ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, to whom he frequently acknowledged his debt, particularly the latter’s will-to-power thesis and his genealogical method. He readily accepted ‘the Nietzschean view that the will-to-power is universal, and supported it by arguing that since the seventeenth century in the West societies have continually extended their power over the lives of their members.’1 His genealogical research into the impersonal, but pervasive apparatuses of power in society’s central institutions – hospitals, insane asylums, prisons, factories, military, schools – led him to conclude that power relations (rapports de force) go hand-in-hand with society’s relations of production (rapports de production). Unlike Nietzsche, however, while he exposed the pervasiveness of these apparatuses (‘biopower’ as he called them) and described how they render the individual subject submissive, how they bring about the subjection of bodies, and how they achieve control of the population, he did not advocate the Nietzschean enterprise of recovering the Dionysian side of life rather than choosing merely to submit to these impersonal relations of power. At best, he concluded, all the individual can do is to transgress biopower.
