ABSTRACT
The Death of the God Killer
The work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984) redefines the questions, "What is modernity?" and "What is enlightenment?", and creates new interrelationships between them. Foucault took a huge task upon himself: to be the archeologist of Western culture, to examine its sexuality, its confessions, its forms of punishment, its speech, its patronizing attitude to other cultures; to analyze the relationships of power and knowledge in every ideology and organization; to be the psychologist of the psychiatrists, the historian of historiography; and to look at research disciplines known as adhesive mixtures that have become the outmoded and subtle means of retaining power.1 He scrutinized their discourse from his professorial chair, which he called without false modesty "the chair of the history of systems of thought". He wished to be a new, up-to-date Nietzsche. If the "death of God" proclaimed the birth of a new man within aesthetics—that is, modernism—the Paris philosopher boasted of coining a new concept a hundred times more daring: the "death of man", which is the birth of post-modernism. Foucault's starting point is to be found in Nietzsche:
