As Simon Solomon is keen to remind me, any attempt to cloak oneself in the skin of another is to violate Zarathustra's greatest teaching: Lose me and find yourselves. No master worthy of the name wants disciples and, in truth, there was only ever one Christian and he died on the cross.
And so, what then are we to make of Foucault's remark in an interview shortly before his death in 1984: I am simply a Nietzschean ... Doesn't this already betray an essential misunderstanding of Nietzsche and his philosophy?
I don't think so. Foucault wasn't a slavish disciple of Nietzsche's, nor an uncritical reader and so this statement is rather more complex than it first appears. It helps, I think, to read the sentence from which the remark is taken in full:
And so, what then are we to make of Foucault's remark in an interview shortly before his death in 1984: I am simply a Nietzschean ... Doesn't this already betray an essential misunderstanding of Nietzsche and his philosophy?
I don't think so. Foucault wasn't a slavish disciple of Nietzsche's, nor an uncritical reader and so this statement is rather more complex than it first appears. It helps, I think, to read the sentence from which the remark is taken in full:
"I am simply a Nietzschean, and I try as far as possible, on a certain number of issues, to see with the help of Nietzsche’s texts - but 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." [1]
I suppose what Deleuze says of D. H. Lawrence, we might also say of Foucault: it's not that either writer simply imitated Nietzsche; rather, each picks up the arrow shot into the future by the latter and then shoots it in a new direction.
So it is that, whilst finding new targets of his own, the weapons (i.e. genealogical methods) that Foucault adopts, originate in Nietzsche: "Many things change or are supplemented from one initiative to another, and even what they have in common gains in strength and novelty." [2]
Ultimately, what enables one to call oneself a Nietzschean without embarrassment (but always with a dash of irony) is the fact that there was no one Nietzsche with whom one might identify.
I suppose what Deleuze says of D. H. Lawrence, we might also say of Foucault: it's not that either writer simply imitated Nietzsche; rather, each picks up the arrow shot into the future by the latter and then shoots it in a new direction.
So it is that, whilst finding new targets of his own, the weapons (i.e. genealogical methods) that Foucault adopts, originate in Nietzsche: "Many things change or are supplemented from one initiative to another, and even what they have in common gains in strength and novelty." [2]
Ultimately, what enables one to call oneself a Nietzschean without embarrassment (but always with a dash of irony) is the fact that there was no one Nietzsche with whom one might identify.
Thus, what it means, to call oneself a Nietzschean, is that one is loyal only to fluidity of thought and a multiplicity of perspectives; that one likes wearing masks as a philosopher; that in all things, one values style above all else. It doesn't mean you have to have a big letter S tattooed on your chest or grow a walrus-handlebar moustache ...
Notes
[1] Michel Foucault, 'The Return of Morality', trans John Johnston in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. by Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 1996), pp. 465-73. The lines quoted are on p. 471. This interview was conducted by Gilles Barbedette and André Scala on 29 May 1984 and was originally published as 'Le Retour de la Morale', in Les Nouvelles littéraires, (Paris, 1984), pp. 36-41.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998), p. 37.
If we're to dig Foucault out of his hole (and why, anyway, should we uncritically accept anything an author tells/sells us about 'who they are' - especially from one who explicitly reduced him/her to an 'ideological' fiction?), the most interesting aspect of his 'confession' is the idea that 'anti-Nietzschean theses' are themselves viewed as Nietzschean. This points, we infer, to the perceived hallmark of 'Nietzscheanism' as one of self-reflexivity/self-contradiction, if not pre-postmodern irony. Like the night porter in Macbeth, 'Nietzsche' was, in short, a great equivocator.
ReplyDeleteOn this reading, the emblematic text here comes from Beyond Good and Evil (Part 3, Sec. 48):
'"Let us then boldly assert that religion is a product of the normal man, that man is most in touch with truth when he is most religious and most assured of an infinite destiny . . . When he is good he wants virtue to correspond to an eternal order, when he contemplates things in a disinterested manner he finds death revolting and absurd. How can we not assume that it is in those former moments that man sees best? . . ." These sentences are so entirely antithetical to my ears and habits that when I found them my initial rage wrote beside them "la niaiserie religieuse par excellence!" [the finest example of religious stupidity] - until my later anger grew to like them, these sentences which turn the truth on its head! It is so nice, so distinguished, to have one's very own antithesis!'
To read Nietzsche as a stylist is therefore already too much, in our view. All one can say here is that he entertains his own contradictions/antithesis, or, perhaps, stages the Hegelian 'master-slave' dialectic in his own person - without necessarily progressing to a liveable synthesis, but rather, like Hoelderlin in his own estranged pagan-Christian supersanity, ultimately being dashed on the impossible rocks of the Christ/Dionysos contrariety.
In a 1982 interview, it's worth noting, Foucault also stated: 'I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? [...] The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.'
So, in a nutshell, Foucault both was and wasn't a Nietzschean, not even being a Foucauldian. At any rate, 'Nietzschean' is still clearly a slippery term to say the least, and one we would counsel caution in applying to any person(s), as Nietzsche's self-dissolution among 'all the names of history' on the evil altar of history in 'Ecce Homo' ultimately attests.
Nomen est omen!