ABSTRACT: Michel Foucault started to reflect on a methodology for analyzing power relations upon his appointment to the Collège de France in 1970. This essay discusses potential unacknowledged sources of these reflections. Drawing on archival material deposited at the Bibliothèque nationale de France , I highlight similarities between Foucault's pre-1976 portrayal of power relations as essentially warlike and a passage from Erich Ludendorff's Der totale Krieg that Foucault excerpted as a reading note. On this basis, I ask to what extent the interpretation of Nietzsche developed by Foucault in the early 1970s depends on ideas that had been brought to Nietzsche's work from elsewhere. Citing a manuscript on governmentality not yet published in full, I argue moreover that although Foucault began to identify 'power' with 'government' after 1976, he still construed politics as a form of warfare. His reference henceforth would be Carl Schmitt's definition of the political through the friend-enemy distinction.

ABSTRACT: This article revisits Foucault's reading of Nietzsche, with a special focus on the medical metaphors surrounding the definition and practice of genealogy. It argues that, in addition to the emphasis on the notion of diagnosis as a key medically inspired element of genealogy, it is important to consider an aspect that has been significantly less explored in existing scholarship on Foucault's appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy: that of genealogy as a "curative" art or as a "science of remedies." Hence the article presents Nietzsche as a thinker of health and disease, and his views on the philosopher as a kind of physician. Then, it moves on to examine the "historical sense" as a notion that plays a key role in Foucault's reading of Nietzsche in his 1969–1970 lectures at Vincennes and his definition of genealogy as a practice of history that both emerges from epochal disease and points to possible forms of healing. My claim is that, in the Vincennes lectures on Nietzsche, the historical sense can be described as something that can poison and heal, and as a process of immanent critique of the present, carrying the possibility of its transfiguration.

ABSTRACT: This article provides a survey of the material in the University at Buffalo archives concerning Foucault's two visits in 1970 and 1972. The 1970 visit was Foucault's first trip to the United States, and he gave a course advertised as "The desire for knowledge or the phantasms of knowledge in French literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." On his return in 1972 as the Melodia E. Jones Chair he gave two courses: a seminar on "The Criminal in the Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries" and a lecture series on "The Origins of Culture," renamed as "History of Truth." Using the personnel files and correspondence with his host John K. Simon, as well as the audio recordings of the 1972 lectures and parts of the 1970 course, this article reports on what we know of his teaching and its role in his initial reception in the United States. Particular attention is given to how much of the 1970 course has been published in different places, without its overall organization and linking theme being previously recognized.

ABSTRACT: Based on tape recordings preserved in the archives of SUNY Buffalo, this article discusses a hitherto unpublished lecture course entitled "The History of Truth," which Foucault gave in Buffalo in 1972. It traces Foucault's archaeological investigation of the discursive practices that led to the phenomenon known in Western history as "truth." Accordingly, the article reconstructs the two central "knowledge-power" complexes that Foucault analyzes: the "truth of measure" in relation to the question of justice in the ancient Greek legal system and the "truth of investigation" within the discourse on war and the appeasement of society in medieval law. The Buffalo lectures clarify the substantive connection between these topics and also provide deeper insight into the methodological foundations of Foucault's archaeological approach. In this regard, particular attention is paid to his critical remarks on Althusser's variant of scientific Marxism. The article concludes that the audio recordings of the lecture course "The History of Truth" are an important addition to Foucault's first two already published lecture courses at the Collège de France, as they allow listeners to experience Foucault not only as an impressive scholar, but also as a philosophical practitioner.

ABSTRACT: From the first edition of The Gay Science (1882) to the second (1887), Nietzsche gave considerable thought to the problem of how a will to truth emerged in the history of knowledge. In this article, I advance a threefold thesis: first, I argue that in 1887 Nietzsche reread his own Gay Science genealogically, and that it is within this new context that he uncovered a hidden asceticism of knowledge, inherent in the will to truth "at any cost." Second, I show that Foucault grasped this shift as early as his work in the early 1970s, where he in fact describes Nietzsche's history of truth as an ascetic history. Third, I seek to highlight the implications Foucault drew from this analysis for the genealogical project of The Will to Know , the first volume of The History of Sexuality .

ABSTRACT: Habermas and Foucault read Nietzsche at exactly the same period (1968–1970) and started from the same problem of knowledge and science. This paper aims to explore the parallel between these two readers of Nietzsche, not in order to compare them but to highlight the specificity of the Foucauldian reading. My hypothesis is that Habermas and Foucault have in common not only their reading of Nietzsche but also how they use it to rethink the status of social struggles by reconfiguring the relationship between theory and practice, reason and emancipation. If Habermas makes emancipation an interest of reason, Foucault aims at another emancipation concerning the truth in which Nietzsche is the great instigator.

ABSTRACT: In light of the recent publication of an important volume collecting previously unpublished lectures and manuscripts by Michel Foucault on Friedrich Nietzsche, this paper discusses the (largely implicit) presence of Nietzsche in Foucault's later lectures and writings. In particular, I address Foucault's references to the notions of Wahrsagen and Wahrsager in connection with his own project to write a genealogy of truth-telling, as well as his problematization of Nietzsche's reading of asceticism with the aim of shedding light on what I call an "asceticism of becoming," as opposed to the "asceticism of being" that Nietzsche examines and criticizes. I conclude by emphasizing several elements of continuity between Foucault's writings on Nietzsche in the 1950s and his own analyses of parrhesia , critique, and the role of the will in the final years of his life.