Genealogy and History. Michel Foucault’s Reading of Nietzsche

Abstract

This paper represents a critical discussion about Michel Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, which focuses on two topics: genealogy and “effective history”. The Nietzschean genealogy can be understood both as a critic of metaphysics and as an interpretative strategy. I will focus on some classical philosophical problems, such as language, subject, truth and knowledge, which Nietzsche and Foucault discuss in a critical manner, and on interpretation, that I consider to be the only “positive” and universal operator of Nietzsche’s philosophy. I identify some terminological errors of Foucault’s reading (mainly concerning the concepts of Ursprung, Herkunft and Entstehung) and a few limits of the interpretation that Foucault offer to the Nietzschean debate on the discontinuity between knowledge and cognoscible world, as well as that between knowledge and human nature. Finally, I shall discuss the Foucaultian exposition of the problem of history that Nietzsche analyzes in the second of his Untimely Meditations and I shall conclude by showing that the genealogical strategy can be recognized as a new and efficient model of writing history.

Keywords

• Foucault
• Nietzsche
• genealogy
• history
• critic of metaphysics