Foucault,Nietzsche,and the promise–threat of philology

I. The use of Nietzsche

The Nietzschean rupture, for Foucault, is not merely a personal, biographical break in Foucault’s own life and thought: as Nietzsche cuts Foucault off from his past, forcing a new, at least somewhat Nietzschean future, so Nietzsche stands in the history of thought in the West as well. In the paper he delivered at the Royaumont conference of 1964, Foucault reminded his audience of Freud’s claim that there have been “three great narcissistic wounds in Western culture,” specifically, those associated with Copernicus (the Earth does not rest at the center of the universe), Darwin (humanity’s demonstrable origins are more animal than divine), and—somewhat immodestly—Freud (consciousness only covers over the unconscious). Having raised the comparison, Foucault suggests that perhaps, in the second half of the twentieth century, it might be possible to revise Freud’s claim: “I wonder whether one could not say that Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, by involving us in a task of interpretation that always reflects back on itself, have not constituted around us, and for us, these mirrors in which we are given back images whose perennial wounds found our narcissism today.” ¹⁶ In the rest of the Royaumont paper, Foucault briefly develops the thesis that Nietzsche—like Freud and Marx in this regard—constitutes a challenge and a rupture for hermeneutics in the present age. While the three thinkers obviously go about things in their very different ways (and with very different purposes, to be sure), Foucault concentrates in this paper on their overarching similarity, where interpretation is concerned: each of them, in his own way, forces interpreters to become self-aware and self-reflective about the act of interpretation.

It is on this basis, Foucault thinks, that interpretation becomes hermeneutics and hermeneutics becomes, for lack of a better word, philosophy. Foucault writes:

It is, above all, in Nietzsche and Freud, moreover, and to a lesser degree in Marx, that one sees delineated this experience, which I believe so important to modern hermeneutics: the farther one goes in interpretation, the closer one comes at the same time to an absolutely dangerous region where interpretation not only will find its point of return but where it will disappear as interpretation, perhaps involving the disappearance of the interpreter himself. The existence that always approached the absolute point of interpretation would be at the same time that of a point of rupture. ¹⁷

As such, interpretation is not only existential and self-revelatory by its very nature (distancing it from anything even remotely resembling a scientific hermeneutics): it is unending, seeing as there is no natural conclusion to the project of self-reflection and self-understanding. “In Nietzsche, too,” Foucault writes, “it is clear that interpretation is always incomplete. What is philosophy for him if not a kind of philology continually in suspension, a philology without end, always farther unrolled, a philology that would never be absolutely fixed?” ¹⁸ Nietzsche—among the greatest philologists of the nineteenth century, as well as its greatest philosophers—unites the two endeavors: philosophy is philology, infinitized.

There is no reason to doubt that Nietzsche himself would have been unable to articulate this view, at least not precisely in this way. As we have already seen, Nietzsche’s point of view on academic philology seems to have been as a product of a certain sort of scientific impulse that had overtaken the German educational institutions, and one in which he displayed—at least as a student—a formidable talent. When Nietzsche applies for the open professorship in philosophy at Basel in 1871, ¹⁹ he does so at least in part out of the recognition—soon to be forced upon him by the reception among philologists of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, the next year—that his work is philosophical, not philological, in nature. ²⁰ Nietzsche, at least for a time, conceives of himself as a philosopher and, that seems to have been to say, a philologist no longer. Yet Nietzsche has a sense of a different possible philology as well: a philology of the future, as it were; the sort he might practice as philosophy. It is certainly closer to Foucault’s notion of philosophy than the standard view of philology in Nietzsche’s day. One might argue, in fact, that Foucault’s interpretation of Nietzsche on this point reveals itself to be precisely the sort of thing Foucault claims Nietzsche’s philosophy revealed philology to be: a mirror in which Foucault is reflected back to himself (and for us), unrolled and unendingly.

The issues within and aspects of Nietzsche’s work which interest Foucault most, then, are significantly interrelated. While we have already seen how Foucault’s interest in Nietzsche as he presented his views at Royaumont in the 1960s had everything to do with methods of interpretation and hermeneutics, he recounts elsewhere that, when he first read Nietzsche in the 1950s, his interests were somewhat more epistemological: “In 1953, I read Nietzsche and indeed—equally unusual as Nietzsche himself—in his perspective of an examination of the history of knowledge, the history of reason: How can one write the history of rationality, that as the problem of the 19th century.” ²¹ And, in the same interview in which he makes that admission, Foucault further elucidates which texts in Nietzsche have had the greatest impact on his thinking: “What I thank Nietzsche for, I owe more to his texts of around 1880 in which the question of truth, or the truth of history and the will to truth were central for him.” ²² In addition to the hermeneutical interest already expressed, Foucault also tells us that he has read Nietzsche as part of his (Foucault’s) thinking on “the history of knowledge, the history of reason” and “the question of truth, or the truth of history and the will to truth.” These are not far removed from questions of interpretation. Like Deleuze, Foucault tries to put Nietzsche to use ²³ —and, specifically, to use Nietzsche to understand the historicity of knowledge, truth, and meaning.

II. Philology and philosophy

Already, in “Freud, Nietzsche, Marx,” Foucault has identified what, for him, is at the center of Nietzsche’s significance for the history of Western thought. In a passage from that essay, Foucault identifies what he calls “depth” [profondeur] as the category within which not only Nietzsche’s, but Marx’s and Freud’s importance, too, can be discerned. Of depth in Nietzsche, Foucault writes:

Nietzsche shows how it implies resignation, hypocrisy, the mask; so that the interpreter must, when he examines signs in order to denounce them, descend along the vertical line and show that this depth of interiority is in reality something other than what it says. Consequently, it is necessary that the interpreter descend, that he be, as Nietzsche says, “the good excavator of the lower depths.” ²⁴

Despite Nietzsche’s frequent (and frequently aphoristic) analyses of such phenomena, for Foucault, Nietzsche’s primary interest and major contribution is in the analysis of language. For Foucault, Nietzsche’s shifting of language to a central position in philosophy is the beginning of what becomes a basic element of twentieth-century European philosophical thought. As he writes in The Order of Things, “Language did not return into the field of thought directly and in its own right until the end of the nineteenth century. We might even have said until the twentieth, had not Nietzsche the philologist—and even in that field he was so wise, he knew so much, he wrote such good books—been the first to connect the philosophical task with a radical reflection upon language.” ²⁵ Once again, Foucault sees in Nietzsche a thinker (and writer) with one foot in philosophy and the other in philology; despite the sometimes seeming obviousness of a “linguistic turn” in philosophy, only a philologically-trained philosopher could do—would think to do—what Nietzsche did in this regard.

Thus, it is hard to disagree with Foucault, when he takes the claim further: “And now, in this philosophical-philological space opened up for us by Nietzsche, language wells up in an enigmatic multiplicity that must be mastered.” ²⁶ Contrary to concurrent developments in the direction of a scientific philology and a scientific linguistics, Nietzsche’s interest in language is an interest in language’s ambiguity, its secrecy, the obscurity of even linguistic meaning—what Foucault calls its “enigmatic multiplicity.” Nietzsche’s interest in language is a poet’s interest, not just in what words are doing but what words can—what words might—do. In language, philologists and linguists and even philosophers typically see little more than a phenomenon to be studied, an object to be known: a thing. In language, however, Nietzsche sees power. ²⁷ Mystery, hiddenness, deception, masquerade: yes, but all as the guises of a certain sort of power—or, perhaps more to the point, all of which demand of the interpreter a powerful response.

Only those interpreters who are able to master the multiplicity and ambiguity within language rise to Nietzsche’s challenge, or rise to the challenge as Nietzsche did. And this seems to be at least part of what Foucault is getting at when he writes:

The whole curiosity of our thought now resides in the question: What is language, how can we find a way round it in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plenitude?…. Is it a sign of the approaching birth, or, even less than that, of the very first glow, low in the sky, of a day scarcely even heralded as yet, but in which we can already divine that thought—the thought that has been speaking for thousands of years without knowing what speaking is or even that it is speaking—is about to re-apprehend itself in its entirety, and to illumine itself once more in the lightning flash of being? Is that not what Nietzsche was paving the way for when, in the interior space of his language, he killed man and God both at the same time, and thereby promised with the Return the multiple and re-illumined light of the gods? ²⁸

Foucault moderates his presentation of Nietzsche’s own relationship to the death of God (and of man) a little later in The Order of Things, where he does a masterful job of linking the two. There, he writes:

Perhaps we should see the first attempt at this uprooting of Anthropology—to which, no doubt, contemporary thought is dedicated—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 superman signifies first and foremost the imminence of the death of man. ³⁰

Finding Nietzsche, Foucault finds the promise of his own future—and the future of philosophical thought, as he understands it. This is not to say, of course, that Foucault conceives himself some sort of superman. No, Foucault seems to understand that, for Nietzsche, the Übermensch is always promised—is essentially a promise, a future development, a guide (of a sort) whose presence just beyond our present, just over the horizon, prevents our sights from setting on and prevents us from settling for the present-day understanding of what is possible for us, for philosophy, for society, and for culture. “It is easy to see why Nietzsche’s thought should have had, and still has for us, such a disturbing power,” Foucault writes. ³² The future is nothing if not the annihilation and supersession of the present, and everything that matters in the way that it matters today; as Nietzsche has Zarathustra note, “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss. / A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. / What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.” ³³ Foucault continues, then, to say that Nietzsche

introduced in the form of an imminent event, the Promise-Threat [la Promesse-Menace], the notion that man would soon be no more—but would be replaced by the superman; in a philosophy of the Return, this meant that man had long since disappeared and would continue to disappear, and that our modern thought about man, our concern for him, our humanism, were all sleeping serenely over the threatening rumble of his non-existence. ³⁴

In simultaneously promising and threatening us with his conviction in the Übermensch, Nietzsche challenges us to recognize our own finitude and historicity, not just individually (since this is something, however much we try to evade it in our own, personal lives, that we have always known), but culturally and conceptually. Prior eras and epochs differ from our own not only in the specific details of their understandings and arrangements of concepts, but also in terms of the very frame within which they could conceive of anything like a concept at all. The difference between ancient Greece and modern France cannot be expressed simply in terms of scientific and technological advances, transformed notions of the political, the role of religion and the arts in social and cultural life, and so on. The differences between the ancient and modern worlds is a matter not only of knowing more or different things, but of knowing differently—of fundamental disagreements about what it is to know, to understand, to act, and ultimately, to be human. In teaching us the Übermensch, Nietzsche forces us to recognize that human history is, in a fundamentally important sense, constituted by the overcoming of previous understandings of the human. He does this, through Zarathustra and in other ways, by promising/threatening us with the realization that we, too, must be overcome.

This, of course, makes a familiarity with—if not a study of—previous articulations of the human in all of its complexity and interrelationship with other concepts, categories, beings, and ways of life, absolutely essential. Knowing how the Greeks, for example, confronted, endured, and were fundamentally transformed by the overcoming of what it was to be human in their era can, in a way, prepare us for whatever future shifts are to come. This is not to say that anyone can predict their supersessor, he (or she) by whom one is to be overcome; the notion of the Übermensch is an inherently and intentionally ambiguous one. That said, if the goal of philosophy is to understand and interpret the human world and everything it contains—to seek the meaning of things, in one way or another—then there is no task left for philosophy but a philological one: to look backward, into the past, not with the antiquarian’s eye for the preservation of the old, but with what, for lack of a better term, we (and Foucault) must call a Nietzschean eye. Foucault seems to take to heart what Nietzsche expresses in “We Philologists” and articulates in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”: “That much, however, I must concede to myself on account of my profession as a classicist: for I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” ³⁷ This backward-looking, future-oriented untimeliness becomes characteristic of both Nietzsche and Foucault, throughout their works, as what readers of both men know as genealogy. And the untimeliness of genealogy is likely at the root of the assertion—made of both Nietzsche and Foucault, although perhaps by different parties in different circumstances—that these thinkers and writers are neither classical nor modern, but something else: something anti- or even post-modern.

III. Genealogy and perspective

In what is perhaps Foucault’s most widely read (and certainly his lengthiest) engagement with Nietzsche—the essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”—Foucault writes as if the nature, purpose, and practice of genealogy is so well established as not to need justification: merely description and explanation. To the extent that this is true, of course, it is a result of the growing popularity and influence of Nietzsche’s works, especially On the Genealogy of Morality, the most prominent place where Nietzsche himself uses the term, but nevertheless never, or hardly ever, seems to apply to his own work. Foucault appropriates the term “genealogy” and bestows upon it a certain Nietzschean sense which, to be fair, Nietzsche himself might not have associated with it. Foucault’s fruitful appropriation extends beyond the bounds of the Genealogy to include, significantly, the second of the Untimely Meditations, a text of central importance to Foucault’s thesis in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Foucault’s use of the term, “genealogy” becomes an effort to enact the results of Nietzsche’s philological philosophy outside of a strictly literary or linguistic context—an effort which Foucault himself, in The Order of Things, called “archaeological” rather than genealogical when applied to history. All the same, as Foucault and Nietzsche both teach us, words do not take their meanings from their origins, and both Foucault and present-day academic custom use the term to refer to at least a certain aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophical method.

Nietzsche sought the meaning of linguistic and literary practices in how they served life in the present, precisely by seeking out but not marrying himself (or ourselves) to the original or intended meaning. This means, for Nietzsche, taking into account the significance of every detail for the present and being willing to reject all attempts at a “metaphysical history,” one that tied the persons, objects, and events of the past to notions such as Truth, Reality, the Good, and so on (as in, to take the most famous example, the case of Hegel). The contrary practice—which relies upon those scraps of history to maintain the illusion of a grander, non- or super-historical force at work through history—Nietzsche deems “antiquarian,” and he observes that an attitude of this sort “always produces one very imminent danger: everything old and past that enters one’s field of vision at all is in the end blandly taken to be equally worthy of reverence, while everything that does not approach this antiquity with reverence, that is to say everything new and evolving, is rejected and persecuted.” ³⁸ In the end, Nietzsche is critical of the antiquarian quest to seek out and protect the origins of things because “it knows only how to preserve life, not how to engender it.” ³⁹ Although some orientation toward the past is necessary—again, Nietzsche’s perspective is philological through-and-through—losing oneself, losing the present, and losing life itself in an obsession with the past is debilitating and destructive in the extreme. The proper approach to the past, then, is not a scholarly, antiquarian, or even etymological one: it is genealogical. Such a project cannot provide us with “conclusions,” with “teloi,” or “ethical ideals”: rather, history understood as Nietzsche wants to understand it reveals to us, more than anything else, that there is nothing eternal about the past, and thus there is nothing eternal about the present. Every era, every development, every ideal is but a stepping stone to the next—and thus none of them should inspire in us anything like metaphysical or religious belief.

In contrast to the Hegelian or otherwise metaphysical view of history, Foucault asserts his own sense of genealogy. “A genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge,” he writes, “will never confuse itself with a quest for their ‘origins’, will never neglect as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice; it will await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other.” ⁴⁰ It would be easy to see in Foucault’s insistence upon the “details and accidents” an antiquarian’s obsession with evidence of the past, but this would be to misinterpret the emphasis in both Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s works. For Foucault, the focus on the details of history is meant to undermine all efforts to construct history from what he calls a “suprahistorical perspective,” ⁴¹ that is, as if history is an intentional process. One opposes such an inhuman perspective, on Foucault’s view, precisely so as not to lose sight of human beings in the present—for whom history must, in one sense or another, live.

Similarly, for Nietzsche, the project of history—what he calls “wirkliche Historie,” or “effective history”—is undertaken precisely so as to sustain life in the present, opening ourselves to becoming whatever it is we will become on our way to the ever unattainable Übermensch. As Foucault reads him, this is the centerpiece of Nietzsche’s view: “Nietzsche’s criticism, beginning with the second of the Untimely Meditations, always questioned the form of history that reintroduces (and always assumes) a suprahistorical perspective…” ⁴² Antiquarian history in Nietzsche’s sense, although concerned with details, does not believe in accidents. On this view, everything that happens happens for a reason external to itself, and history transpires as it does for a reason originating outside of history. The antiquarian historian cannot accept the potential for chaos inherent in the view, shared by Nietzsche and Foucault, that history is quite literally what we make of it—both insofar as our lives are not planned, designed, or scripted in accord with some suprahistorical narrative, and insofar as our understanding of the past can (and often should) change as our need for the past changes, over time.

Thus, Foucault can say that “History is the concrete body of a development, with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells; and only a metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of the origin.” ⁴³ The relationship between history (as practiced by Hegelian or other scientific historians) and metaphysics is exceptionally important, both for Foucault and in Nietzsche, as it is the recognition of this fact about history as knowledge-seeking, or as an example of intellectual inquiry in general, that unites what Nietzsche is doing in On the Genealogy of Morality and what Foucault is doing in The Order of Things as two versions of what is basically the same sort of project: undermining what Heidegger will later call “philosophy” (in contrast to “thinking”), ⁴⁴ or what Lyotard will later call “metanarratives,” ⁴⁵ in pursuit of a more authentic, historically situated, subjective—even personal—endeavor.

In his most succinct articulation of this idea, and this practice, Foucault writes: “Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival.” ⁴⁶ It is this notion of genealogy as carnival that, it seems, gets closest to Nietzsche’s understanding of the nature of intellectual inquiry in pursuit of “truth” or “knowledge” (the meanings of both of which terms must be held ever suspended, so as not to rigidify and become metaphysical: truth and knowledge both are evolving, unstable, developing, moving targets). In a long and famous but nevertheless still important and surprising passage from the Genealogy, Nietzsche announces the change in philosophy that will result in the very possibility of a Foucault (or a Heidegger, or a Lyotard, etc.). He writes:

From now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more 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’: —here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. ⁴⁷

Such a self-understanding (and understanding of the self) is not easily won, especially for those—such as Nietzsche and Foucault, if not also ourselves—who inhabit a culture in which the atomistic, individual, and even immortal nature of the soul is always coupled with the moral injunction to seek integrity, continuity, and coherence of the self, to avoid hypocrisy and self-contradiction whatever the cost. Such “soul atomism” (to use Nietzsche’s term), ⁴⁹ however, finds itself shipwrecked upon genealogy and effective history. As Foucault writes, “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.” ⁵⁰ Only when we understand ourselves—when we un- and re-make ourselves—with an openness to our own internal divisions, multiplicities, and discontinuities, can we engage fully in the project of genealogy, and it is the genealogical project which will serve us best in pursuit of this new and diversified self-understanding: oneself as (quite possibly) more than one.

For both Foucault and Nietzsche, this is to say that it is not simply the case that, once we understand ourselves in the right way, we can begin to know the truth in a renewed and appropriate manner. Instead, by way of pursuing “truth” (rather than Truth) and “knowledge” (rather than Knowledge), by way of recognizing that the pursuit is all, that where “truth” and “knowledge” are concerned there is no attainment or possession, we can also begin to see that the goal is not to understand one’s self; it is to become the many selves one is. As Foucault notes, with a decidedly Nietzschean eloquence, “This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” ⁵¹ Genealogy is always in pursuit of the knowledge—or the “knowledge”—that cuts, and the genealogist is the one who recognizes that it is we, ourselves, that need (and, presuming it does not kill us, are strengthened by) the cutting.

(Self-)division, (self-)differentiation, (self-)fragmentation, (self-)multiplication: these are not the conclusion but the premises of genealogy, the starting point for effective history, both the promise and the threat of philology. Everything in Nietzsche—from his admiration of the Greeks to his condemnation of the German Christianity of his contemporaries to his proposal for a “philosophy of the future”—is directed away from univocality and dogmatism and toward the proliferation of perspectives, both actual and merely possible. Although, admittedly, Nietzsche is just as famous for his notion of Übermenschlich power as he is for his perspectivism, it is important to keep in mind that this is not simple authoritarianism. Even though the Nietzschean hero speaks with a commanding voice, refuses to explain him- or herself, and gains the obedience of his or her followers, as we can see in Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s understanding of power is such that it need not exert itself through authority or violence. Zarathustra does not want his disciples to follow him blindly, just because he is more powerful or persuasive than they are. Rather, he wants followers who follow him as a means of following—finding, inventing, discovering—themselves. ⁵² And it is with this conception of power and the Übermensch, on the one hand, coupled with the necessity of multiplying perspectives in pursuit of truth and knowledge on the other, that Nietzsche presents us—and presented Foucault—with the grounds for a discursive, combative but collaborative model for the intellectual’s (the historian’s, the philosopher’s, or the philologist’s) engagement with culture. The paradigmatic model for this sort of engagement in Nietzsche’s writings is probably his disagreeing reverence for Schopenhauer in the third of the Untimely Meditations; in Foucault, it is probably in his repeated—critical but approving, resistant but appropriating—returns to Nietzsche.

Those returns are occasioned as often by disagreements or discord between Nietzsche and Foucault as they are by Foucault’s agreement with his predecessor. Just as Nietzsche accorded Schopenhauer some of the highest praise he bestows upon anyone, without thereby asserting his agreement with him, so too does Foucault often treat us to his own disagreements with his Schopenhauerian educator, Nietzsche. Of course, Foucault’s style differs from Nietzsche’s, as well, and the stylistic difference extends to the manner in which they express—or instantiate—their disagreements. Nietzsche is as likely as not to make his criticisms and differences of perspective known (when he is aware of them himself) directly; think of his frequent critical discussions of Socrates and Plato, or Wagner, or Kant. Foucault is, in contrast, less directly antagonistic toward those with whom he disagrees, especially when those disagreements are with figures to whom he owes a great deal and with whom he shares a close correspondence. Thus, we are more likely to find Foucault’s disagreements with Nietzsche in the ways in which Foucault shifts or undermines or metamorphoses Nietzsche’s views while he appropriates them. We see this phenomenon rather transparently practiced in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” for example. As Foucault notes in an interview from 1975,

Nietzsche’s contemporary presence is increasingly important. But I am tired of people studying him only to produce the same kind of commentaries that are written on Hegel or Mallarmé. For myself, I prefer to utilize the writers I like. The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say that I am being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest. ⁵³