commensurate with the sacrifice, “because for this goal no sacrifice is too great.” But this goal remains too distant and lofty; much closer to home is the task of working out the extent to which humanity can take steps toward the advancement of knowledge and ascertaining what kind of knowledge-drive could impel it to the point of extinction “with the light of an anticipatory wisdom in its eyes.” However, we may need the help of other species on other planets in order to pursue the practice of knowledge with enthusiasm: Perhaps one day, once an alliance for the purpose of knowledge has been established with inhabitants of other planets and one has communicated one’s knowledge from star to star for a few millennia: perhaps then enthusiasm for knowledge will swell to such a high tide!34

In a number of aphorisms scattered throughout book five of Dawn Nietzsche configures the operations of philosophy in relation to the sublime and reflects on its sublimities. Philosophy’s love of knowledge—and to be a lover of knowledge is for Nietzsche to be an essentially unrequited lover—now develops as a form of passion that shrinks at no sacrifice. He notes that we moderns fear a possible return to barbarism and not because it would make us unhappier since in all ages barbarians have been happier peoples. Rather, he argues, our drive to knowledge has become so strong for us that we now cannot tolerate the idea of happiness without knowledge: “The restlessness of discovery and divining has become just as appealing and indispensable to us as an unrequited love is to the lover; a love he would never trade at any price for a state of apathy; indeed, perhaps we too are unhappy lovers!”35 We now honestly believe, Nietzsche writes, that “under the pressure and suffering of this passion the whole of humanity must believe itself to be more sublime (sich erhabener) and more consoled than previously, when it had not yet overcome its envy of the cruder pleasure and contentment that result from barbarism.”36 Nietzsche holds that we feel “more consoled,” I think,

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because of our growth in intellectual strength: we have the chance of knowledge and rendering things comprehensible, and with this there comes a new courage, fearlessness, and cheerfulness (Heiterkeit). We even entertain the thought that humanity might perish of its newfound passion for knowledge. Our evolution is now bound up with this passion, however, and the task is to allow ourselves to be ennobled and elevated by it: “if humanity is not destroyed by a passion it will be destroyed by a weakness: which does one prefer? This is the main question. Do we desire for humanity an end in fire and light or in sand?”37 We will grow in power by now making sacrifices of ourselves to knowledge. Nietzsche clearly sees this process as ushering in a new Enlightenment and with it a new period of maturity—the defining quality of “Enlightenment” according to Kant38—in humanity’s development. He observes that as the world becomes more comprehensible to us the more solemnity of all kinds decreases. Hitherto, he notes, it was fear that informed humanity’s attitude of reverence as it found itself overcome in the face of the unknown and the mysterious, forcing it to sink down before the incomprehensible. He then asks whether the world will lose some of its appeal once a new humanity comes into being that has grown less fearful in the face of the character of the world: might it not also result in our own fearsomeness becoming slighter? His answer is negative and it is such because of the courage that he sees as among our new virtues; this is a species of courage so courageous that it feels itself to be “above people and things,” it is a kind of “excessive magnanimity” and, Nietzsche notes, has hitherto been lacking in humanity. He declares the age of “harmless counterfeiting” to be over and looks ahead to the “astronomers of the ideal” who will take over the role of the poets whose task was to be seers who could recount to us “something of the possible!” If, as might be supposed, there are reasons for nihilism there are also equally good reasons for its exact opposite: If only they wanted to let us experience in advance something of the future virtues! Or of virtues that will never exist on earth, although they could exist somewhere in the world—of purple-glowing galaxies and the whole Milky Ways of the beautiful! Where are you, you astronomers of the ideal?39

Nietzsche does not, then, align his thinking with the cause of spreading fear or terror but instead commits himself to expanding our appreciation of the beautiful: The pessimist, who gives all things the blackest and gloomiest colours, makes use of only flames and bolts of lightning, celestial effulgence, and everything that has glaring brilliance and confuses the eye; brightness is only there for him

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Nietzsche suggests that we should no longer feel the need to rush knowledge along to some end point. There is no longer the need, he holds, to approach questions and experiments as if the solutions to them had to correspond to a typical human time span. The course of science is no longer being crossed by the accidental fact that people live to be approximately seventy years old. We are now free to take our time and go slowly: To solve everything at one fell swoop, with one single word—that was the secret wish:  this was the task one imagined in the image of the Gordian knot or of Columbus’ egg; one did not doubt that in the realm of knowledge as well it was possible to reach one’s goal after the manner of an Alexander or a Columbus and to solve all questions with one answer.41

The idea evolved that there was a riddle to solve for the philosopher and that the task was to compress the problem of the world into the simplest riddle-form: “The boundless ambition and jubilation of being the ‘unriddler of the world’ were the stuff of thinker’s dreams.”42 Under such a schema of the task of thinking philosophy assumed the guise of being a supreme struggle for the tyrannical rule of spirit reserved for a single individual (Nietzsche thinks that it is Schopenhauer who has most recently fancied himself as such an individual). The lesson to be drawn from this inheritance is that the quest for knowledge has been retarded by the moral narrow-mindedness of its disciples. In the future, Nietzsche declares, it needs to be pursued with a higher and more magnanimous feeling: “ ‘What do I matter!’ stands over the door of the future thinker.”43 This is the philosopher’s ultimate sacrifice. Indeed, humanity for Nietzsche has earned the right to selfexperimentation: “The greatest sacrifices to knowledge have not yet been made— indeed, previously it would have meant blasphemy and the surrender of one’s eternal salvation even to have a presentiment of the thoughts that precede our actions.”44 Nietzsche addresses what philosophy now does in relation to the emerging science of knowledge. He draws a comparison with rococo horticulture that arose from the feeling that nature is ugly, savage, and boring and thus the aim was to beautify it. This is now what philosophy does with science, beautifying what strikes us as ugly, dry, cheerless, and laborious. Philosophy is a species of art and poetry and thus a form of entertainment: it wants to entertain “but, in accordance with its inherited pride, it wants to do this in a more sublime and elevated manner and before a select audience.”45 Nietzsche already has here, then,

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the conception of the project of “the gay science” with its mixture of poetry, song, the philosophical aphorism, and dedication to science. In this aphorism from Dawn Nietzsche speaks of philosophy enabling us to wander in science as in “wild nature” and without effort or boredom. Such an ambition for philosophy is one that makes religion, hitherto the highest species of the art of entertainment, superfluous. For the thinker who now has the new dedication to knowledge existence is lived magnanimously. In aphorism 459 entitled “The thinker’s magnanimity” Nietzsche writes: Rousseau and Schopenhauer—both were proud enough to inscribe upon their existence the motto: vitam impendere vero (“to dedicate one’s life to truth”). And again—how they both must have suffered in their pride that they could not succeed in making verum impendere vitae! (“to dedicate truth to life”)—verum, as each of them understood it—in that their lives tagged along beside their knowledge like a temperamental bass that refuses to stay in tune with the melody! But knowledge would be in a sorry state if it was meted out to every thinker only as it suited his person! And thinkers would be in a sorry state if their vanity were so great that they could only endure this! The great thinker’s most beautiful virtue radiates precisely from: the magnanimity with which he, as a person of knowledge, undauntedly, often shamed, often with sublime mockery and smiling— offers himself and his life in sacrifice.46

Neither Rousseau nor Schopenhauer, Nietzsche is arguing, had the cognitive maturity needed to allow for knowledge and life to enter into a new marriage in which knowledge elevates and pulls life up with it: their emotional personalities interfered too much to permit this process to take place. For Nietzsche the consolations of religion are rapidly disappearing from our consciousness.47 The new sublimities of philosophy he is fashioning can be understood, I  think, as affording new consolations. What has gone for us free-spirited moderns are precisely those things Boethius sought as consolation from philosophy:  belief in ultimate goodness, in an avenger and a final improver, belief in Providence, resting in endless trust, and so on.48 While the passion of knowledge does not exist in order to console us or to satisfy the heart’s desire—indeed, it challenges us to the very core of our being since truth and knowledge reveal that we are not what we take ourselves to be as agents or subjects—philosophy can entertain us (hold our attention) in new ways and free spirits console themselves in entertaining the thought that the personal sacrifices they make to knowledge may contribute to the greater health of a future superhumanity.

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Foucault on Nietzsche and knowledge Foucault is one of the few major philosophers of the last century to have been deeply inspired by Nietzsche on knowledge. He stresses the extent to which for Nietzsche knowledge is something contingent and its emergence an accident.49 In several of his writings he appeals to Nietzsche to account for an antihumanist break within the history of modern philosophy. As a reader of Nietzsche, Foucault is best known for his work on genealogy. My view is that he also has a deep appreciation of Dawn with its passion of knowledge, and that once we see his interpretation of Nietzsche in this context the antihumanism of his project becomes a lot more persuasive and as a position he derives from his encounter with Nietzsche. The break with philosophy that Foucault locates in Nietzsche centers on the very subject of knowledge. Above all, Foucault wants to show that the subject of knowledge itself has a history in which the relation of the subject to the object, or truth itself, has a history.50 The focus is how social practices engender new domains of knowledge that bring to light not only new objects, new concepts, and new techniques, but also new forms of subjectivity and subjects of knowledge. What is key is the claim that there is no given subject of knowledge. This means that the subject is not foundational with respects to questions of knowledge, including its production, promotion, and advancement. Although Foucault mentions psychoanalysis, and its discovery of the prodigious terrain of the unconscious, as a key theory and practice that has re-evaluated in a quite fundamental way the sacred priority conferred on the subject and established in the Western tradition since Descartes, it is to Nietzsche that Foucault appeals the most. In a key admission he writes: I would like to pick up again, in a different way, the methodological reflections I spoke of earlier. It would have been possible, and perhaps more honest, to cite only one name, that of Nietzsche, because what I say here won’t mean anything if it isn’t connected to Nietzsche’s work, which seems to me to be the best, the most effective, the most pertinent of the models that one can draw upon.51

For Foucault, Nietzsche’s significance resides in the fact that he undertakes a historical analysis of the formation of the subject, involving an analysis of the birth of a certain type of knowledge (savoir) that does not grant the pre-existence of a subject of knowledge (connaissance). Rather, knowledge is invented, it is an Erfindung. And to say that it is invented is to say that it is without origin: More precisely, it is to say, however paradoxical this may be, that knowledge is absolutely not inscribed in human nature. Knowledge doesn’t constitute man’s

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oldest instinct; and, conversely, in human behaviour, the human appetite, the human instinct, there is no such thing as the seed of knowledge.52

But more than this we can also say that, in addition to not being bound up with human nature, it is also not intimately connected to the world to be known. This means that there is no resemblance or prior affinity between knowledge and the things that need to be known, or, expressed in Kantian terms, we can say that the conditions of experience and the conditions of the object of experience are completely heterogeneous. For Foucault, This is the great break with the prior tradition of Western philosophy, for Kant himself has been the first to say explicitly that the conditions of experience and those of the object of experience were identical. Nietzsche thinks, on the contrary, that between knowledge and the world to be known there is as much difference as between knowledge and human nature. So one has a human nature, a world, and something called knowledge between the two, without any affinity, resemblance, or even natural tie between them.53

Such an insight is in accord with what we have encountered in Nietzsche when he elaborates on the passion of knowledge:  knowledge is an accident and yet once it has come into being we employ it conscientiously (with the aid of “the intellectual conscience”) to undermine and overturn cherished pieties about human nature and human identity:  in short, through knowledge we become strangers to ourselves and treat ourselves as experiments. In his celebrated essay on “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Foucault places the passion of knowledge in the service of an antihumanist intellectual agenda and project. Nietzsche’s aim, contends Foucault, is not to capture the essence of things or their purest possibilities and protected identities since this is to assume “the existence of immobile forms that precede the world of accident and succession.”54 Continuing this anti-Platonic agenda, Foucault writes of a search for what is already there waiting to be uncovered, “the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature” and that requires “the removal of every mask to ultimately disclose an original identity.”55 Replacing metaphysics with (genealogical) history, Nietzsche finds not timeless and eternal secrets behind things, but the secret that they have no essence or that if such an essence exists it was fabricated in a piecemeal manner from alien forms. The history of reason demonstrates that it was born from chance, so that what is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin but rather disparity. In a radical moment Foucault further contends:

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Keith Ansell-Pearson Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being do not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.56

The history of humanity is a series of interpretations; this history is not one that requires the slow exposure of a meaning hidden in the origin since if it was then only metaphysics could make sense of the development of humanity. Instead we need to conceive interpretation as “the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning.”57 When we conceive interpretation in this way it becomes possible to bend it to a new will and impose a different direction. This is to practice what Foucault calls “effective history” that does away with constants, including the constant of humanity and of being true to ourselves in our identity: Knowledge, even under the banner of history, does not depend on “rediscovery,” and it emphatically excludes the “rediscovery of ourselves.” History becomes “effective” to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being—as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself.58

This “effective” history, which Nietzsche starts to practice in earnest in Dawn, deprives the self of any reassuring stability of life and nature. This is because, as Foucault has it, knowledge is not made so much for understanding as it is for “cutting” (trancher). The task is to make ourselves different to what history has, in fact, made us. We need to appreciate that the forces that operate in history do not conform to destiny or are subject to the control of regulative mechanisms: events are singular and even random. Foucault illuminates this realm of chance as follows: the world that can be known is not one where events are reduced so as to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, and their ultimate value. Rather, what is to be encountered in “a profusion of entangled events,” in which what appears as profound and meaningful is, in fact, something that begins its existence through a host of errors and phantasms: “We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark

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or a point of reference.”59 For Foucault, then, history has a more important task than to be a handmaiden to (metaphysical) philosophy, such as recounting the necessary birth of truth and values. Rather, it needs to become a differential knowledge, one of energies and failings, of heights and degenerations of poisons and antidotes; in short, its “task is to become a curative science.”60 As we have seen, Foucault takes extremely seriously Nietzsche’s insight that the passion of knowledge may entail the perishing of humanity. In short, what is signaled here is the double death of God and of man—that is, of man as the very “subject” of knowledge: Even in the greatly expanded form it assumes today, the will to knowledge does not achieve a universal truth; man is not given an exact and serene mastery of nature. On the contrary, it ceaselessly multiplies the risk, creates dangers in every area; it breaks down illusory defences; it dissolves the unity of the subject; it releases those elements of itself that are devoted to its subversion and destruction. Knowledge does not slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of reason; its development is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject.61

What Foucault acutely recognizes is that where once religion demanded the sacrifice of our bodies, knowledge now calls for Nietzsche for an experimentation on ourselves, and this requires we sacrifice the subject of knowledge. Two key points emerge from Foucault’s presentation of the claims of the enterprise of genealogy: (a) first, inquiry cannot lay claim to a truth that would be detached and timeless, but rather needs to see itself as a practical tool for the critique of values; (b) second, such a critique of values must destroy the idea of a fixed human identity, so that instead of positing solid identities we learn to engage in a radical experimentation with ourselves.62 As Nietzsche himself puts it in Dawn, we are experiments and the task is to want to be such.

Conclusion Although knowledge has its origins in a contingent evolution and accidental birth, Nietzsche also wishes to place the passion of knowledge in the service of specific practical ends. These ends center on a care of self and on the importance of individual and social experimentation. As we have seen, Nietzsche construes lovers of knowledge as unrequited lovers. According to Robert Pippin there is

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no better image of philosophical eros than this: “it dominates philosophy’s selfimage from Socrates on, rendering it useless and even comical in the eyes of nonphilosophers.” Indeed, he notes that for Nietzsche the philosophical type is precisely a person “who can sustain an entire life of unrequited love.”63 Although this is surely right we should also not neglect the fact that Nietzsche places the passion of knowledge, including its adventure, in the service of specific practical and transformative ends. Nietzsche favors ethical and social experimentation that will endeavor to bring about human pluralization contra what he takes to be the fanatical claims and presumptions of morality. For Nietzsche it is necessary, for example, to contest the idea that there is a single moral-making morality since every code of ethics that affirms itself in an exclusive manner “destroys too much valuable energy and costs humanity much too dearly.”64 In the future, he hopes, the inventive and fructifying person shall no longer be sacrificed and “numerous novel experiments shall be made in ways of life and modes of society.”65 When this takes place we will find that an enormous load of guilty conscience has been purged from the world. Humanity has suffered for too long from teachers of morality who wanted too much all at once and sought to lay down precepts for everyone.66 In the future, care will need to be given to the most personal questions and create time for them.67 Small individual questions and experiments are no longer to be viewed with contempt and impatience.68 Contra “morality,” then, he holds that we ourselves are experiments and our task should be to want to be such. In the interregnum we are living through the best strategy is for us to become our own reges (sovereigns) and establish small experimental states.69 So, while there is a passion of knowledge for Nietzsche this passion is to dedicate itself to the practical task of bringing about a new epoch in human history centered on individual and social experimentation. Foucault’s work as whole takes up this challenge and is one of the few interpretations of Nietzsche to have its basis in the text Dawn.

Notes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), 15 vols., ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin and New York/Munich: dtv and Walter de Gruyter, 1967–77 and 1998), vol., 9, p. 381 (7 [302]). I am grateful to Carol Diethe for assisting me with the translations from KSA vol. 9 that appear in this essay. I am also indebted to Paul S. Loeb who read several drafts of this essay and provided me with useful feedback and extremely helpful suggestions on how to finesse it.

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2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 249 (V, 501). 3 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 9, p. 364 (7 [226]). 4 Marco Brusotti, “Erkenntnis als Passion: Nietzsches Denkweg zwischen Morgenröthe und der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft,” Nietzsche-Studien 26 (1997), p. 199. For insight into the “passion of knowledge” in Nietzsche, see also Mazzino Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge,’ ” in Reading Nietzsche, trans. Greg Whitlock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. 57–69. 5 Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 61. 6 Ibid., p. 91. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 255 (IV, 324). 8 Ibid. 9 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 9, p. 357 (7 [197]). 10 Nietzsche, Dawn, p. 72 (II, 105). 11 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 8. 12 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 9, p. 467 (11 [69]). 13 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 9, p. 494 (11 [141]). 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 177. 15 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 9, p. 517 (11 [193]). 16 Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 128–9. For a recent instructive study that goes beyond Curley’s skepticism, see Stuart Pethick, Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche: Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 17 Nietzsche, Dawn, p. 223 (V, 429). 18 Ibid. 19 Nietzsche, Dawn, p. 37 (I, 45). 20 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 9, p. 295 (6 [381]). 21 Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, p. 97. 22 Ibid. 23 Robert Hull, “Skepticism, Enigma and Integrity: Horizons of Affirmation in Nietzsche’s Philosophy,” Man and World 23 (1990), p. 382. 24 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 254 (“Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” 172). 25 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, pp. 222–3 (“Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” 33).

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39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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50 51 52

Keith Ansell-Pearson Nietzsche, Dawn, p. 249 (V, 501). Ibid. Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 9, p. 352 (7 [171]). Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 106. Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 9, pp. 350–51 (7 [165]). Ibid. Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), p. 79. Nietzsche, Dawn, p. 94 (II, 128). Ibid, p. 37 (I, 45). Ibid., p. 223 (V, 429). Ibid. Ibid. See also p. 226 (V, 435) on perishing as a “sublime ruin” (erhabene Trümmer) and not as a “molehill.” See Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ ” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 54–61. Nietzsche, Dawn, pp. 273–4 (V, 551). Ibid., p. 278 (V, 561). Ibid., p. 270 (V, 547). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 249 (V, 501). Ibid., p. 222 (V, 427). Ibid., pp. 233–4 (V, 459). See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, pp. 250–51 (“Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” 169); Dawn, pp. 47–51 (I, 68). Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pp. 229–30 (IV, 285). What Boethius wants from philosophy is assurance that the wicked will not go unpunished and knowledge that the world is a rational order and guided by Providence. See Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. E. Watts (Middlesex: Penguin, 1969). This is one of the principal themes of his lecture on Nietzsche in the 1970–71 lecture course on the will to know. See M. Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, ed. Daniel Defert, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), especially chapter 13, pp. 202ff. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–84, Volume 3, ed. James D. Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 2. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 8.

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53 Ibid., p. 9. 54 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p. 142. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., p. 146. 57 Ibid., p. 151. 58 Ibid., p. 154. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., p. 156. 61 Ibid., p. 163. 62 For further insight, see Hans Sluga, “Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 2nd ed.), p. 228. 63 Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 38. 64 Nietzsche, Dawn, p. 120 (III, 164). 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., pp. 138–9 (III, 194). 67 Ibid., p. 141 (III, 196). 68 Ibid., pp. 269–70 (V, 547). 69 Ibid., p. 232 (V, 453).

Bibliography Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by V. E. Watts. Middlesex: Penguin, 1969. Brusotti, Marco. “Erkenntnis als Passion: Nietzsches Denkweg zwischen Morgenröthe und der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft.” Nietzsche-Studien 26 (1997), 199–225. Curley, Edwin. Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Foucault, Michel. Lectures on the Will to Know, edited by Daniel Defert, translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 139–65. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Juridical Forms.” In Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–84, Volume Three, edited by James D. Faubion, 1–90. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.

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Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, translated by Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Franco, Paul. Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Hull, Robert. “Skepticism, Enigma and Integrity: Horizons of Affirmation in Nietzsche’s Philosophy.” Man and World 23 (1990), 375–91. Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ ” In Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, 54–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Montinari, Mazzino. “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge.’” In Reading Nietzsche, translated by Greg Whitlock, 57–69. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Dawn: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, translated by Brittain Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, 15 vols., edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin and New York/Munich: dtv and Walter de Gruyter, 1967–77 and 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated and edited by Christopher Middleton. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996. Pethick, Stuart. Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche: Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pippin, Robert B. Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Sluga, Hans. “Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche.” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., edited by Gary Gutting, 210–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Ure, Michael. Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

4

Nietzsche and Foucault Modalities of Appropriating the World for an Art of Living Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg

Friedrich Nietzsche’s compelling diagnosis of the cultural crisis of the modern epoch—signaled by the “death of God,” of the metaphysical certitude that, in several forms, had shaped the West for nearly two millennia—together with his commitment to genealogy and perspectivism, which opened up the prospect of new modes for an art of living, present enormous interpretive challenges. To these must be added the difficulties presented by the very way in which Nietzsche writes his texts, which we believe are closely linked to the modes of thinking, feeling, and acting that Nietzsche sought to induce in his readers, and which are integral to what we see as a project of self-fashioning linked to an art of living. While the two are conjoined, there are distinctions between them as well. And the bases for such a distinction can best be illuminated by turning to Michel Foucault, whose own thinking ripened under the warm Nietzschean sun. Foucault’s concern with Nietzsche begins early, and continues until his death. We can clearly see the beginning of that concern in his The Order of Things (Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), where Foucault links Nietzsche’s death of God to what he sees as the “end of man,” the end of an historically specific understanding of human being and with it the whole of “the entire modern episteme—that which formed toward the end of the eighteenth century and still serves as the positive ground of our knowledge, that which constituted man’s particular mode of being and the possibility of knowing him empirically.”1 For Foucault, then, Nietzsche initiated the end of that vision of “man,” that “invention” of human being, that had its inception at the end of the eighteenth century, and now was about to “be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.”2 For both these thinkers, then, the death of God entailed the death of man as a transcendental subject, demanding for both a new concept of man, of human being: for Nietzsche, the

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notion of the “overman” (the Ubermensch); for Foucault, the idea that we have to create a new mode of subjectivity. Indeed, we believe that Foucault can provide a framework on the basis of which Nietzsche’s own concern with an art of living can come into sharper focus. Foucault distinguishes between a techne of the self, or self-fashioning, and a techne of life, or how to live. The former entails an attunement to one’s self, a vigilant mindfulness about what one thinks and does; the “actions exercised on the self by the self,” what he designated as care of self (souci de soi). The latter entails what Foucault designates as an ethics, an art of living,3 which also has a political dimension, one which in ancient Greece, for example, entailed obligations to one’s city and its citizens.4 That art of living is the culmination of a chain that begins with care of self, and which then also includes both self-fashioning and an ethics. Foucault points out that in the ancient world, so important to Nietzsche as well as to him, techne of the self became the object of a veritable art of living, in which one’s own life was transfigured.5 In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault defined the art of living as “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct but also seek to transform themselves . . . and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.”6 Foucault’s emphasis on style, both in writing and in an art of living, a conscious style of life too, echoes Nietzsche’s own insistence that: One thing is needful.—To “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye . . . In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small.7

Foucault’s aim as he writes about what an art of living, a techne of the self, entails is to point to “that which enables one to get free of oneself [se déprendre de soi-même].”8 Literally Foucault here sees an art of living as entailing a way to detach oneself from the modalities of life to which one has historically and culturally been habituated or subjected. In this undertaking, Foucault looks not just to Nietzsche, but to writers like Georges Bataille or Maurice Blanchot, themselves so powerfully affected by Nietzsche, about whom he says: “For Nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot . . . experience has the function of wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution. This is a project of desubjectivation.”9

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Nietzsche too had a vision of just such a mode of desubjectivation, upon which we believe Foucault drew:  a detaching of oneself from one’s historically constructed mode of subjectivity, with his vision of “self-overcoming,” so powerfully articulated in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and his concept of becoming “untimely.” As Nietzsche developed that vision in The Case of Wagner, what he sought was precisely “self-overcoming”: “To overcome his time in himself, to become ‘timeless.’ ”10 What Nietzsche states about overcoming one’s time in oneself, to become untimely, then, resonates with Foucault’s powerful image of a “permanent critique of ourselves,” as well as one’s historical epoch, as articulated in his “What Is Enlightenment?” where he points out that “the critical ontology of ourselves must be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”11 Foucault’s point, here, links his vision to Nietzsche’s own insistence that it is the overcoming of one’s time, one’s idols, one’s values, oneself, that opens up the space, the freedom, for fashioning a self, embodied in the image of a “great liberation,” where one can become a “free spirit,” a “master over yourself,” where “You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display first one and the other in accordance with your higher goal.”12 Indeed, in each of these cases, it is that space for freedom, the freedom to fashion a self, upon which both Foucault and Nietzsche insist. For Foucault, that entailed, as Timothy O’Leary has pointed out, something like the acts through which one can “disassemble the self,” and fashion it anew. Foucault’s aim, as O’Leary reads him, is not to write a “truth book” or a “demonstration book,” which is the aim of most works of philosophy, but rather an “experience book”: As O’Leary reminds us, in French experience is both experiment and experience, this would be a book that not only conveys the experience of the author, or changes the experience of the reader, but that constitutes both an experiment that the author carries out on him or herself and an experiment in which the reader too can participate— thus participating in the subjective transformation that the book makes possible. Foucault wants to write books that will lead to a transformation in his own form of subjectivity and also facilitate a similar transformation on the part of his readers.13

Can the reading of such an “experience book” generate the kind of experience in the reader that Foucault sought to encourage; could it have such a

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transformative power? Foucault’s aim in his writings is to shake-up his readers, to demonstrate the “precariousness” of the truths that we—in any epoch—take to be self-evident; the practices that we never question: I don’t try to universalize what I say . . . What I say ought to be taken as “propositions,” “game openings” where those who are interested are invited to join in; they are not meant as dogmatic assertions that have to be taken en bloc. My books aren’t treatises in philosophy or studies of history: at most, they are philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems.14

Here Foucault’s “modesty” should not be taken as implying any lack of conviction with respect to the importance of the questions that are being raised or the stakes of raising them. These fragments, like Nietzsche’s aphorisms, seem aimed at provoking in the reader modes of thinking that can challenge well established practices and “truths, as well as the power relations that ground them.” Indeed, What Foucault seeks is an “ethics of discomfort,” which he sees as one of the essential tasks of philosophy, of a “critical ontology of ourselves,” and one aspect of which was to “never consent to be completely comfortable with your own certainties.”15 Foucault here echoes Nietzsche’s own call “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.”16 Those very “certainties,” however, are not just arbitrary axioms, but are embodied and embedded in the very way of life that one lives. To change such a “certainty,” then, is to change the way one lives one’s life: it is not just about changing ideas or beliefs, but about changing the way one experiences the world, the way one acts, feels, as well as how one thinks. Foucault’s own “journey to Greece,” which was the focus of his last several years, like that of Nietzsche, then, was propelled by his quest for a new relation of self to self, a new way of thinking about ethics. What attracted Foucault to the Greco-Roman world, then, was not the content of its ethics, but the way in which the question of ethics was problematized. The concept of problemization plays an important role in Foucault’s thinking. One can speak of a problemization when a field of experience, a complex of power/knowledge relations or a set of practices becomes a “problem,” and provokes “a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions.”17 Through problemizations, Foucault, then, saw a way to respond to present dangers. In our view, what sent Foucault on that journey to ancient Greece was what he saw as the crisis of the ethical subject in the modern world, a facet of the cultural crisis provoked by the death of God, to which Nietzsche had pointed. He sought in the Greco-Roman world alternatives to modes of subjectivity constituted through a dispositif that

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rested on technologies of domination; possibilities for the constitution of a subject in autonomous fashion through practices of freedom.

Writing and reading This concern with the reconstitution of a techne of the self, which both Foucault and Nietzsche shared, and the “experience books” which they each wrote, compelled both to constantly confront—and confront over, and over again—both how to write, and how they wanted to be read; the kinds of readers that they sought. Foucault’s own stylistic pluralism is striking. In addition to works like Discipline and Punish, and his History of Sexuality, or his lecture courses at the Collège de France, which are exemplars of academic scholarship and archival research, Foucault excelled in a variety of styles and genres, from interviews in which he communicated ideas and theories that were intended to be later developed in more traditional modes of writing, to his published books, and especially in what he termed his self-writing, which he saw as integral to a philosophical life. Here, Foucault’s model was the Hupomnemata, the notebooks of the ancients in which one gave an account of one’s life and experiences, and expressed one’s most intimate thoughts as guides for conduct. He believed that such writing facilitated the transformation of one’s text “into rational principles of action”; that they provided the basis for what Plutarch had termed, “an ethopoietic function,” becoming “an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos.”18 Such writings could become an important element in the “shaping of the self.”19 Nietzsche’s own focus on how to write, on how he wants to be read, seems to us to lie in his conviction that both writing and reading are pathways to appropriating the world for the fashioning of a self. Nietzsche’s concern, he tells us, is not to “know thyself,” but rather to fashion, to create, indeed to “will a self.—Active, successful natures act . . . as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a self.”20 Yet few thinkers spent so much time in an endeavor to know themselves, to explore the nooks and crannies of their very being, as did Nietzsche. Here, we can see Nietzsche problematizing (to use a Foucauldian trope) the question of knowing, through the shock to his reader, through his use of irony: a veritable goad to the importance of grasping Nietzsche’s own art of writing and his own frequent injunctions about how to read him. We see Nietzsche’s modalities for appropriating the world, and his transfiguration of one’s self, then, as being integrally linked to the creation of a life based

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on stylistic criteria, but also as being conveyed through the very modes in which he writes; the tropes or devices that he wields in the construction of his texts, and how his readers might grasp his writings. In addition to the actual claims of the thinker, we, his readers, then, need to pay no less attention to how he constructs his contentions, to his writing styles,21 if you will, and to what he expects of his readers, the extraordinary demands that he makes on them—and about which he wrote so much. Those demands, as Christopher Janaway claims, are linked to a “therapeutic process,” entailing an “affective reorientation,” a revaluation of values. To that end, Nietzsche wields “a multiplicity of rhetorical devices for provoking the affects of his reader.”22 Nietzsche not only utilizes a “rhetoric that arouses the affects”23 of his readers, that makes us “ ‘feel differently,’ changing or reversing our inclinations and aversions, losing our habitual or inherited attachment to the attitudes that comprise the morality of selflessness,”24 but that same rhetoric proceeds from its author’s own passionate commitment to that reevaluative project. Thus, Nietzsche’s provocative claim, “Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood,”25 to which we would add that one must also read with “blood”—with all of one’s affects, and mobilizing all our capacities for thinking, especially for thinking the “forbidden.”26 To read with blood, for us, means that the issues raised by the text with which one is engaged affect the reader in a profoundly personal sense; that they are intimately linked to who one is, and who one seeks to become. As Nietzsche forcefully claims, when one “does” philosophy: All great problems demand great love, and of that only strong, round, secure spirits who have a firm grip on themselves are capable. It makes the most telling difference whether a thinker has a personal relationship to his problems and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness, or an “impersonal” one, meaning that he can do no better than to touch them with the antennae of cold, curious thought. In the latter case nothing will come of it; that much one can promise in advance.27

If our involvement with Nietzsche needs to be extremely personal if anything is to come of it, it is also the case, as David Allison has claimed, that as a reader, we feel that Nietzsche is speaking directly to us. Perhaps more than any other philosopher who readily comes to mind, Nietzsche writes exclusively for you. Not at you. For you, the reader. Only you. At least this is the feeling one often has when reading him. Like a friend, he seems to share your every concern—and your aversions and suspicions as well. Like a true friend, he rarely tells you what you ought to do—that would be too presumptuous,

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immodest, authoritarian. And friends don’t moralize either. They share secrets and encourage you—to enjoy, to travel, to try something new, to get out of your skin for awhile.28

Our concern with Nietzsche’s mode of writing, then, is motivated by Nietzsche’s own stylistic concerns and his preoccupation with how he wanted to be read, together with our own decision as to how we read him, and with our conviction that those concerns and preoccupations are themselves profoundly linked to Nietzsche’s vision of a revaluation of our most deeply embedded values, and the possibility that one can shape a self “beyond good and evil.” We want, then, to forge a direct link between Nietzsche’s claims for the possibility of selffashioning, concretized as a techne of the self, and his focus on the arts of writing, and of reading or exegesis.29 What, then, of Nietzsche’s style and his multifarious rhetorical devices, especially his use of metaphor, and hyperbole, in his writing? How did Nietzsche want to be read? What kinds of readers did he want? And beyond those important questions, we will then take up the question of how we choose to read Nietzsche? What status do we accord our own interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings? These are “strange, wicked, questionable questions!”30 Nietzsche, in contrast to most Western philosophers, has also explicitly raised the question of the kinds of readers that he wants, and has insisted that we grapple with the issue of how to read. Indeed, the very strangeness of Nietzsche’s texts, about which so much has been written, seems intended to goad us into also raising the question of how to read him. What, for example, are we to make of Nietzsche’s own claim that the whole third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals is a detailed exegesis of a short aphorism in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a treatise, so to speak, on how to read an aphorism?31 Indeed, what is the reader to make of Nietzsche’s frequent recourse to aphorisms in which to express his thought, and what exegetical tools do we have to unpack them? What is the significance of Nietzsche’s decision to include poetry in his texts? The Gay Science, for example, begins and ends with poems; and this juxtaposition of science and poetry, Wissenschaft and Dichtung, as Christopher Janaway points out, seems to be a very deliberate methodological shift.32 Indeed, for Nietzsche, the reader that he seeks is not simply one who can assimilate his words, grasp their purported meaning, but one who goes beyond his words: “Books—What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?”33 How then do we interpret Nietzsche? It seems to us that there is not one way to understand Nietzsche, but rather understandings of Nietzsche, different

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understandings that arise from the various perspectives of his readers. The claim that there can be a definitive interpretation of Nietzsche, one that finally gets him right, strikes us as dubious. Rather than speak of misreadings of Nietzsche, we would claim that any reading arises from a determinate perspective. There are, then, different interpretations of Nietzsche based on the perspectives that his readers bring to his text. What does this reading of Nietzsche do to the multifarious claims that Thinker X has “misread” Nietzsche, or that Interpreter Y has “misappropriated” him? This is especially relevant to the controversies surrounding the appropriation of Nietzsche by nationalist or even racist thinkers, or what so many friends of Nietzsche claim is a misappropriation, a misreading, of Nietzsche’s “real” intentions. Cynthia Halpern’s take on this issue seems to us to be especially sound: “I think that misses the point of Nietzsche—all interpretations are will to power, appropriations for political purposes, and which ones miss and which don’t depends on the reader’s own purposes.”34 We believe that a multiplicity of readings of Nietzsche is not only possible, but also desirable. No one reading can claim to be complete. And, yes, Nietzsche’s own perspectivism is also a perspective, as is the claim of certain philosophers to grasp the real world as it is in itself. And with respect to reading, while one always reads Nietzsche from within a perspective, the perspective itself is not wrong or a misunderstanding, however much one may legitimately challenge its particular claims.

The text as polysemic and the experiential bases of philosophy As opposed to efforts to distinguish between rival interpretations, and to provide canonical bases for a purported “correct” interpretation, we want to acknowledge our own belief that the interpretation of the text, including the Nietzschean text, is polysemic. There is, then, an undecidability of interpretation—though any particular interpretation, for that interpreter, is, indeed, decidable, and may even remain stable—and the very criteria for judging any interpretation arise from within a given interpretive perspective. Any interpretation of Nietzsche, then, rests upon a reader’s own perspective, on the basis of which meaning is generated, created. It is here that certain of Christopher Janaway’s comments about recent Nietzsche interpretation can be confronted:  “Beneath some recent Nietzscheinterpretation there seems to operate what I  might call a will to extremity, or a will to perversity: a drive whose end is that Nietzsche should testify to a supposed bottomless irony and arbitrariness in all writing and an inability of

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meanings ever to be stable or decidable.”35 Any grand proclamations about the essential, ontological bases of the undecidability of all texts, both risk the charge of being self-refuting, but also raise the issue of whether the “recent Nietzscheinterpretation” in question (ostensibly those of poststructuralist provenance) makes such claims. Indeed, any and every interpretation is also a statement about the decidability of a text, inasmuch as our own fore-structure provides us with the taken-for-granted rules for such a decision, the criteria for the interpretation— ones that only become problematized, to use a Foucauldian trope, under determinate cultural-political conditions, and the challenge of new interpretations. That seems to us to be consonant with both the claims of poststructuralism, and of how we interpret Nietzsche’s own conception of genealogy and perspectivism, concerning historicity, including that of both texts and their interpretation. However, it also seems to us that Nietzsche specifically invites—perhaps it would be more accurate to say incites—us to read his writings by transforming them; indeed by adding to them, by rewriting them in significant ways. While Nietzsche is insistent on the need to read well, he also makes it clear that for those who are untimely—as Nietzsche believed he was—to be “misunderstood, misjudged, misidentified, slandered, misheard, and not heard” was their “fate.”36 Moreover, as Nietzsche quickly added: On the question of being understandable.—One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention—he did not want to be understood by just “anybody.”37

If there are no “misunderstandings” or “misreadings” of Nietzsche, only different interpretations, what do we make of his claim that he has been misunderstood or misjudged? It seems to us that Nietzsche here is seeking to stop his reader from claiming too soon, or too easily, that he understands, that she has understood him. For Nietzsche, understanding comes slowly, as a result of rumination; it occurs—and here understanding is a rhetorical trope—when as a result of such cow-like behavior, one feels that one understands; one’s very self has been transfigured by the experience, by the encounter. Beyond the seeming clash between Nietzsche’s oft-repeated question, “Have I been understood,” and his perhaps less frequent challenges to potential readers that he is doing everything to make himself hard to understand, Duncan Large has offered one more interpretation in the introduction to his translation of Twilight of the Idols, to the effect that as a youthful thinker, virtually

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still unknown as a philosopher, a defiant Nietzsche said that he cared little whether or not he was understood, whereas when his writings began to reach a wider audience, by 1888, his concern had shifted to whether or not he had been understood. That said, for those who could read him well, Nietzsche wanted nothing “to keep me from being understandable.”38 However, beyond the question of both “who” and “how” to read Nietzsche well, issues to which we shall return, we immediately confront a paradox here. On the one hand, Nietzsche insists on the importance of reading well, and seeks good readers. On the other hand, Nietzsche contrasts thinking to reading, and boldly tells us that “My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness—in brief, philology: I was delivered from the ‘book’; for years I did not read a thing—the greatest benefit I ever conferred on myself.”39 Indeed, Nietzsche goes further, and asserts: “Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength—to read a book at such a time is depraved!”40 Thomas Brobjer has shown that despite Nietzsche’s oft-repeated claims to have read little, he was indeed an avid reader. And despite his well-documented eye problems he continued to read, and to have friends and relatives read to him:  “Nietzsche was, in fact, a rather substantial reader. This was true not only for his younger days but also for his last four active years, 1885–88.”41 If Nietzsche could be so scornful of the activity of reading, even as he read extensively, continuously, and diligently, it seems reasonable to conclude that he must have drawn a sharp distinction between what is ordinarily construed as reading, whether as pastime or memorization of facts, and the activity of thinking, the task of philosophy as Nietzsche understood it, with its concomitant need to read well, and the obstacles that anyone determined to so read would face. The importance of reading, the significance of interpretation as the task of the reader, and the acknowledgment that Nietzsche’s writings constitute works of art, coalesce in the vision of Nietzsche proffered by Alexander Nehamas: Nietzsche’s model for the world, for objects, and for people turns out to be the literary text and its components; his model for our relations to the world turns out to be interpretation . . . Like an artwork, the world requires reading and interpretation, “good philology,” in order to be mastered, understood, and made livable. The “death of God,” both as hero and as author, allows Nietzsche to deny that the world is subject to a single overarching interpretation, corresponding to God’s role or intention. And its self-creation introduces the most paradoxical idea yet, the fact that the readers of his text are some of its own parts, some of its own characters, who in reading it further its self-creation . . . As in the literary case, so in

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the world, according to Nietzsche, to reinterpret events is to rearrange effects and therefore to generate new things. Our “text” is being composed as we read it, and our readings are new parts of it that will give rise to further ones in the future.42

Thus interpretation and reinterpretation which are inseparable from the selfcreation of the text itself, which follow from Nietzsche’s own challenge to the traditional authorial function, also seems to us to reinforce the powerful role of reading in the project of fashioning a self, and indeed a “world,” to which we believe Nietzsche’s philosophy was directed. In addressing the issues raised by reading Nietzsche, we now want briefly to address the question of the kind of philosophy we think that Nietzsche was doing; to advance our own perspective on Nietzsche’s understanding of philosophy. It seems to us that Nietzsche is very clear about the experiential basis of his philosophizing, leading to a new experience of being-in-the-world. In contrast to the way in which Western philosophy has historically come to be practiced, in the form of abstract conceptual systems, through propositions about the world or the way we come to know it, Nietzsche saw philosophy as a way of life, and looked to philosophers as “examples of achievable ways of living,”43 instantiated in specific projects for the fashioning of a self. In the case of a philosopher, such examples, Nietzsche argued, “must be supplied by his outward life and not merely in his books—in the way, that is, in which the philosophers of Greece taught, through their bearing, what they wore and ate, and their morals, rather than by what they said, let alone by what they wrote.”44 These two modes of “doing” philosophy are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, in the ancient world they often went hand in hand, and the Stoics, for example, believed that they were absolutely connected. Michel Foucault, whose own project, as we read it, can be seen as arising under the light of that Nietzschean sun, has provided us with a genealogy of philosophy in the West that both distinguishes between these two modes of philosophy and delineates the very different historical trajectories of each. On its basis, one can perhaps more clearly grasp the significance of our questionable questions, and the lineaments of an answer to the question of how Nietzsche wanted to be read, and how we choose to read him. In one of his final cycle of lecture courses at the Collège de France, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, where his focus was ethics, Foucault distinguished between two modes of philosophy in the ancient world. Starting from the Socratic injunction to “know thyself ” [gnôthi seauton], philosophy progressively assumed the form of theoretical knowledge, with its focus on cognition. Socratic thought, however, also gave birth to a very different vision of philosophy as well,

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one based on care of self [epimeleia heautou], with its focus on the fashioning of a self, and an art of living. Whereas in the ancient world the modes of philosophy were closely linked, they began to diverge in the medieval world, and what Foucault—acknowledging it as a “purely conventional phrase”—designated as the “Cartesian moment” in the history of the West proved decisive “by philosophically requalifying the gnôthi seauton (know yourself), and by discrediting the epimeleia heautou (care of self).”45 Each of these two modes of philosophy establishes a different relationship to truth:  that embodied in the tradition of theoretical knowledge, Foucault designates as “philosophy,” while that embodied in care of self and an art of living, Foucault designates as “spirituality” (spiritualité). The former has as its focus “how to have access to the truth,” while the latter asks what are the set of transformations of the self “that are necessary conditions for having access to the truth.”46 This Foucauldian distinction between two modes of doing philosophy can help us to appreciate how Nietzsche reacted to that Cartesian moment and its legacy, how he sought to requalify the care of self, the transfiguration of the self, and philosophy as a way of life. One way to see how Nietzsche practiced philosophy, then, is by looking at what Alexander Nehamas has designated an “art of living,” which entails that philosophers construct their personalities through the investigation, the criticism, and the production of philosophical views . . . More important, the philosophers of the art of living make the articulation of a mode of life their central topic: it is by reflecting on the problems of constructing a philosophical life that they construct the life their work constitutes. The body of work that reflects on the philosophical life is the very content of the life it composes.47

Indeed, if we take philosophy to be an art of living, then one facet of it would seem to be an art of reading, to see the reading of a philosopher, in this case Nietzsche, as a spiritual exercise integral to an art of living. For us, Nietzsche’s readers, that means—as one of his first serious readers, Lou Salomé, pointedly claimed—“we must direct our attention to the human being and not the theorist in order to find our way in Nietzsche’s works.”48 However, if seeing philosophy as an art of living entails focusing on how a philosopher constructs or fashions his/ her life, Nehamas, in his essay “On the Philosophical Life” also takes us a step further, and tells us that when you read people like Nietzsche or Socrates, Montaigne, or Foucault you should not ask “Were they right in the way they lived?” or “Did they themselves live the way they said life is to be lived?” but rather, “How does that affect me?

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What am I to do once I read them?” The philosophical question is not about them, but about you and your life.49

Nietzsche’s critique of the philosophy taught in the universities of his day—and we might add, in our own day too—focuses on just this point: “The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities: all that has been taught is a critique of words by means of other words.”50 The way we believe Nietzsche wanted to be read, then, is close to Robert Solomon’s injunction that “we should take Nietzsche personally,” that our aim “is not so much ‘what did Nietzsche really say?’ . . . but rather ‘what would Nietzsche make of us?’ ”51 That is, how would reading Nietzsche transform us? Here it is the case that philosophy is conceived not as a set of timeless abstractions, but as the lived experience of human beings in their historicity. Thus, as Solomon asserts, perhaps Nietzsche’s most significant impact on his readers is his “goading them to see themselves in new and different ways,”52 or, as Nehamas puts it with respect to Nietzsche’s impact on his readers, “you must try to imagine what kind of life you would live if you accepted his views and lived according to them.”53 For Nietzsche himself, as we read him, one of the primary tasks of the philosopher is self-mastery, the fashioning of a self. Indeed, as Nietzsche claimed, the “art of transfiguration is philosophy.”54 Philosophy, then, entails self-overcoming, a transfiguration of one’s own self: What does a philosopher demand of himself first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become “timeless.” With what must he therefore engage in the hardest combat? With whatever marks him as a child of his time . . . For such a task I required a special self-discipline: to take sides against everything sick in me, including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including all of modern “humaneness.”  —A profound estrangement, cold, sobering up—against everything that is of this time, everything timely—and most desirable of all, the eye of Zarathustra, an eye that beholds the whole fact of man at a tremendous distance—below. For such a goal—what sacrifice wouldn’t be fitting? What “selfovercoming”? What “self-denial”?55

In an epoch that one believes to be “decadent,” as Nietzsche firmly believed his—and dare we say ours—to be, one characterized by “apathy and indifference towards life,”56 by a pervasive sense that “All is empty, all is the same, all has been!,”57 a new kind of discipline, an asceticism, understood as self-mastery, and very different from that which Nietzsche designated as the “ascetic ideal” that had reigned over the Christian and modern worlds,58 was needed by the

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philosopher who followed “his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.’ ”59 In such an epoch, to “Be your self!” meant to overcome the cultural and moral truths of one’s own time; to overcome the self that one was, to transfigure one’s self. As Nietzsche proclaimed: “We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.”60 Nietzsche, then, sought to refunction asceticism in the service of life:  “I also want to make asceticism natural again: in place of the aim of denial, the aim of strengthening. A gymnastics of the will.”61

Modes of subject formation We can, perhaps, better unpack Nietzsche’s quest for such human beings by linking it to Foucault’s own understanding of just how humans are “made” or become subjects:  how the subject shows up, given both Nietzsche and here Foucault’s insistence that there is no “universal form of subject to be found everywhere.”62 With respect to the processes through which the subject is constituted through knowledge–power relations, the term that Foucault uses is assujettisement. Thus, to take but one example, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, in describing the complex processes through which Western man was constituted as a subject, Foucault speaks of “l’assujettisement des hommes” (“men’s subjection” in Robert Hurley’s translation).63 With respect to the meaning of assujettisement, it clearly entails both subjugation and subjection, but while such a meaning implies a subordination on the part of the subject, Foucault also sees assujettisement as entailing more than relations of domination; as also involving the autonomy, and the possibility of resistance, of the one who is assujetti (subjected) as well. That range of meanings is severely restricted when assujettisement is translated into English as subjection or subjugation. The importance of acknowledging the active factor in assujettisement became especially important in the late 1970s when Foucault expanded the purview of his investigations of power relations beyond disciplinary power and docile bodies, to include “governmentality,” where the reversibility of power relations became particularly important, and where he articulated a vision of government through freedom. Judith Butler has grasped the multifaceted elements of assujettisement that escaped so many others: Power not only acts on a subject, but in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being. As a condition, power precedes the subject. Power loses its priority,

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however, when it is wielded by the subject, a situation that gives rise to the reverse perspective that power is the effect of the subject, and that power is what the subject effects.64

However, in his 1981–2 lecture course at the Collège de France, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, in discussing how we constitute ourselves as ethical subjects, Foucault very deliberately introduces a new term: subjectivation. While assujettisement pertains to how one is produced as a subject through the exercise of power/ knowledge, including the modalities of resistance through which that exercise of power can be modified or attenuated, subjectivation pertains to the relation of the individual to him/herself, and to the multiple ways in which a self can be constructed on the basis of an art of living: “it involved arriving at the formation of a full, perfect, complete, and self-sufficient relationship with oneself, capable of producing the self-transfiguration that is the happiness one takes in oneself.”65 That same ethical ideal, we have argued, animated Nietzsche too. If one facet of Nietzsche, as Duncan Large has argued, is that he “promotes the process of self-becoming as an ethical ideal . . . by presenting himself as an inspirational example of successfully achieved selfhood,”66 let us explore in more detail how that ethical ideal affects the way that he wants to be read, and the kinds of readers that he wanted. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche “imagined a perfect reader,” that “monster of courage,”67 to whom we have already pointed. What is this “monster of courage” that Nietzsche seeks in his readers? She clearly seems to be someone who has “The predilection of strength for questions for which no one today has the courage; the courage for the forbidden.”68 One facet of the strength for questions, the ability to raise uncomfortable questions, to probe an author, to decipher him, let us say it again, is to be a “cow,” to “ruminate.” Here, we are at the core of just what such an art of reading entails for Nietzsche, and how we understand it. To ruminate takes time; ideas must “percolate” in the reader’s mind. For that, the reader must—though it surely goes against the grain of modern life—read slowly, and probably more than once. That is why Nietzsche, as we have already shown insists that reading is an art: in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to “get everything done” at once, including every old or new book: —this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers . . . My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well! —69

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Slow reading, then, with time to ask questions, also carries with it, as James Conant has forcefully argued: The implication . . . that one has not learned anything from an author of this work unless one has in some way denied him. Nietzsche writes books that demand of their reader that he learn to reach the point at which he can throw them away. The sign of our genuine appropriation of them is that we ultimately reject them . . . An integral part of what [Nietzsche] seeks to teach is when to throw a book away.70

The possibility that one will reject the teachings contained in a book, including a book of his, lies in Nietzsche’s own fervent belief—linked to his vision of philosophy as an art of living—that he seeks no disciples, no acolytes: Now I  go alone, my disciples. You too go now, alone. Thus I  want it. Verily, I  counsel you:  go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better:  be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you . . . One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have denied me will I return to you.71

Indeed, it seems to us that Nietzsche writes to be resisted. His texts are not just antidogmatic and polysemic, but an incitement to resistance on the part of his readers. Nietzsche’s ethical ideal for himself may be very different from the ethical ideal that a given reader may pursue, something that Nietzsche clearly acknowledged through the words of his creation, Zarathustra, in response to those who sought to be his disciples: “This is my way; where is yours?”—thus I answered those who asked me “the way.” For the way—that does not exist.72

Nietzsche, as we have said, sought his ideal reader among those for whom his book would strike a profoundly personal chord, yet those who were engaged in their own project of self-fashioning: “The man to whom it says nothing personal will probably not be further interested in me. It contains the basic scheme according to which I have so far lived; it is a rigorous promise.”73 Yet that project of self-fashioning, and its art of living, would not replicate Nietzsche’s own. Nietzsche’s vision was indeed one of philosophy as an art of living, but his reader’s version of such an art might certainly differ, perhaps quite substantially, from his own. Within the ambit of a project of self-fashioning, the elaboration of an art of living, that is to say, within a Nietzschean vision, Nietzsche’s readers would construct their own version of such an art, the outcome of which might be very different from the self that Nietzsche had sought to fashion.

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How we choose to read In an unpublished note from 1875, Nietzsche says:  “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.”74 We read Nietzsche precisely to become uncomfortable—uncomfortable with our taken-for-granted beliefs, with our unquestioned Truths, uncomfortable with ourselves. We read Nietzsche precisely to disrupt the modes of life that constitute the very foundations of the cultural world that we inhabit. The philosophical wisdom that we find in Nietzsche, let us reiterate, is a disruptive wisdom, one that both disturbs us and generates new ways of seeing the world, transforms our feelings, our affective sensibilities, and can generate new modes of living.75 Such disruptive wisdom is not just uncomfortable, however. For Nietzsche, opening oneself up to such a prospect is unbearably painful for the reader or the philosopher: Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit . . . Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were—pain which takes its time—only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and put away all trust, all good-naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium—things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us “better,” but I know that it makes us more profound.76

For the person who has embarked on a project of self-fashioning, doing things to ourselves that we would hesitate to knowingly do to nature is involved: for we experiment with ourselves in a way we never permit ourselves to experiment with animals and, carried away by curiosity, we cheerfully vivisect our souls: what is the “salvation” of the soul to us today? Afterward we cure ourselves: sickness is instructive, we have no doubt of that, even more instructive than health—those who make sick seem even more necessary to us today than any medicine men or “saviors.” We violate ourselves nowadays, no doubt of it, we nutcrackers of the soul, ever questioning and questionable, as if life were nothing but cracking nuts; and thus we are bound to grow day-byday more questionable, worthier of asking questions; perhaps also worthier— of living?77

Such experiments on our selves, in the service of an affirmation of life, constitute examples of that naturalized asceticism with which Nietzsche challenges the ascetic ideal and its devaluation of life. Just as our reading of Nietzsche is compelling because of the disruption and disturbance it causes us, and just as our reading is inflected by the recognition that Nietzsche speaks to each of us differently, so too is our reading shaped by his

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unwillingness to seek any kind of closure, any kind of certitude in his interpretations. There may never be a time when Nietzsche is “understood,” inasmuch as understanding implies some kind of closure, and for us, Nietzsche is always open to question, to new and fresh interpretations. Indeed, we have the sense that were the canons of writing recast, Nietzsche would have ended virtually every one of his sentences with ellipses, to mark the unfinished character of both the world and his interpretations of it—a world and an oeuvre that is never complete, that is full of questionable maybes. Moreover, as Robert GoodingWilliams claims, Nietzsche never ceases to question his skepticism and to think speculatively beyond it. As a philosopher of Dionysus, he challenges the authority of his irony and skepticism no less than, as an ironist and a skeptic, he challenges the authority of his own Dionysian thinking. The essence of Nietzsche’s rigor is his relentless, if often stressful practice of thinking against himself.78

Indeed, as will become clear when we raise the question of the status of our own interpretations of Nietzsche, we too, were it acceptable, would end our sentences with ellipses; indeed, they are there, albeit as a ghostly presence, indicative of the need to also think against ourselves. Reading Nietzsche this way entails paying strict attention to his widespread use of rhetorical tropes in unconventional ways. How else could we read this old philologist? As Mazzino Montinari alerts us, one of the elements in reading Nietzsche “well,” entails not “taking his pronouncements literally.”79 For Nietzsche, as we read him, speech acts are examples of language that is both performative and figural. Nietzsche’s use of metaphors is neither aesthetic nor ornamental, even as they are not merely oratorical devices to trick the uninitiated, as Plato believed rhetoric to entail. For Nietzsche, as we read him, metaphors are tropes of persuasion, his fishhooks. The forms or modes through which Nietzsche sought to communicate, his recourse to metaphor, his tropes of persuasion, are all aimed at provoking self-activity, are indirect, as are the experiments (Versuche) in which he shaped his communications, and the masks he wore in pursuit of his art. And it is that provocation to self-fashioning, to an art of living, which guides our reading of both Nietzsche and Foucault. If we take Nietzsche’s hyperbole as integral to his tropes of persuasion, exactly how do we read that hyperbole in the Nietzschean text, for it is surely omnipresent there? Nietzsche, then, often makes claims that have the stamp of authority; that are formulated so as to be oracular. Claudia Crawford insists that Nietzsche’s frequent recourses to hyperbole, especially toward the end of

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1888, just before his final breakdown, “are not symptoms of megalomania and impending madness, rather that Nietzsche was consciously wielding a grand style of agonal rhetorics of prophecy, apocalypse, legislation, and the dithyramb in order to do just what he claimed to be attempting—to assassinate two millennia of anti-nature and desecration of man and revive a Dionysian age!”80 Crawford’s Nietzsche is a “messianic prophet,” and “because of their hyperbolic power the words and action of a prophet and redeemer change the behavior of readers, the read becomes the acted.”81 Crawford’s vision of Nietzschean hyperbole in the service of prophecy is very close to our own understanding of Nietzschean rhetoric as tropes of persuasion, as fishhooks intended to snare the reader. This is also consonant with Alexander Nehamas’ contention that “Nietzsche’s writing, and his thinking, is essentially hyperbolic.”82 Moreover, Nehamas links this hyperbole to Socratic irony, two rhetorical tropes with a common aim: “The one reaction Nietzsche cannot tolerate is indifference, and this is what his use of hyperbole is designed to eliminate. Like Socratic irony, it often fails to accomplish its end, and some people are particularly unsusceptible to it. But the aim is the same in both cases, and the effect the two tropes are intended to have is identical.”83 Nietzsche’s aim, however, beyond the shock provoked by any given formulation, its ability to grab the reader’s attention, is to get his readers to think, to question what might have been taken for granted, truths hitherto unquestioned; we think, precisely to block any certainty, for what is presented as incontestable is often accompanied by the announcement that its author’s own claims must be subject to question. Nietzsche seeks to prevent his experiments in the morning from becoming our truths in the afternoon. In his epilogue to The Gay Science, for example, Nietzsche has alerted us to the fact that “the spirits of my own book are attacking me, pull my ears, and call me back to order. ‘We can no longer stand it,’ they shout at me; ‘away, away with this raven-black music!’ ”84 Nietzsche’s book laughs at its own author; it has among its many qualities, that of parody. Moreover, Nietzsche, who seeks to take us “beyond good and evil,” beyond a vision that sees the world in terms of the unconditional, in terms of clashing binary oppositions, clearly affirms the importance of nuance: When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial—as the real artists of life do.85

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All of Nietzsche’s writings can be seen as experiments, attempts, indeed “riddles,” with which he tempts or seduces his reader, to explore new paths in the art of living. Indeed, Versuchen possesses all of those connotations, and Nietzsche the riddler plays with each: A new species of philosophers is coming up: I venture to baptize them with a name that is not free of danger. As I unriddle them, insofar as they allow themselves to be unriddled—for it belongs to their nature to want to remain riddles at some point—these philosophers of the future may have a right—it might also be a wrong—to be called attempters. This name itself is in the end a mere attempt and, if you will, a temptation.86

Beyond Nietzsche’s playfulness, and his puns, there is also the acknowledgment that none of his texts can be definitive or final, that each is an experiment, both in terms of its content and its style—an experiment in provoking self-activity and new modes of the art of living. It is to those ends that Nietzsche puts on and takes off a series of masks; masks that both conceal and reveal his project. As Douglas Burnham claims, “a mask is not only a mode of hiding, but also a mode of being engaged, that is a particular way of entering into a community with others.”87 Let us remember too that Dionysus, whose spirit permeates the whole of the Nietzschean project, is the god of masks. Indeed, in addition to his own masks, Nietzsche’s very conception of an art of living entails the probability that one who fashions a self, may also—in the course of time—refashion that self. As Horst Hutter puts it: “Hence the ability of a body to construct for itself several ‘personalities’ and several ego identities in a lifetime, that is, the ability to wear different ‘masks.’ ”88 That very ability to construct different “personalities,” to fashion and refashion one’s self, is a focal point of our reading of Nietzsche. Here again, it is that twentieth century Nietzschean, Michel Foucault, who perhaps best alerts us to what should motivate our reading—though in this instance Foucault is speaking about his own motivation as an historian: As for what motivated me, it was quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing

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if one can think differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.89

Our reading of Nietzsche, then, is also motivated by just such a concern to fashion a different self, and by the sense that the cultural crisis through which we are now living is the right time for just such a project.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 385. 2 Ibid., p. 387. 3 See Foucault’s 1982 lecture course at the Collège de France, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 10–11. 4 Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 348. 5 While both thinkers concentrated their attention on the ancient world, Nietzsche focused on the pre-Socratic world, on archaic Greece, while Foucault focused on the Hellenistic world, especially on the Pythagoreans, the Epicureans, and the Stoics. Foucault’s own successor at his chair at the Collège de France, Pierre Hadot, has provided us with an excellent vision of how Nietzsche and Foucault each saw the task of philosophy: “The philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being. It is a progress which causes us to be more fully, and makes us better. It is a conversion which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it.” Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p.83. 6 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 10–11. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 232. 8 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 8; Michel Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 14. Paul Rabinow has suggested “detach oneself from oneself ” as closer to a translation of Foucault’s idea here. See his Introduction to Michel Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. I, Ethics (New York: New Press, 1997), p. xxxviii. 9 Michel Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 241. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p.611.

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11 Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Essential Works of Foucault, Volume I, Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 319. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 91. 13 Timothy O’Leary, “Foucault, Dewey, and the Experience of Literature,” New Literary History 36.4 (Autumn 2005), pp. 544–5. 14 Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method,” trans. Colin Gordon, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 73–4. 15 Michel Foucault, “For an Ethics of Discomfort,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext[e], 1997), p. 144. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 50. 17 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2001), p. 74. 18 Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault, Volume I, p. 209. 19 Ibid., p. 211. 20 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 294. 21 We say styles in the plural, because here we follow Alexander Nehamas in claiming that Nietzsche utilizes a variety of styles, not just in different periods of his life, but in the same period, including aphorism, metaphor, and hyperbole. See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), chapter 1. We shall examine the significance of this stylistic pluralism later. 22 Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 91. 23 Ibid., p. 45. 24 Ibid., p. 99. 25 Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 152. 26 Nietzsche explicitly forges the link between reading and the “Revaluation of All Values” in the Preface to The Antichrist. See Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” in The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 568–9. 27 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 283. 28 David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), p. vii. 29 Pierre Hadot, whose own writings on the ancients, on philosophy as a way of life, and as an interlocutor of Foucault, saw reading as a “spiritual exercise,” and one whose mastery has been largely lost in the modern world: “we have forgotten how to read: how to pause . . . return to ourselves . . . in order to meditate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us. This, too, is a spiritual exercise, and one of the most difficult.” Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, p. 109.

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30 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 199. Nietzsche is here speaking about the will to truth, but that issue seems to us to be directly linked to the questions that we are raising here. 31 For a discussion of how to read the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, see Kelly Oliver, “A Dagger Through the Heart: On the Ethics of Reading Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals,” International Studies in Philosophy 25.2 (1993), pp. 13–28; and Christopher Janaway, “Nietzsche’s Illustration of the Art of Exegesis,” European Journal of Philosophy 5.3 (1997), pp. 251–68. 32 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, p. 98. 33 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 215. 34 Cynthia Halpern, Suffering Politics Power: A Genealogy in Modern Political Theory (Albany : SUNY Press, 2002), p. 298n57. 35 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, p. 185. 36 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 331. 37 Ibid., p. 343. In terms of the importance of being understood by his readers, as opposed to not being understood, Nietzsche’s focus in his texts is nonetheless primarily on the former, as we pointed out earlier. 38 Ibid. 39 Nietzsche, “Ecce Homo,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 743. 40 Ibid., p. 709. 41 Thomas H. Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading and Private Library, 1885–1889,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58.4 (1997), p.664. 42 Nehamas, Nietzsche, pp. 90–91. 43 Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Carl von Gersdorff, May 26, 1876, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe, vol. 5, in Kritische Studienausgabe, 15 vols., ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin and New York/Munich: dtv and Walter de Gruyter, 1967–77 and 1998), p. 163. Nietzsche was here specifically referring to the Greek philosophers. 44 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 137. 45 Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 14. 46 Ibid., p. 17. 47 Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998), p. 6. 48 Lou Salomé, Nietzsche, trans. Siegfried Mandel (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 29. 49 Alexander Nehamas, “On the Philosophical Life: An Interview with Alexander Nehamas,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy 8 (2000), p. 27. So, as Nehamas adds, the question is, “Who do I become as a result of trying to understand what [the philosopher] is saying,” p.31.

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50 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 187. 51 Robert C. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 12–13. 52 Ibid., p. 13. 53 Nehamas, “On the Philosophical Life,” p. 30. 54 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 35. 55 Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 611. 56 Ansell-Pearson, How to Read Nietzsche, p. 75. For Horst Hutter, “Decadence is willlessness, because the overall organization of willing is lacking. But this will-lessness is ambivalent: it points beyond itself to the beginning of new lines of willing.” Hutter, Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), p. 24. 57 Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 245. 58 As Keith Ansell-Pearson has recognized, “It would be a mistake to suppose that Nietzsche opposes ascetic practices completely, since the kind of greatness that he esteems requires sacrifice and self-discipline. What he is opposed to are practices of self-denial which devalue earthly, sensual life.” Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 141. We believe that Nietzsche refunctioned the concept of asceticism, uncoupling it from its Christian moorings, and linking it to a GrecoRoman understanding, thereby making it integral to a project of self-mastery, and self-fashioning, one which presages and shaped the project of the later Michel Foucault. 59 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 127. 60 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 266. 61 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 483. 62 Michel Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 49. 63 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité I: La Volonté de Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 81; and The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 60. 64 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 13. However, Butler’s own translation of assujettisement as “subjection” weakens her otherwise powerful argument, inasmuch as subjection privileges the element of domination and control over the very autonomy and agency to which she is pointing. By contrast, Nikolas Rose, in his Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), translates assujettisement as “subjectification,” which seems to us particularly

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67 68 69 70

71 72 73

74 75 76

77 78 79 80

81 82 83

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felicitous as it does not foreclose any of the range of possible meanings that Foucault’s term contains. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, pp. 319–20. Duncan Large, “Introduction,” in Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. xvii. Nietzsche, “Ecce Homo,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 720. Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 568. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5. James Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 201. Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 190. Ibid., p. 307. Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Georg Brandes, April 10, 1888 in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett, 1996), p. 292. Nietzsche was speaking here about the third of his Untimely Meditations, Schopenhauer as Educator. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 50. Here Nietzsche foreshadows Foucault’s own “ethics of discomfort,” to which we pointed above. For an elaboration of this point, see Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg, “Nietzsche and Disruptive Wisdom,” Dialogue and Universalism 15.5–6 (2005). Friedrich Nietzsche, “Nietzsche Contra Wagner: Out of the Files of a Psychologist,” in The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 680–81. We shall address the question of Nietzsche’s hyperbole—perhaps on display here—as well as his insistence on the importance of nuance when we discuss the question of Nietzsche’s style. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 549. Robert Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 83. Mazzino Montinari, Reading Nietzsche (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 7. Claudia Crawford, “Nietzsche’s Psychology and Rhetoric of World Redemption: Dionysus versus the Crucified,” in Nietzsche and Depth Psychology, ed. Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santiago, and Ronald Lehrer (Albany : SUNY Press, 1999), p. 271. Ibid., p. 273. Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 31. Ibid., p. 28.

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84 85 86 87

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 347. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 233. Ibid., p. 242. Douglas Burnham, Reading Nietzsche: An Analysis of beyond Good and Evil (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), p. 70. 88 Hutter, Shaping the Future, p. 55. 89 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 8.

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Foucault and Nietzsche Sisyphus and Dionysus Michael Ure and Federico Testa

This chapter shows how Foucault adopts and reconfigures Nietzsche’s Hellenistically inspired model of the philosophical and cultural physician.1 It elaborates and explains Foucault’s Nietzschean model of the philosophical physician and its normative underpinning. In the first section we establish the philosophical background to this model by demonstrating how Nietzsche conceives genealogy as a medical interpretation and diagnosis of phenomena. For Nietzsche genealogy is an art of interpretation that enables the philosophical physician to diagnose health and sickness. In the second section we turn to Foucault’s own debt to the Nietzschean idea of the philosophical physician. We argue that Foucault’s genealogical method commits him to the ideal of the philosophical physician. Nietzsche conceives the genealogist as a physiologist or doctor who interprets phenomena in terms of health and sickness. By adopting Nietzsche’s genealogical method Foucault, therefore, explicitly frames his analysis of modern power in terms of this ancient ideal. Yet, if Foucault deploys Nietzsche’s method he too is faced with the difficulty of circumscribing and defining norms of health and illness. We argue secondly that Foucault’s own normative judgments are partly informed by a Nietzschean ideal of “vital normativity,” and its corresponding distinction between the normal and the pathological. Like Nietzsche, Foucault acknowledges that flourishing requires the capacity to invent new norms and ways of life, and in doing so to become different to oneself, to go astray from oneself. We, therefore, describe Foucault’s ethical experimentalism as an ethics of errancy. And like Nietzsche, Foucault also investigates and deploys Hellenistic philosophies as technologies that transform logos into ethos, truth into a way of life. Nevertheless, as we show in the final section, there remains a significant difference between Nietzsche’s ethical experimentalism and Foucault’s ethics

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of errancy. While Nietzsche formulates a principle for distinguishing between health and sickness, Foucault’s skeptical genealogy of the present leaves him without the conceptual resources to discharge the role of the philosophical physician. Foucault takes up Nietzschean genealogy but omits the philosophical quest for eternity to which Nietzsche was committed. For Nietzsche, selftransformation is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of “the great health.”2 Nietzsche’s “great health” requires not just ethical experimentation, not just an art of going astray from oneself, but experimentation that tests and enhances one’s capacity to be affected by and to incorporate the widest possible range of experiences or stimuli. Nietzsche endorses tragic pessimism as a sign and symptom of great health precisely because, as he conceives it, this type of pessimism actively seeks out “the fearful and questionable that characterizes all existence.”3 Nietzsche’s ethical experimentation aims at realizing the greatest possible margin of tolerance for all that threatens or endangers the self, or the luxury, as he puts it, of tragic insight into the eternal repetition of same. Nietzsche’s great health is an affirmation of tragic fate. Nietzsche therefore frames his philosophical askēsis in terms of the classical problem of fate.4 Foucault reclaims the ancient philosophies, but not as therapeutic responses to the tragic character of existence, but simply as technologies of open-ended self-transformation. Nietzsche’s philosophical physician sets free spirits the Dionysian task of affirming the tragic character of existence to the extent of affirming its eternal repetition. Foucault’s philosophical physician sets modern subjects the task of perpetually going beyond the limits of the present to the extent of pursuing the Sisyphean task of always starting anew on the same task.

Nietzsche’s reinvention of the philosophical physician Hellenistic philosophers conceived philosophy as analogous to medicine: they argued that its goal is to diagnose and treat the illnesses that prevent human flourishing. In every period of his philosophical development Nietzsche lamented that contemporary philosophy lacked this therapeutic orientation. “For where are the physicians for modern mankind who themselves stand so firmly and soundly on their feet that they are able to support others and lead them by the hand?”5 One of Nietzsche’s principal aims is to reorient philosophy around the medical analogy that formed the organizing principle of Hellenistic philosophies.6 Where, he asks, can we find “new physicians of the soul”?7 He shares with the Hellenistic schools the belief that the central motivation for

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philosophizing is the urgency of human suffering and that the goal of philosophy is human flourishing (eudaimonia). In his view we need new physicians of the soul precisely because the earlier Hellenistic cures and remedies ultimately cause more harm than good. If Nietzsche’s genealogist shares the Hellenistic philosophers’ therapeutic ambitions he does so, as we will see, while condemning their account of human flourishing.8 Nietzsche reconstitutes the Hellenistic model of the philosophical physician, but with a very different and competing conception of health. Nietzsche attempts to reinvent the philosophical physician not only to cure the pathologies engendered by the earlier Hellenistic therapeia, but also for new and peculiarly modern diseases. “There is at present,” as he remarks, “no profession capable of being so greatly advanced as that of the physician.”9 We can see how Nietzsche reconstitutes the ancient philosophical physician in the guise of the genealogist of morals by briefly elaborating the central theoretical and substantive aims of his Genealogy. Following the model of the Hellenistic philosophical physicians Nietzsche conceives the genealogist as one who aims to determine the value of practices for individual and collective flourishing. Nietzsche’s particular focus is on the medical value of morality. Nietzsche explains the key aim of genealogical analysis as raising and resolving the question of the “value of all previous valuations.”10 Nietzsche identifies his genealogy of morals as essentially the preparation for the work of evaluating the value of these values. Nietzsche observes that the book’s central problem is something far more important than pursuing any particular empirical hypothesis about the origins of morality; it concerns rather what he describes as the much more significant problem of “the value of morality.” Nietzsche identifies his genealogical history as a means to this “higher” end of evaluating the value of morality—specifically compassion. It is to this end that he examines the history or origins of our modern table of values, which he identifies as the morality of compassion, in order to “know about the conditions and circumstances under which [it] grew up, developed, changed (morality as result, as symptom . . . as sickness, as misunderstanding, but also morality as cause, remedy, stimulant, inhibition, poison), since we have neither had this knowledge up till now nor even desired it.”11 His contemporaries, both metaphysicians and naturalists alike, he laments, have taken for granted the value of compassion.12 Under the spell and seduction of morality, the “Circe of the philosophers,”13 philosophers, metaphysicians and naturalists, dogmatically assume that the morality of compassion establishes the criterion of value for distinguishing between ascending and descending, healthy and pathological types. To evaluate morality in this way, he claims, philosophy, physiology and medicine must overcome

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their mutual suspicion and enter into “the most cordial and fruitful exchange.” “Every table of values, every ‘thou shalt’ known to the history of ethnology,” he suggests, “needs first and foremost a physiological elucidation and interpretation rather than a psychological one and all of them await critical study from medical science.”14 Nietzsche suggests that this medical or physiological elucidation of value is necessary to address the “question: what is this or that table of values and ‘morals’ worth?” and to ask from “different angles” in particular “the question ‘value for what?’ ” According to Nietzsche then “All sciences must: from now on, prepare for the future work of the philosopher: this work being understood to mean that the philosopher has to solve the problem of the values and that he has to decide on the rank order of values.”15 On this basis Nietzsche revives the ancient model of the philosopher as physician: “I am still waiting for the philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the term—someone who has set himself the task of pursuing the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of humanity.”16 For Nietzsche, future philosophers must become physicians capable of identifying the best conditions of human flourishing and curing individual and collective maladies. He conceives his genealogical history as a medical diagnosis and prognosis of our values as expressions and symptoms of health and sickness, ascending and descending life. Nietzsche’s philosophical physician conceptualizes moralities and moral practices in medical terms—that is, he conceives moral values as physiological symptoms that, in turn, contribute to individual or collective health or sickness. We can take our initial bearings on Nietzsche’s genealogical physician of culture by examining how he evaluates one particular morality, namely, the morality of compassion. On the Genealogy of Morality’s polemical significance lies in Nietzsche’s claim that if we conceive moralities medically or physiologically, as he insists anti-metaphysical naturalists must, then we will see that the morality of compassion constitutes “the final sickness” of “nihilism,” of mankind “turning its will against life.”17 Nietzsche aims to demonstrate that the morality of compassion (the unegoistic, self-denial, self-sacrifice) first emerged among those who suffered from life, who were too sick, weak or deprived to engage in struggle or contest, and who therefore gilded, deified or transcendentalized values that condemn agonism and slander the drives of heroic individuals capable of engaging in contest. The ethics of compassion is a symptom of a physiological incapacity to engage in a struggle for power and its effect is to protect or shield those who suffer from this incapacity. Nietzsche’s presupposition is that the natural rule is the struggle for power, not “merely” the struggle for self-preservation. “To wish to preserve oneself,” as he explains, “is a sign of distress, of a limitation of

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the truly basic life instinct, which aims at the expansion of power and in doing so often enough risks and sacrifices self-preservation.”18 Physiological health expresses itself as the organism’s struggle for “growth and expansion”; physiological illness expresses itself as the organism’s struggle to maintain its status quo ante, or bare life.19 Compassion is the value expression of the physiologically sick, Nietzsche argues, insofar as it seeks to protect all forms of attenuated, weakened life and condemns the struggles for growth and expansion that jeopardize this bare existence. Nietzsche claims that Schopenhauer’s pessimistic judgment of life flows logically from the ethics of compassion: since this ethics values above all else weakened, attenuated life protected from the struggle for power, and the rule in nature is in fact the struggle for growth and expansion, it must condemn life. “Morality as it has been understood hitherto—as it is ultimately formulated by Schopenhauer as ‘denial of the will to life’ is the instinct of decadence, which makes out of itself an imperative: it says: ‘Perish!’—it is the judgment of the judged.”20 “For a condemnation of life by the living is . . . no more than the symptom of a certain kind of life:  . . . of declining, debilitated, weary, condemned life.”21 Through his genealogical account of compassion we can see then how Nietzsche himself assumes the role of the cultural physician: he identifies our reigning morality and its altruistic model of “the good man” as “the most sinister symptom of our European culture,” a “regressive trait,” as the “danger of dangers” that will prevent the species from ever reaching its “highest potential power and splendour.”22 Nietzsche diagnoses compassion as predatory morality insofar it as an instrument that enables the weak to prey on the strong for their own protection. For Nietzsche modern power operates through a predatory morality of compassion that preserves and protects the “herd” by eliminating the very conditions that make it possible for the species to attain its heights, namely, the condition of agonistic competition. It flows from a pathological fear of life that aims to eliminate all orders of rank (“ni dieu ni maître”), and the spectacle and experience of all suffering.23 The love of neighbor espoused by herd morality is born of a fear of neighbor, a fear of all strong, dangerous drives that elevate individuals above the herd.24 We might say then that Nietzsche diagnoses compassion as a collective moral regulation of the life process as a whole, the affective dimension of modern “bio-politics,” which aims to secure the collective or “herd” by eliminating all grounds for fear of life.25 Nietzsche then revives the Hellenistic model of the philosophical physician, reconfiguring it in the guise of the genealogist who charts the history of our values as symptoms of illness and health. In this context, he conceives values as

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conditions of biological existence that function as poisons, remedies, anesthetics, or intoxicants. Nietzsche as genealogist condemns compassion as a predatory morality that regulates collective and individual affects in order to protect the weak from the dangers and insecurities of life, and does so by eliminating the agonistic conditions of existence necessary for the “highest” or “healthiest” types to flourish. In Nietzsche’s language, health is not adapting to the environment in order to maintain a “normal” standard or to preserve oneself, but an expansion of power through the creation of new norms and with them new ways of living. The “great health,” as he understands it, consists in the ability to transform and expand one’s capacities in the context of dangerous conditions. Nietzsche identifies a “plastic power,” or a “superfluity of formative, curative, moulding and restorative forces” as “precisely the sign of great health.”26 The experimental ethics that expresses this healthy condition requires living beyond the organism’s current means, so to speak; or “to live dangerously” as Nietzsche succinctly put it.27 Nietzsche’s celebration of “Dionysian” tragedy embodies and articulates his conception of “vital normativity,” to borrow Canguilhem’s neo-Nietzschean concept.28 Nietzsche elaborates his idea of “the great health” as a “luxury,” that is, as the ability to maintain, indeed to cultivate and expand one’s exposure and sensitivity to the most terrible and fearful events. It is the luxury, as he puts it, of “tragic insight” and the “terrible deed.”29 For those endowed with great health, with a “superabundance of life,” tragedy is a luxury they can afford since: He who is richest in fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man can allow himself not only the sight of what is terrible and questionable, but also the terrible deed and every luxury of destruction, decomposition, negation; in his case, what is evil, nonsensical, and ugly seems acceptable because of an overflow of procreating, fertilizing forces capable of turning any desert into bountiful farmland.30

For those physiologically endowed with abundant life, over-rich in “plastic powers,” Nietzsche suggests, tragic insight is “permitted luxury” since they have a much greater margin of tolerance for experiences and environments that demands powers of incorporation, assimilation and transformation.31 In such cases, Nietzsche suggests the demand for tragic insight is an index of health.

Foucault’s Sisyphean ethics As we have seen, Nietzsche conceives the genealogist as a philosophical physician and he formulates the idea of “the great health” as its normative principle.

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Foucault identified his own research as an application of Nietzschean genealogy. There are compelling reasons therefore to investigate how exactly Foucault drew on this Nietzschean legacy in developing his own philosophical ethos or limit attitude. What is his model of the philosophical physician? What, if any, normative principles does he propose to differentiate between health and sickness? How does Foucault’s perspective compare with Hellenistic and Nietzschean philosophical therapies and their evaluative or normative principles? We address these questions in three steps. First, we show how Foucault borrows from Nietzsche’s genealogical perspective a nonteleological conception of history as a palimpsest of competing value interpretations and the model of the genealogist as a physician capable of diagnosing heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes. Second, we examine how in formulating his own philosophical ethos the “late” Foucault also follows Nietzsche by drawing on the Hellenistic model of philosophy as an art or exercise of self-transformation and does so in a way that partially endorses what we have described as Nietzsche’s experimental ethics and its concept of “the great health” and vital normativity.32 In Nietzsche’s genealogy, as we shall see, Foucault discovers a differential knowledge of energies and failing that hinges on conceiving “life” in terms of vital normativity: that is, as the incessant creation of new norms. Finally we show how what we might call Foucault’s version of this experimental ethics, a “Romantic” ethics of errancy, diverges from Nietzsche’s ethical experimentalism and the theoretical and practical lacunae it generates. As we have seen, for Nietzsche the primary goal of the genealogical method is to make it possible to diagnose values and practices as symptoms of health and illness. He conceives genealogy as the philosophical physician’s diagnostic instrument:  it explains value systems as symptoms of life and identifies whether and how they contribute to its flourishing or decline. In his 1964 essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” Foucault outlined Nietzsche’s genealogical hypothesis that there are no fundamental or essential concepts (“signifieds”), only a constant process of reinterpretation that imposes new meanings and purposes on fluid forms and practices.33 Foucault draws on Nietzsche’s genealogy to account for and explain one of his fundamental theoretical principles: an antiteleological conception of history. This antiteleological, naturalistic framework eliminates the idea that history is the development or fall away from the true or essential meaning or use of a given phenomenon. It replaces this teleological, progressive idea with a genealogical mapping of the continual reinvention and redeployment of phenomena for new ends or purposes. Nietzsche’s genealogy of suspicion, he explains, does not seek to uncover a fundamental or primary

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“signified” beneath layers of interpretation, but to identify “the great tissue of violent interpretations beneath everything that speaks.”34 In his account of the genealogical method of interpretation Nietzsche highlights what he calls “a major point of historical method”: There is no more important proposition for every sort of history than . . . that anything in existence . . . is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which the former “meaning” and purpose must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.35

Foucault discovers in Nietzsche’s genealogical method the claim that life itself is a nonteleologcal and continual process of the invention of new norms and practices; in short, he discovers vital normativity. In reflecting on his own genealogical studies of power Foucault explicitly acknowledges the Nietzschean aims and methods of his historical studies: “If I wanted to be pretentious,” he remarks, “I would use the term ‘genealogy of morals’ as the general title of what I am doing.”36 Given the frequent claims that Foucault’s genealogies are normatively confused or incoherent,37 we might be tempted to think that he only borrows from Nietzsche his “grey,” patient historical methodology that focuses on nothing more than identifying sharp historical discontinuities among regimes of truth;38 and that he skips overs, erases or forgets that genealogy, as Nietzsche understood it, is an instrument philosophical physicians use to diagnose the species’ health and identify the illnesses that prevent its future flourishing. However, when we turn to Foucault’s account of the genealogical method we discover that he highlights precisely the connection Nietzsche establishes between genealogy and medicine, and his claim that it is a diagnostic instrument: “Historical sense has more in common with medicine than philosophy . . . it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes. Its task is to become a curative science.”39 Foucault pinpoints here Nietzsche’s debt to the Hellenistic medical analogy, which understands philosophy as a sort of medical practice. In this 1971 lecture he explicitly distinguishes between conventional philosophy and the genealogical medicine. Foucault describes what he takes to be a conventional philosophical perspective that identifies this discipline as the domain of necessary truths and values and identifies history as merely a handmaiden that charts their point of emergence. By contrast, he identifies his own research with a Nietzschean genealogical perspective

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that charts the history of morality and truth, not as a progressive discovery of necessary truths, but as a constant process of violent interpretation and reinterpretation of practices.40 Foucault reclaims Nietzsche’s genealogy as a differential knowledge of energies and failing that hinges on conceiving life in terms of vital normativity: that is, as the incessant creation of new norms. We can see how in his later work Foucault develops his philosophical ethos on the basis of a normative perspective oriented around transformation and differentiation in a brief, yet remarkable passage in which he declares that the selftransformation that takes place through the practice of “games of truth” is not superfluous or irrelevant backstage material to the main philosophical drama. Life itself, he implies, ought to be the theater of truth. What, he asks rhetorically, is the value of the passion for knowledge if it does not transform the knower? For Foucault self-transformation, the transformation of how one lives, is the point and purpose of philosophy, if we assume, as he seems to, that it is still what it was for the ancients, namely, an askēsis or an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought. “What is philosophy today,” he asks, if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not the endeavour to know how and to what extent is might be possible to think differently instead of legitimating what is already known? . . . philosophical discourse . . . is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. The “essay”— which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the games of truth, one undergoes changes . . . is the living substance of philosophy.41

Foucault clearly echoes Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy as askēsis, as a test in which one practices a strange or foreign knowledge in order to become different to oneself, to stray afield of oneself.42 Indeed, his invocation of the concept of the “passion for knowledge” unmistakably recalls Nietzsche who uses this concept to identify a thought he calls the “great liberator,” namely, “the thought that life could be an experiment for the knowledge-seeker. And knowledge itself: let it be something else to others, like a bed to rest on or the way to one, or a diversion or a form of idleness; to me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings also have their dance.”43 In Foucault’s language philosophy as askēsis does not legitimate “what is already known,” it is not a bed to rest on, but a test that demands self-transformation. In Foucault’s ethics of errancy one engages in philosophical askeses in order to become different from oneself, and one does so over and over again. Freedom, as Foucault conceives, is not realized by coming into alignment with nature or the

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cosmos, the fulfillment of a telos or essence, but through an exercise in the creation or invention of the new. The ethical question is not “How can I live according to nature?” but “What new game can we invent?”44 In Foucault’s “philosophical ethos,” which he describes as a “limit attitude,” freedom or health is therefore identical to vital normativity, the permanent exercise of inventing new norms, and pathology is the inability to transgress the limits of present norms.45 That is to say, Foucault conceives his genealogical critique of the present as an exercise of the self on itself that aims at generating new norms of practice and new modes of living. What counts as valuable for Foucault is the capacity to create new norms and ways of life rather than conform or return to a given norm. The curative aspect of Foucault’s genealogy consists exactly in its transformative and differential aspect: (a) identifying fissures, fragilities and weak points in our normalized practices;46 (b) challenging the necessity of these norms; and (c) in doing so, restoring not specific norms of life, but our normative capacity to create different and contingent ways of life, in a permanent, endless errancy. Following Nietzsche, Foucault seems to presuppose that health just is the capacity for normative variation. Foucault’s genealogical aim is not to establish a norm, but to liberate our capacity for normative variation or error. It aims to liberate our capacity for normative variation or errancy, not determine to what specific end we should employ this capacity. This entails the “negative” goal of exposing the contingency or fragility of the present. Its ideal or positive goal is to make it possible for us to engage in ethical experimentation, rather than to determine or select specific, substantive ends. We can say that Foucault criticizes normalizing institutions in the name of normative errancy or the capacity of life to constantly generate variations or new norms. Foucault’s philosophical medicine is that of an art of life, which consists of openness to the creation of values, to the establishment of new norms. Foucault’s genealogy generates an ethics of errancy that we can understand as partly motivated by a neo-Nietzschean vital normativity or health: that is, not the return to a static norm, but as the creation of new norms. “The critical ontology of ourselves,” he explains, is “a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”47

Sisyphus and Dionysus If, however, Foucault is in some respects a neo-Nietzschean philosophical physician who draws on the genealogical method to diagnose the ills of the present and

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proposes ethical experimentation as their remedy, on closer inspection his account of health differs in significant ways from Nietzsche’s. As we have seen, Foucault establishes his normative principle as the continuous, open-ended creation of new, improbable ways of life. Foucault’s philosophical ethos entails what we might describe as a Sisyphean labor of eternally binding together and then unraveling our mode of life. It affirms the exercise of freedom in unraveling our current limits, not in order to realize or attain an ideal end, but exclusively for the sake of inventing new modes of existence. Genealogy, as he explains “is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus . . . to the undefined work of freedom.”48 Yet, since for Foucault every possible mode of existence is merely contingent or singular, since he rules out in principle any concept of any advance to greater biological luxury, our “impatience for liberty” must immediately unravel this new mode of existence.49 In this sense Foucault’s philosophical ethos liberates or condemns individuals to perform Sisyphus’s eternally repeated task or to weave Penelope’s web: in the absence of any final goal or summum bonum each time they identify the limits or contingency of present norms “to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable”50 and experiment with and invent new modes of life, they must begin again and apply this limit attitude to the newly invented life. “It is true,” Foucault asserts, that we have to give up the hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete or definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning anew.51

Since any new game we might invent is also a product of arbitrary constraints that establish new limits, the limit attitude must also apply to this new game. In Foucault’s ethics, it seems, we are condemned to the eternal repetition of the same: viz., a series of games that might have different contents, but that are qualitatively the same. We have to dig deeply to show things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly unavoidable challenge of the question: what can we make work, what new game can we invent.52

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If, as Foucault makes clear, the background of our current practices is “emptiness,” then any new mode of intelligibility or newly invented game cannot be the fulfillment of some good, but is itself another mode of life that is equally contingent or nonnecessary. Foucault’s philosophical ethos thus engenders the type of impatient desire or will that Schopenhauer denounces as the source of our suffering, that is an impatient desire for a new object that immediately proves insufficient or lacking. Once “the patient labour giving form to our impatient desire for liberty” is complete we find ourselves “always in the position of beginning again.”53 Foucault’s subject of willing is marked out by its impatient and permanent desire to destroy or unravel its contingent mode of life for the sake of creating another equally contingent mode of life. We might then describe Foucault’s subject as “constantly lying on the revolving wheel of Ixion, is always drawing water in the sieve of the Danaids, and is eternally thirsting Tantalus.”54 Foucault’s genealogy, as Richard Bernstein puts it “ironically tantalises us with new possibilities.”55 Schopenhauer condemns this desire as futile because he claims that all first order desires are motivated by and aim at achieving a second order desire: viz., the cessation of all desire. Foucault attempts to conceive the perpetual transition from desire to desire, from norm to norm as itself the exercise of freedom. Unlike Schopenhauer he does not lament the impossibility of achieving this summum bonum, a final satisfaction of the will that brings all willing to end, or the discovery or realization of a perfect form, but celebrates it as the condition for the exercise of an undefined freedom. Foucault’s subject engages in the unending labor of unraveling its mode of life. If we compare Foucault’s philosophical limit attitude with its predecessors it becomes apparent that his ethics of errancy diverges significantly from Nietzsche’s experimental ethics. We can bring into greater relief Foucault’s own account of health by contrasting it with the Stoic and Nietzschean therapies. For Foucault, the value of philosophy as an exercise of self-transformation does not lie in enabling us to consent to the universe or cosmic whole (Stoic) or in making the self worthy of eternity (Nietzsche), rather it simply endorses variation or difference for its own sake. By seeing how Foucault diverges from Nietzsche’s ethical experimentalism we can get a better understanding of the normative problems his position generates. Despite Foucault’s debt to the ancient model of philosophical askēsis, his Sisyphean limit attitude or philosophical ethos puts him at odds with the Stoic and the Nietzschean and neo-Nietzschean philosophical therapies. By identifying the rational necessity of events, and engaging in exercises like the view

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from above to incorporate this perspective and make it “ready to hand,” Stoic philosophical physicians make it possible for us to consent to the universe. Stoic physics rules out counterfactual beliefs that events might be or might have been otherwise and with them, grief and fear. Stoics argue that their philosophical therapy delivers the summum bonum, conceived of as a “severe joy.” “Seneca,” as Hadot explains, “finds joy not in Seneca, but in the Seneca identified with universal Reason. One rises from one level of the self to another, transcendent level.”56 Foucault’s philosophical ethos and its exercises of the self are fundamentally anti-Stoic in principle and aim: it rejects all notions of necessity, fate or teleology and it therefore cannot aim at serene consent to or affirmation of necessity. For Foucault’s perspective, even if it requires a patient labor, things can always be different to how they in fact are. Foucault’s anti-Stoic picture delivers rather an ethics of what he describes as “hyperactivism,” that is, a constant contestation and transgression rather than affirmation of events. It undermines the Stoic perspective: it assumes that nothing is necessary or a priori, but always contingent and reversible. If Stoic therapy pivots on the belief in fate or necessity, Foucault’s philosophical ethos turns on contingency. It compels us to ask, “in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints?”57 In opposition to Stoic therapy, the Foucauldian physician rejects the idea of necessity, engaging in a “historical ontology of ourselves” designed to disclose precisely the contingency of things as a prelude to and preparation for a “possible transgression.”58 In this respect Foucault also diverges from the goal of Nietzsche’s ethical experimentalism, namely the creation of a life of eternal value and with it the affirmation of necessity.59 Of course, Nietzsche rejects Stoicism’s providential cosmology and with it the idea that the world is embodied reason.60 From Nietzsche’s perspective we cannot affirm necessity because it expresses divine reason, but we can and ought to make our lives necessary. Nietzsche formulates the ancient idea of eternal recurrence not as a cosmological doctrine, but as an askēsis or spiritual exercise through which we can make our lives eternally necessary for ourselves. Nietzsche’s antiteleological naturalism rejects the idea of eternal essences or purposes, but he does not therefore abandon the ideal of eternal value. Rather his doctrine of eternal recurrence reconceives necessity as something one makes, not something one discovers: “Let us etch the image of eternity upon our life. This thought contains far more than all those religions which hold our present lives in contempt as being ephemeral, and which have

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taught us to raise our sights towards some dubious other life.”61 Nietzsche’s goal or ideal is to make our lives worthy of eternity. It is, as he puts it the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated to all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo—not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to the spectacle but at bottom him who needs precisely this spectacle—and who makes it necessary because again and again he needs himself—and makes himself necessary.62

We could hardly draw a sharper contrast between Foucault and Nietzsche’s account of the purpose of ethical experimentation. On the one hand, Nietzsche’s great health entails learning to make things necessary to the point that one wants them to be exactly as they are for all eternity. Nietzsche establishes as a task and ideal making one’s life necessary such that one dreads the idea that it might have been different in the past or might be different in the present. We make or fashion our lives as necessary insofar as we want what was and is to repeat itself to all eternity. If we can fashion our lives in this way then we can affirm rather than lament the fatalistic belief in the eternal, cyclical return of all events. Nietzsche conceives the idea of an eternally desirable life by analogy to the experience of a work of art: “We want to experience a work of art over and over again! We should fashion our life in this way, so that we have the same wish for each of its parts! This is the main idea!”63 On the other hand, Foucault’s genealogical critique of the present formulates exactly the opposite practice: it discloses what is contingent in what seems necessary in order to identify a “possible transgression.” If we were to fashion our lives according to his limit attitude we could not will the eternal return of the same since this attitude wills that everything can be and ought to be different from how it presently is. Indeed, insofar as Foucault assumes that everything is both “contingent” and “dangerous” it is not clear how he can explain the desire for change or transgression since we can only move from one equally contingent danger to another. Foucault identifies this limit attitude with a high Romantic model of life as a work of art: “An art of the self which would be the complete contrary of oneself. To make one’s being an object of art, that’s what is worth the effort.”64 In this model of art the Sisyphean nature of Foucault’s ethics of errancy becomes apparent: it is, as he explains, the “endless movement by which every rule laid down, deduced, induced, or inferred from preceding actions is rejected and refused by the following action.”65 If life as a work of art is modeled on this nineteenth

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century Romantic conception of art then it necessarily entails “the permanent refusal and rejection” of every form of established life.66 Despite their common commitment to philosophy as askēsis and the philosopher as physician, then, Nietzsche and Foucault are motivated by very different ethical orientations. Nietzsche models his ethics of eternal recurrence on the work of art: we are to fashion our life like a work of art such that we want its eternal repetition. If we successfully fashion our life and self in this way we “no longer want . . . anything better from the world than it and it again.”67 Nietzsche’s philosophical askēsis aims to eliminate the desire for things to be other than they are. Foucault also models his ethics of errancy on the work of art, but he adopts a Romantic conception: we are to fashion our lives so that we permanently refuse and reject the world as it is. If the Foucauldian philosophical physician recommends a Sisyphean task of endlessly transgressing the contingencies or limits of the present, the Nietzschean physician recommends transforming these contingencies into eternally valuable necessities, an ideal measured by the Dionysian affirmation of their eternal recurrence. Nietzsche’s ideal self is eternal; Foucault’s always passé. One idealizes eternity, the other natality.68

Notes 1 We would like to thank Michael Janover for his constructive and generous comments and suggestions on several drafts of this essay. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 246 (V, 82). 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Volumes 1 and 2, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 213 (2, “Preface,” 7). 4 Karl Löwith argues that the doctrine of eternal recurrence was the fundamental issue of Nietzsche’s philosophy and that he formulated a peculiarly modern response to the classical cyclical view of the eternal cosmos. Over and against the modern illusion of indefinite progress, a secularized version of Christian soteriology, Zarathustra proclaims “the eternal recurrence of life in its unmoralized fullness of creation and destruction, of joy and suffering, of good and evil” and in affirming this recurrence “he (became) . . . a man who had overcome himself by accepting voluntarily what cannot be otherwise, thus transforming an alien fate into his proper destiny.” Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1949), pp. 217–18. Löwith’s account of Nietzsche’s central doctrine comes close to conceiving it as recycling Stoic ethics. Drawing on Nietzsche’s

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Michael Ure and Federico Testa doctrine, Löwith himself came to venerate a Stoic perspective. Gadamer summarized his Stoic perspective in the following terms: “We should look up at the eternal cycle of nature in order to learn from it the equanimity that alone is appropriate to the minuteness of human life in the universe.” Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 76. Whether Nietzsche successfully differentiated between Stoic ethics and his own ethical doctrine is a matter of contention. On the one hand, Hadot notes of Epictetus’ famous formula “Will that what happens happen as it happens,” “we again find the theme of consenting to the Universe, assuming that we cannot change what obstructs the order of the world. You said that a modern could not joyfully consent, but Nietzsche said, ‘Not only to bear the ineluctable . . . but to love it.’ This kind of attitude was thus admitted by one of the masters of contemporary thought.” Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. M. Djaballah and M. Chase (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 159–60. See also Michael Ure, “Nietzsche’s Free-Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 39 (2009), pp. 60–84. On the other, Reginster criticizes Löwith’s interpretation as too passive and fatalistic, in a word as too “Stoic.” See Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 206–9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 133 (“Schopenhauer,” 2). See Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2008); and “Nietzsche’s Free-Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 33 (I, 52). See Ure, “Nietzsche’s Free-Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy,” and Marta Faustino, Nietzsche e a grande saúde. Para uma terapia da terapia (Doctoral dissertation (Philosophy), Faculdade de Ciencias Sociais e Humanas, Universidade de Nova Lisboa, 2013). Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 116 (1, 5: 243). Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 34 (I, 17: “Note”). Ibid., p. 7–8 (“Preface,” 6). Ibid. Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 2 (“Preface,” 3). Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 34 (I, 17: “Note”). Ibid.

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16 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 6 (“Preface,” 2). Nietzsche himself italicizes the word “physician” to stress that his philosopher must be a physician, a “philosophischer Arzt.” 17 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 7 (“Preface,” 5) 18 Nietzsche, Gay Science, pp. 207–8 (V, 349). 19 Ibid. 20 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 56 (“Morality as Anti-Nature,” 5). 21 Ibid., p. 55 (“Morality as Anti-Nature,” 5). 22 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 8 (“Preface,” 6). 23 Nietzsche, Gay Science, pp. 241–3 (V, 377). 24 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 112–14 (V, 201). 25 See Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 26 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 8 (1, “Preface,” 4). Nietzsche defines the concept of “plastic power” in the second Untimely Meditation in his analysis of what might make it possible for history to serve life: “I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds . . . The stronger the innermost roots of man’s nature, the more readily will he be able to assimilate and appropriate the things of the past; and the most powerful and tremendous nature would be characterized by the fact that it would know no boundary at all at which the historical sense began to overwhelm it; it would draw to itself and incorporate into itself, and as it were transform it into blood.” Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 62 (“History,” 1). 27 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 161 (IV, 283). 28 See Sander Werkhoven on the similarities between Nietzsche and Canguilhem’s concepts of health and pathology. According to Werkhoven, Canguilhem “endorses and systematizes” Nietzsche’s claim that “ ‘alive’: that means already valuing,” and that “valuations lie in all functions of the organic being.” Werkhoven, “Live and Objective Norms: Canguilhem in the Context of Contemporary Meta-Ethics,” in The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspective in Bioethics and Biopolitics, ed. Miguel de Beistegui, Guiseppe Bianco, and Marjorie Gracieuse (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), pp. 81–2. Canguilhem, Werkhoven notes, writes in full agreement that “there is no life whatsoever without norms of life” and that “even for an amoeba, living means preference and exclusion.” 29 Ibid., p. 234 (V, 370). 30 Ibid., pp. 234–5 (V, 370). 31 Ibid., p. 234 (V, 370).

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32 According to Francisco Vazquez-García, we need to establish a new focus on the links between Canguilhem and Foucault, including “the ontological and ethicopolitical links between the two philosophical projects,” “affinities and divergences . . . regarding the concepts of social and vital norm; the implication of both in the genesis of the concept of ‘biopolitics’ and, finally, the importance of the notion of life in both trajectories.” Vazquez-García, “Canguilhem, Foucault and the Political Ontology of Vitalism,” LOGOS: Anales del Seminario de Metafísica 48 (2015), p. 169. 33 Nietzsche, Genealogy, pp. 50–52 (II, 12). 34 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1964), p. 276. 35 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 51 (II, 12). 36 Michel Foucault, “Prison Talk,” in Power-Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), p. 53. He also identifies Discipline and Punish as a “genealogy of the ‘modern soul’ . . . a soul born out of the methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 29. 37 See Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” Praxis International 1 (1981), 272–87; Fraser, “Foucault’s Body Language: A Posthumanist Political Rhetoric?” Salmagundi 61 (1983), 55–70; and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 38 Nietzsche, Genealogy, pp. 6–7 (“Preface,” 5). 39 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1971), p. 90. In this passage, Foucault quotes from The Wanderer and His Shadow (Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 356). 40 “In the same manner, Nietzsche seizes interpretations that have already seized each other. For Nietzsche, there is no original signified. Words themselves are nothing but interpretations, throughout their history they interpret before being signs, and ultimately they signify only because they are essentially nothing but interpretations. Witness the famous etymology of agathos. This is also what Nietzsche means when he says that words have always been invented by the ruling classes; they do not denote a signified, they impose an interpretation. Consequently, it is not because there are primary and enigmatic signs that we are now dedicated to the task of interpreting but because there are interpretations, because there is always the great tissue of violent interpretations beneath everything that speaks.” Foucault,

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43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

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“Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” p. 276. See Nietzsche, Genealogy, pp. 13–16 (I, 4–6 and Note), and pp. 50–52 (II, 12). Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 8–9. On Nietzsche’s deployment of the ancient conception of philosophy as askēsis or “spiritual exercise,” see Horst Hutter, Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006); Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg, “Nietzsche and the Transfiguration of Asceticism: An Ethics of Self-Fashioning,” in Reading Nietzsche at the Margins, ed. Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2008), pp. 200–239; Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy; and Michael Ure and Thomas Ryan, “Nietzsche’s Post-Classical Therapy,” PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25 (2014), pp. 91–110. Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 181 (IV, 324). Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Foucault Live: Interviews 1961– 1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1996), p. 312. Charles Taylor describes Foucault’s position as liberation from nature rather than liberation of nature, that is, the creative power to impose an artificial order without natural constraints. Taylor, “Review: Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration,” New Left Review 170 (1988), p. 114. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 45. “I would like to say something about the function of any diagnosis concerning what today is. It does not consist in a simple characterisation of what we are but, instead—by following the lines of fragility in the present—in managing to grasp why and how that which is might no longer be that which is. In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fractures which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, that is, of possible transformation.” Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1983), pp. 449–50. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” p. 50. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 47. Emphasis added. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” p. 312. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” p. 47. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 196.

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55 Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 156. 56 Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, p. 136. Hadot claims that in his account of the Stoic practices of the self, “Foucault does not sufficiently emphasize the process of becoming aware of the cosmic Whole, and the awareness of belonging to the human community, processes that also correspond to self-transcendence.” However, in his 1981–2 lectures, Foucault elaborates in great detail exactly this Stoic “view of the world from above” and the mode of self-transcendence it inculcates. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 271–85. 57 Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” p. 45. 58 Ibid. 59 See Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). As Maudemarie Clark comments: “Eternal recurrence,” on Magnus’s view, “strikes at the root of nihilism by attaching ‘eternalistic predicates’ to our lives. It transforms the aimlessness of becoming into a fated eternity.” Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 250. 60 See Nietzsche, Gay Science, pp. 109–10 (III, 109), and Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 15–16 (I, 9). 61 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), 15 vols., ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), vol. 9, p. 503 (11 [159]). 62 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 68 (III, 56). 63 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 9, pp. 505 (11 [165]). Also see Hicks and Rosenberg, “Nietzsche and the Transfiguration of Ascetism,” pp. 230–36, on the relationship between Nietzsche’s ethical experimentalism, with its dynamics of enhancement, and the doctrine of eternal recurrence. 64 Michel Foucault, “Passion According to Werner Schroeter,” in Foucault Live: Interviews 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1996), p. 318. For an account of Foucault’s high “romantic” model of subjectivity, see Michael Janover, “The Subject of Foucault,” in Foucault: The Legacy, ed. C. O’Farrell (Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 1997), pp. 215–25; and Christopher Norris, “ ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Kant According to Foucault,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 159–96. 65 Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 188. 66 Ibid.

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67 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 186 (IV, 334). 68 Cf. Hannah Arendt: “It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever happened before . . . The new always happens against overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact than man is capable of action means the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.” Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 178.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Bernstein, Richard J. The New Constellation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological, translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Clark, Maudemarie. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Esposito, Roberto. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, translated by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Faustino, Marta. Nietzsche e a grande saúde. Para uma terapia da terapia (Doctoral dissertation (Philosophy), Faculdade de Ciencias Sociais e Humanas, Universidade de Nova Lisboa, 2013). Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud and Marx.” In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, 269–78. New York: New Press, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, 369–92. New York: New Press, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “Prison Talk.” In Power-Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper, 37–55. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Foucault, Michel. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In Foucault Live: Interviews 1961–1984, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 308–12. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. Foucault, Michel. “Passion According to Werner Schroeter.” In Foucault Live: Interviews 1961–1984, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 313–21. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, edited by Frédéric Gros, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.

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Foucault, Michel. “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.” In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, 433–58. New York: New Press, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 340–72. London: Penguin Books, 1984. Foucault, Michel. The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, edited by Frédéric Gros, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1984. Foucault, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32–50. London: Penguin Books, 1984. Fraser, Nancy. “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions.” Praxis International 1 (1984), 272–87. Fraser, Nancy. “Foucault’s Body Language: A Posthumanist Political Rhetoric?” Salmagundi 61 (1983), 55–70. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Hadot, Pierre. The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Marc Djaballah and Michael Chase. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Hicks, Steven V., and Alan Rosenberg. “Nietzsche and the Transfiguration of Asceticism: An Ethics of Self-Fashioning.” In Reading Nietzsche at the Margins, edited by Steven V. Hicks and Alan Rosenberg, 200–39. Indiana: Purdue University Press. 2008. Hutter, Horst. Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. Janover, Michael. “The Subject of Foucault.” In Foucault: The Legacy, edited by C. O’Farrell, 215–25. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 1997. Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Magnus, Bernd. Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985. Norris, Christopher. “ ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Kant According to Foucault.” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, edited by Gary Gutting, 159–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Reginster, Bernard. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969. Taylor, Charles. “Review: Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration.” New Left Review 170 (1988), 110–18. Ure, Michael. Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works. Lanham: Lexington Press, 2008. Ure, Michael. “Nietzsche’s Free-Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 39 (2009), 60–84. Ure, Michael, and Thomas Ryan. “Nietzsche’s Post-Classical Therapy.” PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25 (2014), 91–110. Vazquez-García, Francisco. “Canguilhem, Foucault and the Political Ontology of Vitalism.” LOGOS. Anales del Seminario de Metafísica 48 (2015), 165–87. Werkhoven, Sander. “Live and Objective Norms: Canguilhem in the Context of Contemporary Meta-ethics.” In The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics, edited by Miguel de Beistegui, Guiseppe Bianco, and Marjorie Gracieuse, 79–94. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. Wolin, Richard. Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001.

6

Truth and Becoming Beyond the Liberal Regime Jill E. Hargis

Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach toward understanding the foundational values of Western thought, including Christianity and liberalism, has revolutionized the way contemporary thinkers analyze power, values, and identity. For the most part, Nietzsche and Foucault engage in historical analyses of power that are without moral judgment; providing little foundation or guidance for judgment, in fact, they tend to press the opposite—that morality itself is a historical construct and contingent upon power. For many, this level of criticism is akin to nihilism, providing no positive program for change or reform.1 Many other interpreters have found in Nietzsche and Foucault an affirmation of certain ways of life, a closer connection with humanity and politics as a result of deep skepticism of metaphysical and universal truths, and the possibilities for freedom through the deconstruction of power.2 This debate has lasted for quite a long time, and in its exploration of Nietzsche and Foucault, we find both important cautionary tales as well as great optimism about what is possible through genealogy and the care of the self. This chapter presents a position somewhere in the middle; it agrees that Nietzsche and Foucault’s genealogy, which exposes how power relations shape meaning and identity, is an absolutely critical method for moving forward to increase freedom and well-being. On the other hand, I suggest that their focus on the individual as the agent responsible for criticism and pursuit of alternative ways of life is not enough to resist the systems of power they criticize, and it is not enough to create a collective politics necessary for democracy capable of acting for the public good. Others have criticized them for weak political responses, but this chapter focuses on the paradox that Nietzsche and Foucault both criticize liberalism, but they fail fully to challenge its central reliance upon and glorification of the individual.3

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This essay begins with a description of their critiques of the power relations within liberal society and the consequences for the individual. Nietzsche and Foucault were concerned with the relation between the ability to assert oneself and forms of power that became increasingly difficult to recognize within mass, liberal societies in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Both Nietzsche and Foucault criticized constitutive elements of modern liberal societies for disempowering individuals and privileging a narrow and thin set of values regarding individuals’ ways of life. The essay ends by exploring the problematic focus each places on the individual as a point of resistance and freedom, which can seem like support for the liberal individual at first glance, in part because neither theorizes a collective politics to remedy the effects of liberal society. Although individual resistance and affirmation of life are differently imagined between Nietzsche and Foucault, both position their visions of empowered individuals against the imperatives of the liberal individual.

Nietzsche’s last man and Foucault’s governable liberal individual Scholars have argued about the degree to which Nietzsche was an elitist. But there is no doubt that he disdained of modern enlightenment claims regarding equality and democracy, as well as the Christian claims that the weak and oppressed will be rewarded in an afterlife. Throughout his works, Nietzsche exposed what he saw as the consequences of these values. In the Prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s central character Zarathustra descends from the mountains after years of isolated contemplation to share his newfound knowledge with humanity, and warns the people of the last man.4 The last man believes he is happy when basic needs of life are met and has hopes of an otherworldly future. Nietzsche argues, however, that Christian and modern Western philosophy have cut these last men off from their true source of vitality and creativity—their own lives on earth. The last man is the opposite of Nietzsche’s overman, the “free-spirit” who can embrace the reality of human existence on earth and the loss of the belief in God. The overman has a chaos and wildness that gives him the creative power and spirit to move beyond humanity as it exists. Nietzsche compares this overcoming to the evolution of humans who “have made [their] way from worm to man” and past the apes.5 Humanity is not an end in itself, but instead a becoming, a

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“rope over an abyss.”6 In deliberate change and struggle to improve itself within the context of life on earth, humanity finds its meaning. The last man, on the other hand, has settled for things as they are, and for comfort and warmth. In order to live with the acceptance of what Nietzsche argues is a meaningless life, the last man will lie to himself about what happiness is. Zarathustra says to the people, “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.”7 Nietzsche indicates that the last man has a deep-seated physiological reaction against his own desire for the life of ease and stasis. “ ‘We have invented happiness’ say the last men, and they blink.”8 “ ‘Formerly, all the world was mad,’ say the most refined, and they blink.”9 The effects of the workings of power through cultural norms affect humans at the most basic biological and psychological levels. Nietzsche famously developed a biting critique of Christianity, which is the clearest example of Nietzsche’s understanding of the relationship between power and values. Christianity comes to glorify weakness and pity and condemn strength as sinful.10 Nietzsche believed that by demonizing strength, Christian values have had a fundamentally negative impact on contemporary Western values, in part, by rejecting “life,” but Nietzsche also argues that many elements of modern philosophy have contributed to the weaknesses of humanity. Philosophers including Hobbes, Hume, and Locke signify a “debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of ‘philosophy.’ ”11 And as such, German philosophers have waged battle against the English philosophers’ “mechanistic doltifications.” Utilitarian standards of pleasure and pain are also rejected as “mere epiphenomena and wholly secondary.”12 Nietzsche disagrees with a basic premise of liberal philosophy that a central motive force of individual humans is self-preservation. In Beyond Good and Evil, he argues that “Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.”13 As the fundamental principle of self-interest and the basis of civil society, as envisioned by Hobbes and much of liberal thought, self-preservation leads to the limited and narrow goals of the last man. Nietzsche also characterizes equality and democracy as squabbles over equal advantages. When the goals of life are to maintain the ability to pursue individual physical comforts, or individual choices about lifestyle, then the range of human possibility is reduced and easily managed. Nietzsche objects to the idea of individuals simply pursuing survival, guided by the superficial

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feelings of pleasure and pain. For Nietzsche, these measures deny the ability of humans to create themselves and new values, which he argues instead must be embraced and cultivated. Foucault’s studies of governmentality also expose the constraining imperatives of liberalism. In the Lectures at the Collège de France during 1977–9, Foucault laid out his theory of governmentality and the central forms of it from the sixteenth into the twentieth centuries. Governmentality is the conduct of conduct, and it relies on particular “regimes of truth” that shape the relations between the governed and government.14 In the year of lectures entitled “The Birth of Biopolitics,” Foucault focused on explaining the historical shift to liberalism and neoliberalism, which are regimes of truth and central rationalities of Western governments from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Within liberalism the government is both limited by and empowered to turn society into a productive free market economy based on the understanding that the free individual pursuit of interests will spontaneously and naturally bring about productivity and growth. As did Nietzsche, Foucault identifies a range of consequences that follow from understanding the pursuit of basic interests as the fundamental goal of humanity. For Nietzsche this undermines the higher purpose of man; for Foucault, liberalism, and the biopolitics it makes possible, create a society of “eminently governable” individuals. Foucault explains in detail how, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the role of government and its theoretical justifications shifted from the rule of sovereign kings with direct control over people and lands, to a governmentality in which the sovereign is limited by fundamental individual rights and natural law. The conception of individual natural rights acting as an external juridical limitation on the sovereign’s power arose early in liberal thought. This form of limitation was followed by another shift within liberal rationality in the eighteenth century, in which the government’s limiting factor is internalized, so that the goal of government is to limit itself to protect the natural operation of interests in the market. Under this rationality, government is evaluated based on the success of the market, which is organized according to natural and spontaneous freedom of individuals.15 This is a necessary measure of government because under liberal rationality, no sovereign (and no individual) can know and control the totality of a state and economy that is composed of individuals who will act according to private and irreducible interests.16 According to Foucault, “government rationality had concerned itself with health and hygiene, life expectancy, etc. before liberalism, but those earlier rationalities assumed that the sovereign had the power

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and should have the power to govern these things directly in support of increasing the power of the sovereign and/or state.”17 From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, there is a vast change in the power of the sovereign: from the all-knowing, all controlling sovereign, to the government who can understand so little of the market, that it is judged based on how well it allows the invisible hand of individual choice to govern. Foucault argues that the new governmental reason or principle of government, was “an understanding of the market as a mechanism of exchange and a site of veridiction regarding the relationship between value and price.”18 The paradox of liberalism, and the basis of biopolitics, then is this: if the sovereign is so significantly limited in its powers, how does government control extend to so many parts of life, including the most basic biological elements of a whole population? According to Foucault, there are two points of limitation: the success of the market in facilitating exchange, and utility, that government must act only “where it is positively and exactly useful.”19 Foucault argues that interests are the general category for thinking about both exchange and utility, and that governmental reason in its modern form “functions in terms of interest.”20 Foucault is concerned not just about the reach of government under liberalism, but also about the nature of what is legitimate for government to do. It is very significant for Foucault that the government under liberalism acts upon things, lands, and bodies, but only by way of “interests.”21 The government is no longer based on the singular interest of the state as a “self-referring” whole, whose goal is to increase its own power, but instead on multiple interests, which are found in “a complex interplay between individual and collective interests.”22 From the eighteenth century on, governmental reason can “have a hold on” only the “thin phenomenal theme of interests.”23 Foucault asks, how is it possible that the utility value of government is based upon a system in which true values are determined by exchange?24 In other words, how are the goals of whole states to gain wealth, power, and peace replaced by values that are determined by individual pursuit of interests in the market? The implication is that these values simply reflect fleeting, often superficial individual choices, and in the aggregate do not reflect any intentionally agreed upon values to be applied to the collective. Not only is the ability of government to openly and intentionally promote particular values and ways of life removed under liberalism, but only a particular understanding of individual freedom is available as well. Foucault presses the point that protection of individual pursuit of interests by the limitation of government does not result in an increase of freedom, or a respect for “this or that freedom,” instead the result is that liberal governments must become producers

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and “consumers of freedom.”25 Liberal governments need and cultivate particular freedoms, including “freedom of the market, freedom to buy and sell, the free exercise of property rights . . . possible freedom of expression . . . Liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free.”26 What individuals need to be this kind of free is secure and safe enough to engage in the market, and so a culture of fear is produced; they need to be able to work so that they can freely buy; and there needs to be a free labor market with “sufficiently competent, qualified, and politically disarmed workers.”27 In sum, these freedoms support competitive pursuit of interests in the market, and within this regime of truth a new subjectivity arises—homo economicus. Because competition carries with it certain negative consequences for society, pursuit of interests are understood in the framework of the enterprise. Therefore in liberalism, “enterprise becomes the form within the social fabric rather than individuals.”28 Individuals operate within “a multiplicity of entangled enterprises.”29 Individuals, families, businesses all consider choices in terms of how much value can be added to each enterprise, and each enterprise is valued according to the competitive advantage of its human capital. So for example, the family will choose a type of education for the children based on the values added so that the family enterprise is economically viable in the future. The economic goals of the enterprise shape each individual’s basic relationships in life: “his relationships to his private property . . . with himself, his family, household, insurance, and retirement . . . [make] him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.”30 Unlike the juridical subject of right in early liberalism, English empiricists create a different subjectivity, a subject of interest that “gets the problematic of homo economicus underway.”31 Foucault argues that in the framework of universal human rights, the juridical subject of right voluntarily decides to renounce certain rights to create and enter into the social contract. In doing so, the subject of right creates a certain “transcendence,” by which the subject is constrained. Foucault writes that Hume rejects this and claims instead that the subject only acts according to interest, and when the subject’s interests are not met by the contract, then she can leave the contract. There is no transcendence or dual subjectivity, in which the subject must make decision between the transcendent goals of the collective and the “private” interests of the subject. This shift away from transcendent choices and agreements is necessary because, in the economist’s understanding of the subject, the subject is unable to understand all of the elements surrounding his interests, including accidents of nature,

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distant political events and “a course of the world that outstrips him and eludes him in every respect.”32 The subject is incapable of understanding such things as the application of universal human rights. Because this subject cannot understand the totality of unintentional consequences her actions have upon others, she should not try. It is best for the subject to act only according to her individual interests, allowing Adam Smith’s invisible hand to operate to the good of all. Therefore the subject acts according to a completely “egoistic mechanism” of individual interest, and it is “doubly involuntary, indefinite, and nontotalizable.”33 And despite the action of the subject in a vacuum of narrow individual choices, his interests and calculations about how to maximize it are not disqualified. The subject can effectively and freely choose because the range of free choices and their purposes are highly delimited. The resulting governmentality under liberalism is vast and, at the same time, thin, meaning that it is based on narrow, economic measures and that the role of the government is not as a leader or even a representative of significant and transparent goals for humanity; it is instead a liminal actor, it needs only to affect marginal changes in the behavior of the population to have widespread impact on the population. For example, in relation to criminals, Foucault says the liberal government analyzes and acts on criminal behavior according to economic principles of optimizing wealth and power, and not who they are as people, which leads to the “anthropological erasure of the criminal.”34 Although Foucault does not argue for a return to the power of the sovereign who can act on bodies directly, he makes it possible to see how in the governmentality of the sixteenth century, power was more obvious and transparent. Sovereigns acting on bodies and lands to maintain their power may be brutal, but the people can see and understand it. This is because the mechanisms of sovereign power, such as those described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish in the torture of the punished individual, are evident, and their goals are fully understood. Nietzsche explicitly prefers the strong leader because he identifies the transparent nature of this power as honest and healthy; it does not need to hide its actions on the people. Other more insidious forms of power cause sickness and weakness throughout society. Foucault does not claim liberalism causes illness, but he exposes how little individual subjects are understood and expected to know and understand of the world around them, which in turn limits the extent to which individuals can consciously create themselves. Not only is the conception of the role of government thin in liberalism, the understanding of individual freedom and subjectivity is also thin. In the seventeenth-century conception of limited government, freedom is an original

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right that individuals will or will not cede to the government. In the second, later conception, freedom is simply the “independence of the governed with regard to the government.”35 Whereas earlier conceptions of government affirmed natural rights of people to freedoms inherent in their very being, the second type makes no claim about the importance of human freedom to their nature or flourishing. Foucault argues that both types are evident in the regimes of truth underlying liberal governmentality and they are not mutually exclusive, but that they have distinct origins and the second predominates.36 The “fundamental axiomatic of the rights of man” is not the “major criteria” as is utility for “working out the limits of the powers of public authorities.”37 Individuals can only act upon their own interests, all else is beyond their understanding and control. Government action can be limited because within liberalism the creation of subjectivity is deeply in line with the goals of liberalism. Individuals create themselves as enterprises in pursuit of monetary value. Individuals can be left alone because they respond in rational and therefore predictable ways to intentional “modifications in the variables of the environment,” making homo economicus “eminently governable.”38 The result is that no one is responsible for or has the agency to think about the big picture, including questions of humanity, national well-being, or global environmental health. Anyone engaged in these questions would be ungovernable within a liberal framework, but the liberal (and by extension neoliberal) regime of truth claims that these endeavors are impossible and that the subject should form herself according to individual questions of economic value. And so, neither the government nor individuals in society or through government are required to or empowered to think and act on issues beyond economic pursuits to increase wealth. Both Nietzsche and Foucault expose the great depths of cultural conformity to liberal norms, and suggest that liberalism, as it shapes individuals’ understandings of themselves and their personal purposes, value, and intentions, should be understood to operate at the basic level of biological life. Although it is difficult to fully distinguish the effects of Christianity versus liberal ideals on the emerging last man, Nietzsche’s understanding of the effects of both forces, as they act on individuals’ understandings of themselves and their personal desires, foreshadows Foucault’s biopolitics. Nietzsche’s blinking last man indicates the degree to which Nietzsche believed that humanity can be made to act unconsciously against its own nature and needs. Foucault did not engage psychology in the way that Nietzsche did, but he was certainly concerned with how medicine and psychology created

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self-understandings and later in his work he theorized that power could not be executed without self-referential engagement. With regards to liberalism, the pursuit of self-preservation and self-interests do not seem to achieve what humans are capable and needful of. Foucault raises as problematic the diffuse and opaque reach of government on many elements of life, all of which are done in the name of freedom. As in Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity and the blinking last man, the people believe they are in better positions while in fact very minute details of the realm of their personal choices have been shaped and circumscribed. Foucault does not make the comparison between the freedom of the individual in liberalism and the happiness of Nietzsche’s last man, but the similarities are profound and the implications similarly problematic. Such freedoms are supposed to protect the natural ability of people to flourish in their determination and fulfillment of unique individuality. But the freedom of liberalism is quite constrained, as is the role of the government in the business of producing and consuming that freedom. While Nietzsche is clearly driven by the idea that claims of equality will end up reducing the creative abilities of the elite (public education for all is a terrible thing), Foucault sees that the leveling in terms of focusing on individual choice makes people governable.

Becoming and truth Although their responses to the negative effects of liberalism are obscured by their extensive analyses of the role of power in creating the most fundamental aspects of human life, both theorists have positive responses. What is interesting and perhaps somewhat troubling is that in the face of such overwhelming determinism and cloaked power dynamics, they each turn to the individual as the source of resistance. Neither theorizes collective action or collective consciousness-raising in the pursuit of the public good. How then does each envision the individual’s resistance and life affirming actions? It may seem as if the two were fundamentally different in this endeavor because Nietzsche relies on the overman’s inner creativity, intuition, and vitalism to overcome wrongheaded commonly shared values, and Foucault is more thoroughly deconstructive in calling for individuals to engage in specific and constant historical criticism to create new values and ways of life. However, they share the sense that individuals must have personal commitments to an engagement with truth. “Through a process of reevaluation of values for Nietzsche,

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and care of self and knowledge of self for Foucault, individuals are able to create themselves and their relationships in ways that are not already ‘institutionalized.’ ”39 Because Nietzsche and Foucault were critical of metaphysical understandings of being, they argued that humans should pursue their singularities and differences as continuous becoming. For both, becoming is an engagement with truth. In other words, their works create and encourage, as a fundamental part of life, continuous critical analysis of how power is involved in the historical development of common values. They look to the individual to find in herself the strength, resolve, and self-reflection enough to engage in critical analysis. These practices of truth open the way for the courageous person to use critical knowledge, even of themselves, to create new values and ways of life. It may be that because of the towering structures of regimes of truth within Christianity and liberalism that involve the widespread control and diminution of life, Nietzsche and Foucault relied on individuals’ use of intellectual and physical strengths to be aware of and, to some extent, overcome the values and regimes of truth that would otherwise uncritically shape their actions and thoughts. In the face of the modern concerns for comfort and pursuit of individual interests, which appear to be driven and measured by survival and economic concerns, Nietzsche and Foucault found in ancient Greece examples of meaningful individual actions that provide ways to engage with truth and truth-telling. But their preferred methods of engaging and telling the truth are different. Foucault identifies four modes of truth-telling or veridiction, which are prophecy, technical knowledge, wisdom, and parrhesia.40 According to this framework, Nietzsche’s preferred method of truth-telling is wisdom. According to Foucault, the figure who shares wisdom is the sage, the one who comes and gives large philosophical pronouncements on being and the nature of the world and has no direct engagements with individuals about how these pronouncements should affect their individual actions. The sage can leave individuals “ignorant or uncertain about what he has actually said.”41 Zarathustra is in many ways similar. He appears to the crowd with speeches about the death of God; his enigmatic messages tend to confuse the uneducated people; and Zarathustra can then leave the company of humans without violating any ethical duties because his obligation to the truth is greater than his obligation to the people. Foucault argues that Heraclitus, as described by Diogenes Laertius, was a sage because he lived in withdrawal and silence, and when he did speak to others, he did so in riddles. Nietzsche’s preference for this kind of truth-telling is revealed when he refers to Heraclitus as a kindred spirit. Nietzsche says of Heraclitus that he was “devoted to insight alone.”42 Nietzsche saw in Heraclitus a free spirit, like

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himself, because he too denied the duality of physical and metaphysical realms, and in fact Nietzsche claims that, “he altogether denied being.”43 Similarly to Nietzsche’s own writings, he found that Heraclitus spoke truths that the people were not ready to hear.44 According to Nietzsche, Heraclitus proclaimed: I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your myopia, not of the nature of things, if you believe you see land somewhere in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away. You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before.45

Alone in their rejection of metaphysical truths, Heraclitus and Nietzsche retreat away from their contemporaries who are not ready to confront their own short-sightedness.46 Although Foucault agrees with these metaphysical claims, he focuses on a different form of truth-telling, parrhesia. Parrhesia, argues Foucault, is a way for the individual to engage in the creation of their own subjectivity, which Foucault refers to as subjectivization.47 Foucault says the person who engages in parrhesia, the parrhesiast, speaks as clearly as possible and “says what is, but in terms of the singularity of individuals, situations, and conjunctures. Her specific role is not to tell of the being of nature and things.”48 Parrhesiasts are partners to other individuals in order “to tell individuals the truth of themselves hidden from their own eyes, to reveal to them their present situation, their character, failings, the value of their conduct, and the possible consequences of their decisions.”49 And there is risk involved in being a parrhesiast because they might offend, lose a friend, enrage the other or even endanger themselves by telling these personal kinds of truths about their truth partner. Foucault focuses on the parrhesiast and the engagement with truth between two people who have a commitment to the other to engage in truths that are personal and ethical. To engage in parrhesia one much choose a person who is able to use “free-spokenness so that the individual can, in turn, tell the truth about himself and constitute himself as subject telling the truth about himself.”50 This is the central aspect of the parrhesiastic relationship, the individual hears and engages with truth in order to shape their own subjectivity. This truth allows for a greater self-awareness and therefore greater self-control over one’s own becoming. Foucault’s parrhesiast wants to create an ethical life based in truth; the engagements are personal and direct. Nietzsche’s sage speaks of truth that is more distant, less personal, and not necessarily about ethical ways of life. Foucault’s

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exploration of the ancient Greek parrhesia shows how truth and the becoming of a subject are fully interdependent. Parrhesia, as it regards the truth of oneself in the world and in ethical practices, is central to the concept of the care of the self which Foucault finds are fundamentally connected practices in ancient times. He suggests, and seems to mourn, that parrhesia is absent in contemporary times.51 In Foucault’s final lectures during 1983–4, he reflects back on his life work and states that what he has been doing is understanding the connection between three elements that are constitutive of each other: (1) forms of knowledge and truth, studied in terms of the specific modes of veridiction, (2) governmentality, the relations of power in the procedures by which people’s conduct is governed, and (3) modes of formation of the subject through practices of the self.52 Foucault argued that these three—modes of veridiction, governmentality, and practices of the self—are always happening in relation to and in tension with each other.53 When used to understand liberalism, these three can be seen to operate in particular ways. The measure of truth or the veridiction of government and individual actions, choices, or policies is within the field of economics and whether an increase in monetary value is achieved. In liberalism’s governmentality, governments are justified and limited to the extent that they can produce a particular kind of freedom that insures the governed pursue the increase in value of all their enterprises. In the practices of self, there are multidirectional practices and influences. One direction is where the individual partakes of a game of truth, like the confessional in which the individual loses freedom (but of course within this relationship of truth-telling there may be reflection and learning as well). The truth of freedom in liberalism engages the individual in pursuing their own economic interests, and in doing so shapes their subjectivity. But individuals can also engage in the practice of parrhesia that originates from the possibility of the individual’s critical perspective. By engaging in this practice of truth, the individual finds individuals to help them reflect on themselves and their actions critically and in ways to create ethical practices and ways of life that may be beyond the regime of truths of liberalism.54 These practices can challenge the meaning of human freedom and purpose as simply self-interested economic pursuits.

Conclusion Although Nietzsche and Foucault have been charged with nihilism by failing to present theories that provide clear standards for normative evaluation, both

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in fact identify certain norms and cultures that decrease the power, health, and freedom of the individual more than others. They do not lay out alternative paradigms, but leave the choices to the individual who is engaged in the pursuit and telling of truth. There seems to be a fundamental trust in the individual. Neither advocates a clearly political and collective response to these situations, instead they look to the critical and creative abilities of individuals to recreate their own values and ways of life. Both Nietzsche and Foucault found that power works on individuals and through individuals. For Foucault, this meant that there is a multiplicity of games of truth—some that reinforce the nomos of current governmentality such as when the self must engage in the self-referential expression of truth in the confessional. This may be why he found the point of self-reflection, self-control, and engagement with a parrhesiastic partner to be the ongoing line of resistance. Perhaps Foucault, and Nietzsche as well, believed that the self is the site of a critical agonistic struggle and the point from which politics and the possibility of collective resistance emerge. Because of the depth and pervasiveness of the liberal understandings of truth and subjectivity, Nietzsche believed that individuals must tap into something pure and free to resist and become something new, and Foucault also saw the individual as the point of resistance. But for Foucault the individual engages in deeply personal introspection on the basis of practices of truth in order to choose how to live. Both give us ways of resisting power and becoming more free subjects, but Foucault’s is a day-to-day engagement that seems open to everyone, even those without a creative genius or strength. In the end, the challenge is whether the recommendations put forward by Nietzsche and Foucault are enough to allow individuals and peoples consciously to engage in the government of themselves rather than living lives that are largely determined. A  necessary part of this question is whether the individualism of their approaches is sufficient to affect change not only for the individual, but also in the broader regimes of truth and governmentalities themselves.

Notes 1 For a discussion of the various nihilisms within their works, see Steven Hicks, “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault,” in Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 74–109.

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2 For just a few examples, see William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) and A World of Becoming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Hicks, “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault”; and Judith Revel, “Identity, Nature, Life: Three Biopolitical Deconstructions,” in The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, ed. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 3 See, for example, Wendy Brown’s criticism of Foucault in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982). 5 Ibid., p. 124. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 129. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 130. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1969). 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 189 (“Peoples and Fatherlands,” 252). 12 Ibid., p. 153 (“Our Virtues,” 225). 13 Ibid., p. 21 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 13). 14 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Politics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008), pp. 34–7, 186. 15 Ibid., p. 44. 16 Ibid., p. 292. 17 Ibid., p. 292. 18 Ibid., p. 44. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 45. 22 Ibid., p. 44. 23 Ibid., p. 46. 24 Ibid., p. 46n. 25 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 26 Ibid., p. 63. 27 Ibid., p. 64. 28 Ibid., p. 241. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 273. 32 Ibid., p. 277.

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Ibid., pp. 275 and 278. Ibid., pp. 258–9. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 270. Revel, “Identity, Nature, Life,” p. 116. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983– 1984, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2011), p. 25. Ibid., p. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1962), p. 31. Ibid., p. 51. Artur Przbyslawski, “Nietzsche Contra Heraclitus,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 23 (Spring 2002), p. 89. Przbyslawski argues that Nietzsche’s interpretation of Heraclitus is more self-serving than true. Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, pp. 51–2. Christoph Cox argues that in The Birth of Tragedy, “Heraclitus appears bearing a new world-interpretation with which Nietzsche is clearly in sympathy.” Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999), p. 187. Judith Revel equates becoming with Foucault’s subjectivization, in which the individual engages in the care of self to avoid a “trifecta of pitfalls” associated with power: “identification, individualization, and naturalization.” Revel, “Identity, Nature, Life,” p. 115. Foucault, Courage of Truth, pp. 18–19. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p 7. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 8. For a discussion of Foucault’s thoughts on the pursuit of ethical ways of life in the context of the gay rights movement, see Revel, “Identity, Nature, Life.”

Bibliography Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Connolly, William E. Political Theory and Modernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Connolly, William E. A World of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

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Cox, Christoph. Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Politics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The Courage of Truth, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2011. Hicks, Steven. “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault.” In Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, edited by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, 74–109. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1969. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, translated by Marianne Cowan. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1962. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” In The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, 103–439. New York: Viking Penguin, 1982. Przbyslawski, Artur. “Nietzsche Contra Heraclitus.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 23 (Spring 2002), 88–95. Revel, Judith. “Identity, Nature, Life: Three Biopolitical Deconstructions.” In The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, edited by Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter, 112–24. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

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Twice Removed Foucault’s Critique of Nietzsche’s Genealogical Method Brian Lightbody

Nietzsche’s clearest influence on Foucault is found in the Frenchman’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In that remarkable work, Foucault avows the genealogical method: a way of doing philosophy where neither concepts nor values are scrutinized nor valued in and of themselves. Ideas, practices, indeed, even ways of behavior, are historical constituents. The purpose of genealogy is to defragment such notions, historically speaking, and then re-evaluate them regarding the role they played in the formation of “regimes of truth”—environments of power where particular statements are weightier than others (i.e. some statements can carry truths while others cannot). No idea, so argue Nietzsche and Foucault, is beyond a genealogical inquiry: all ideas may be dissolved into their more basic historical components. Although Foucault in this essay becomes a genealogist in name and later in practice with his publication of Discipline and Punish, he reserves harsh criticism for his mentor, Nietzsche. Indeed he claims that on at least some occasions Nietzsche is not a true genealogist.1 What then makes a genealogist a genealogist? In the following essay, I examine what I take to be the key aspects of a genealogical inquiry. These aspects are: (1) the epistemic doctrine of perspectivism and (2) the adoption of the body as the main historical document of genealogical inquiry. I show that Foucault’s main problem in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” has to do with Nietzsche’s increasing ossification of the body. The body progressively becomes a metaphysical substance for Nietzsche; it lies somewhere beyond the vicissitudes of history and language. However, this reverence for the body serves to undercut the entire genealogical enterprise: for if the body transcends history, then there may be other absolutes, too. Foucault, I argue, fully realized the diminishing returns, as it were, of Nietzsche’s position and thus, on some occasions, sharply criticizes Nietzsche.

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In contrast to Nietzsche’s essentialist view of the body, Foucault adopts what may best be construed as a social constructionist position, but this stance too is fraught with its set of problems. I  articulate what these problems are and offer a partial solution of sorts by invoking Foucault’s subsequent development of Lamarck’s quasi-natural term “milieu” as presented in Foucault’s lectures: Security, Territory, Population. Nietzsche and Foucault are avowed genealogists, but what is philosophical genealogy? As the name itself implies, genealogy is a distinct method of practicing philosophy that entails examining the historical origins of presentday philosophical concepts, ideas, practices, and discourses. The purpose of this examination is to take ideas long thought to be innate, immutable, and absolute and instead demonstrate that such ideas are constructs of sorts: they are elaborate assemblages that have been constructed from previous concepts, behaviors, and even feelings. Nietzsche, as a genealogist, is at his best when he reveals the genealogical origin of guilt in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. According to Nietzsche, guilt is neither something sui generis (it is not a gift from God) nor is it a natural development of an instinctual feeling. Guilt is a discrete yet contingent interpretation and evolution of “the bad conscience”: a more basic and primordial emotion. Guilt, Nietzsche reveals, is a complex physiological, psychological, and social phenomenon. It is a tapestry woven by many weavers using different threads and one that begins with the very looping of the thread of subjectivity itself:  the internationalization of our animal-like ancestors via civilization.2 Nietzsche’s analysis primarily focuses on tracing the evolution of feelings; for feelings, not thoughts, are inherited, he writes in Daybreak, section 30. However, feelings are often beyond one’s conscious understanding. They are buried beneath historical ruins. For Nietzsche, then, the body serves as the main device one may use to uncover primal feelings to see how such emotions have been reinterpreted. In this vein, Nietzsche uses the body in two ways: first, he likens the body to a document that is overwritten by history, culture, and religion and yet may be recovered. One sees this in section 13 of Essay II of the Genealogy. Nietzsche there shows that most moralists do not go far enough when it comes to tracing the sine qua non condition for morality because they are too terrified to undertake the study. The actual precondition of morality is the creation of memory, and to ensure that a particular value, precept, or code found itself stuck within the mind of early humans, it was necessary that the body be “conditioned” to accept it. Such conditioning, Nietzsche maintains, required torture: the first

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moral code, consisting of five or six “I will nots,” was only remembered because of this long historical conditioning of the body. Thus it is the genealogist who must unpack the mnemonics that created values.3 Moreover, the way to unpack this is to study how the body was tortured. The lesson to be learned, Nietzsche evinces, is that one can discover the underpinnings of a concept by examining the sequence of bodily procedures that produced it. In other words and in a counterintuitive way, one gets a better understanding of what some idea entails by understanding the how of the notion. That is, the essence of the idea is revealed by understanding various “How” questions: “How was the idea first ingrained in human beings?” “How are bodies managed by the idea?” “How does the idea reconfigure the body?” Indeed, if one were only to understand an idea in regard to how it connected to other ideas within a defined historical narrative, then one would not be able to go beyond the narrative. Genealogy can go beyond and delve deeper into the roots of some concept, value or practice by showing that the historical self-understanding of the particular object under investigation is superficial. Nietzsche extrapolates from his analysis of section 13 to create one of the most important distinctions and key methodological procedures of genealogy:  one must keep meaning and interpretation separate from the rules of procedure. Nietzsche remarks that, in the case of punishment, for example, the procedural is the enduring part of the punishment, “the custom, the act, the ‘drama’, a certain strict sequence of procedures.”4 The other aspect is the fluid element—the meaning, the purpose, the expectation of punishment, etc. These two aspects are distinct from one another, and we make a grave mistake if we think, as some naive genealogists, that the meaning of punishment can be projected back onto the procedures of punishment. That is, the second aspect, the meaning aspect, always comes later; as Nietzsche will later argue, the meaning aspect has no causal efficacy on the first aspect. This tracing of values to their mnemonic roots causes us to see our values in a different light, so Nietzsche argues. Values such as self-sacrifice, upholding a duty and remembering a promise cannot be decoupled from the very real physical forces that shaped, contoured, and indeed ingrained themselves within our early ancestors. Thus, failing to uphold a promise may cause us to experience real physical anguish, but the reason behind our pain has nothing to do with the promise itself; rather, Nietzsche extols, it has to do with the painful breeding our ancestors went through and that we rather miraculously inherited.5 Understanding this process, Nietzsche thinks, allows us to see the value, as in the

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case of promise making, in a different light. It allows the genealogist to take up a new a very different perspective on our historical reality. Perhaps the most striking aspect of genealogy is its affirmation of perspective and not truth. Nietzsche’s perspectivism (or better “perspectivalism”) is an epistemic and ontological position which both places limits on what sort of knowledge is impossible for humans to attain as well the possible sorts of things that we can come to know. These “perspectives” which we may have on the world, Nietzsche makes clear, are not grounded in any nascent structures which we “humans” instinctively have for ascertaining the true nature of reality. Rather, such perspectives emerge simply from the Abgrund (abyss) of power itself.6 In other words, there is no hypokeimenon beneath any of our most treasured and trusted concepts, and that includes the most primary philosophical concept of all, namely, truth. All there is, all there can ever be, are the confluences of power. Such a realization, namely, that truth claims are never value-neutral—they are perspectival—has both ethical virtues and very troubling epistemic problems. Turning to the ethical merits of the position first, adopting a perspectivist view allows one to realize that some truth claims, such as “the good shall be saved and the wicked punished,” are thought to be true at least to some only because they express someone’s system of values. They are not facts that have been discovered. In fact, Nietzsche claims, there is no such thing as a fact: even facts are valuations. A fact is infused with power, perspective, and agenda.7 But this realization as to the perspectival nature of facts themselves is freeing, suggest Nietzsche’s commentators, because it emancipates us from feeling troubling and painful emotions like guilt should we fail to live up to strict codes of Christian conduct, for example (if we feel so inclined by our social upbringing). Even though guilt causes us pain, it is not a feeling that denotes a punishment from God. It is an emotion that we inherited in a rather unexpected and arbitrary historical process. Now that we acknowledge that guilt is not metaphysically necessary, it is not a punishment ordained by God, the pain once experienced by this feeling is significantly blunted. With this realization, we may not feel the sting of guilt as we otherwise would.8 Like Nietzsche, Foucault too believes in the great emancipatory powers of genealogy. He thinks of genealogy as a curative science capable of unmasking the parade of regimes of power that have traipsed themselves across the stage of history.9 The new historian, the genealogist, Foucault writes, “will know what to make of this masquerade. He will not be too serious to enjoy it; on the contrary, he will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing.”10 The purpose of this masquerade is to

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displace and subvert history, and the best way to do this is through laughter.11 Writing on these very curative powers of genealogy, Kathleen Marie Higgins echoes Foucault’s sentiment, “Laughter,” she writes, “is the ultimate cathartic that can alleviate our overly poisoned systems.”12 In short, Foucault too, just like Nietzsche before him, believes genealogy to be a means of diagnosis and cure. Perspectivism is the key to initiating the genealogist’s ironic ethos because perspectivism allows the genealogist to resist taking any one perspective too seriously. Each perspective is only a mask:  there is no face, human or otherwise, and no end to this process of unmasking. The cure, Foucault seems to suggest, consists in the process of analysis itself and not the end result of the analysis. Unlike Nietzsche, Foucault does not ask his readers to reflect on the genealogical origin of feelings as part of this cure, but instead, focuses his readers’ attention on the evolution of desires. He stresses that what we desire as well as how we go about desiring has changed radically from one regime of truth to the next. Such desires, according to Foucault, are produced from what he calls “technologies of the self.” These technologies not only include the external techniques of surveillance and discipline employed by Bio-power (more on this later), but also internal techniques: they include all those things we do and say to ourselves. Foucault’s comprehension and explication of the place and role of the body in a genealogical investigation, therefore, is both more explicit and clearer than that of Nietzsche’s but, more importantly, Foucault carefully imbricates the diagnostic and curative elements of genealogy. Foucault’s fusion of analytic and therapeutic components will be demonstrated more concretely when I turn to his genealogy of sexuality below. Although the emancipatory benefits of perspectivism are substantial, the position remains troubling from an epistemic point of view. One question that immediately arises when discussing perspectivism is the following:  “How is perspectivism underwritten?” For notice that if truth statements are themselves merely expressions of value, then what can be said for Nietzsche’s adoption of perspectivism? Is perspectivism itself merely an evaluation? If so, then why believe it? On the other hand, if it is not an evaluation, that is, it is objectively true, then how does it avoid self-referential contradiction?13 Another issue concerns the epistemic merit of genealogy. More precisely one might ask in this regard: How does Nietzsche argue with any measure of coherence that genealogy is more meritorious than competing forms of historiography? Both Nietzsche and Foucault are vociferously critical of contemporary historiographic approaches. For example, in the Genealogy Nietzsche is quite explicit in holding that the English psychologists of his day are on the wrong

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road when it comes to the true origins of morality: “According to this theory, that which has always proved itself useful is good: therefore it may claim to be ‘valuable in the highest degree’, ‘valuable in itself.’ This road to an explanation is, aforesaid, also a wrong one, but at least the explanation is in itself, reasonable and psychologically tenable.”14 However, if Nietzsche is insistent that we have “no organ for knowing” then how can he criticize another historical method of investigation?15 What gives Nietzsche the right to declare that one form of historiography is wrong if he is not sure that he has the right one? “Whence stands the genealogist?”16 Why believe Nietzsche’s genealogy? Nietzsche, I believe, can answer the above two questions, though the solution is rather pyrrhic. From an epistemic standpoint, the body acts as the nondoxastic linchpin linking the narrational chains of different historical eras. Reading bodies as historical documents and interpreting value systems regarding how they harness, suppress, re-interpret or extirpate primal, ancient drives, allows the genealogist to evaluate and critique what would otherwise be incommensurable belief systems. If there were no common thread running through regimes of truth—something that Foucault suggests—then a genealogical investigation would be incoherent for it would be impossible to trace the origins of anything. What’s more and expanding on his methodological point made in section 13, in section 14 of the same essay, it is clear that Nietzsche understands this point and thus places a premium value on the raw procedures used to train and torture the body. However, Nietzsche thinks of the body in another way, too. He increasingly views the body as a rigid descriptor. Just as Kripke defines a rigid descriptor as a definite description that denotes the same entity in all possible worlds, by analogy, Nietzsche claims that the body or, more accurately, the drives that comprise the body, do not alter; they remain the same from historical era to historical era. They can be harnessed and bred toward new aims and goals by external pressures, but the drives themselves are always present. It is the expression of these drives that form values, ideas, and character types. Brian Leiter presents the clearest and most robust construal of Nietzsche’s character-type theory in the secondary literature. According to Leiter, Nietzsche, like Hume before him and like Freud afterward, desired to construct a type theory of human behavior. The type theory argues that people belong to fixed psycho-physiological types such that an understanding of these types determines and explains the cognitive faculties, actions, and behavior of individuals. “Each person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which defines him as a particular type of person.”17 There are two kinds: weak types who are impotent,

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reactive, prone to nursing grudges, and strong types who are active, exuberant, healthy, and according to Leiter, express their values physically and, conversely to the weak type, construct values which come to serve their instincts.18 Thus, for Leiter, there are immutable type facts about a person: physiological and psychological traits that constitute the individual and which place him in one of the categories above. These type facts may then be used to predict, with some degree of accuracy the moral and theoretical beliefs of that one and the same person. What’s more, there seems to be substantial support for this view throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre and especially in the Genealogy. Consider Nietzsche’s tree analogy: “Our thoughts, values, every ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘if ’ and ‘but’ grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree—all related and each with an affinity to each, and evidence of one will, one health, one earth, one sun.”19 Or, again, compare what Nietzsche writes in Note 2 of Essay I: “Indeed, every table of values, every ‘thou shalt’ known to history or ethnology, requires first a physiological investigation and interpretation rather than a psychological one; and every one of them needs a critique on the part of medical science.”20 In Nietzsche’s later work he increasingly takes on a more rigid essentialist bodily position. Nietzsche’s essentialist body solves the perspectivism problem but perhaps only too well: because, for Nietzsche, perspectives slowly become mere perspectives. For example, those who are unhealthy, sick, ill, or degenerate in some way are part of the descending line of life and thus must take up perspectives where someone is to blame for his or her problems. They require tartufferie to live. The strong, in contrast, those who are healthy, have an inside track to the truth, and thus their values are in keeping with the overarching value and drive of life itself which is to overcome. As a result, Nietzsche begins to adopt an ossified view regarding the body in his late work and one that is expressly antigenealogical.21 Foucault uses genealogy differently than his German predecessor though he is no less concerned about the origin and development of human emotions. Foucault’s genealogies, such as those put forward in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trace the evolution of dispositifs (a power/ knowledge apparatus). A  dispositif is a fusion of sorts: it consists of discursive and nondiscursive elements that combine to form an environment of power. This environment then conditions, trains, and coerces bodies within a particular historical era according to the specific goals of that dispositif. Thus, Foucault notes that the eighteenth century’s obsession with docility “was not the first time that the body had become the object of such imperious and pressing investments; in every society, the body was in the grip of very strict powers, which

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imposed on it constraints, prohibitions or obligations.”22 Foucault’s principal task for using genealogy, then, is to demonstrate the origin of new relations that develop between power/knowledge and the body. In a rather long but largely forgotten passage of Discipline and Punish, Foucault reveals what these precise bodily relations are in particular historical eras. In the medieval era, for example, the bodily relation was that of vassalage. The common perception of vassalage is one where oaths of fealty are sworn to a lord. Given Foucault’s focus on the relationship between power and a body, however, vassalage takes on a different meaning. According to Foucault, vassalage, “was a highly coded, but distant relation of submission, which bore less on the operations of the body than on the products of labor and the ritual marks of allegiance.”23 Our current dispositif, according to Foucault, is one that he calls “bio-power.” Bio-power establishes a new relationship to the body by doing two things through the twin poles of discipline and surveillance: first it, “increases the forces of the body (in terms of economic utility) and second it diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).”24 In other words, Bio-power creates docile and productive bodies for increased productivity and efficiency, as these qualities come to be defined by the particular node of the carceral regime (prison, workplace, school, army barracks, etc.). According to Foucault, then, the body is the principal document for the genealogist because it is the focal point for the emergence of forces. Analyzing the relations that invest the body is the best way to determine the particular dispositif within a historical era. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault writes, “descent (Enstehung) attaches itself to the body. It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament in the digestive apparatus.”25 The body is the primary historical document for Foucault because the body can be read like a text: it is “the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas) the locus of a dissociated self-adopting an illusion of substantial unity and a volume in perpetual disintegration.”26 The body for Foucault is the touchstone for power; there is nothing else for power to grab hold of. The soul is an invention or more accurately put a stratagem reinvested and redeployed by Bio-power to exercise normalization more effectively. Indeed under methodological point 4, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes that he will, “try to discover whether this entry of the soul on to the scene of penal justice, and with it the intention in legal practice of a whole corpus of ‘scientific’ knowledge, is not the effect of a transformation of the way in which the body is invested by power relations.”27 A genealogist is responsible for tracing the evolution of ideas, feelings and/or actions with the aim of demonstrating the

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sudden, sharp rupture of these evolutionary threads. The goal, in other words, is to trace how ideas become uprooted, taken up from their older traditions and then reinterpreted toward new ends by new regimes of power/knowledge. The importance of the body for both genealogists is that it serves as the most reliable means of understanding current systems of control. Since different dispositifs attempt to control our bodies, although in different ways and for different purposes, the best way to study a past dispositif or the dispositif one currently inhabits, is to observe how the body is analyzed, conceptualized, examined, disciplined, or in sum, “managed.” Foucault’s ontological conception of the body, however, is deeply problematic. It was already revealed that the body is “a volume in perpetual disintegration.” Now, however, consider what Foucault writes in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”: We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest and holidays . . . “Effective” history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for the understanding of other men.28

From this passage, it would appear that Foucault embraces a vague social constructionist view of the body: the body is a not a natural kind of thing but a tapestry of sorts; one woven by many threads and many weavers. Concretizing this further we might do well to examine how so-called natural features of the body, such as sexuality, cannot simply be traced backward to a previous, under-developed concept like “the flesh.” Foucault shows that it is the seemingly trivial practices (like church confessions), public policies (town planning), earlier forms of knowledge (medical investigation), and documents (birth statistics) that become assembled in a rather haphazard and entirely contingent manner under one universal signified, that of “sex.” Furthermore, this “new” concept does not just signify a new classification for knowledge but correspondingly signifies a new form of power. As Foucault writes: The notion of “sex” made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and a universal signified.29

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Sex, then, is “used” by power to gain a hold on bodies by investigating bodies both individually and collectively. The data collected then serves to reinforce the acceptance and later “truth” of sex and sexuality. Sex is formulated and produced through prior strategies of power coming together in an entirely chaotic manner. Based on the viewpoint developed above it is clear that Foucault avoids the problems of Nietzsche’s reductionist genealogical approach, but falls victim to peculiar problems of his own making. If the body is the one common element allowing us to compare what would otherwise be incommensurable dispositifs, then how are such comparisons possible when the documents being compared are entirely different? If there are only interpretations of the document called the “body” but no real body serving as the interpretandum to the interpretans, then we are not getting interpretations of the same underlying text but different texts entirely. Thus Foucault’s understanding of genealogy as articulated in Discipline and Punish is incoherent, for how could one claim that a common feature of a dispositif is that it reinvests the body with a new relationship of power when the body that is reinvested alters from one era to the next? Secondly, given Foucault’s constructivist approach at least as presented in his early genealogical writings like “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” it is hard to understand how the body retains the training, discipline or even torture it receives. If there are no ontological structures that latch onto or are molded by such techniques of power then why are said techniques so effective? Surely they are effective because they do understand at least something inherent about the body irrespective of the historical era in which bodies are found.30 It is here where Foucault may and in fact does defend his position by arguing that the body is twice removed: it surely is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest holidays, diet and so forth, but, even here, these techniques are themselves a weaving or intersection of past bodily practices. There is a reciprocal relationship between these techniques and how they determine the body and the body, in turn, further determines these technologies. This insight is better understood by turning to Foucault’s lectures on Security, Territory, Population and his analysis of the Lamarckian term, “milieu.”31 We normally think of a milieu as a person’s social environment, and we usually equate it with the zeitgeist of the times. However, to take up this typical rendering of the term would be tantamount to adopting a discursive idealist position. Foucault is using the term differently here. In these lectures, Foucault expands and deepens Lamarck’s notion. He writes:  “A milieu is a multiplicity of individuals such as a town who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live.”32 The natural

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givens of a town, for example, its grasses, marshes, hills, rivers and so forth are only quasi-natural for they too can be affected and indeed infected by the actions taken by the individuals so bound within this material milieu.33 Harkening to Hacking’s position of dynamic nominalism where the reality of objects is questionable but where the reality of effects is very real, Foucault continues:  “The milieu is a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it.”34 How might we be able to cash this out? One way to understand Foucault’s use of Lamarck’s rather “naturalistic” interpretation of milieu is to examine the phenomenon called Trophic Cascade Effects.35 Trophic Cascade Effects have a high probability of occurring when apex predatory groups are introduced or, as in the example below, reintroduced into an environmental niche. The action of introducing an ultra-predatory group into an ecosystem significantly and irretrievably alters the behavior of a select group of creatures within that environment. The alteration of this group’s behavior then produces cascading effects on other groups—consisting of animals smaller in physical size than the first group—and these, in turn, generate behavioral changes in other organisms and so on.36 One provocative and fascinating case of such a reintroduction of predators was the repopulation of wolves in Yellowstone National Park begun in 1995. Wolves had been extricated from the park for approximately seventy years because they were a danger to both visitors in the park as well as the livestock residing on the farmland surrounding its borders. The initial purpose of reintroducing wolves was to curb the whitetail deer and elk populations of the park, which had grown out of control in the wolves’ absence. Reintroducing wolves, it was believed, would help to curtail the growth of these populations in an absolutely natural way. However, another issue at play was the significant loss of many of the native grasslands of the park. The deer and elk populations had grazed so much of the vegetation that enormous areas of the park, but especially its dales and valleys, were now infertile. However, once the wolves were reintroduced, though initially few, they instantly changed the foraging patterns of the deer and elk. Both groups of herbivores began feeding in safer areas of the park which offered better protection for their fawns and calves. Moreover, as this occurred, the vegetation regrew and, in general, reforestation of the park began to take place. The regeneration of plant life in Yellowstone led to the propagation of many smaller native inhabitants, such as songbirds, rabbits, and beavers, species that were thought to be nearly extinct in the park. Many of the above-mentioned ecological developments were anticipated by the ecologists who reintroduced wolves. However, the wolves did something

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that no one expected or predicted:  they transformed the very structure of Yellowstone’s river banks. The removal of wolves from Yellowstone in 1925 caused the rivers within the park to grow in hydraulic capacity. How can wolves change the very geophysical nature of an ecosystem? The answer is that the elk and deer of Yellowstone, in the absence of wolves, decimated riparian vegetation (such as cottonwood, for example), on the banks of Yellowstone’s rivers. Riparian vegetation acts a natural buffer against soil erosion and helps to maintain rigid river channels. However, because these grazers no longer had a natural predator, they proliferated in number eating nearly all of this type of vegetation within the park.37 Rivers became increasingly wider and deeper as a direct result of the loss of this particular kind of vegetation. When wolves were reintroduced they changed the grazing behavior of elk immediately:  the elk no longer ate along river banks because it was now too dangerous to do so. Within six years, the rivers of Yellowstone became more inelastic and returned to their traditional narrower channels because much of the riparian vegetation, had regrown: all on account of the reintroduction of a few dozen wolves.38 In the same vein, I would argue that Foucault’s understanding of a milieu as a material environment where the social and natural meet thereby affecting one another in a chain of reciprocal causality resolves at least some of the difficulties encountered regarding Foucault’s often interpreted social constructivist view of the body presented in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Where Nietzsche’s body is once removed from reality because the body for Nietzsche is simply an ever changing battlefield of primordial yet competing drives, Foucault’s is twice, indeed, infinitely removed: the body is affected and afflicted from a seemingly endless supply of quasi-natural and quasi-social channels and in turn can itself be causally efficacious, too. This reading, only hinted at by Foucault, preserves the spirit of genealogy as one of unmasking while allowing the flourishing of an infinite number of perspectives to shine forth.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 78. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 2000). 3 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 497 (II, 3). 4 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 515 (II, 13).

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5 Such an inheritance would truly be miraculous given Nietzsche’s Lamarckian tendencies. 6 Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the few writers who fully appreciate the novelty of Nietzsche’s position. See his “Genealogies as Subversions” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 7 “No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations,” Nietzsche famously declares in section 481 of The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968). 8 See David Owen, “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory,” European Journal of Philosophy 10.2 (2002), pp. 216–30. 9 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” section 7, pp. 93–97. 10 Ibid., pp. 160–61. 11 According to Todd May, Foucault explicitly views genealogy as a therapeutic science “capable of subverting the assurances of transcendence or meaning which history appears to offer to knowledge.” See his Between Genealogy and Epistemology (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 77. 12 Kathleen Marie Higgins, “On the Genealogy of Morals—Nietzsche’s Gift,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994), p. 61. 13 Steven D. Hales and Rex Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000) is required reading for understanding the logical problems perspectivism presents as an epistemic and metaphysical doctrine. 14 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 463 (I, 3). 15 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 214 (V, 354). 16 This is a play on words of Carlos Jacques’ seminal essay, “Whence Does the Critic Speak: A Study of Foucault’s Genealogy,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 17.4 (1991), pp. 97–113. 17 Brian Leiter, “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will,” Philosopher’s Imprint 7.7 (2007), p. 7. 18 Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 8. For an extended and critical treatment of Leiter’s position, see chapter 2 of my book, Nietzsche’s Will to Power Naturalized (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2017). 19 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 452 (“Preface,” 2). 20 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 491 (I, 17). Compare this with section 57 of The AntiChrist where Nietzsche seems to reduce one’s mental abilities and beliefs to their physiological development and body type. While in Zarathustra Nietzsche claims that “Truly, my brother if you only knew a people’s need and land and sky and neighbour you could surely divine the law of its overcomings and why it is upon this ladder that it mounts its highest hope.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

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Brian Lightbody trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 85 (I, “Of the Thousand and One Goals”). Scholars like Ruth Abbey have severely criticized Nietzsche’s reductionist construal of power because the hypotheses generated from such a power narrative cannot be falsified. In his later work, Nietzsche, Abbey evinces, “now holds that if a great individual acts badly, this is a sign of declining life, making his claim about the importance of birth and lineage for greatness nonfalsifiable.” Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 104– 105. Besides the non-falsifiability problem, there are problems concerning what Nietzsche means when he assesses a value system using medical terminology. This criticism is explored by Gregory Moore, who argues that descriptors such as “degenerate,” “sick,” and “unhealthy” hover between a literal and metaphorical meaning and thus render Nietzsche’s entire moral enterprise breathtakingly incoherent. See Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 211. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 136. Emphasis added. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 138. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 147. Ibid., p. 148. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 23–24. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 153. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 154. This last consideration has inspired a flurry of philosophers to “supplement” Foucault by grounding his conclusions from Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the corps propre. The first book to propose this specific kind of supplementation was Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Of more recent vintage is Johanna Oksala’s book, Foucault on Freedom. She proposes to “construct a non-foundational reading [of Merleau-Ponty] that is compatible with Foucault’s understanding of the body as historically constituted.” Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 133. See note 36 in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) for more on Lamarck’s understanding of this term. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 21. Ibid., pp. 21–22. Ibid., p. 21

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35 The term “milieu” has a rather long and complicated history in French philosophy. The word was initially defined in an entry in the Encyclopédie Méthodique of Diderot and d’Alembert by Jean Bernouilli. Today it is typically used to refer to an individual’s social environment. However, as Georges Canguilhem notes in chapter 5 of Knowledge of Life, the idea has been interpreted in many ways: there are harder (i.e. naturalistic) and softer (i.e. cultural) interpretations of the term. I cannot discuss Lamarck’s interpretation of the concept in explicit detail here as it would be beyond the scope of the chapter, but, in general, Lamarck conceived of milieu as an interminable “negotiation” of sorts between biological life and physical environment. See Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 36 Robert Beschta and William Ripple, “Trophic Cascade Effects in Yellowstone: The First 15 Years after Wolf Reintroduction,” Biological Conservation 145.1 (January 2012), pp. 205–13. 37 See Robert Beschta and William Ripple, “The Role of Large Predators in Maintaining Riparian Plat Communities and River Morphology,” Geomorphology 157–8 (July 2012), pp. 88–99. Also see Kristin N. Marshall, N. Thompson Hobbs, and David J. Cooper, “Stream Hydrology Limits Recovery of Riparian Ecosystems after Wolf Reintroduction,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 280 (April 2013), p. 1756. 38 For an extended discussion of this example in relation to a naturalistic interpretation of Nietzschean will to power, see my Nietzsche’s Will to Power Naturalized, pp. 101–3.

Bibliography Abbey, Ruth. Nietzsche’s Middle Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Beschta, Robert, and William Ripple. “The Role of Large Predators in Maintaining Riparian Plat Communities and River Morphology.” Geomorphology 157–8 (2012), 88–99. Beschta, Robert, and William Ripple. “Trophic Cascade Effects in Yellowstone: The First 15 Years after Wolf Reintroduction.” Biological Conservation 145.1 (2012), 205–13. Canguilhem, Georges. Knowledge of Life, translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

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Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 76–100. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977– 1978, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Hales, Steven D., and Rex Welshon. Nietzsche’s Perspectivism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Higgins, Kathleen Marie. “On the Genealogy of Morals—Nietzsche’s Gift.” In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, edited by Richard Schacht, 49–63. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994. Jacques, Carlos. “Whence Does the Critic Speak: A Study of Foucault’s Genealogy.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 17.4 (1991), 97–113. Leiter, Brian. Nietzsche on Morality. New York: Routledge, 2002. Leiter, Brian. “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will.” Philosopher’s Imprint 7.7 (2007), 1–15. Lightbody, Brian. Nietzsche’s Will to Power Naturalized: Translating the Human into Nature and Nature into the Human. Lanham: Lexington Press, 2017. MacIntyre, Alasdair. “Genealogies as Subversions.” In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, edited by Richard Schacht, 284– 306. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994. Marshall, Kristin N., N. Thompson Hobbs, and David J. Cooper. “Stream Hydrology Limits Recovery of Riparian Ecosystems after Wolf Reintroduction.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.2977 May, Todd. Between Genealogy and Epistemology. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Moore, Gregory. Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” In Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 437–600. New York: Random House, 2000. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books, 1980. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968. Oksala, Johanna. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Owen, David. “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory.” European Journal of Philosophy 10.2 (2002), 216–30.

8

The Religion of Power Between Nietzsche and Foucault Jim Urpeth

Must we conclude that our scientia sexualis is but an extraordinarily subtle form of ars erotica?1 Nietzsche and Foucault are rightfully regarded as having, between them, provided arguably the most radical articulation of the “death of God” in its criticalnegative import for religion. The resources their thought might contain, if only largely implicitly, for the elaboration of a positive conception of the nature of religion, premised on and presupposing the same epochal development, has received less attention.2 This piece will attempt to sketch a nascent conception of such a post-theistic account of the nature of religion by bringing into dialogue aspects of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s respective ontologies of power in general and critical interrogations of religion (more specifically Christianity) in particular. The emerging hybrid—an immanent religion of power itself—admittedly cannot be said to be explicitly recognized or endorsed by either philosopher. Rather, it will be argued, such a conception of a religion of immanence offers a significant possibility for which, between them, Nietzsche and Foucault provide the critical and conceptual resources. A distinctive “Nietzschean” formulation of such a historically conditioned philosophical account of the nature of religion will thereby be available to those who, continuing to regard religion as a first-order ontological process, pursue the contemporary task of reconceiving it without reference to the transcendent.3 This project is rendered even more demanding as the focus here will be on texts and aspects of the work of both Nietzsche and Foucault that might be thought to be among the least favorable for such a venture. While both philosophers might be thought to have exhibited, albeit in a highly heterodox form, “religious”

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tendencies in some of their earlier texts, the later phases of their respective critical projects seem to have decisively abandoned such proclivities on the basis of ever more sophisticated conceptions of the nature and character of power.4 Furthermore, although Nietzsche more or less explicitly self-identified as being of a religious sensibility, such a disposition, even in the “pagan” form found in Nietzsche, seems to be wholly “lacking” in Foucault, especially in his later work. A profound and sustained interest, such as Foucault exhibited in religion as a crucial cultural phenomenon, and insistence on the specificity and significance of its role in the “genealogy of the modern subject,” is, of course, quite distinct from any personal affiliation to a religious viewpoint, however unorthodox, and cannot, in itself, be regarded as evidence of it.5 Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity can plausibly be said to be religiously inspired and motivated; clearly Foucault’s cannot be. Nietzsche’s atheism was arguably religious in nature; Foucault’s is assuredly not. Both were staunchly suspicious and skeptical of the claims of various pretenders to the throne of postChristian culture, such as secular humanism, scientific naturalism, and atheism. Indeed, their respective genealogies were fundamentally aimed at debunking the presumption of such new regimes of value to be as free of the Christian inheritance as they imagine. Yet while this shared critique of both God and Man can be claimed to have a religious underpinning in Nietzsche’s case, such a conception of Foucault’s thought is surely implausible. Nonetheless, the question of what the implicit “religiosity” of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s most radical, later ontologies of power might be will be explored notwithstanding the fact that they were both increasingly disinclined to conceive their thought in such a way.6 Hence, the task undertaken here is to argue that Nietzsche and Foucault provide the means to elaborate a religious critique of transcendent religion that issues in a conception of immanence as itself religious (and as the source of whatever, naturalistically grounded, vestigial religiosity may be found in transcendent religion). The emerging viewpoint will require a reconfiguration of the standard conception of the relation between religion and power. This is usually understood in terms of a contrast between, on the one hand, the infinite power of a transcendent deity or order of being in its sovereignty over an inherently insufficient and ultimately impotent order of finitude or, on the other hand, a sociopolitical, finite, and contingent power historically exercised by various religions in diverse societies and epochs. This latter approach, developed in enormous depth and influence in Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s respective genealogies of religions (particularly Christianity), is usually assumed to lead inexorably to the full decoding of religious discourse and practice into the inherently nonreligious domain

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of human cultural history such that religion per se loses any claim to primacy. The perspective sketched here cross-fertilizes aspects of both Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogies of religion to propose an alternative conception of the relation between religion and power culminating in their identification but as neither the infinite power of the transcendent nor the sociopolitical power of specific religious institutions, values, and practices. Rather, power, immanently conceived and endorsed in its primary ontological status, is itself “deified”— immanent power conceived as itself an essentially religious force.7 The historical economies of power structures and relations as described in the genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault are themselves to be recognized as intrinsically religious processes, to be inhabited as such. In order to bring this perspective into view, the relevant aspects of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s texts respectively will be identified before a closing discussion of how the resulting hybrid vision of the nature of religion itself can be thought to emerge between the two philosophers.

I The development of both Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s conceptions of power and genealogical practice share some striking structural affinities. Arguably, both moved from earlier, more oppositional conceptions of power and its contestation to later, ever more complex, nonoppositional (or immanent) perspectives. For both philosophers the extent and significance of what can be termed the “libidinal-affective investment” in a regime of power relations by those defined by it becomes an increasingly important aspect of their respective critiques of various economies of power and leads them to reconceive the nature of the resistance to them.8 The focus here will be Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s respective genealogies of Christian values and practice, as elaborated in their accounts of the “ascetic priest” and “pastoral power,” respectively. For Nietzsche the instinctual, libidinal-affective source of asceticism is described as an over-abundant enjoyment of one’s suffering . . . of making oneself suffer— and wherever man allows himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation . . . or in general to desensualization, decarnalization . . . he is secretly lured and urged onward by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrills of cruelty directed against himself.9

Nietzsche was fascinated by the seemingly paradoxical characteristic of many devotees of the “ascetic ideal” recommending that, “with all who call themselves

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‘sinners’ and ‘bearers of the cross’ and ‘penitents’ do not overlook the sensual pleasure that is in this complaint and accusation.”10 A primary instinctual gratification, namely, “pleasure in cruelty,”11 is identified as the source of the “moral conceptual world”12 as this emerges in the primordial creditor/debtor relation in which, “making-suffer felt good . . . seeing-suffer feels good, making-suffer even more so.”13 Nietzsche insists that such quasi-erotic instinctual gratifications continue to define the entire historical process of “humanization” conceived as an “ever-growing spiritualization and ‘deification’ of cruelty . . . a certain sublimation and subtilization . . . translated into the imaginative and inward.”14 As he states of the human animal’s process of moralization, “this uncanny and horrifying-pleasurable work of a soul compliant-conflicted with itself, that makes itself suffer out of pleasure in making-suffer . . . we know . . . what kind of pleasure it is that the selfless, the self-denying, the self-sacrificing feel from the very start: this pleasure belongs to cruelty.”15 For Nietzsche, “morality”— in the specific critical sense at issue in the Genealogy—is the achievement of “Christianity’s stroke of genius.”16 It is, Nietzsche argues, the “entanglement of bad conscience with the concept of god”17 that brings about the fateful “moralization of the concepts guilt and duty.”18 Again Nietzsche stresses the centrality of affectivity, “the Christian god . . . brought a maximum of feelings of guilt into appearance on the earth”19 and he clearly underlines the primacy of its libidinal determinants in this regard, the animal-human . . . invented the bad conscience in order to cause himself pain . . . this man of bad conscience has taken over the religious presupposition in order to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome severity and sharpness . . . the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to the point that it cannot be atoned for . . . his will to erect an ideal . . . in order, to be tangibly certain of his absolute unworthiness.20

From this perspective, the rhetoric and value of moralized “self-denial” are merely the means through which the human animal explores and insists upon its ingrained libidinal preferences, the pleasure it takes in abject self-abasement. In turning to the crucial appropriation of asceticism by the “ascetic priest,” Nietzsche again emphasizes the priority of the libidinal-affective dimension. The inhabitants of the “true ascetic star”21 are described as those “who caused themselves as much pain as possible out of pleasure in causing pain: —probably their only pleasure . . . pleasure is felt and sought in deformation, atrophy, in pain . . . in un-selfing, self-flagellation, self-sacrifice . . . a conflict that enjoys itself in this suffering.”22 The “ascetic priest,” in Nietzsche’s view, deploys an “affect

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medication”23 in order to constitute the “soul” as a subject of suffering—a virtuosic feat of libidinal-affective creativity such that, “people no longer protested against pain, they thirsted after pain; ‘more pain! more pain!’ ”24 Nietzsche’s account of the “ascetic priest’s” manipulation of the “ascetic ideal” for the purposes of the attainment of certain libidinal-affective pleasures marks the zenith of his naturalistic reclamation of “moralization.” His awareness of the critical consequences of such an audacious genealogical feat is evident in the rejection of the superficial initial interpretation of the “ascetic priest’s” asceticism as “life against life”25 in favor of an alternative, positive conception of the “ascetic priest” as “an artifice for the preservation of life,” through which “life is wrestling with death and against death.”26 Nietzsche thus offers his extraordinary account of the “ascetic priest” as an unwitting instrument of the self-affirming essence of life. From this perspective, the “ascetic priest” is to be ranked among “the very great conserving and yes-creating forces of life” such that, in a striking anticipation of Foucault’s notion of “positive power,” “the ‘no’ that he says to life brings to light an abundance of tender ‘yes’s.’ ”27 The “ascetic priest” is thus inducted into Nietzsche’s bestiary and valorized as “a new best of prey—a new animal terribleness . . . as attractive as it is fear-inspiring,” and as the “tamer of beasts of prey.”28 In a similarly radical and rigorous vein, Nietzsche insists on the full naturalistic repatriation of the “internalizing of man,”29 conceiving it, crucially, as a mere rerouting by life of the self-same “active force”30 deployed in any other historical formation of power. The lesson of Nietzsche’s libidinal-affective renaturalization of moralized asceticism is that it is, to borrow a phrase from Eliade, to be regarded as a “technique of ecstasy.”31 Indeed, to pursue a Nietzschean-inspired suggestion made by Foucault, moralized asceticism is the West’s predominant “ars erotica,” the way in which it has constructed the pleasures that best reflect its distinctive libidinal-affective genius. Nietzsche thus anticipates and inspires Foucault’s critique of the notion of “repression” enabling the insight that, for instance, Christianity is, first and foremost, the means through which a particular libidinal-affective type pursued— without restraint—the pleasures peculiar to it and that, furthermore, these are to be affirmed as a creative product of natural life itself. The “moralization” of the human animal is an undiluted and direct investment of life (or “will to power”) itself and it has the latter’s full endorsement. Often Nietzsche uncovers an order of “perversity” (i.e., the pleasures of moralization) within life that repulses him to an extent that he falters in the task of affirmation.32 Nietzsche’s emphasis on the libidinal-affective dimension of moralization, attuned as it is to life’s manifest investment in human perversity for its own sake (beyond that required to ensure

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the preservation of society), requires that he achieve an immanent recuperation of the transcendent (i.e., the “ascetic ideal”) or a renaturalization of “nothingness” crediting it to the “will to power” rather than surrendering it to the clutches of its idealist interpretation and its suppression of its libidinal origin and role. On Nietzsche’s most radical view, “moralization” is to be affirmed as a species-specific hallmark, celebrated as the libidinal-affective creativity of life’s (only) “internalized” animal. Even the most extreme “moral” variety of the “ascetic ideal,” the “ascetic priest,” is thus conceived as an undiluted manifestation of the “will,” a fully positive “will to nothingness.” As Nietzsche famously insists, but struggles to affirm, “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”33

II Undoubtedly key aspects of Foucault’s Nietzsche-inspired thought enable the libidinal-affective aspect of Nietzsche’s critique of the “ascetic priest,” and Christian morality in general, to achieve the prominence it merits in the interpretation of his thought.34 It is useful in this regard to recall the relevant features of Foucault’s thought in general and, more specifically, to highlight aspects of his genealogical account of the contribution made by Christian ascetic practices to the constitution of the modern subject. The theme of “positive power” is central to Foucault’s notion of the “power/ knowledge” axis and the displacement it entails of the traditional “negative” monarchical-juridical conception of the nature and functioning of power crucial to his project overall. As he states, We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes,” it “represses,” it “censors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it “conceals.” In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.35

This prioritization of the “positive” or productive-constitutive conception of power, is arguably nowhere more radically illustrated than in Foucault’s critique of the “repressive hypothesis” as an account of the nature of the relation between power and bodily pleasure in the modern period.36 For Foucault “positive” power constructs a field of “sexuality” characterized by a “hermeneutics of desire,” the guise (he argues) adopted by “pastoral power” in its post-ecclesiastical phase of operation.37 This process concerns an activity of self-constitution beyond the

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constraints imposed by “external” authorities and institutions. As a process of self-objectification it plays a key role in how individuals “learned to recognize themselves as subjects of sexuality.”38 The focus of Foucault’s analysis of this phenomenon of auto-subjectification is ascesis, the techniques of self-disciplining and self-examination in relation to sexual pleasure that play a central role in the “cultivation of the self.” In the course of Foucault’s “history of sexuality” project the theme of “positive power,” and the associated “power/knowledge” relation, undergo an important enhancement that clearly illustrates the influence of the Nietzschean themes sketched above. The key theme here is Foucault’s libidinization of power, as outlined thus, “the object . . . is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality . . . entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the ‘polymorphous techniques of power.’ ”39 The full elaboration of this vision of the libidinal-affective essence of positive power is as follows: a sensualisation of power and a gain of pleasure . . . Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered . . . mechanisms with a double impetus:  power and pleasure . . . The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing . . . power asserting itself in the pleasure of . . . scandalising or resisting. Capture and seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement . . . These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure . . . Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement.40

This insistence on the nonoppositional relation of power and pleasure underscores Nietzsche’s more faltering appreciation that the “ascetic ideal” is a particular culture’s technique of erotic intensification (demurely presented by it as “repression”). The interpretation of it as a “moral” phenomenon is wholly erroneous. The centuries of Christian self-formation are not, therefore, to be conceived as “repressive” but as the steady self-affirmation of a particular economy of power relations and its refusal to deny itself its defining pleasures. Medieval Christendom, and the modern subject formed by it, uninhibitedly pursued an erotics of inhibition, or what Nietzsche termed a “saintly form of debauchery.”41 In his fragmentary studies on Christian ascesis, particularly in its early and medieval monastic form, Foucault charts its transformative appropriation of

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ancient Greco-Roman techniques and practices of self-disciplining and their crucial reorientation, particularly through the development of a religion of confessional practice, toward a “hermeneutics of the self.”42 It is noteworthy that the crucial addition, in the extant three volumes of The History of Sexuality, of pleasure to the “knowledge/power” axis is less apparent and clearly underplayed in the two more “programmatic” texts of the four fragments that form part of the unpublished fourth volume.43 This is particularly striking in their account of the constitutive link between truth and (self-)sacrifice generated, Foucault argues, by the “Christian technologies of the self.”44 However, this aspect of Foucault’s genealogical account of the production of the Christian subject receives more emphasis in the other two fragments of the fourth volume.45 Noting that the difference between Greco-Roman and Christian forms of selfdisciplining cannot be established in terms of any fundamental distinction in their codes of conduct per se, Foucault argues that the key development occurs in the emergence of a “new type of experience of oneself as a sexual being . . . a new type of relationship . . . between sex and subjectivity . . . sexuality, subjectivity and truth were strongly linked together.”46 In this respect Foucault underlines the importance of Augustine’s establishment of the struggle between the will and “libido” (or the “relation to oneself and to the erection problem”47) and the field of unlimited critical self-interrogation and analysis it establishes. Augustine is credited with the underpinning (through his “theory of the libido”) of the spiritual techniques of monastic asceticism that collectively produce the “libidinization of sex”48 through which a new field of ascetic pleasure emerges, a technique of incitement pursued in the name of “purification” in relation to the “masturbation problem.”49 The coming into being of a particular historical field of knowledge/ power/pleasure is identified—that of the “internalized” soul—generated as and for the exploration of such, hitherto unavailable, pleasures (e.g., delectio morosa). Although Foucault does not explicitly formulate it as such, the implication of such an analysis is the suggestion that the “scientia sexualis” produced by a regime of such “positive power” is, in fact, an “ars erotica” and, therefore, a contrast of cultures in terms of the prioritization of one over the other is not sustainable. Power only produces, on this view, techniques of pleasure.50 Although, for Foucault, this historical process culminates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the implication for the interpretation of Christian ascetic practice is clear—far from repressing or excluding libidinized pleasure it creates and multiplies it, not as an unforeseen consequence or through a failure of domination and control but as the intrinsic aim of the power immanent to its techniques and practices. The variety of pleasure in question, “pleasure in the truth of pleasure,”51

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is doubtless culturally specific but its status as an “ars erotica” must not be missed as a result. As Foucault expresses it, “in the Christian confession, but especially in the examination of conscience, in the search for the spiritual union and the love of God, there was a whole series of methods that had much in common with an erotic art.”52 This perspective also enables the import of the last of the texts that are part of the unpublished Confession of the Flesh to be appreciated fully. This is Foucault’s discussion in “The Battle for Chastity”53 of Cassian—a key technician of medieval monasticism. Foucault attempts to present Cassian’s fight against the “spirit of fornication” as further “errant fragments of an erotic art.”54 Again, a “technology of the self ” is produced which creates and multiplies domains (internalized particularly) for the satisfaction of the new, hermeneutic, pleasures of self-mortification and denial. Indeed, assuming that the monks’ vow of chastity precludes the need to discuss carnal relationships with others and any acts as such, Cassian concentrates his “battle” entirely in relation to the attainment of a state of chastity identified as the elimination of any residual influence, even in sleep, of the body over the mind. This “neverending struggle over the movements of our thoughts,” the source of the notion of “concupiscence,” aims at a total “disinvolvement of the will” with the exclusion of “pollution” as its goal.55 It is in his concluding reflections on the significance of Cassian’s manual that Foucault again emphasizes the importance of its interpretation in terms of “positive power” and hints at its erotic investment and creativity. The key terms of Cassian’s text can only be understood through reference to the “techniques of self-analysis” and context of “spiritual battle” within monastic life. The whole is a “withdrawal that also reveals hidden depths within”56 not orientated to prohibition but to the “opening up of an area,” that of the circuit of reciprocal influence between mind and body focusing on the realm of thought. There are thus emergent “monastic sexual mores” requiring an “eternal vigilance, a suspiciousness directed every moment against one’s thought, an endless self-questioning to flush out any secret fornication lurking in the inmost recesses of the mind.”57

III Attention has been drawn to a crucial ingredient of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s conceptions of power in general and genealogies of Christianity in particular—their

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insistence on the essentially libidinally affectively invested character of power. It has been claimed that, on the basis of such an insight, neither philosopher can orientate whatever critique of Christianity they may wish to maintain on an interpretation of it as a “moral” phenomenon premised on a “repressive” stance toward the body’s pleasures. Christianity is rather viewed as a power-pleasure regime with a distinctive range of libidinal-affective investments which it pursues, if anything, with less restraint than its Greco-Roman predecessors. Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogies preclude the drawing of clear-cut distinctions (or “ruptures”) between historical economies of power and they redefine (not undermine) the range of critical perspectives available should a hierarchization of them be attempted. This is not to deny that both philosophers struggled to sustain their own genealogical insights when engaging in the task of the critique of power that their genealogies support. Both Nietzsche and Foucault are drawn to a valorization of the Greco-Roman variety of self-disciplining over its Christian successor. Arguably, Foucault seems more inclined than Nietzsche to sustain the critical self-discipline required in this respect—perhaps due to the relative “lack” in his case of an overarching agenda of revaluation concerning the future trajectory and evaluative foundation of Western culture such as Nietzsche pursued. Furthermore, Foucault seems more at ease with the consequence of a recognition of the libidinally affectively invested constitution of power—that its contestation requires the evolution of a transformed “type of will” arising from, and embedded at, a “biological” level. The mere proffering of new values and meanings remains sterile unless these originate “physiologically” as libidinal satisfactions. Arguably to attain to a genuinely affirmative (i.e., “nonmoral” or nonoppositional) form of critique requires that the critical viewpoint is itself acknowledged to be inextricably related to the power it contests and that the regime in question is credited with producing the resources for its own overcoming.58 The critique of any economy of power relations requires the recognition and analysis of its multifaceted and inherently contestational nature and the recruitment of it within an immanent critique of the regimen in question. Both Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogical studies underline the internally contested and dynamic character of the economies of power they interrogate. Historical economies of power rarely approach total hegemony, self-coincidence and domination to the point of univocity. As Foucault stressed, power presupposes “freedom” and incites and creates “resistance” not due to its limits but as a constitutive feature of it.59 All regimes of power contain the seeds of their own destruction and all are, however glacially, pursuing a trajectory of “self-overcoming.”

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Both Nietzsche and Foucault were alive to, and stressed, these multiplicities in their respective genealogies of Christianity. In Foucault’s case, this took the form of a contrast between, on the one hand, the constituting center seeking hegemony (“pastoral power”) and, on the other hand, the “internal” contestations and resistances generated in response and within the practice of Christianity (“counter-conducts”). In the case of Christianity’s technologies of power Foucault identified a range of “counter-conducts” including mysticism and, significantly, asceticism (when engendering a self-sufficiency in spiritual life independent of the pastorate).60 The critique of any regime of power credits power (ontologically conceived) as the even-handed source of both the phenomena of domination and resistance. The forces of resistance and contestation develop the resources provided by the constituting processes of “positive” power, but do so to the point of incompatibility with them. In this respect, power liberates both in providing life with the “form” necessary to it (Nietzsche and Foucault being among those who reject the claims to necessity of any particular historical variety of it) and in shaping and creating resistances to it. On the basis of these aspects of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s thought it is possible to identify some key features of an “affirmative critique” of the Christian “technology of the self.” Such a critique would consist of two related gestures. Firstly, the full genealogical “renaturalization” of the aspect striving for domination (i.e., “pastoral power”) which challenges the “official” (i.e., idealist and transcendent) account of its origin and source of power and its prized self-image. The “mere” translation of the discourses and practices of the Church into the terms of the “ascetic priest” (Nietzsche) or “pastoral power” (Foucault) completes a fundamental critique of them without the need of further evaluations. Through such a genealogical analysis purportedly transcendentally inspired, allegedly “other worldly” sourced phenomena are unmasked as merely the processes whereby certain desires and pleasures (e.g., feelings of guilt, self-mortification, etc.) are produced, cultivated and satisfied. This is Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s “take” on “telling the truth to power.” A regime of power is exposed in its “will to truth,” its production (via constitution) of the phenomena it claims to “discover” or reflect. Its “truths” are thus seen to be produced by its power. Second, “counter-conducts” of resistance and contestation are identified and affirmed as the creative becoming of the regime of power itself. It is undoubtedly this aspect of critique that prevails given that such counter-practices are the primary phenomena of power’s self-affirmation in its movement of selfovercoming. As Nietzsche states, “All great things perish through themselves, through an act of self-cancellation:  thus the law of life wills it, the law of the

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necessary ‘self-overcoming’ in the essence of life . . . Christianity as dogma perished of its own morality; in this manner Christianity as morality must now also perish.”61 However, the significance and critical force of the first critical gesture (“renaturalization”) must not be underestimated. It would be sufficient even in the absence of any internal “lines of flight” produced by the regime of power.62 For Foucault the “counter-conducts” within any economy of power are crucial resources in the collaborative effort between the human animal and power of nurturing nascent “technologies of power.” The broader proposal of this discussion must, in closing, be revisited. This is the claim concerning a possible conception of the “nature” of religion premised on the “death of God” available on the basis of this staging of a dialogue between Nietzsche and Foucault. The suggestion is that, between them, an emergent religious reality can be discerned—that of immanent power itself. In one sense this is merely to note that power, when conceived “ontologically” as it is by both Nietzsche and Foucault, as that on the basis of which all phenomena exist as such and are determined as to what and how they are—power as the source and medium of historical “worlds” of relations of domination and resistance— satisfies a basic criterion of religious status, namely, identification as the source of being. The religious claims of immanent power are further underlined when its self-overcoming creativity (as the source of “counter-conducts”) is appreciated. A  further key criterion of “deification”—ontological priority over the human—is also a fundamental aspect of both Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s conceptions of power. With the advent of the “death of God” this religiously conceived immanent power even confirms its primacy over a personal deity and the order of the transcendent in general. Hence, for those who pursue the task of the philosophical elaboration of the nature of religion, from a viewpoint for which “historicality” is fundamental, a possibility comes into view, the Nietzsche–Foucault “hybrid” of libidinally affectively invested “anonymous” power. Turning from the essential task of the translation of the discourse and practice of specific religions into the political technology of the self, the possibility emerges that the “technology of power” itself, within which all historical religions are sourced, is itself religious. A possible turn occurs from the sociopolitical “reduction” of religions of the transcendent to the emergence of the immanent religion of power itself. That Nietzsche occasionally discerned this looming religiosity of “will to power,” even its Christian guise, is apparent when he states, Hitherto the mightiest men have still bowed down reverently before the saint as the enigma of self-constraint and voluntary, final renunciation: why have they

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bowed down like this? They sensed in the saint—as it were behind the questionmark of their fragile and miserable appearance—the superior force that sought to prove itself through such constraint, the strength of will in which they recognized and knew how to honour their own strength and joy in ruling:  they honoured something in themselves when they honoured the saint . . . the mighty of the world learned in face of the saint a new fear, they sensed a new power, a strange enemy as yet unsubdued—it was the “will to power” which constrained them to halt before the saint.63

The claim of the title of this piece is that the “religion of power” emerges “between” Nietzsche and Foucault. Nietzsche is certainly the source of the requisite “pagan” religious sensibility required for such a religious relationship toward power. Nietzsche, the “disciple of Dionysus,” viewed the world—or “will to power”—as an intrinsically religious field of self-sufficient immanence, a self-expending, auto-deifying “monster of energy.”64 Yet, while the proposed libidinal-affective essence of the religious power in question, as underlined earlier, is a strong aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, it is inclined, at least in its application to Christianity, to be drowned out by his visceral hostility to the erotic sensibility in question. In contrast, Foucault’s inclusion of pleasure as an essential component of the knowledge/power axis, and capacity to affirm it even in the guise of Christian asceticism, provides a crucial corrective to Nietzsche’s often overly abrasive tone and oppositional stance. Foucault’s key contribution here is his keen eye for the “perverse”—beyond its role as a category of “objectification” within the “positive power” of a particular historical discourse—recognized by him as a constitutive feature of life itself (conceived as an inextricable play of power and pleasure). This Foucauldian affirmation of the essential perversity of life is an important antidote to Nietzsche’s unwholesome obsession with “health” and teleological fantasies concerning life’s singular investment in it. As Nietzsche noted, but could never quite affirm, “we, too, love the poison.”65 In this respect, Foucault’s thought, unlike Nietzsche’s, remains unencumbered by the task of maintaining a distinction between “health” and “sickness” and is thereby better equipped to maintain itself within immanence. In this way Foucault remained profoundly “Nietzschean,” helping Nietzsche’s thought to overcome itself in, and as, his own. Arguably Foucault’s most radical suggestion is contained in the epigram of this piece. In proposing that the “scientia sexualis” that constitute the modern hermeneutic subject, as founded in Christian confessional and other practices, are an ars erotica (and fully so), Foucault promotes an exorbitantly “Nietzschean” prospect. We are

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asked to recognize and reverence “our maker”—the religious reality of “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure.”66

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 71. 2 This task concerns the articulation of a philosophical, but “nonessentialist,” account of the “nature of religion” founded on the “death of God.” For my conception of the religious character of Nietzsche’s thought, see my “ ‘Health’ and ‘Sickness’ in Religious Affectivity: Nietzsche, Otto, Bataille,” in Nietzsche and the Divine, ed. John Lippitt and Jim Urpeth (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), pp. 226–51, and “Reviving ‘Natural Religion’: Nietzsche and Bergson on Religious Life,” in Nietzsche and Phenomenology, ed. Andrea Rehberg (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), pp. 185–205. For my formulation of aspects of a “religion of immanence,” see “Religious Immanence: A Critique of Meillassoux’s ‘Virtual’ God,” Angelaki 19.1 (2014), pp. 49–61. Although Jeremy Carrette frequently employs the term “religious immanence,” this clearly (following Foucault) concerns the critical translation of transcendent religion (particularly Christianity) into sociocultural discursive practices and power relations conceived as inherently nonreligious processes; see Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000). For an approach more related to the path pursued here, see Jones Irwin, “Heterodox Religion and PostAtheism: Bataille/Klossowski/Foucault,” Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy 10 (2006), pp. 215–44. For an alternative discussion of the relation of the themes of immanence and religion in Foucault’s thought, see John McSweeney, “Religion in the Web of Immanence: Foucault and Thinking Otherwise after the Death of God,” Foucault Studies 15 (February 2013), pp. 72–94. 3 This neither formulates a “new religion” nor recommends a “revisionist” stance within extant religions. From the viewpoint adopted, “God” (and the transcendent in general) dies due to the advent of a more fundamental (immanent-naturalistic) religious reality. This in turn provides the basis for a religious critique of specific religions and the interpretation of their histories conceived as “traces” of an emergent religious immanence. Religions are revealed as always already having been appropriations of an intrinsically religious, biosemiotic process. 4 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Foucault’s fascination with the “religious” in figures such as de Sade, Artaud, Bataille, Klossowski, and Blanchot is helpfully discussed by Jeremy Carrette and Jones Irwin; see Carrette, “Prologue to a Confession of the Flesh,” in

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6

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Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 19–32, and Foucault and Religion, pp. 44–108; and Irwin, “Heterodox Religion and Post-Atheism.” For my account of Bataille on religion, and broader themes linked to the stance developed here, see my “ ‘Health’ and ‘Sickness’ in Religious Affectivity,” and “Religious Materialism: Bataille, Deleuze/Guattari and the Sacredness of Late Capital,” in Difference in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip Goodchild (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 171–86. See the helpful comments on the nature of Foucault’s interest in religion in Jeremy Carrette, “Foucault, Religion and Pastoral Power,” in A Companion to Foucault, ed. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (New York: Blackwell, 2013), pp. 370ff. That Foucault’s notion of “political spirituality” is also to be understood as essentially nonreligious in import is also effectively argued by Carrette in “Rupture and Transformation: Foucault’s Concept of Spirituality Reconsidered,” Foucault Studies 15 (February 2013), pp. 52–71. The primary focus here will be on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality and the texts available of the unpublished Confessions of the Flesh, in Foucault, Religion and Culture. The use of the term “ontological” in this piece is deployed in a “Heideggerian” sense (the “materialist’ orientation of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s thought notwithstanding). For a general statement of how this might be understood in this context, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4.1 (1996), pp. 1–16. I discussed these claims about the Nietzsche–Foucault relation in general, and the relation between On the Genealogy of Morality and The History of Sexuality, in particular, in my “ ‘Noble’ Ascesis: Between Nietzsche and Foucault,” New Nietzsche Studies 2.3/4 (Summer 1998), pp. 65–91. In this piece I extend these reflections to include Religion and Culture and amend them somewhat as a consequence. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 140–41. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 235. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), p. 43. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., pp. 42–3. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid.

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Jim Urpeth Ibid. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., pp. 83–4. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., pp. 102–3. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 59. Without implying any further affinity between Nietzsche and Eliade, the phrase suggested here is adapted from Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Penguin, 1989). I articulate and discuss how Nietzsche’s radical, libidinal-affective renaturalization of human normativity generates insights and conclusions that threaten to derail his general historico-cultural project of “revaluation” in a forthcoming paper, “Renaturalisation and Revaluation: A Tension in On the Genealogy of Morality.” Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 118. I develop this claim concerning the “mutual radicalization” of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s thought in my “ ‘Noble’ Ascesis.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 194. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, pp. 15–49. On the nature and mutations of “pastoral power” in the modern period, see Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, pp. 18–26 and 58–61, and Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 213–15. On the “hermeneutics of desire,” see Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, pp. 66–7, and Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 3–7, 89, and 92. These two notions are central to Foucault’s account of the evolution of the relation between power and bodily pleasure from the Greco-Roman to the Christian worlds as well as to his critique of psychoanalysis. For general overviews of this trajectory, see Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, pp. 57–65 and 67–73; History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, pp.70 and 249–54; History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 62, 67–8, 185, and 235–40; and “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 366.

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Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 208. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, p. 11. Ibid., pp. 44–5, 48–9. Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 72. For the general features of the genealogy of this transition from the ancient to the Christian worlds as presented in the fragments of Confessions of the Flesh, see “On the Government of the Living” and “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” in Foucault, Religion and Culture, pp. 154–7 and 158–81. Two earlier texts that offer particularly helpful accounts of the key theme of “pastoral power” in terms of the power/sexuality relation are “Sexuality and Power” and “Pastoral Power and Political Reason,” both also in Religion and Culture, pp. 115–30 and 135–52. Namely, “On the Government of the Living” and “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” in Foucault, Religion and Culture, pp. 154–7 and 158–81. Foucault, Religion and Culture, p. 168. Also see p. 179–81. Namely “Sexuality and Solitude” and “The Battle for Chastity,” both in Foucault, Religion and Culture, pp. 182–7 and 188–97. Foucault, Religion and Culture, pp. 184, 186, and 187. For an important formulation of Foucault’s conception of the transition from Greco-Roman to Christian forms of ascesis, see “Sexuality and Power” in Religion and Culture, pp. 120–21. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 187. This is to apply the radical suggestions made in the first volume of The History of Sexuality to the text under consideration. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, pp. 51–73. In this earlier text, Foucault identifies Christian confessional practice as among the main sources of the West’s uniquely devoted pursuit of a “scientia sexualis” usually regarded in apparent (and deficient) contrast to the seemingly more liberated “ars erotica” characteristic of certain non-Christian cultures. See History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, pp. 58–65. For a fascinating approach to early Christian sources in the spirit of Foucault (and even Nietzsche) as read here, see Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, p. 71. Ibid., p. 70. Foucault, Religion and Culture, pp. 188–97. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, p. 71. See Foucault, Religion and Culture, pp. 192–3. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., p. 197

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58 For helpful discussions of aspects of the question of the critical evaluation of ancient and Christian forms of ascesis in Foucault, see Carrette, “Rupture and Transformation,” and McSweeney, “Religion in the Web of Immanence.” I also discussed this issue in my “ ‘Noble’ Ascesis.” 59 For a statement of this, see Foucault, Religion and Culture, p. 152. 60 For a stimulating discussion of this aspect of Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity, see Matthew Chrulew, “Pastoral Counter-Conducts: Religious Resistance in Foucault’s Genealogy of Christianity,” Critical Research on Religion 2.1 (2014), pp. 55–65. This topic is also helpfully discussed in Carrette, “Foucault, Religion and Pastoral Power,” and McSweeney, “Religion in the Web of Immanence.” A more general and provocative discussion of related issues is offered by Ivan Strenski, “Religion, Power, and Final Foucault,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66.2 (Summer 1998), pp. 345–67. 61 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 117. 62 This phrase is an implicit reference to themes in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The speculative suggestion made is that Foucault’s Christian “counter-conducts” might be conceived as something like—to adapt some terms from Deleuze and Guattari’s thought—a “minor religion” operating within and against “major,” “royal,” or “State” religion (i.e., Foucault’s “pastoral power”). For some reflections on religion in Deleuze and Guattari, see my “Religious Materialism.” 63 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 61. 64 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 550. 65 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 18. 66 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, p. 45.

Bibliography Burrus, Virginia. The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Carrette, Jeremy R. Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality. London: Routledge, 2000. Carrette, Jeremy R. “Foucault, Religion and Pastoral Power.” In A Companion to Foucault, edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki, 368–83. New York: Blackwell, 2013. Carrette, Jeremy R. “Rupture and Transformation: Foucault’s Concept of Spirituality Reconsidered.” Foucault Studies 15 (2013), 52–71. Chrulew, Matthew. “Pastoral Counter-Conducts: Religious Resistance in Foucault’s Genealogy of Christianity.” Critical Research on Religion 2.1 (2014), 55–65.

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Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4.1 (1996), 1–16. Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, translated by Willard R. Trask. London: Penguin, 1989. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1979. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1981. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1985 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self, translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1988. Foucault, Michel. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 340–72. London: Penguin, 1991. Foucault, Michel. Religion and Culture, edited by Jeremy R. Carrette. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–26. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Irwin, Jones. “Heterodox Religion and Post-Atheism: Bataille/Klossowski/Foucault.” Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy 10 (2006), 215–44. McSweeney, John. “Religion in the Web of Immanence: Foucault and Thinking Otherwise after the Death of God.” Foucault Studies 15 (2013), 72–94. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Strenski, Ivan. “Religion, Power, and Final Foucault.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66.2 (1998), 345–67. Urpeth, Jim. “ ‘Health’ and ‘Sickness’ in Religious Affectivity: Nietzsche, Otto, Bataille.” In Nietzsche and the Divine, edited by John Lippitt and Jim Urpeth, 226–51. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000. Urpeth, Jim. “ ‘Noble’ Ascesis: Between Nietzsche and Foucault.” New Nietzsche Studies 2.3/4 (1998), 65–91. Urpeth, Jim. “Religious Immanence: A Critique of Meillassoux’s ‘Virtual’ God.” Angelaki 19.1 (2014), 49–61.

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Urpeth, Jim. “Religious Materialism: Bataille, Deleuze/Guattari and the Sacredness of Late Capital.” In Difference in Philosophy of Religion, edited by Philip Goodchild, 171–86. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Urpeth, Jim. “Reviving ‘Natural Religion’: Nietzsche and Bergson on Religious Life.” In Nietzsche and Phenomenology, edited by Andrea Rehman, 185–205. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011.

9

Nietzsche and Foucault on Power From Honneth’s Critique to a New Model of Recognition João Constâncio and Marta Faustino

I What does “power” mean for Nietzsche, and what does it mean for Foucault? In his book on the concept of “power” (Die Kritik der Macht, 1985), Axel Honneth argued that Nietzsche and Foucault have basically the same conception of power, and that Foucault’s project in the 1970s should be seen as an attempt to “translate the naturalistically informed ideas of Nietzsche’s theory of power into the framework of a theory of society.”1 On Honneth’s view, the ultimate problem with both Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s conceptions of power is that they fail to acknowledge the role of struggles for recognition in social interaction and the development of society, particularly if such struggles are understood as involving the reasoned contestation of intersubjective norms. Is this critique justified? Let us begin by summarizing Honneth’s interpretation of Foucault’s Nietzschean conception of power: 1. Like Nietzsche, Foucault believes that power necessarily involves a “diversity of power relations,” a “multiplicity of competing subjects rather than . . . one subject holding power.”2 The power of the state, for example, depends on a multiplicity of “micro-powers,” that is, on the “decentered activities of the most varied actors in diverse situations of struggle.”3 2. Like Nietzsche’s, Foucault’s view of power and society is radically Hobbesian: society is “a war of all against all,” and this follows from the fact that all social relations are, at bottom, relations of power. All social behavior that seems to rest on reason and mutual understanding is always the result of hidden “power-strategies.” Since these power-strategies never

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cease to develop, such a result is always provisional, and the state of war in society is “constant and in principle unending.”4 3. Thus, the word “power” designates the provisional result of certain powerstrategies, that is, it means “success in a situation of struggle.”5 Power is tantamount to “domination,” or “control.” Foucault perpetuates Hobbes’ (and, according to Honneth, Nietzsche’s) “coercive model” of societal order. He does indeed change Hobbes’ model by replacing the centralized control envisioned by the latter with a multiplicity of decentered micropowers. But these micro-powers remain instances of domination or control, that is, of “success in a situation of struggle.”6 As Foucault himself writes, all “systems of micro-power” are “essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical.”7 These systems of decentered control or domination are what Foucault calls “disciplines.”8 And these are fundamentally modern phenomena, greatly fostered by the Enlightenment’s effort to institutionalize the principle of equal rights for all: “the ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines,” Foucault writes.9 4. In developing this conception of modern society as ruled by a multiplicity of “disciplines,” Foucault eventually replaced his “original action-theory model” with a “systems theory” of society.10 His starting point was a Nietzschean theory of power that aimed to describe intersubjective behavior. But, since he was led to the conviction that the end result of a “strategic intersubjectivity of struggle” is always a given order of domination,11 his theory eventually evolved into a theory about how power emerges in “trans-subjective” processes and systems—how power “stabilizes” in social systems of control, how its “institutionalization” is not really intersubjective, but mechanical. According to this theory, social struggle is not a matter of subjects having competing goals on the basis of commonly acknowledged norms and values, and normativity is not a matter of consent, compromise, or mutual understanding. According to the theory, subjects are not “subjects”: they are “formless, conditionable creatures”12 that could never engage in relations of mutual recognition. Individuals are forever imprisoned in trans-subjective systems of micropowers that oppress them, dominate them, control them, and “discipline” them. It is in this sense that such systems are always “non-egalitarian and asymmetrical.” 5. Furthermore, Foucault believes that social control has been steadily augmenting since the early stages of modernity. Human history and

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civilization are a “succession of systems of domination,” and the multiplication and refinement of the disciplines have made these systems ever more effective. The trans-subjective systems of micro-powers that hold a modern society together optimize strategies of social control.13 In this context, Foucault reduces knowledge to a “history of techniques of social domination,” a process of increasing social power14—in fact, everything the Enlightenment considered to be of emancipatory value is reduced by Foucault to an instrument of power that has caused society to proceed from domination to domination and toward an ever more perfect system of social control. As Honneth puts it, Foucault believes that “today the population as a whole is controlled through a network of disciplinary institutions spanning all spheres of social life. The title that Foucault gives to this compulsory form of social order is ‘panopticism.’ ”15 6. For Honneth, this “panopticism” is a reductionism. It reduces all social relations to “a one-sided rule of force.” Foucault embraces the implausible model of “a merely one-sided stabilization of a position of social power,” that is, of an “institutionalization of power as a process of constant use of force.” He leaves no room for recognition (Anerkennung), that is, for the model of a “two-sided stabilization of social power” motivated by agreement, compromise, reasoning.16 7. This reductionism is also, according to Honneth, “a crude behaviorism.” The description of common individuals as formless, conditionable creatures is, of course, behavioristic: their conduct and even the expressions of their bodily life are reduced to “material to be shaped by the power strategies operative at a given time.” But also the dominant classes become, for Foucault, “the mere bearers of systemic processes.”17 8. One of the main implications of this behaviorism is the idea that conceptualizations and institutionalizations of equal rights are not intersubjective, symbolically mediated interactions, but rather mere “discourses” that mask, at the surface of social life, the development of power-strategies and processes of social control at a more fundamental or subterranean level. As Honneth writes, Foucault dismisses “the legal norms and moral orientations that regulate the interaction of members of society with one another as mere illusions, as cultural deceptions.”18 Concepts that are culturally influential and that seem to emerge from subjective (and fundamentally intersubjective) commitments emerge, in fact, from techniques of social domination and serve social control by concealing the comprehensive prevalence of social control under the

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illusion of emancipation. According to Foucault, the subject itself (i.e., the concept of “a subject”) emerges from such techniques: in reality, there is no “subject” producing those concepts and causing social struggle.19 And the same should be said of morality and the law: these are merely “means for the cultural concealment of strategic goals,” so that there is, for example, no substantial difference between “social organizations in which membership is regulated on the basis of juridically free contracts and total institutions in which membership is coerced on the basis of legal orders.”20 In nuce: subjective consent and participation are immaterial, and intersubjective emancipation is better described as self-deception—for it is not the subject and it is not intersubjective interaction that constitutes the social order. When intersubjective interaction and consent occur—or when reciprocal recognition seems to have occurred—individual subjects are in fact being duped into reinforcing power-strategies that, in the end, result only in the augmentation of social control. There is no doubt that Foucault thought that in defending these views he was developing a core set of Nietzschean views (e.g., all social relations are powerrelations, there is no “subject,” morality is self-deception, etc.), and this fact certainly reinforced Honneth’s conviction that Nietzsche’s conception of power is basically Hobbesian and prefigures Foucault’s views on power and society in his writings from the 1960s and 1970s. However, in a footnote Honneth himself remarks that Nietzsche’s conception of power, unlike Foucault’s, was originally based on a “doctrine of dispositions,”21 that is, in a doctrine of the affects. This is indeed true. Nietzsche’s “will to power” is “an affect,”22 a “pathos,”23 “the primitive form of affect,”24 so that Nietzsche defines his “morphology of the will to power” (Morphologie des Willens zur Macht) as a “morphology of the affects” (Morphologie der Affecte).25 This immediately seems to mark an important difference from what we have just found in Foucault. Nietzsche’s philosophy is a “psychology,”26 it considers our “soul,”27 our subjective life—the psychē—even if, as a psychology that understands itself as a “doctrine of the affects”28 (Affektenlehre), it considers our subjective life from the view point of how the body is affected. So, the first important question we would like to raise in this chapter is whether Nietzsche’s psychological approach—his philosophy as psychology, his “physiopsychology” as a “morphology and doctrine of the development of the will to power”29—implies a conception of power that is fundamentally different from the conception of power that Honneth attributes to Foucault, and indeed

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so different as to be able to offer an alternative model for describing the phenomenon of reciprocal recognition, instead of excluding the possibility of this phenomenon. A second question will then be whether Foucault’s conception of power is really as opposed to the possibility of reciprocal recognition as Honneth suggests. We shall raise this second question below by asking whether Foucault’s “ethical turn” in the last phase of his thought answers at least some substantial part of Honneth’s objections to his conception of power and society. We shall argue that in the writings that express the “ethical turn,” Foucault’s conception becomes very similar to Nietzsche’s, such that both can in fact be said to offer an agonistic model of recognition.

II Nietzsche’s hypothesis of the “will to power” concerns, first of all, our “drives” (Triebe).30 It assumes that, in our experience of ourselves, “we cannot get down or up to any ‘reality’ except the reality of our drives”31 and, hence, it posits (hypothetically) a multiplicity of such drives as what constitutes what we are. These drives perceive, interpret, build perspectives about themselves, about each other, and about the so-called external world.32 Insofar as each drive develops elemental perceptions, interpretations, and perspectives, each drive is, at the same time, an “affect.” In perceiving, a drive is thereby affected by what it perceives and how it perceives it. This allows Nietzsche to describe the body as “a society constructed out of many souls,”33 that is, of many drives and affects that perceive, interpret, build perspectives, as well as to conceive of the “soul” as a way of describing the body, that is, the “soul” as “a society constructed out of drives and affects”34 which are the body as a “smart body” that perceives, interprets, builds perspectives. Within the context of the hypothesis of the will to power, Nietzsche’s conception of what is traditionally called “soul” and “body” is “adualistic” and, more than that, it involves a “double aspect” theory of “body” and “soul” (i.e., it sees “body” and “soul” as two aspects, or two possible descriptions, of the same reality).35 Drives and affects are not necessarily conscious, and only some of them become conscious in the form of thoughts, desires and passions.36 Not only conscious desires and passions, but especially conscious thoughts (which involve conceptualizations) are “only a certain behavior of the drives towards one another,”37 or “only a relation between these drives.”38 All forms of the properly

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human consciousness are, in sum, just a “surface” and a “sign” of unconscious drives and affects.39 Thus, subjectivity becomes, for Nietzsche, decentered subjectivity.40 One can only still speak of the “soul” if one understands “soul as subject-multiplicity.”41 That there is no “subject” does not mean that there is no subjectivity (and intersubjectivity):  it means, rather, that there is no fixed center, no unchanging conscious “I” or ego in our subjective (and intersubjective) lives. We are a multiplicity of drives and affects, an interplay of unconscious relations among “undersouls”42 and fragmented conscious expressions of these relations. Now, assuming that all of the elements of this multiplicity compete and struggle with each other, we should conceive of our subjectivity as constructed out of drives and affects (of “under-wills or under-souls”43) that are “wills to power”: “Man as a multiplicity of ‘wills to power’: each one with a multiplicity of means of expression and forms.”44 According to the hypothesis of the will to power, we can say that a person is one person—or that her being has unity—only if we think of unity as “organization and connected activity” among a multiplicity of drives and affects, that is, as a “formation of rule which means ‘one’ but is not one.”45 Likewise, we can still say that a person has a “will” or even that a person is a “will” (for example, a “strong will” or a “weak will”), but only if we understand this “will” as the (always provisional and nonsubstantial) result of the “organization and connected activity” of her drives: for example, a “strong will” will be the result of a well-stabilized—but not unconditionally stable—“order of rank” among the drives (i.e., a “formation of rule” built around a “dominant drive”), a “weak will” will be the “decadent” result of an “anarchy of the instincts,” etc.46 Nietzsche’s conception of power should, first of all, be understood from the viewpoint of this whole conception of our subjectivity in terms of a multiplicity of drives that struggle with each other but, in this struggle, are also able to coordinate and establish orders of rank among them. Drives are “wills to power” (“our drives can be reduced to the will to power”47), every drive seeks power for itself (“every drive craves domination” [ist herrsüchtig]),48 or, as Nietzsche also puts it: “Every drive is a kind of lust for domination [Herrschsucht], each has its perspective, which it would like to impose as a norm on all the other drives.”49 But the power each drive actually has depends on its relation to the power of the other drives, that is, of other wills to power. Power is relational—it occurs only among a multiplicity of wills to power. This also means that for there to be power there has to be the kind of reality that perceives, interprets, builds perspectives, and this kind of reality has to be

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efficacious (wirkend).50 Power is the way efficacious wills relate to other efficacious wills—power is a function of the “causality of the will,”51 that is, of how this kind of causality operates among a multiplicity of wills that relate to each other. If we think of this at the macroscopic level of persons—that is, of interpersonal and social relations as relations among “synthetic” wills—power is the way in which persons are reciprocally affected by each other, power is what happens in intersubjective relations (each “subject” being a “subject-multiplicity”). When Nietzsche writes that “everything is will against will” (“alles ist Wille gegen Willen”),52 he means precisely this: the hypothesis of the will to power states that from the most elemental forms of organization of our bodies to the most complex forms of interpersonal and social relationships there are only subjective and intersubjective multiplicities whose elements affect each other. That is why the will to power is an affect or pathos. Being the effect of relations among wills, power is also relative. As Henning Ottmann has put it, a “monopoly of power” (Machtmonopol)53 is impossible: all power is a mixture of power and lack of power or, in other words, power is always a matter of degree. A will to power is a will to domination, but domination is, strictly speaking, impossible. What Honneth calls “the reductionist idea of a one-sided rule of force” to be found in Foucault54 is not even a possibility for Nietzsche. At the level of social relations, Nietzsche is not at all interested in describing “social control” as a comprehensive form of trans-subjective, onesided domination, but rather in describing intersubjective relations that involve an interplay and mixture of mastery and vulnerability. A crucial case in point is Nietzsche’s version of the dialectic of the master and the slave in the Genealogy. What Nietzsche describes there is how the slave is, for a long time, affected by the oppression of the master, and in such a way that the hatred of his impotence—his ressentiment—eventually creates new values (i.e., a new intersubjective stance), so that, in the end, these values affect and defeat the master by instilling a bad conscience in his intersubjective relation with the slave. The reason why, according to Nietzsche, power is relational, intersubjective, and relative is because resistance is of the essence of power and the will to power:  “A will to power can only express itself against resistances.”55 A  will to power presupposes a multiplicity of forces or spheres of power that resist each other. Even the most asymmetrical or hierarchical relations of power presuppose resistance and, indeed, reciprocal resistance.56 If the instinctive, unconscious values of our drives play a crucial role in shaping the kind of power-relations that are at the basis of all interpersonal relationships and social life—namely, intersubjective power-relations based on

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reciprocal resistance—so do customs, norms, rights, duties, and other ways of valuing which involve symbolically mediated interactions at the “surface” level of consciousness. For Nietzsche, consciousness is the “surface” that arises from our ability to formulate concepts and words which express subterranean relations among the drives—but, even more importantly, Nietzsche believes that concepts and words (or consciousness and language) do not belong to “man’s existence as an individual, but rather to the community- and herd-aspects of his nature.”57 Consciousness (together with language) is the “connecting net”58 which allows human beings to form communities by communicating with each other on the basis of symbols or “communication signs.”59 Customs, norms, rights and duties are, of course, a crucial part of such a net. Therefore, these ways of valuing that involve symbolically mediated interactions are at least as important for the very existence of society as other forms of valuing that are presymbolic and preconceptual. However, even presymbolic, preconceptual power-relations are in some sense mediated. For, according to Nietzsche, all power-relations presuppose distance— “action at a distance.”60 For there to be power a will must be able to affect another will at a distance, as the earth seems to affect the moon (while also being affected by the moon) at a distance, without physical contact or impact. A  multiplicity of wills to power is a multiplicity of wills acting and being acted upon (or being affected by) other wills at a distance. Therefore, all power-relations depend on perceptions, perspectives, and interpretations—even if these are merely the kinds of perceptions, perspectives and interpretations that occur at the unconscious (or purely affective) level of the drives and instincts. Asymmetrical power-relations (e.g., between master and slave) will often result from violence and coercion, but even in such cases the power-relation depends on the threat of further violence and, therefore, on the perception of power and the estimate of a superior quantity of power. The upshot of all this is that in stating that all social relations are powerrelations Nietzsche is implying that all social relations hinge upon a given equilibrium61 of “recognized and guaranteed degrees of power.”62 It is not power as such—that is, brute force—that holds a society together, but rather a multiplicity of symbolically mediated interactions in which reciprocal recognition of different degrees of power occurs. Already at the level of purely interpersonal relationships, a minimum of recognition of another will as another will is part of every power-relation, even of the most asymmetrical, anisotropic powerrelations. The master does not take the slave as a person, he does not relate to the slave as an equal at all, but he feels at least a minimum of resistance from

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the part of the slave—that is, he recognizes a minimum of power on the part of the slave. And the slave, of course, feels forced to consent to be subjugated to the master because he estimates the value of his other options (e.g., being killed) as even worse than being subjugated to the master and, hence, recognizes the superior power of the master’s position. But the main point is that such interpersonal relations are always already embedded in larger nets of symbolically mediated power-relations, that is, in a society consisting of such relations. As Volker Gerhardt has shown, Nietzsche’s theory of society even includes the argument that, since power-relations are mediated by perceptions, perspectives, interpretations, conceptualizations, communication signs, norms, rights, duties, etc., the equilibrium of power in a society always depends on some sort of “symbolic understanding” or “agreement” among its members,63 that is, on a “social contract,” a “compact”64 based on reciprocal power-recognition.65 It could be objected that even if it is true that Nietzsche’s conception of society involves the idea of “recognition,” this still does not prove that his theory of society has anything in common with the kind of Hegelian conception of recognition which Honneth believes to play a crucial role in the development of society and social interaction. For we seem to be operating with two wholly different concepts of “recognition.” The reciprocal “recognition” of different degrees of power within an equilibrium of forces seems to be something wholly different from the reciprocal recognition of oneself “in the other,” especially if (a) the latter is supposed to involve a change in the status of the other which lets the other become an equal, and if (b) this change of status is supposed to mean that the other ceases to be an obstacle to one’s freedom and becomes, on the contrary, a condition thereof. But this objection is answered by the following two points. First, reciprocal recognition of different degrees of power within an equilibrium of forces can be seen as an alternative description of recognition of oneself “in the other” because, as we just saw, it refers to an intersubjective equilibrium of power—the difference being that persons are here redescribed as “wills,” “spheres of power,” “subjects-multiplicities” constructed out of drives which are “wills to power,” etc. Second, the objection would still be valid if Nietzsche’s conception only acknowledged asymmetrical power-relations—but that is not at all the case. Nietzsche believes that there are symmetrical powerrelations, equilibria of power in which the parties involved recognize each other as equals, that is, in which a will recognizes another will as equally powerful and hence a person recognizes another person as an equal, or as a person of more or less equal power and standing.66 In addition, it is important to remark that Nietzsche also seems to conceive of freedom as something that occurs among

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equals, namely among “free spirits,” “sovereign individuals,” “higher types” that recognize each other as equals.67 Thus, just as Hegel and Honneth describe the most elemental and rough forms of reciprocal recognition as instances of misrecognition and the most complete and perfect forms of recognition as developments of such elemental and rough forms, so Nietzsche describes asymmetrical and symmetrical relations of power-recognition in a way that makes us question whether every development and transition from misrecognition and inequality to recognition and equality could and should be redescribed in terms of developments and transitions from asymmetrical power-relations to symmetrical power-relations. In other words, by describing all power-relations in terms of reciprocal, intersubjective resistance, what Nietzsche shows is that no relation of domination is ever absolutely stable, or that relations of domination are agonistic: as long as the dominated party remains a subject that resists, the relation of domination contains in itself the seeds of its self-undermining and self-subversion. And this idea lays the basis for an alternative descriptive model of struggles for recognition. So, in sum: not only it is not the case that Nietzsche’s conception of power is incompatible with the idea of recognition, but it also seems to be the case that that conception gives at least the basis for an agonistic account of struggles for recognition.68 In the final section of this article, we shall discuss the difference between such a model and the Hegelian/Honnethian model. Let us now reconsider Foucault’s conception of power.

III Even if one grants that Honneth gives a correct interpretation of how Foucault conceives of power in the middle period of his work, it is safe to say that Foucault’s “ethical turn” in his final works from the 1980s takes into account human subjectivity (or the human “subject” and the “self ”) in a way which makes his conception of power much more complex than it was (or seemed to be) in the writings from the 1960s and 1970s.69 In his last writings, Foucault develops the idea that, besides the technologies of power or domination which had previously occupied him, one should also acknowledge the existence of another form of training and modification of individuals, or another “mode” by which human beings become “subjects,” which he calls “technologies of the self.” He describes these technologies as techniques “which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the

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help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”70 The technologies of power and the technologies of the self “hardly ever function separately,” such that what Foucault seeks to show is “both their specific nature and their constant interaction.”71 Any interpretation of Foucault’s view of power which neglects one of the two kinds of technique is one-sided and fails to do justice to Foucault’s final conception of power. Foucault himself acknowledges that he overstressed the impact of the technologies of power and dominance on modern societies, such that he was led, in his writings from the 1960s and especially from the 1970s, to an unbalanced, asymmetrical and reductive view of power.72 In the last period of his work, he seeks to develop a more balanced view by bringing to the fore “the interaction between oneself and others” and “the technologies of individual domination, in the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of the technologies of the self.”73 The criticism of disciplinary power and social control is thus supplemented with a new concern with an ethics of “care of the self ”—an ethics which expresses the ways in which people can resist the oppressive and disciplining powers that are active in society by governing themselves (and even by “shaping” and “creating” themselves). Indeed, Foucault’s reflections on the Greco-Roman tradition of the care of the self allowed him to conceive the possibility of an active (or, at least, a relatively active) human subject. The human subject is no longer a passive product of the coercive influence of multiple systems of micro-powers, but rather a subject which, despite all the external powers that oppress, control, and discipline him/ her, can still emerge as an ethical subject by being actively engaged in his/her own self-constitution. This relatively active subject is not at all the purely autonomous subject of modern philosophy and liberal ideology, but it is also not the “formless, conditionable” creature which Honneth and many others had seen in Foucault’s previous conception of the human subject. The passivity and activity which Foucault has in mind complement each other, such that, as Sebastian Harrer puts it, “ ‘fabrication’ and ‘self-constitution’ are but two aspects of subjectivation.”74 “Fabrication” (or “normalization”) remains, for Foucault, the dominant mode of subjectivation, but it has ceased to be the only, all-encompassing mode of subjectivation. Or, as Daniel Smith writes, ethical practices are of course saturated with power relations . . . But it is not true, either, that the subject is totally determined by external influences; not in the

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sense that there is always a point of absolute freedom hidden deep within us that cannot be completely subjected to power, but rather that the self, in addition to being influenced by outside forces, also affects itself.75

This means that self-constitution is also a matter of “power,” or is also a powerrelation. But it is a power-relation of the self over the self. Not all disciplinary practices are coerced, not all power-relations are external: the possibility of selfconstitution means that, besides being conditioned by external coercive structures, subjects can also subject themselves voluntarily to their own disciplinary (or “ascetic”) practices. But, in fact, all of this entails a decisive revision of the very concept of power. Insofar as subjects are capable of engaging in self-constitution, power cannot easily be stabilized or maintained by means of a “one-sided rule of force,” or a “one-sided stabilization” (to borrow Honneth’s expressions). Following Nietzsche, Foucault now clarifies that he sees power as involving freedom. In an interview in 1984, he explicitly distances himself from a reductive conception of power incompatible with freedom: “the claim that ‘you see power everywhere, thus there is no room for freedom’ seems to me absolutely inadequate. The idea that power is a system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom cannot be attributed to me.”76 The reason why such a view cannot be attributed to Foucault is because, in fact, he sees power as intersubjective and relational—or, he sees the exercise of power as “a mode of action upon the action of others”77—and so he can claim that freedom is the very condition of possibility of power, that is, of relations of power: When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterizes these actions as the government of men by other men—in the broadest sense of the term—one includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are “free.” By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available. Where the determining factors are exhaustive, there is no relationship of power: slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains, only when he has some possible mobility, even a chance of escape. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.)78

Again following Nietzsche, Foucault relies on the idea of resistance in order to defend that power is relational and always presupposes some degree of (inter-)subjective freedom: “in power relations there is necessarily the possibility of resistance because if there were no possibility of resistance (of violent resistance, flight, deception, strategies capable of reversing the situation), there would be

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no power relations at all.”79 Or, as Foucault also puts it, “At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom.”80 What we encounter here is precisely the same idea that we encountered in Nietzsche: power-relations involve reciprocal recognition of power: A power relationship . . . can only be articulated on the basis of two elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that “the other” (the one over whom power is exercised) is recognized and maintained to the very end as a subject who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up.81

And, thus, Foucault embraces, quite explicitly, the idea of an agonistic model of recognition. In the crucial text titled “The Subject and Power,” he states that the consequence of acknowledging that power-relations involve resistance and freedom should be to acknowledge “agonism,” that is, “permanent provocation,” as belonging to the nature of power-relations: “rather than speaking of an essential antagonism, it would be better to speak of an ‘agonism’—of a relationship that is at the same time mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.”82 This does not imply that Foucault abandons the claim that trans-subjective systems of micro-powers resulting in domination are a crucial part of social life. But this kind of domination is now reinterpreted in terms of situations or states of domination in which the power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them, remain blocked, frozen. When an individual or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversibility of movement by economic, political, or military means, one is faced with what may be called a state of domination.83

Insofar as a power-relation always involves an agonistic relationship with “the other,” or is “a mode of action upon the action of others” which results in “permanent provocation,” or in relentless processes of “mutual incitement and struggle,” it is of the nature of domination that it can always be modified and indeed reversed—no matter how “blocked” or “frozen” the state of domination has become at a certain point in time, it can always, at least in principle, be subverted. Thus, processes of “liberation” are possible, that is:  emancipatory struggles are possible, and they can even be successful, so that one has to acknowledge that something like reciprocal “recognition” is a human possibility. The claim

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that there is a network of disciplinary institutions controlling all spheres of modern social life is now replaced with the more modest (and more plausible) claim that liberation can never be complete because power-relations will always be part of social life: The idea that there could exist a state of communication that would allow games of truth to circulate freely, without any constraints or coercive effects, seems utopian to me . . . I do not think that a society can exist without power relations, if by that we mean the strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others.84

What this entails is also that the kind of intersubjective norms or laws which societies adopt have a crucial role in determining the degrees of liberation and the degrees of domination that prevail, but the “practice of freedom” will always require more than “liberation,” because it will always require the individual, private “practice of the self,” that is, “self-constitution” as a mode of resistance: “The problem, then, is not to try to dissolve them [i.e., power-relations] in the utopia of completely transparent communication but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the ēthos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible.”85 Finally, this seems to involve a more positive view of the potentialities of philosophical discourse. Philosophy, and particularly philosophy as genealogy, is now supposed to be able to play a crucial role in promoting not only liberation, but, more generally, the practice of freedom: “philosophy is that which calls into question domination at every level and in every form in which it exists, whether political, economic, sexual, institutional, or what have you.”86 And, thus, philosophy can show people that “they are freer than they feel” by showing that “there are no universal necessities in human existence.”87 The unmasking of the coercive and oppressive nature of modern disciplinary societies does not have to lead to resignation. On the contrary, by showing the “the arbitrariness of institutions,” it also shows “which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.”88

IV The heart of Honneth’s critique of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s conceptions of power is the claim that these conceptions are incompatible with the idea of recognition, or with the idea that struggles for recognition play a crucial role in the

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very development of society. To an important extent, we have already shown that this critique is unfair: both in Nietzsche and in Foucault one can find, if not a fully fledged agonistic model of recognition, at least a clear outline of it. But the fact is that this does not fully respond to the kind of worries that a Hegelian thinker like Honneth is likely to have vis-à-vis Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s conceptions of power, and it is certainly not an accident that one finds the same kind of worries expressed in the works of Habermas and others. Struggles for recognition are about the contestation of intersubjective norms,89 and there seems to be an irreconcilable dissension between the different ways in which the Hegelian and the Nietzschean traditions see the contestation of intersubjective norms. The fact that a Nietzschean thinker like Foucault does not really dissolve intersubjective relationships and, particularly, intersubjective contestations of norms into blind trans-subjective processes of power, or, even more importantly, the fact that he acknowledges that there are processes of “liberation” and the fact that in acknowledging that these are based on intersubjective, reciprocal resistance to domination he develops something like an “agonistic model” of recognition, still does not preclude a Hegelian thinker like Honneth from objecting to his theory of society. If one considers Honneth’s work after The Critique of Power, that is, from The Struggle for Recognition onwards, we can perhaps condense his opposition to the Nietzschean/Foucauldian approach to society into three main objections. The first one is that the agonistic model fails to account for the rationality involved in contesting intersubjective norms which condone domination and fail to institutionalize reciprocal recognition (i.e., fail to institutionalize the basic equality of the subjects affected by the norms at stake); the second objection is that, in historical reality, rational argument does play a crucial role in the contestation of intersubjective norms (just think, for example, of the abolition of slavery or the women’s suffragist movement); the third objection is that, by failing to conceive of recognition as a matter of rational contestation of intersubjective norms, the “agonistic model” still reduces the success of struggles for recognition to sheer “power,” that is, to “success in a situation of struggle,” and thus fails to establish any criterion for evaluating moral progress, that is, for presenting successful struggles for recognition as progress (e.g., abolitionism or suffragism as progress toward the moral ideal of full equality among races and genders). Thus, the fundamental question which this article intends to raise is whether the Hegelian and the Nietzschean traditions are indeed irreconcilable, or whether it is possible to reconcile these two traditions by bridging the differences between such different interpretations of recognition as Honneth’s rational model and

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Foucault’s agonistic model. We hope to have suggested with enough clarity that the latter is the case because the two traditions are in fact closer than is often assumed. However, this means that to reconcile them is a philosophical task which lies ahead of us, and which ought, perhaps, to start with the difficult task of synthesizing the rational and the agonistic models of recognition into a new one.

Notes 1 Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power, Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 154. 2 Ibid., p. 155. 3 Ibid., p. 158. 4 Ibid., pp. 156–7. 5 Ibid., p. 161. 6 Ibid., pp. 161, 196–8. 7 Ibid., p. 198. And see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 222. 8 Honneth, Critique of Power, p. 198. 9 Ibid., p. 198. And see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 222. 10 Honneth, Critique of Power, pp. 193–6. 11 Ibid., p. 157, also 141ff. and 177. 12 Ibid., p. 199. 13 Ibid., p. 194. 14 Ibid., p. 177. 15 Ibid., p. 197. 16 Ibid., pp. 174–5. 17 Ibid., p. 195. 18 Ibid., p. 162. 19 Ibid., p. 177. 20 Ibid., p. 197. 21 Ibid., p. 322n 9. 22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (KSA), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), vol. 12, p. 140 (12, 2 [151]). 23 Ibid., vol. 13, p. 259 (14 [79]). 24 Ibid., p. 300 (14 [121]; Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bitner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 256. 25 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 12, p. 244 (6 [26]); and vol. 13, p. 199 (12 [1]), p. 214 (13 [2]), p. 254 (14 [72]), p. 320 (14 [136]).

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26 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 23–4 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 23). 27 Ibid., p. 14 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 12). 28 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 13, p. 214 (13 [2]). 29 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 23 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 23). 30 Ibid., pp. 35–6 (“Free Spirit,” 36). 31 Ibid. 32 See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 74–6 (II, 119) and pp. 79–80 (II, 129). 33 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 19 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 19). 34 Ibid., p. 14 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 12). 35 On Nietzsche’s “adualism,” see Günter Abel, “Bewuβtsein-SpracheNatur: Nietzsches Philosophie des Geistes,” Nietzsche-Studien 30 (2001), pp. 1–43; João Constâncio, “On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer,” Nietzsche-Studien 40 (2011), pp. 1–42; on Nietzsche’s double aspect theory, see George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1983); and Patrick Wotling, La philosophie de l’esprit libre. Introduction à Nietzsche (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). 36 See, for example, Nietzsche, Daybreak, pp. 71–2 (II, 115), and Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 35–6 (“Free Spirit,” 36). 37 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 186 (IV, 333). 38 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 35 (“Free Spirit,” 36). 39 See, for example, Nietzsche, Daybreak, pp. 77–8 (II, 125); Gay Science, pp. 211–14 (V, 354); Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 18–20 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 19) and pp. 32–3 (“Free Spirit,” 32); and Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 96–8 (Ecce Homo, “Clever,” 9). 40 See João Constâncio, “Nietzsche on Decentered Subjectivity or, the Existential Crisis of the Modern Subject,” in Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, ed. João Constâncio, Maria João Mayer Branco, and Bartholomew Ryan (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), pp. 279–342. On the whole question of Nietzsche and the problem of subjectivity, see Constâncio, Branco, and Ryan, Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity. 41 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 14 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 12). 42 Ibid., p. 19 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 19).

220 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

João Constâncio and Marta Faustino Ibid. Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 12, p. 25 (1 [58]); Writings from the Late Notebooks, p. 60. Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 12, p. 104 (2 [87]); Writings from the Late Notebooks, p. 76. Note that, in this context, Nietzsche’s famous contention that “the deed is everything” and there is no “indifferent substratum” behind a person’s deeds (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Vintage, 1989], p. 45 [I, 13]) raises the question of his “expressivism.” If we take Nietzsche’s contention seriously, then the unity of a person—her “will,” the “formation of rule which means ‘one’ but is not one”—never exists as such before it is expressed in deeds (and therefore can only be known in retrospect). On Nietzsche’s “expressivism,” see Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) and “The Expressivist Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, ed. Constâncio, Branco, and Ryan, pp. 654–67; and Maria João Mayer Branco, “Questioning Introspection: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein on ‘The Peculiar Grammar of the Word I,’ ” in Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, ed. Constâncio, Branco, and Ryan, pp. 454–86. Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 11, p. 661 (40 [61]); Writings from the Late Notebooks, p. 46. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 9 (“Prejudices of Philosophers,” 6). Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 12, p. 315 (7 [60]); Writings from the Late Notebooks, p. 139. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 36 (“Free Spirit,” 36). Ibid. Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 12, p. 187 (5 [9]); Writings from the Late Notebooks, p. 106. Henning Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 358. Honneth, Critique of Power, p. 175. Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 12, p. 424 (9 [151]); Writings from the Late Notebooks, p. 165. See, for example, Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 11, p. 222 (26 [276]). Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 213 (V, 354). Ibid., p. 212 (V, 354). Ibid., p. 213 (V, 354). See Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 10, p. 404 (12 [27]), and vol. 11, p. 503 (34 [247]) and p. 563 (36 [31]); Writings from the Late Notebooks, p. 26: “The physicists cannot eliminate ‘action at a distance’ from their principles, nor a force of repulsion (or attraction).” See Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 48–57; Pietro Gori, La Visione Dinamica del Mondo, Nietzsche e la filosofia naturale di Boscovich (Napoli: Edizioni La Città del Sole, 2007), p. 103ff.; and Maria João Mayer Branco, “Nietzsche on Metaphor, Musicality, and Style: From Language to the Life of the Drives,” in Nietzsche on Instinct and Language, ed. João Constâncio and Maria João Mayer Branco (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 35–59.

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61 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 311–12 (II, “Wanderer and His Shadow,” 22). 62 Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 112 (II, 112). 63 Volker Gerhardt, “Das ‘Prinzip des Gleichgewichts’: Zum Verhältnis von Recht und Macht bei Nietzsche,” in Pathos und Distanz. Studien zur Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988), p. 104. 64 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 164 (I, 8: 446). 65 This does not preclude Nietzsche from being as critical of the liberal social contract theory as is Hegel: see BGE 257, GM II 17. Note that their reasons for rejecting such a theory are, to a great extent, very similar: they both reject the liberal notion of asocial (or presocial) “selves” or “subjects.” See Owen (1995, 2008). 66 See, for example, Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 152–3 (9, 259) and pp. 153– 6 (9, 260); and Genealogy, pp. 36–9 (I, 10) and pp. 58–60 (II, 2). 67 See Genealogy, pp. 58–60 (II, 2). 68 For an extended version of this argument, see Constâncio, “Nietzsche on Decentered Subjectivity.” 69 Since the 1980s and 1990s, many scholars have used Foucault’s last writings (particularly the lecture courses) to dispel the idea that his conception of power and society involves any sort of reductive elimination of human subjectivity: see, in particular, Sebastian Harrer, “The Theme of Subjectivity in Foucault’s Lecture Series L’Herméneutique du Sujet,” Foucault Studies 2 (2005), pp. 75–96, Mark G. E. Kelly, “Foucault, Subjectivity, and Technologies of the Self,” in A Companion to Foucault, ed. Falzon, O’Leary, and Sawicki, pp. 510–27, Jon Simons, “Power, Resistance, and Freedom,” in A Companion to Foucault, pp. 301–19, and Daniel Smith, “Foucault on Ethics and Subjectivity: ‘Care of the Self ’ and ‘Aesthetics of Existence,’ ” Foucault Studies 19 (2015), pp. 135–50. 70 Michel Foucault, “ Technologies of the Self,” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1: Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 225–51. See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1990), pp. 10–11. 71 Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” p. 225. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Harrer, “The Theme of Subjectivity in Foucault’s Lecture Series L’Herméneutique du Sujet,” p. 75. See Michel Foucault, “ The Subject and Power,” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3: Power, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 326–7 and 340–42; see also Kelly, “Foucault, Subjectivity, and Technologies of the Self ” and Simons, “Power, Resistance, and Freedom.”

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75 Smith, “Foucault on Ethics and Subjectivity,” p. 145. 76 Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1: Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 293. 77 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 342. Compare Simones, “Power, Resistance, and Freedom,” and Amy Allen, “Power and the Subject,” in A Companion to Foucault, pp. 337–53. 78 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” pp. 341–2. 79 Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” p. 292. 80 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 342. 81 Ibid., p. 340. Emphasis added. 82 Ibid., p. 342. 83 Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” p. 283. 84 Ibid., p. 298. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., pp. 300–301. 87 Michel Foucault and Rux Martin, “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 10–11. 88 Ibid., p. 11. See also Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1: Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 315–19. 89 We borrow the terminology of David Owen, “Tully, Foucault and Agonistic Struggles over Recognition,” in Recognition Theory and Contemporary French Moral and Political Philosophy: Reopening the Dialogue, ed. Miriam Bankovsky and Alice Le Goff (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 133–65, an article that we find congenial to ours in several important respects.

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Contributors Keith Ansell-Pearson holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author and editor of books on Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze. In 2013–14 he was Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Center of Rice University. João Constâncio is associate professor of philosophy at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (FCSH) in Nova University of Lisbon. He earned his PhD there with a dissertation on Plato. He is also a member and researcher of Instituto de Filosofia da Nova/FCSH, where he directs the research group “Lisbon Nietzsche Group” (previously “Nietzsche International Lab”), and where he codirects the Lab of Aesthetics and Artistic Studies. He is the author of Arte e niilismo: Nietzsche e o enigma do mundo (2013) and co-editor of five books on Nietzsche, including Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (2015) and Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics (2017). He has also published many articles on Nietzsche and other authors and philosophical subjects, including “On Consciousness:  Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer,” Nietzsche-Studien 40 (2011). Marta Faustino is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Philosophy (IFILNOVA), New University of Lisbon. She studied philosophy at the same university and earned her PhD with a thesis on Nietzsche and the “great health.” Her postdoctoral research deals with Nietzsche and Foucault and the topic of therapy in Western culture. In addition, she also collaborates in two funded projects, “Nietzsche and the Contemporary Debate on the Self ” and “The Plurality of the Subject in Nietzsche and Pessoa” (NIL/IFILNOVA). She is a member of Nietzsche International Lab (NIL), Nietzsche Forschungsgruppe Greifswald, and Groupe International de Recherches sur Nietzsche. She has several publications on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the Hellenistic Schools, focusing mainly on the topics of subjectivity, health, therapy, and related topics.

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Jill E.  Hargis is an associate professor in the Political Science Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her work focuses on the concept of the masses in relationship to democratic theory and practice in twentieth-century continental political thought, particularly in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. She is also writing about the concept of power in the work of Hannah Arendt and its relation to contemporary environmental political theory. Brian Lightbody is an associate professor of philosophy at Brock University, Saint Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Philosophical Genealogy (2010, 2011) and The Problem of Naturalism (2013). He has published articles on Foucault, Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Haack. Alan Milchman teaches in the Department of Political Science at Queens College of the City University of New  York. His scholarly work has focused on modern political philosophy, as well as the philosophical implications of modern genocide. In addition to coediting several volumes, including Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust; Postmodernism and the Holocaust; and Foucault and Heidegger:  Critical Encounters, he has contributed to journals such as Socialism and Democracy and Historical Materialism. Paul Patton is Scientia Professor of Philosophy at The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (2000), Deleuzian Concepts:  Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (2010), and numerous articles and book chapters on Foucault and Nietzsche. Alan Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Queens College of the City University of New York. His scholarly work has focused on philosophical issues relating to the Holocaust, philosophical issues that arise in connection to psychoanalysis, as well as key themes in Continental philosophy, value theory, and philosophy of the social sciences. Rosenberg is the coauthor of over eighty journal articles and book chapters. He is also the coeditor of numerous books, including Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time (1988); Healing Their Wounds:  Psychotherapy and Holocaust Survivors (1989); Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition (1998); Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz: Philosophical Challenges (2000); Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (2003); Eksperymenty w myśleniu o Holokauście (in Polish; 2003);

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and Reading Nietzsche at the Margins (2008). He has served as coeditor and managing editor of Foucault Studies. Alan D.  Schrift is the F.  Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy at Grinnell College. In addition to his many published articles or book chapters on Nietzsche and French and German twentieth-century philosophy, he is the author of Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (2006), Nietzsche’s French Legacy:  A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (1995), and Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation:  Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (1990). Most recently, he was General Editor of the eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy (2010) and continues as General Editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the translation of Nietzsche’s Kritische Studienausgabe. Federico Testa is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Monash University (Australia) and the University of Warwick (England). His research investigates the concept of life and its relations to the notions of norm, normativity, and vitalism in the works of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem. He is currently translating Jean-Marie Guyau’s La Moral d’Épicure. Michael Ure is a faculty member of the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University. He researches modern European philosophy and political theory and has published widely on Nietzsche’s philosophy and political theory. His first book, Nietzsche’s Therapy: The Ethics of Self-Cultivation (2008), examined Nietzsche’s reception and transformation of the Hellenistic philosophies. He is currently investigating Nietzsche’s conception of philosophical “wisdom,” modern philosophy’s reception of Stoicism, and the role of passions in sustaining democracy. He has recently published The Politics of Compassion (2014), and he is completing a book on Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. Jim Urpeth is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Greenwich, London. He coedited (with John Lippitt) Nietzsche and the Divine (2000) and has published papers on Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Bataille, Foucault, Deleuze, and Meillassoux, focusing mainly on themes in the philosophies of art and religion. Joseph Westfall is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston-Downtown. He is the author of The Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship

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Contributors

and Performance in Kierkegaard’s Literary and Dramatic Criticism (2007) as well as numerous articles and essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and various thinkers and issues in Continental aesthetics. He is the editor of The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader (2018) and Authority and Authorship in Kierkegaard’s Writings (forthcoming), and serves on the editorial board of the journal Evental Aesthetics.

Index Abbey, Ruth 180 absolute 7, 20, 53, 61, 82, 167–8 absolutism 20 action 9, 11, 14, 17, 19–20, 22, 26, 44, 48–9, 54, 62, 65, 68, 82, 84, 88, 99–101, 103, 117–18, 140, 147, 157, 159–60, 162, 172, 174, 177, 204, 210, 213–15, 220 Aeschylus 41 aesthetics 17, 22, 85, 100, 116 affect/affective 3, 25, 27, 47, 54, 104, 115, 131–2, 185–9, 192, 194–5, 198, 206–10 affirmation 44, 49, 68, 72, 93–4, 115, 117, 128, 139–41, 151–2, 159, 187, 189, 192 afterlife, see otherworld agonism 2, 15–16, 24, 30, 130–2, 163, 207, 212, 215, 217–18 Alexander 88 alienation 7, 141 Allison, David 104 Althusser, Louis 62 Ansell-Pearson, Keith 1, 122 anthropology 11–13, 63–4, 157 aphorism 86, 89, 102, 105, 120 appearance 45, 49, 195 Aquinas, Thomas 3 archaeology 8–9, 13, 29, 36, 40, 62–3 Archimedes 61 architecture 67 Arendt, Hannah 147 Aristotle 3, 38–42, 60, 72 art 17, 21, 88–9, 100, 108, 116–17, 133, 140–1 ars erotica 183, 187, 190–1, 195, 199 of existence 18, 22 of interpretation 127 of life/living 17, 22, 25, 31, 99–100, 110, 113–14, 116, 118, 136 of reading 105, 113 of the self 140

of writing 103, 105 Artaud, Antonin 196 ascetic/askēsis 5, 19, 22–4, 26, 46, 80, 122, 128, 135, 138–9, 141, 188–9, 214 ideal 111, 115, 185, 187–9 pleasure 190 priest 185–8, 193 asceticism 45, 49–50, 111–12, 115, 122, 185–7, 190, 193, 195 assujettissement 18, 21, 62, 66–7, 69, 71, 112–13, 122, 161, 165, 213 atheism 184 Augustine 190 authenticity 15, 21–2 author 61, 101, 107–9, 113, 117 authoritarianism 17, 105 autonomy 112 Bataille, Georges 63, 100, 196–7 beauty 18, 52, 68, 87, 89 becoming 10, 12, 16, 20, 25, 30, 60, 80, 84, 104, 112–13, 152, 160–2, 165 behaviorism 205 Bernouilli, Jean 181 Bernstein, Richard 138 biologism/biology 64, 153, 155, 158, 175– 6, 181, 192 Blanchot, Maurice 100, 196 body 11, 26, 47, 66, 69–70, 92–3, 112, 118, 155, 157, 167–9, 171–6, 178–9, 180, 188, 191–2, 198, 205–7, 213 Boethius 89, 96 boredom 79, 84, 88–9 bourgeoisie 79 Brobjer, Thomas 108 Brusotti, Marco 79 Buddha 6 Burnham, Douglas 118 Butler, Judith 112, 122 Canguilhem, Georges 132, 143–4, 181 capitalism 70, 154–6

232

Index

Carrette, Jeremy 196 Cassian, John 191 cheerfulness 80, 87 Christianity 6, 11, 16, 20, 27, 44–5, 66, 83– 4, 111, 122, 141, 151–3, 158–60, 170, 183–96, 198–200 Clark, Maudemarie 146 class 12, 144, 205 collective 14, 129–30, 159, 163, 176, 214 Columbus, Christopher 88 comfort 160 communication 5, 116, 210–11, 216 compassion 129–32 Conant, James 114 conditioning 168–9 conscience 16, 49, 66, 91, 94, 112, 168, 186, 191, 209 contemplation 83, 152 contingency 37, 90, 93, 136–41, 151, 168, 184 courage 84–5, 87, 113, 160 Cox, Christoph 165 Crawford, Claudia 116 Critical Theory 3 critique 11, 26–7, 60, 63–4, 93, 101, 111, 136, 140, 216 cruelty 42, 49, 185–6 culture 6, 8–9, 11–12, 17, 22, 26, 38, 49, 64–5, 99–100, 102, 107, 112, 115, 119, 127, 130–1, 153, 156, 158, 163, 168, 181, 184–5, 190–1, 196, 198 history of 49 Curley, Edwin 82 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond 181 decadence 111, 122, 131, 208 deconstruction 151, 159 Defert, Daniel 51, 72, 77 deity, see god Deleuze, Gilles 4–5, 47, 52–3, 67, 77, 200 democracy 11, 151–3 Derrida, Jacques 73 Descartes, René 3, 11, 13, 54, 61, 65, 68, 90, 110 desire 20, 26, 41–2, 49, 51, 61, 82, 87, 89, 112, 129, 138, 140–1, 153, 158, 171, 193, 198, 207 destiny, see fate diagnosis 8, 11, 99, 127–8, 130–1, 133–4, 136, 145, 171

dialectic 13, 209 Diderot, Denis 181 difference 9, 24, 70, 92–3, 127, 136, 138– 40, 160, 176 Diogenes Laertius 160 Dionysian/Dionysus 26, 116–18, 128, 132, 141, 195 discipline 17, 23, 50, 60, 66, 69–71, 111– 12, 122, 134, 171, 174–6, 189–90, 192, 204–5, 213–14, 216 discomfort 102, 113, 115 discourse 35–9, 43, 59, 61, 64, 69, 73, 135, 168, 173, 176, 184, 193–6, 205, 216 disease, see sickness dispositif 173–6 divine/divinity, see god dominance/domination/dominion 13–14, 27, 38–40, 43, 46, 48–9, 54, 60, 65, 112, 122, 134, 190, 192–4, 204–5, 208–9, 212–17 Doubrovsky, Serge 73 Dreyfus, Hubert 180 drive 13, 45–9, 80, 82, 86, 130, 172–3, 178, 207–11 economics 11–12, 35, 40, 51, 61, 69, 154, 156, 158, 162, 174, 215–16 education, see teacher/teaching Elden, Stuart 50 Eliade, Mircea 187, 198 embodiment, see body empiricism 35, 64, 93, 99, 156 enlightenment 79–80, 87, 152, 204–5 Epictetus 142 Epicurus 119 episteme 36–7, 64, 99 epistemology 62, 72, 83, 167, 170–1, 179 equality 152–3, 159, 204, 210–12, 217 error 36 essentialism 26, 30, 168, 173 non-, 196 eternal/eternity 50, 52, 68, 84, 88, 91, 128, 137–40, 146 recurrence/repetition/return of the same 12, 61, 81, 128, 137, 139–41, 146 ethical/ethics 9–10, 13, 16–23, 62, 94, 100, 102, 109, 113–14, 131, 137, 141–2, 144, 160–2, 170, 207, 212 of errancy 127–8

Index experimentalism/experimentation 127– 8, 132–3, 136–40 ethnology 130, 173 eudaimonia, see happiness evaluation/valuation 8–9, 20, 36, 50, 53, 64, 72, 92–3, 101, 118, 129–31, 133– 4, 143, 151–5, 158–63, 167–73, 180, 185, 192–3, 204, 209–10, 217 devaluation 115 revaluation 104–5, 192, 198 existentialism 21–2, 61, 73 experience 64, 73, 87, 91, 100–3, 107, 109, 128, 131, 190, 207 experiment/experimentation 25, 79–80, 83–5, 88, 91, 93–4, 101, 116–18, 135 expressivism 220 faith 4, 6, 43–5, 50 falsehood 36–8, 44 fate 80, 85, 92, 104, 107, 128, 139, 141–2 amor fati 26 Faubion, James 76 Feuerbach, Ludwig 7 flourishing, see happiness Foucault, Michel (works): The Archaeology of Knowledge 35, 50 “The Birth of Biopolitics” 154 The Birth of the Clinic 10, 74 Discipline and Punish 10, 24–5, 60, 65– 7, 69, 71–2, 103, 144, 157, 167, 173–4, 176, 180 “The Hermeneutic of the Subject” 62, 109, 113 The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 4, 10, 22, 25, 51, 65, 72–3, 103, 112, 173, 180, 190, 199 The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure 19, 22, 60, 73, 100, 190 The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self 22, 60, 73, 190 The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4: The Confession of the Flesh 190–1, 197, 199 Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology 60, 63–4 Lectures on the Will to Know 40, 51, 72 Madness and Civilization 10, 60, 74 “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” 75, 133 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 2, 91, 167, 174–6, 178

233

The Order of Things 10, 35, 60–4, 68, 99 “The Punitive Society” 67 Security, Territory, Population 168, 176 “Society Must Be Defended” 55 “The Subject and Power” 215 “Subjectivity and Truth” 62 “Truth and Juridical Forms” 36, 40, 42, 47, 51, 59, 67 “What Is an Author?” 61 “What Is Enlightenment?” 101 “The Will to Know” 59–60, 67, 76 Franco, Paul 79, 83 freedom 15, 22, 42, 46, 53, 61, 65, 70, 85, 101, 112, 118, 135–8, 145, 151–2, 154–9, 162–3, 170, 192, 211, 214–15 Freud, Sigmund 11, 16, 75, 172 friendship 15–16, 23–4, 104–5, 108, 161 future 8, 50, 86–9, 94, 109, 118, 130, 134, 152, 192 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 142 genealogy 2–3, 8–9, 11–13, 20, 22, 26–7, 29, 43, 62–3, 65–7, 69, 71, 90–3, 99, 107, 109, 127–9, 131–8, 140, 144, 151, 167–76, 178–9, 184–5, 187–8, 190–3, 199, 216 Gerhardt, Volker 211 God 6–7, 25, 43, 45, 62–4, 68, 108, 139, 152, 168, 170, 184, 186, 191, 196 death of 5–8, 12, 27, 61–2, 64, 68, 93, 99, 102, 108, 160, 183, 194, 196 Goldmann, Lucien 61 Gooding-Williams, Robert 116 government 14, 112, 154–9, 162–3, 214 governmentality 112, 154, 157–8, 162–3 Greece, ancient 11, 17, 19–22, 26, 30, 37–8, 72, 100, 102, 109, 119, 122, 160, 162, 190, 192, 198, 213 Guattari, Félix 67, 200 guilt 65, 94, 168, 170, 186, 193 Habermas, Jürgen 217 Hacking, Ian 177 Hadot, Pierre 119–20, 139, 142, 146 Hales, Steven D., 179 Hallward, Peter 62 Halpern, Cynthia 106 happiness 46, 82, 84, 86, 104, 113, 129–30, 132–4, 152–3, 158–9, 213 Hargis, Jill 1

234 Harrer, Sebastian 213 health 89, 115, 127, 129–34, 136–8, 143, 154, 157–8, 163, 173, 195 great 132–3, 140 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 7, 11, 13, 27, 211–12, 217, 221 Heidegger, Martin 3, 8, 76–7, 197 Hellenistic 22, 26, 119, 127–9, 131, 133–4 Heraclitus 160–1, 165 herd 131, 210 hermeneutics 188, 190–1, 195, 198 Hesiod 37–8 Higgins, Kathleen Marie 171 history 3, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 18, 20, 24, 35–40, 43–4, 59–60, 62, 64–5, 69–70, 72–3, 80, 90–3, 99–102, 107, 109, 111, 118, 129, 131, 133–7, 139, 143–4, 151, 159–60, 167–76, 179–81, 183–7, 190, 192–3, 195–6, 198, 204, 217 Hobbes, Thomas 153, 203–4, 206 Honneth, Axel 27, 203–7, 209, 211–14, 216–17 Hull, Robert 83 human/humanity/man/mankind 6–12, 15, 19–20, 23, 25, 40–2, 49–50, 54, 61–2, 64, 67–9, 72, 79–88, 91–2, 94, 99, 110–12, 115, 129–30, 140, 142–3, 146, 151–4, 156–60, 169–72, 175, 184–6, 194, 198, 204, 208, 215, 221 death of man 7, 64, 93, 99 end of man 7–8, 25, 60–2, 99 last man 8, 12, 152–3, 158–9 overman, see Übermensch superman, see Übermensch humanism 12, 37, 61–2, 184 anti-, 90–1 Hume, David 153, 156, 172 Hurley, Robert 112 Husserl, Edmund 3 Hutter, Horst 118, 122 hyperbole 105, 116–17, 120, 123 identity 11, 15–16, 26, 66, 91, 93, 151 ideology 40, 62, 66, 69, 76, 213 illness, see sickness immanence 27, 183–5, 188, 192,  194–6 individual/individualism/individuality 11, 14–19, 26–7, 61, 66, 70–2, 80, 84, 88, 93, 113, 115, 129–32, 137, 151–63,

Index 165, 172–3, 176–7, 180, 188–9, 204– 6, 210, 212–16 infinity 7 insanity 37–8, 73, 84, 117, 153 instinct 42, 47, 49, 68, 91–2, 131, 153, 168, 170, 173, 185–6, 208–10 interest 23, 44, 69, 153–60, 162 dis-, 46 interpretation 3, 5, 9, 24, 46, 49–50, 60, 65, 75, 79, 90, 92, 94, 99, 105–9, 116, 127, 130, 133–5, 144, 165, 168–9, 172–3, 175–9, 181, 187–8, 190–2, 196, 203, 207–8, 210–11, 213, 217 invention/inventiveness 7, 42–3, 46, 59, 65, 68, 90, 94, 99, 136–8, 144, 215 irony 103, 106, 116–17, 138, 171 Irwin, Jones 196 Janaway, Christopher 104–6 Kant, Immanuel 11, 13, 39, 44, 52, 60–1, 63, 87, 91 Kierkegaard, Søren 11 Klossowski, Pierre 76, 196 knowledge 2–3, 9, 11, 23–5, 30, 35, 39–51, 53–4, 59–60, 62, 64, 67–72, 77, 79– 92, 96, 99, 101, 109–10, 118, 129, 133, 135, 137, 152, 155, 157, 160, 162, 170, 174–5, 179, 188, 205 connaissance 35, 39, 50, 59, 67, 90 history of 63 passion for/of 25, 46, 79–85, 87, 89–91, 93–4, 118, 135 savoir 35–7, 39, 50, 59–60, 67, 72, 90 self-, 18, 66, 103, 109–10, 160 technical 160 will to 4, 24, 36–43, 45, 51, 59, 63, 67–9, 71–3, 76, 93 Kripke, Saul 172 Lacan, Jacques 62 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 26, 168, 176–7, 179, 181 language 35, 64–5, 116, 167, 174, 210 Large, Duncan 107, 113 laughter 47, 54, 61, 80, 117, 171 Leiter, Brian 172–3 liberalism 26, 151–60, 162–3, 213, 221 liberation/liberty 7, 15, 137–8, 204, 216–17

Index libido 27, 185–90, 192, 194–5, 198 life 6, 16–18, 22, 44, 46, 48, 52, 54, 72, 80, 83–5, 89, 92, 94, 102–3, 109–12, 115, 117, 120, 127, 130–7, 139–44, 151–3, 155–6, 158–60, 163, 177, 180–1, 187– 8, 193–5, 205 techne of 100 Lightbody, Brian 1 Locke, John 153 love 41, 49, 83–4, 86, 93–4, 104, 191 self-, 13 Löwith, Karl 141–2 MacIntyre, Alasdair 179 madness, see insanity Magnus, Bernd 146 Mahon, Michael 1 malady, see sickness market, see capitalism Marx, Karl 11–12, 69, 75 Marxism 4, 40, 76 mask/masking/masquerade 49, 61, 91, 118, 170–1, 188, 205 un-, 170, 178, 193 May, Todd 179 meaning 6, 26, 37, 49–50, 61, 92, 106–7, 133–4, 151, 153, 160, 169, 175, 179, 192 medicine 70, 115, 127–8, 130, 134, 136, 158, 173, 175, 180, 187 memory 41, 168–9 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 180 metaphor 105, 116, 120, 180 metaphysics 6–7, 13, 25, 27, 45, 50, 62–3, 65, 82, 85, 91–3, 99, 129–30, 137, 151, 160–1, 167, 170, 179 hangman’s 65–6 method/methodology 35, 44, 90, 105, 134, 167–9, 172, 174, 191 Milchman, Alan 1 milieu 26, 168, 176–8, 181 mnemonics, see memory moderation 20, 79 modernity/moderns 11, 13, 20, 24–5, 37, 46, 60, 62, 66–7, 69–71, 82, 86, 89–90, 99, 111, 113, 120, 127–9, 131, 141–2, 144, 152–3, 155, 160, 184, 188, 195, 198, 204–5, 213, 216 Montaigne, Michel de 110 Montinari, Mazzino 116

235

Moore, Gregory 180 morality/morals 8–9, 16, 18–20, 22, 44–5, 61–3, 65, 81, 84–5, 88, 94, 104–5, 109, 112, 129–32, 134–5, 151, 168–9, 172–3, 180, 186–9, 192, 194, 205–6, 217 slave 65 naturalism/naturalist/naturalistic 129–30, 133, 139, 181, 184, 187, 196, 203 nature 9, 21, 27, 41–4, 47, 50, 52–3, 59, 62, 88–90, 92–3, 100, 115, 131, 135–6, 142–3, 145, 154, 156, 158–61, 168, 170, 175–8, 188, 193–4, 196, 198, 213 anti-, 117 necessity 9, 52, 68, 136–41, 216 Nehamas, Alexander 25, 108, 110–11, 117, 120 Nietzsche, Friedrich (works): The Anti-Christ 179 Beyond Good and Evil 5, 42, 49, 65, 153 The Birth of Tragedy 6, 165 The Case of Wagner 101 Dawn/Daybreak 25, 45–6, 49, 79–80, 85–6, 89–90, 92–3, 168 Ecce Homo 60, 113 The Gay Science 5–6, 21–2, 42–3, 45, 47–8, 55, 68, 80, 105, 117 On the Genealogy of Morality 8, 20, 42, 44–5, 53, 65–6, 81, 105, 129–30, 168, 171, 173, 186, 197, 209, 220 Homer’s Contest 30 Human, All Too Human 53, 79 Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks 54 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 4–7, 13, 15–16, 23, 101, 105, 111, 114, 141, 152–3, 160, 179 “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” 42, 45, 53, 59 Twilight of the Idols 65, 107 Untimely Meditations 123, 143 The Wanderer and His Shadow 83 The Will to Power 42, 179 nihilism 7, 44–5, 87, 130, 146, 151, 162 norm/normativity 71–2, 127, 132–8, 143, 153, 158, 162–3, 198, 203–5, 208, 210–11, 216–17 vital normativity 127, 132–6, 144

236 normal/normalization 70, 127, 132, 174, 213 objectification 9, 11, 71, 189, 195 Oksala, Johanna 180 O’Leary, Timothy 101 ontology 9, 25, 62, 77, 101–2, 107, 136, 139, 144, 170, 175–6, 183–5, 193–4, 197 otherworld 6, 27, 44, 140, 152, 193 Ottmann, Henning 209 Overbeck, Franz 81 Owen, David 1, 222 pain 46, 84, 115, 153–4, 170, 186–7 -less 53 panopticism 205 parrhesia 160–3 passion 25, 46, 79–84, 86–7, 94, 104, 135, 207 pathological/pathology 127, 129, 131, 136, 143 perspective/perspectivism 2–4, 24, 48, 68, 99, 106–7, 109, 113, 133–5, 139, 142, 162, 167, 170–1, 173, 178–9, 185, 192, 207–8, 210–11 perversity 27, 106, 187, 195 pessimism 87, 128, 131 phenomenology 3–4, 60–1, 63, 65 philology 64, 108, 113, 116 philosopher/philosophy 2, 4–5, 8, 11, 17, 20, 23, 26–7, 36, 39–42, 47–8, 52, 60–4, 68–9, 72–3, 80–3, 85–6, 88–91, 93–4, 96, 101–4, 106, 108–12, 114–15, 118–20, 127–36, 138–9, 141, 143–4, 153, 160, 167–8, 170, 180–1, 183, 194, 196, 206, 213, 216, 218 physician 26, 127–9, 131–4, 136, 139, 141, 143 physiology 127, 129–32, 153, 168, 172–3, 175, 179, 192 Pindar 10 Pippin, Robert 93 pity 7 Plato 3, 11, 37–9, 41, 43–5, 52, 67, 91, 116 pleasure 41, 46, 81, 86, 153–4, 175, 186– 90, 192–3, 195–6, 198 Pliny 17 Plutarch 103 polemic 48, 68, 130

Index politics 9, 13–15, 26, 36–7, 39–40, 48, 54, 66–8, 72, 76, 100, 106–7, 144, 151–2, 156–7, 163, 174, 184–5, 194, 215–16 bio-, 131, 144, 154–5, 158 positivism 11 positivities 35–6 postmodernity 13 poststructuralism 3, 25, 63, 107 power 9–10, 13–14, 16, 23, 25–7, 30, 37, 39, 43, 48–9, 55, 61–3, 66–7, 69–71, 74, 82, 84, 87, 112–13, 127, 130–2, 134, 151–5, 157, 159–60, 163, 165, 167, 170, 174–6, 180, 183–5, 188, 191–6, 198–9, 203–4, 206–9, 211, 213–17, 221 bio-, 171, 174 feeling of 24, 49–50, 85 -knowledge 69–71, 102, 112–13, 173–5, 188–90, 195 micro-, 203–5, 213, 215 pastoral 185, 188, 193, 198–200 plastic 143 positive 188–91, 193, 195 relations 14–16, 25, 27, 47–8, 67, 69, 71, 102, 112, 151–2, 162, 174, 185, 189, 192, 196, 203, 206, 209–16 -strategies 203–6 techniques/technologies of 27, 70, 176, 193–4, 212–13 will to 10, 13, 15–16, 19, 24, 42, 45–6, 48–9, 51, 72, 106, 153, 187–8, 194–5, 206–11 problemization 102–3, 107 prophecy 117, 160 psychē, see soul psychoanalysis/psychology 8, 11, 13, 20, 27, 83, 90, 130, 153, 158, 168, 171–3, 198, 206 Pythagoras 119 Rabinow, Paul 119, 180 rationality/reason 7, 12, 25, 37–8, 61–3, 91, 93, 96, 100, 103, 138–9, 154–5, 158, 203, 205, 217–18 history of 63 reader/reading 2, 4–5, 8, 25, 43, 99, 101–11, 113–17, 121, 172, 174, 178, 180 reality 27, 40–1, 70, 152, 170, 177–8, 188, 194, 196, 206–8, 217

Index reciprocity 15, 42, 176, 178, 206–7, 209– 12, 215, 217 recognition 27, 175, 203–7, 210–12, 215–18 Reginster, Bernard 142 reinterpretation, see interpretation relativism 39 religion 27, 63, 84, 89, 93, 139, 168, 183–6, 190, 194–7, 200 pagan 184, 195 remembering, see memory renaturalization, see nature repression 55, 70, 187–90, 192 resistance 26, 46, 112–14, 152, 159, 163, 185, 189, 192–4, 209–10, 212–17 ressentiment 209 Revel, Judith 165 revenge 7 reverence 4, 45, 87, 167, 196 riddle 81, 88, 118, 160 ritual 37, 51, 70, 174, 188 Romanticism 79, 133, 140–1 Rome, ancient 22, 102, 122, 190, 192, 198, 213 Rose, Nikolas 122 Rosenberg, Alan 1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 89 rumination 107, 113, 120 sacrifice 79, 82, 86–9, 93–4, 111, 122, 130– 1, 169, 186, 190 Sade, Marquis de 196 Salomé, Lou 110 Sartre, Jean-Paul 21–2 Schopenhauer, Arthur 11, 13, 82–3, 88–9, 111, 131, 138 Schrift, Alan 1 science/sciences 9, 11–12, 20, 35–6, 39, 43–5, 50, 68–9, 72–3, 82–3, 88–9, 93, 134, 137, 170, 174, 179, 184 history of 42 human 11, 64, 67, 71, 73 scientia sexualis 183, 190, 195, 199 social 11, 15 scientism 11 secrecy/secret 45, 175 self 11, 13, 15–16, 20–5, 30, 42, 61, 73, 80, 85, 93, 102–3, 107, 110, 112–14, 119, 127–8, 136, 139, 141, 146, 162, 212, 214, 216, 221

237

-assertion 152 care of 11, 17–18, 22, 26, 80, 93, 100, 110, 151, 160, 162, 165, 213 cultivation of 189 -fashioning 16–20, 22–3, 31, 85, 99– 101, 103, 105, 109–11, 114–16, 118– 19, 122, 140–1 -overcoming 6, 8, 10, 13, 19, 23, 101, 111–12, 192–4 -preservation 153, 159 techne of 17–18, 100, 103, 105 technologies of 19, 22, 27, 171, 190–1, 193–4, 212–13 transfiguration 112 will a 103 -writing 103 semiology 75 Seneca 17, 139 sensation 40–2 sex/sexuality 19, 27, 37, 51, 62, 73, 171, 175–6, 188–90, 199, 216 Shapiro, Gary 1 sickness 73, 111, 115, 127–31, 133–4, 157, 173, 180, 195 sign/signification 60, 65, 75, 133–4, 144, 175, 210–11 Sisyphean/Sisyphus 26, 128, 137–8, 140–1 skepticism 116, 128, 151, 184 Smith, Adam 157 Smith, Daniel 213 social/society 9, 11–12, 14, 16, 20, 22, 25– 7, 37, 39–40, 42, 54, 67–8, 71, 80, 90, 93–4, 144, 152–4, 156–8, 168, 170, 173, 176, 178, 181, 184–5, 188, 194, 196, 203–7, 209–11, 213, 215–17, 221 a- or pre-, 221 constructionist/constructivist 168, 175–6, 178 contract 156, 211, 221 sociology 11, 61 Socrates 11, 17, 94, 109–10, 117, 119 Solomon, Robert 111 sophistry 39, 41 Sophocles 41, 67 soul 11, 16, 65–7, 69, 79–80, 83–5, 115, 128, 144, 174, 186–7, 206–8, 213 sovereignty 12, 42, 66, 68, 94, 154–5, 157, 184, 212 speech 61 Spinoza, Baruch 47, 54, 60, 81–2, 84

238 spirit/spirituality 7, 49, 55, 88, 104, 110, 115, 117–18, 120, 139, 152, 160, 186, 191 free 49–50, 79, 81, 89, 101, 128, 152, 160, 212 Stoicism 26, 47, 109, 119, 138–9, 141–2, 146 strength 21, 49, 65, 87, 100, 104, 108, 112– 13, 131, 143, 153, 157, 160, 163, 173, 195, 208 structuralism 60–1, 63, 65 struggle 39, 42, 47–8, 54, 67, 88, 130–1, 153, 163, 190, 203–4, 206, 208, 212, 215–17 style 21–2, 100, 103–5, 117–18, 120, 123 subject/subjectivity 7, 9–17, 19–20, 24–5, 37, 40–3, 46–7, 49–50, 53, 59–63, 66–73, 89–90, 93, 99–102, 112–13, 128, 138, 156–8, 161–2, 168, 184, 187, 189–90, 195, 203, 206, 208–9, 212–15, 217, 221 death of 25, 60, 62, 73 inter-, 203–6, 208–9, 211–12, 214, 216–17 trans-, 204–5, 209, 215, 217 subjectification, see assujettissement subjection, see assujettissement subjectivation, see assujettissement sublime 21, 49, 54, 82, 86, 88–9 suffering 83–4, 86, 89, 94, 129, 131, 138, 141, 185, 187 surveillance 171, 174 Taylor, Charles 145 teacher/teaching 4–5, 81, 114, 156, 159 teleology/telos 12, 17, 20, 136, 139, 195 anti-, 139 non-, 133–4 thinker/thinking/thought 4–5, 8, 10, 12–13, 47, 50, 52, 62, 64, 80, 88, 99, 102, 104, 112, 116–17, 119, 135, 151, 168, 191 time/timelessness/timeliness 12, 53, 61, 91, 93, 101, 111–12, 118 untimeliness 31, 101, 107 torture 69, 157, 168, 172, 176, 186 tragedy/tragic 11, 79, 128, 132

Index transcendence 27, 139, 146, 156, 179, 183– 5, 188, 193–4, 196 transfiguration 111, 113 transgression 16, 45, 136, 139–41 transvaluation 8 Trophic Cascade Effects 177–8 truth 2, 5, 9–13, 20, 24–5, 30, 36–46, 48, 50–1, 60, 62, 68, 70–4, 76, 80, 82, 84, 86, 89, 92–3, 101–3, 110, 112, 115, 117, 127, 135, 151, 159–63, 167, 170– 1, 173, 176, 188, 190, 193, 216 history of 24, 36, 48, 67 regime(s) of 134, 154, 156, 158, 160, 167, 171 will to 10–13, 36–9, 41, 43–4, 50–1, 55, 72, 121, 193 Übermensch 7–8, 12–13, 23, 64, 89, 100, 152, 159 uncomfortableness, see discomfort Ure, Michael 1, 85 usefulness/utility 40–1, 44, 69–70, 72, 79, 155, 172, 174 utilitarianism 153 value, see evaluation/valuation Vazquez-García, Francisco 144 violence 14, 37, 42–3, 45–7, 53, 60, 65, 69, 92, 134–5, 144, 210, 214 Wagner, Richard 111 war 16, 47–8, 55, 80, 203–4 World War II, 13 weakness 6, 21, 65, 87, 100, 130–2, 136, 152–3, 157, 172–3, 208 Welshon, Rex 179 Werkoven, Sander 143 will 15, 24, 46, 49, 53, 68, 92, 112, 138, 173, 186, 188, 190–2, 195, 208–11, 215, 220 free 81, 85 -lessness 83, 122 wisdom 52, 68, 80, 85–6, 115, 160, 213 writing 25, 99–100, 102–9, 114, 116–18 Yovel, Yirmiyahu 84