Joseph Westfall - Foucault and Nietzsche: A Critical Encounter

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 Nietzsches textsbut 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.

Despite the obvious interrelation between Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzscheas 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 otherit 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 articlesincluding the recent work of some of the authors gathered heresuch as those by Keithor readers new to either or bothinterested in Foucaults Nietzscheanism, Nietzsches 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 perspectivetheir ownin 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 disagreementas both Nietzsche and Foucault would have it. If Nietzsche is right that knowledge, as it were. None of us will resolve the question of the precise nature of Foucaults relationship to Nietzsche once and for all, here or elsewhere; that question likely cannotperhaps even should notbe 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 Nietzsches. Most directly, in his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault adapts and adopts Nietzsches singular notion of genealogy to his own twentieth-century purposes, producing not only one of the most provocative readings of 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 thoughtfrom Plato and Aristotle to Aristotle and Aquinas, Descartes and Husserl to Husserl and Heideggerbut 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.