I. Foucault — the thinker of our time

There is little doubt that Foucault was a Nietzschean. This is what Jan Rehmann says in the first edition of his recently published and also translated into English¹ study Postmodern left-Nietzscheanism firmly: “Foucault has known himself so consistently and frequently as a Nietzschean from the beginning to the end of his letter that his 'fundamental Nietzscheanism” is hardly disputed in literature.” (p. 19) He substantiates this on the basis of the following collage of Foucault's self-confessions about Nietzsche:

“Nietzsche was a revelation for me” (1982), “we needed his figures [...] of superman and eternal return to wake up from the sleep of dialectics and anthropology” (1963), “an invitation to question the category of the subject and to wrest it from him” (1978), his announcement of the end of man “has assumed prophetic value for us” (1966), his “presence is always more important” (1975), “Nietzsche and Heidegger, that was the philosophical shock”, “but finally the former prevailed” (1984).²

Similar tributes could also be found in the works of Foucault's philosophical colleagues Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, who were equally involved in the project of “post-structuralism,” but it is Foucault's interpretation that has had the most decisive influence on the familiar view not only of Nietzsche, but also of the world, far beyond academic discourse. The best proof: The omnipresence of the word “discourse” itself, which he played a leading role, although defined very differently in the various phases of his work.

Not least in 1966, together with Deleuze, Foucault published the French translation of Giorgio Collis and Mazzino Montinari's new edition of Nietzsche's writings, which is now regarded as a scientific standard and milestone in the “denazification” of Nietzsche.³ In particular, she made Nietzsche's supposed main work The will to power, from which Deleuze in his study Nietzsche and philosophy had quoted excessively from 1962, as fiction identified Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and her collaborators and replaced it with a heterogeneous plurality of countless fragments of the estate. However, Foucault's essay was particularly effective Nietzsche, genealogy, history from 1971, a kind of program of his Nietzsche interpretation as well as his own philosophical project: Nietzsche is presented here as a radical critic of all fixed structures of meaning, as a cheerful nihilist who has put an end in particular to the myth of a uniform subject through its dissolution into contingent historical games of forces.

In recent years, I have repeatedly taught seminars on Foucault's writings and in particular his Nietzsche interpretation at various colleges and universities, and in doing so I have repeatedly come across a remarkable fact: Despite the obvious gaps in his theory — such as in particular how he himself is able to rescue this theory from the maelstrom of power, and whether he does not implicitly himself presuppose normative standards, a concept of truth and even of subjectivity —, his theses are usually written by students without “swallowed” major objections, albeit without real enthusiasm, and defended them against the criticism I have often put forward. And I feel the same way myself — after many years of working with Foucault: Although I rationally recognize that he is secondary as a philosopher — caught up in hopeless self-contradictions and actually just an adept of Nietzsche and Heidegger in everything original — I feel a peculiar familiarity when reading his writings that stands in a strange contrast to Foucault's radical rhetoric, and that is not just the result of my reading.

We live, especially when we are in discourse — that cursed word! — the social and cultural sciences and of everything that somehow sees itself as “critical” and “left,” in a disposition — i.e. a strategic discourse formation, as the master calls it — which has been shaped by Foucault more fundamentally than by probably no other thinker. No one developed such a pure version of “postmodernism,” which is so compatible with everyday intuition, and which continues to define the cultural climate up to the present day. No one, except perhaps the sister mentioned above, achieved so much, for better or for worse, to popularize Nietzsche and his continued work; and that after his seizure by the Nazis and Fascists after 1945 had actually so fundamentally disavowed him. When we read Nietzsche, we always read him through Foucault's glasses — yes, we go through the world through Foucault's eyes, he is the theorist who defines our time like no other.

This is not necessarily meant in terms of a causal relationship. Foucault was above all a good diagnostician who, in an almost chameloid way, in this respect not unlike the “seismographer” (Ernst Jünger) Nietzsche, captured the basic sentiments of his time and brought up, at least halfway, plausible terms; terms such as “discourse,” “power,” “delusion,” “genealogy,” “dispotive” and many others that were not primarily based on their theoretical Coherence or philosophical depth seem plausible, but precisely because they correspond to those moods. And it is precisely those moods of an exhausted modernity, tired of its former ideals, that define our time to this day, even though we have for several years been a certain revival of objective truth beyond the indiscriminate flickering of discourses (keyword: climate and corona) and the so-called “great stories” by Foucault's colleague François Lyotard, the end of which defined “post-modern knowledge,” experience — just think of the newfound pride in the “free West” or the revival of those thought long ago dead nationalist and imperialist narratives. We certainly live according to postmodernism, but this “after” has not yet been finally decided. That is precisely why it is worth taking a closer look at Foucault's “new book”.

II. Between System and Intoxication — An Iconic History of Philosophy

Foucault wrote the over 400 pages long unfinished manuscript The discourse of philosophy According to the editors in 1966. It is eerie to hold the “new book” of a dead person in his hands who, like Kafka, refused to accept any posthumous edition of his estate. However, it is particularly spooky because it seems so familiar, just as if you had read it before. This is not only due to the fact that Foucault naturally takes up earlier theses in him and anticipates later ones; it is above all because he in turn creates a “big narrative” there — that you obviously need “big stories” to substantiate the end of them is one of the frequently discussed basic paradoxes of post-modernism — which may have been radical, provocative and scandalous in 1966, but long since 2025 Consensus is, seems almost a bit boring and staid, in any case corny.

Boredom sets in when reading because, for Foucault's circumstances — his writings are convincing not least because of their polemical, funny and ingenious rhetoric, with which he consciously mobilizes the mentioned moods and conceals his intellectual imcleanliness — the book is written extremely technically and dryly. My personal hypothesis: Perhaps Foucault, who had not yet “arrived” at the time, wanted to apply for a permanent chair of philosophy, so to speak. The book barely contains a trace of social criticism and, in particular, of the later power criticism that can be easily reconciled with emancipatory concerns, which is associated today with Foucault in general, in form and content, and sometimes Foucault sounds more like Hegel than Nietzsche.

Due to the sometimes very technical character of the book barely accessible to laypeople, here are just a few of its guiding principles: Around 1640 — keyword: “Cogito ergo sum” (Descartes) — a new order of knowledge developed, within which philosophy played a completely new role. According to Foucault, it is actually impossible to compare the philosophy before and after Descartes, since although both discourses talk about the same objects, they do so in a completely different mode: Before Descartes, philosophy was a subdiscipline of a unified cosmos of knowledge; now it confronts literature and science as an independent mode of knowledge production. This new “classical” philosophy tried to combine universal truth and the particular position of a subject. She did this in various ways, with Foucault, who, especially in his late work, repeatedly tries to prove how different discourses interact and are part of overarching networks of power, surprisingly postulates that these ways were a logical and necessary result from Descartes' guiding principle and that there was no interaction between philosophy and the other discourses.

From Descartes to Husserl, philosophers would have tried to articulate a universal truth that is also the individual truth of a unified subject. This project came to an end after just 300 years: The “Descartes Event” was replaced by the “Nietzsche Event.” When it comes to the exact definition of this event, Foucault flips from his otherwise very technical style into a very pathetic and flowery style, as you would expect from his writings. He refers to Georges Bataille, one of his most important “teachers,” and the inventor of the “Theatre of Cruelty,” Antonin Artaud, both convinced Nietzscheans, and praises Nietzsche as a kind of Messiah of a “radical [n] new beginning [s]” (ibid.). It relates in particular to Ecce homo and sees in Nietzsche's writings a way of thinking in which the uniform subject is replaced by a “multiplicity of subjects” (p. 212), “a great pluralism” (p. 213), “an indecipherable multiplicity of masks or faces” (ibid.), in which philosophy and literature, philosophy and madness and even philosophy and religion converged: “[I] n this sense is philosophical discourse should not be so far removed from religious discourse: but no exegesis; the word of Christ itself.” (p. 208)

Soberly, Foucault then continues to bring this project into the context of the general Linguistic turn — that is, the decisive turn from consciousness to language in the humanities from 1945 — and tries to develop the methodology of “archaeology” as an analysis of the “discourse archive” of a culture, which he admittedly breaks off. Perhaps he himself noticed that there are worlds between such “archaeology” as a meticulous, serious discourse analysis and praise of desubjectization and anarchic myth based on Bataille and Artaud. And as mentioned, there is still no talk of “power” here either: It was probably only the events of 1968 that prompted Foucault to (re) politicize his discourse analysis accordingly and to focus more on his first works Madness and Society (1961) and The birth of the clinic (1963).

III. What comes after postmodernism?

Of course, these three basic tendencies — discourse analysis, criticism of power, praise of desubjektification — are not particularly well conveyed in Foucault's thinking anyway. But that is perhaps exactly what accounts for his success. Just like with Nietzsche, anyone can put together their Foucault and, as you can easily see when you look at his numerous interviews, he seems to be himself in the role of the ambiguous theory derby and dazzling provocateur on the fine line between edginess and to have enjoyed a position of power in academia. In the mainstream, he acts primarily as a catchword for “unideological” cultural studies without existential philosophical, Marxist or psychoanalytical ballast; in left-wing circles as a — perhaps even anarchist — critic of repressive power structures, artists and artist-philosophers, he is regarded as a sequel batailles.

The basic mood that Foucault expresses: You want to be critical and reject “repressive” ideologies, but therefore just as little as you don't want to pack yourself with too much “metaphysical” baggage as the last major “system builders” of the 20th century did in the generation before Foucault, such as Adorno, Sartre, Bloch and Heidegger, in any broken form. Foucault thus turns out to be a very precise thought leader of what is now referred to as the “left-liberal mainstream” and, in his ambiguity, enables sometimes more or less radical connections as needed. His extensive abandonment of strong, not just aesthetically motivated, value judgments makes it possible anyway to always read his analyses both as mere descriptions and as critiques, even if his tone of voice usually implies a certain evaluation. A bit of criticism, a bit of cynicism; a bit of liberality, but just no system criticism; individual “art of living,” but please no demanding ethics of authenticity; fascination with desubjectization, but only in art and literature please... Foucault: The leading ideologue of Juste Milieu of our time.

How do we now go beyond this ideology and understand it, perhaps even inspired by Foucault himself, as a device of power that oppresses us and limits our life opportunities? What comes after postmodernism? And should we even yearn for “post-post-modern” conditions? Perhaps we will regard postmodernism as the era of Foucault and Deleuze with as much sentimental melancholy as Nietzsche sometimes regarded the 18th century of Rousseau and Voltaire...⁴ Only when the fascinated priests will once again bless the weapons for the wars of a new imperialism⁵ We may be able to appreciate the cheerful nihilism of postmodernism again, but by then it may be too late...

Or is another way out possible that lies beyond the alternative of repressive “big stories” and a big narrative about the end of the great stories? One way to get there may be an unbiased re-reading of Nietzsche's writings. When Nietzsche, for example, in Zarathustra proclaims: “Man is a rope, tied between animal and superman”⁶, is this not to be understood in the sense of a rearticulation and perhaps even radicalization of classical humanism rather than in the sense of the “death of man,” as Foucault Nietzsche's writings believed to be able to infer as a diagnosis and appeal? And the “last person” that Zarathustra contrasts with the superman is not exactly the self-satisfied “postman” of post-modernism who lives without “big stories”? Are they not the ones of whom it is said: “[F] rech in brief lusts, and throughout the day they barely threw goals anymore”⁷, and aren't they “the colorful speckles [...] [that] are you paintings of everything that was ever believed”⁸, masked people without identity, for whom the late Nietzsche only had contempt? In Ecce homo He doesn't seem to be preaching desubjectization right now, but, on the contrary, is almost convulsing for a”Self-defense”⁹ To ward off the incipient delusion and to announce a bold program that has an almost anti-post-modernist effect:

My task to prepare humanity for a moment of supreme self-reflection, a big noonWhere she looks back and looks out, where she emerges from the reign of chance and the priest and the question of why? , of what for? for the first time as a whole poses —, this task necessarily follows from the insight that humanity is not on the right path of its own accord, that it is absolutely not It is divinely ruled that, precisely under their most sacred values, the instinct of negation, corruption, the décadence instinct has acted seductively.¹⁰

Even the late Nietzsche does not want, as Foucault claims in the said essay, knowledge that only serves to cut up but not to understand (see p. 180), but his cutting criticism is fed back to a primarily affirmative project which can certainly be understood as a continuation of that of the Enlightenment: In moral issues, people should no longer submit to the patronising rule of nature and ideology, but rather finally, on the basis of insight into their natural driving forces, a people-friendly develop autonomous morality. One may disagree with the specific form of this morality in Nietzsche's late work, but this program — deliberately formulated openly — remains forward-looking. It shows little interpretative honesty to see in it merely the expression of an ironically satirical mask play, even when Nietzsche's gesture in Ecce homo It may seem grotesque. Perhaps he just seems bizarre and megalomaniac from the perspective of our own small-mindedness and because of the stunting of our utopian imagination?

In other words: Neomoderne based on Nietzsche instead of post-modernism would perhaps be an alternative to ideological radicalizations, which, to top it all off, rely on Nietzsche, and the continued post-modern skepticism that remains powerless towards them? Or was it not just another “apparatus of power,” from whose clutches, according to the late Foucault, there was no escape anyway? A question that we don't ask the world, but that it asks us...

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Item image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kongniffe/5340624604

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literature

Foucault, Michel: The discourse of philosophy. Berlin 2024.

Ders. : Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In: Writings. Dits et Ecrits. Vol. 2nd ed. by Daniel Defert & François Ewald. Frankfurt am Main 2002, pp. 166—191.

King, Matthew & Matthew Shape: On Jan Rehmann's Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism: Foucault & Deleuze. In: Historical materialism, online.

Rehmann, Jan: Postmodern left-wing Nietzscheanism. Deleuze & Foucault. A deconstruction. 1st ed. Bonn 2004.

Ders. : Postmodern left-wing Nietzscheanism. Deleuze & Foucault. A deconstruction2nd ed. Kassel 2021.

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footnotes

1: For an extensive review and appreciation of this translation, see Matthew King & Matthew Shape, On Jan Rehmann's Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism (link).

2: Ibid.

3: See also Jonas Pohler's comments in his report on the previous annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society on this blog (link).

4: See e.g. Beyond good and evil, Aph 245.

5: And actually it's a long time now...

6: Preface, 5.

7: So Zarathustra spoke, From a tree on a mountain.

8: So Zarathustra spoke, From the land of education.

9: Why I'm so smart, 8.

10: Ecce homo, Morgenröthe, 2.

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