ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault saw himself as the avatar of Friedrich Nietzsche. He strove to reincarnate Nietzsche after he was pronounced dead due to the nefarious role his philosophy had played in support of Nazism. Foucault had already marked out Sartre as the reigning master to be dethroned, and he proceeded to do so in no uncertain terms. Foucault's main purpose in reasserting the identity of knowledge and power is once again to take up Nietzsche's attack on the modern epistemological view of knowledge as based on representation. Foucault's countercultural prescription of pleasing oneself is the opposite of Nietzsche's harsh regime of severity in its attitude to law and morality. Foucault was not the only Parisian avant-gardist intellectual intent on destroying the Subject. The death and resurrection of the Subject is but one of very many such demises and revivals that took place in French intellectual life during the second half of the twentieth century.
