Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject (SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject (SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) by Mahon, Michael. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780791411506.

This is the first full-length study of the impact of Friedrich Nietzsches writings on the thought of French philosopher Michel Foucault. Focusing on the notion of genealogy in the thought of both Nietzsche and Foucault, the author explores the three genealogical axes-truth, power, and the subject-as they gradually emerge in Foucaults writings. This complex of axes into which Foucault was drawn, especially as a result of his early history of madness, called forth his explicit adoption of a Nietzschean approach to his future work. By interpreting Foucaults Histoire de la folie in the light of Nietzsches genealogy of tragedy, Mahon shows how the moral problematization of madness in history provides the historical conditions from which the three axes emerge. After tracing the gradual emergence of the three axes through Foucaults writings of the remainder of the 1960s, especially Les Mots et les choses, Mahon turns to Foucaults explicit methodological statements and his notion of genealogy and offers a reading of Foucaults Larcheologie du savoir, arguing that there is no chasm between Foucaults archaeological writings and his genealogies. The work concludes with an analysis of Foucaults final writings on the genealogy of modern subjectivity and an examination of how truth, power, and the subject operate for the modern psychoanalytic subject of desire.