References
- Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse“, trans. I. McLeod in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. R. Young (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 56. Translator's note: wherever possible we have used English translations of Foucault's texts, otherwise all translations are our own.
- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London & New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 28. See also Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism” in Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 2. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 433–58.
- Michel Foucault, Leçons sur la volonte de savoir, Cours au Collège de France, 1970–1971 (Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2011), p. 27.
- Michel Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault“ in Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 1. Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 244, my emphasis. The term ‘alteration’ is referred to by all the terms relating to ‘crossing’ (franchissement) understood as “put[ting] itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality”, as Foucault puts it in “What is Enlightenment?”, in ibid, p. 316.
- See “Interview with Michel Foucault”, pp. 239–48, passim.
- Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended“: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. D. Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 16.
- Michel Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History” in Essential Works of Foucault. Volume 2, p. 293–94, my emphasis.
- Ernst Behler, “Nietzsche in the Twentieth Century“ in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 281–322, p. 317.
- See Judith Revel, “La pensée verticale: une éthique de la problematisation“ in Foucault, Le courage de la vérité, ed. F. Gros (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), p. 66: “It is without doubt significant that Foucault has indicated the breaking point of the only true intellectual rupture he himself recognised in his reading of Nietzsche in 1953.” See also “Le retour de la morale (entretien avec G. Barbedette et A. Scala, 29 mai 1984)” in Dits et écrits II, 1975–1988 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), p. 1522). And Judith Revel, Michel Foucault, Expériences de la pensée, (Paris, Bordas, 2005), p. 66ff. Finally, in “‘To do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis”, Jacques Derrida inscribes the History of Madness in “the gallery of all those who, from one end of the book to the other, announce, like heralds of good tidings, the very possibility of the book; above all Nietzsche and, most frequently.” Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. P. Kamuf, P-A Brault, and M. Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 82.
- Foucault will go on to dedicate several texts to Nietzsche. Analyses by Foucault taking Nietzsche explicitly their subject are: a discourse at the Royaumont conference entitled “Nietzsche, Freud. Marx” (1964) in Essential Works of Foucault. Volume 2, pp. 269–78 (Hereafter referred to as NFM); the conclusion of The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (London: Routledge, 1994) (Hereafter referred to as OT); the article “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971) in Essential Works of Foucault. Volume 2, pp. 369–91 (Hereafter referred to as NGH); and finally the second lecture of a series bearing the title “Truth and Juridical Forms” (1973) in Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 3. Power, ed. J. D. Faubion, (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 1–89.
- Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression“ in Essential Works of Foucault. Volume 2, p. 71.
- Ibid.
- “The epistemological configuration proper to the Anthropology mimics the Critique; but it was a matter of not being taken in by this trick, and of giving back to this resemblance a rational order. This order consisted in making the Anthropology gravitate around the Critique. And this order established was for the Anthropology the authentic form of its liberation, the bringing to light of its true sense; it could thus appear as that in which the passage from the a priori to the fundamental, from critical thought to transcendental philosophy was announced.” E. Kant, Anthropologie d'une point de vue pragmatique, preface by Michel Foucault, Introduction à l'anthropologie (Paris: Vrin, 2008), p. 79.
- Ibid.
- In the lecture of 1964 Foucault already identifies Nietzsche as “the good excavator of the lower depths;” see NFM, p. 273. This is a title that he will much later come to claim for himself: “I myself am always interested in the lower depths of the lower depths, so to speak. An excavator of the lower depths, as Nietzsche said.” See “Radioscopie de Michel Foucault” in Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975, p. 1652
- Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khlafa (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 351.
- Ibid, p. 351–52.
- Foucault, M. Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. A. Sheridan, (New York: Harpers and Row, 1976) p. 88
- See OT 386: “In our day, and once again Nietzsche indicated the turning-point from a long way off, it is not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of man”. Recall Nietzsche's declaration of the “death of God”, and its conjunction with the increasing existence of the last man, the last man who stands in the “between-two” where the event is found: too old and too young.
- Michel Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History“ in Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 2, p. 293–94
- We cannot show it here, but this latter alternative is also indicated. One can understand the concern with space as a result of this tension, and as another sign of it. See the essay “Different Spaces” (from 1967 and thus nearly contemporaneous with The Order of Things), which begins with the celebrated declaration according to which “the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history […] The present age may be the age of space […]” in Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 2, p. 175.
- It is in relation to the depoliticisation of Nietzsche's work after the war (by way of his rehabilitation after his assimilation by the Nazi's and against the mythologisation of his work by his sister), of which Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist and Antichrist would be a good example, that Keith Ansell-Pearson situates the importance of Foucault's reading of Nietzsche. He being the first to take seriously the works of Nietzsche in relation to the stakes of political theory. See “The Significance of Michel Foucault's Reading of Nietzsche: Power, the Subject and Political Theory” in Nietzsche-Studien, Vol. 20, 1991, p. 267–284. Nietzsche's importance here would be to have not subscribed to any of the political options of modernity, and consequently of being able to disengage the essence of modern politics. On this point see also William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988); Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought, (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1988); Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche: ‘A Radical Challenge to Political Theory’” in Radical Philosophy, 54, Spring 1990, pp. 10–19.
- This is, in any case, how Axel Honneth understands it when he recalls that, and with reference to Nietzsche, Foucault loved to present himself as a “happy positivist.” Axel Honneth, “Foucault et Adorno” in Critique 471–2, pp. 800—816, p. 803. Cf. Axel Honneth, Kritik der Macht, (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2000), Chapter 5.
- See NGH.
- And inscribed in the body: Descent attaches itself to the body. Thus we have here the interesting of seeing Foucault thematising dispositifs: “It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate bodies of those whose ancestors committed errors. Fathers have only to mistake effects for causes, believe in the reality of an ‘afterlife’ or maintain the value of eternal truths, and the bodies of their children will suffer […] the body maintains, in life as in death, through its strength or weakness, the sanction of every truth and error, as it sustains, in an inverse manner, the origin—descent.” (NGH 375)
- In order to get a sense of “wirken“ for Nietzsche, in the sense that Foucault uses it, see, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), § 58.
- If we say “in this period”, it is because the subject of knowledge will subsequently come to pose greater problems for Foucault. See for example the short text entitled “Foucault” written in 1984, by Foucault under the pseudonym Maurice Florence, in Essential Works of Foucault. Volume 2, pp. 459–63.
- NGH, 388, referring to Daybreak, §501.
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science. See also Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), §39: “It could pertain to the fundamental nature of existence that a complete knowledge of it would destroy one.” Except that cutting the quotation here, as Foucault does, is problematic, because what follows qualifies it in terms of the measure of truth that one could tolerate, or incorporate. Cf. also Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clarke and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §§ 429 and 501.
- “Nietzsche's positivism is not a moment of his thought that it is a matter of overcoming; it is not a superficial level of which it would be necessary to grasp the profundity and perhaps the excess: it is a critical act according to two orthogonal directions: one which addresses itself to the outside of knowledge; the other which addresses itself to the non-place of knowledge and truth. It is not a matter of treating this positivism by omitting it or with ‘modesty’. It is on the interior of this positivist critique that the essential will occur”. Michel Foucault, Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, p. 27.
- This is even more the case if history includes the body. Then one finds it in these texts that which enables the analysis of prisons or even the “deployment of sexuality.” See in particular, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), Part 4, pp. 75–131.
- “Hideousness” indicates a reactive character and the actualisation of a Christian heritage.
- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §223.
- Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 1, p. 315–16
- Ibid., p. 316
- See NGH 386: “The parody of his last texts serves to emphasize that [antiquarian history] is itself a parody. Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival.”
- Cf. Beatrice Han, “L’ a priori historique selon Michel Foucault: difficultés archéologiques” in Lectures de Michel Foucault, 2 (Paris: ENS Editions, 2003), pp. 23–38.
- Michel Foucault, “Conversazione con Michel Foucault“ in Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988, pp. 862–69.