Nietzsche and Foucault

Nietzsche and Foucault November 29, 2006

If postmodern theorists are Marxists, they are Marxists of a particular stripe, in that their Marxism is crossed by Nietzschean pessimism. They believe that power struggles are at the center of history but no longer believe that these power struggles will end in an ideal classless society. Revelations concerning the Gulag, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, undermined confidence in utopian Marxism. Postmodernists continue to be profoundly influenced by Marx, but they are Marxists who have lost faith in Marxist eschatology.


From Nietzsche, postmodernists claimed to have learned that human society and human conduct reduces to the will to power, and this is particularly true for Michel Foucault. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow summarize:

“For Nietzsche, as Foucault reads him, history is the story of petty malice, of violently imposed interpretations, of vicious intentions, or high-sounding stories masking the lowest of motives. To the Nietzschean genealogist the foundation of morality, at least since Plato, is not to be found in ideal truth. It is found in pudenda origo: ‘lowly origins,’ catty fights, minor crudeness, ceaseless and nasty clashing of wills. The story of history is one of accidents, dispersion, chance events, lies – not the lofty development of Truth or the concrete embodiment of Freedom. For Nietzsche, the genealogist par excellence, the history of truth is the history of error and arbitrariness: ‘The faith on which our believe in science rests is still a metaphysical faith . . . The Christian faith, which was also the faith of Plato, that God is Truth and truth divine . . . . But what if this equation becomes less and less credible, if the only things that may still be viewed as divine are error, blindness and lies; if God himself [the truth] turns out to be our longest lie?’”

Whether this is a fair reading of Nietzsche is a question. More than one commentator has suggested that Nietzsche is not a nihilist, and Robert Solomon has questioned whether the will to power plays the role in Nietzsche’s thought that it does in purported followed like Foucault. For starters, the book entitled The Will to Power was compiled from scattered notes by his sister Elisabeth, who also gave it the published title. Further, the meaning of the phrase is unclear, and Nietzsche uses it differently in different published works.

Yet, it is not difficult to see how postmoderns find support from Nietzsche. Describing the will to power as the “one basic form of the will” that explains “our entire instinctive life” and the source of “all organic functions,” Nietzsche says that “The world viewed from the inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’ – it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else.” Satisfying the “demon” of the will to power is the only thing that makes men “almost happy.” Falling in love moves from a “wish to appropriate” to “quick appropriation” and “delight in their new possession,” and comes to expression in “action for the benefit of their latest conquest.” Philosophy is a “tyrannical urge itself, the most spiritual will to power.” Both “benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon others.” All “striving for excellence is the striving to overwhelm one’s neighbor,” and even ascetic pursuits aim at “the most alive feeling of power.”

Further, the genealogical method that Nietzsche pursues aims at exposing the self-interest and deceit that are behind human institutions and values. The “squinting” soul of the man of ressentiment is not, after all, a soul reveling in its weakness. The man of ressentiment is a victim, but one who uses his victimhood as a power-play against the strong and superior. Christianity, for instance, arises from ressentiment, which comes to expression as a priestly bid for power. The church sought to “become master over beasts of prey: its method is to make them sick; enfeeblement is the Christian recipe for taming, for ‘civilizing.’” The priests achieve this through “the invention of sin,” and its associated doctrines – “‘Last Judgment,’ ‘immortality of the soul,’ and ‘soul’ itself are instruments of torture, systems of cruelties by virtue of which the priest became master, remained master.” Nor is this “genealogy” of Christianity unique: Time after time, when Nietzsche claims to be getting to the bottom of things he’s getting to the will to power.

Fairly or not, Foucault certainly read Nietzsche as endorsing a quest to find the battle of wills, the subjection and domination, strategies of power, in every area of human existence. Calling Nietzsche “the philosophy of power” who “managed to think of power without having to confine himself within a political theory to do so,” Foucault claims that for Nietzsche the “power relation” was central in a way that the “production relation” was central for Marx. To say the power relation is central is to say that human interactions are struggles of domination and subjugation and resistance. War and battle are the main constituents of human existence, not only in war but in politics, sex, and so on.


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