The Disunity in Genealogy: Foucault’s Anti-Nietzschean Reading of History

Abstract

Contemporary critical scholarship takes Foucault’s genealogical work as a paradigm, and it is widely recognized that Foucault himself took Nietzsche as a methodological exemplar. Notably, Foucault’s landmark methodological text – ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ – is framed as a faithful exposition of Nietzsche. Contrary to Foucault’s framing, however, this article argues that his account of genealogy is incompatible with and anathema to Nietzsche’s philosophy of history. Through a close reading of Foucault’s essay alongside Nietzsche’s second Unfashionable Observation, it seeks to demonstrate that Foucault’s account of genealogy is premised on an inadequately one-sided reading of Nietzsche’s more dialectical account of history and the ahistorical. Whereas Foucault presents an anti-metaphysical Nietzsche suspicious of teleological origins and ahistorical forms, Nietzsche’s essay in fact insists on the necessity of such figures as an antidote to historicism. Reading Nietzsche against Foucault, this article investigates the conceptual foundations of the contemporary genealogical method, suggesting that Nietzsche may present an alternative – rather than precursor – to the Foucauldian paradigm.

Introduction

Foucault’s genealogy is hostile to unity; it stands on the side of dissolution and fracture. Against the traditional historian’s naïve belief in the coherence and persistence of truth, soul, and consciousness, his genealogy ‘corresponds to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates, and disperses . . . the kind of dissociating view that is capable of decomposing itself, capable of shattering the unity of man’s being’ (Foucault, 1984 [1971]: 87, emphasis added). Knowledge is not for understanding, Foucault insists, but for cutting. Foucault works out this schismatic account of genealogy in relation to Nietzsche’s reflections and models; his displacement of Ursprung in favor of the ‘proper’ genealogical objects of Herkunft and Entstehung, the distinction between wirkliche and traditional history, the delineation of the parodic, dissociative, and sacrificial uses of genealogy – all are framed as expositions and elaborations of Nietzsche’s work. Yet in spite of his ostensible fidelity, this paper suggests that Foucault’s hostility to unity, form, totality, and origin departs from – and is even incompatible with – Nietzsche’s understanding of history. In stark contrast with Foucault’s account of genealogy in ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1984 [1971]), Nietzsche’s second essay in Unfashionable Observations, ‘The Utility and Liability of History for Life’ (1995 [1874]), foregrounds the constructive, unifying aspect of history as an indispensable part of its utility to life. This paper therefore seeks to demonstrate that in Foucault’s overemphasis on the dangers of the suprahistorical, he produces a nominalist account of genealogy that excises the constructive, ahistorical, and finally metaphysical moment in Nietzsche’s approach to history. Foucault articulates a version of genealogy concerned only with disunity and dissolution, a version that tends toward the stultifying excess of history Nietzsche is so concerned with avoiding.

To this end, what follows is organized around the close analysis of Foucault’s ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ alongside key moments in Nietzsche’s ‘Utility and Liability of History for Life’. It begins at the heart of Foucault’s argument and the middle of his essay: the distinction between traditional and effective history, and its relation to Nietzsche’s commentary on the ahistorical and suprahistorical. It then turns to Foucault’s revision of Nietzsche’s three modalities of history, in which the monumental, antiquarian, and critical modes turn into parodic, dissociative, and sacrificial uses. Finally, it returns to the beginning of Foucault’s essay, attending to the disparate concepts of origin he claims are at work in Nietzsche’s writing. While the main part of the essay is concerned only with those methodological texts, the conclusion does briefly explore how Foucault’s nominalist revision of Nietzsche produces internal limitations in the theory of power that animates his major genealogical works.

‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ marks a key moment of inflection in the development of Foucault’s work. His earliest published reflection on genealogy as a method, it sets the stage for his move beyond the purely archaeological period and the introduction of power as a central analytical concept. As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) argue, ‘it would be hard to overestimate the importance of the essay for understanding the progression of the work which followed; all of the seeds of Foucault’s work of the 1970s can be found in the discussion of Nietzsche’ (p. 106). In light of more recent archival research, scholars have argued that Dreyfus and Rabinow overstate the discontinuity of this moment with Foucault’s earlier period. It nevertheless remains evident that the 1971 essay is a crucial text – offering Foucault’s most direct and extended engagement with Nietzsche and the philosophy of history on the eve of his highly celebrated historical work from the mid-1970s. And indeed, when it comes to the ‘infrastructure that undergirds Foucault’s oeuvre’, Foucault took Nietzsche as ‘the philosophical model of his critical project’ (Barzilay, 2023: 202). As Rosenberg and Westfall (2018) emphasize, ‘There is no escaping the conclusion that, of all the philosophical and literary influences on the work of Michel Foucault, one of the most striking, the most intriguing, the most lasting, as well as the most challenging is the work of Friedrich Nietzsche’ (p. 2). ¹ Given the significance of this commentary for Foucault’s work – and perhaps just as importantly, for scholarly accounts of genealogy as a method after Foucault – its precision and philosophical strength is of real significance. ²

While Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) ‘plead neutrality concerning the textual accuracy of Foucault’s reading’, the scholarly reception has otherwise largely affirmed Foucault’s claims to accuracy and fidelity (p. 106). On this matter, commentaries fall into two camps. The first frames the essay as a careful exegesis and faithful extension of Nietzsche’s theory and practice of history, while the second frames it as a creative extension of Nietzschean historical themes that diverges from the letter of Nietzsche’s texts only in order to stay true to the spirit of his approach. Gutting (1990) exemplifies the first attitude when he writes that Foucault’s essay ‘takes the form of a meticulous explication de texte, with Foucault scrupulously summarizing Nietzsche’s view of genealogy’ (p. 334). Saar (2002) similarly writes that in the essay Foucault ‘apparently subscribed to this concept [genealogy] without reservations and modifications’, noting that Foucault was able to ‘restrict himself more or less exclusively to this text in order to develop his own understanding of Nietzsche’s critical impetus’ (pp. 231, 233). ³ Mahon (1992) captures the upshot of this view when he writes that ‘in their more general, theoretical statements about the nature of genealogy, then, Nietzsche and Foucault stand very close together’ (p. 126). This first view, which is encouraged by the text itself, has been the standard interpretation of Foucault’s essay – and has underwritten the sense of continuity between Foucault and Nietzsche in their respective genealogical practices.

Readings from the second camp, which has emerged somewhat more recently, identify specific departures from Nietzsche in Foucault’s essay but take these divergences to be in keeping with the spirit of Nietzsche’s overall project. This view is expressed by Rosenberg and Westfall (2018: 2–3): ‘in his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault adapts and adopts Nietzsche’s singular notion of “genealogy” to his own twentieth-century purposes . . . revising and revitalizing Nietzschean genealogy into a distinctly Foucauldian notion’. ⁴ In the same volume, Lightbody (2018) analyzes a divergence between Foucault and Nietzsche over the question of the body – Foucault’s ‘social constructionist’ account of the body stands in contrast with Nietzsche’s ossified, ‘essentialist’ view. Nevertheless, Lightbody (2018) frames this as a matter of internal critique, suggesting that Foucault holds true to the spirit of Nietzschean genealogy: ‘[Nietzsche’s] reverence for the body serves to undercut the entire genealogical enterprise: for if the body transcends history, then there may be other absolutes, too’ (p. 167). At the far end of this second camp, Sluga (2010) develops a detailed account of three points at which Foucault’s essay departs from Nietzsche’s work – related to the scope of genealogy, the motive for it, and the place of interpretation in it. Nevertheless, Sluga’s (2010) analysis unfolds against the backdrop of what he takes to be Foucault’s major ‘threefold agreement’ with Nietzsche regarding the method, goals, and implications of genealogy (p. 37). Sluga (2010) thus frames Foucault’s essay as articulating an ‘advance beyond Nietzsche’ rather than a split with him – a ‘post-Nietzschean stance’ that retains the significance of Nietzsche for the development of genealogy (p. 48).

In what was to be his final interview, Foucault (1996 [1984]) claimed: ‘I am simply a Nietzschean, and try as far as possible, on a certain number of issues, to see with the help of Nietzsche’s texts – but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless Nietzschean!) – what can be done in this or that domain’ (p. 471). If the first scholarly view of ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ holds that Foucault remains ‘simply a Nietzschean’, and the second view finds some of Foucault’s self-professed ‘anti-Nietzschean theses’ but claims with Foucault that they are ‘nevertheless Nietzschean!’, this article attempts to establish a third view: that Foucault’s essay on genealogy is fundamentally anti-Nietzschean, contravening not only the letter but also the spirit of Nietzsche’s reflections on history in ‘The Utility and Liability of History for Life’. Where the Nietzsche of the second Unfashionable Observation is at pains to emphasize the constitutive role of ahistorical form in historical thinking, Foucault is determined to root out all such formal unities in order to render a one-sidedly historicist approach to genealogy. This third view casts a different light on those particular departures from Nietzsche identified by the second camp. It suggests that the divergent understandings of the living body highlighted by Lightbody, and the incompatible attitudes with respect to the origin of morality underlined by Sluga, should not be understood as local or minor disagreements within a larger shared project, but instead as symptoms of a fundamental split between the two over the place of metaphysical concepts in the practice of historical interpretation.

History: Effective and Traditional

Foucault’s insistence on the genealogical dissolution of unities is thematized most explicitly in his division between effective (wirkliche) and traditional history. Foucault (1984 [1971]) claims that beginning with the second Unfashionable Observation, Nietzsche ‘always questioned the form of history that reintroduces (and always assumes) a suprahistorical perspective’ (p. 86). That is, Nietzsche criticizes traditional history insofar as it ‘finds its support outside of time’ in abstract metaphysical figures such as ‘eternal truth, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of consciousness as always identical to itself’ (p. 87). On the basis of these metaphysical figures, traditional history reads an artificial unity into its material: it composes ‘the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself [. . .] attributes a form of reconciliation to all the displacements of the past [. . . and] implies the end of time, a completed development’ (pp. 86–7).

Effective history, on Foucault’s account, is concerned with subverting all of those artificial, metaphysical unities of the suprahistorical perspective – especially figures of form, essence, and origin. Foucault insists that everything we may think of as eternal in the human must instead be situated within a historical process; even the body and its seemingly natural instincts are not the straightforward product of the laws of physiology but shaped at every point by culture and social convention. Any belief in a common, eternal human essence – one that grounds the traditional historian’s projection into the past, their sense of identification with and understanding of historical actors – is stripped away by effective history; any reassuring stabilities of biological life and human nature are discarded. The same disunifying operation is at work in his analysis, earlier in the essay, of the metaphysics of the origin. The search for origins is always an investigation into essence and form, ‘an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities’, one that must assume ‘the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession’ (p. 78). The effective historian finds ‘“something altogether different” behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms’ (p. 78). Against the logic of ontological form and inviolable essence implied the notion of origin, Foucault locates dissension and disparity at the ‘historical beginning of things’, from which every apparent unity is in fact accidentally composed in a fragmentary manner from disparate elements (p. 79). Against the totalizing operation of the essential and the original, Foucault looks to the particular, the variable, and the composite.

Effective history discards all seamless historical continuities as well. Working against the commonplace understanding of history as seamless flow punctuated by exceptional events, traditional history tends to dissolve events back into that continuous progression through detailed accounts of the forces at play. Yet in this skepticism of the exceptional, traditional history constructs exceptions of its own in the form of teleological processes and natural trajectories – what Foucault referred to above as its attribution of ‘reconciliation to all the displacements of the past’. Effective history moves in the opposite direction, rejecting the ‘metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies’ to instead interpret history as a ‘profusion of entangled events’, to be understood ‘in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations’ (pp. 77, 88–9). Instead of the relentless subsumption of every event into larger trajectories, effective history decomposes all such trajectories into an array of discrete events. As the practice of effective history, Foucault’s genealogy is posed term-for-term against the suprahistorical perspective of traditional history; faced with formal unities and teleological continuities, genealogy distinguishes, separates, disperses, dissociates, decomposes, shatters.

Yet Nietzsche’s essay on history is not nearly as hostile to the evocation of metaphysical unities in history as Foucault suggests. On the contrary, while Nietzsche certainly identifies a certain danger in what he calls the ahistorical and suprahistorical perspectives, he nevertheless understands these as indispensable antidotes to the poison of history. Indeed, Nietzsche’s (1995 [1874]) essay begins by emphasizing the dangers of history itself, rather than of suprahistorical metaphysical abstractions (p. 85). While we need history ‘for life and for action’, there is nevertheless ‘a way of practicing history and a valorization of history in which life atrophies and degenerates’. ⁵ We must, therefore, only ‘serve history to the extent that it serves life’ (p. 85). The animal offers a backdrop against which to understand how historical memory can work against life: whereas the herd of cows lives ahistorically, in the paradise of an eternal present, the human being is encumbered by the ‘ever-greater burden of the past’ – the trauma, regret, failure, and so much else that contorts the way they inhabit their world (p. 88). Nietzsche considers the limit case of this burden of history, the person who cannot forget: ‘such a human being would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming; like the true student of Heraclitus, in the end he would hardly even dare to lift a finger’ (p. 89). Not only action, but life itself, requires forgetting. ⁶

What is more, Nietzsche considers the capacity to live ahistorically ‘more significant and more originary’ than the practice of history, insofar as it lays the foundation for ‘something just, healthy, and great, something that is truly human’ (p. 91). It is only against the primary backdrop of the ahistorical that a secondary movement of history is possible: memory, here, is figured as an interruption of forgetting, not vice-versa. The human is distinguished from the cow by this capacity for historical memory, which it cannot tolerate in excess yet cannot do without. The historical sensibility, pushed so far as to dispel the ahistorical entirely, ‘injures and ultimately destroys all living things, whether a human being, a people, or a culture’ (p. 89). Conversely, although the human may envy the cow for its blissful forgetfulness, its own existence is inextricable from its historical capacity; as Ward (2013) puts it, ‘for man to really want to become wholly unhistorical like the cattle would be for him to want to cease existing: this would amount to nihilism’ (p. 72). Nietzsche appears to seek an Aristotelian mean: the historical act of memory and the ahistorical power of forgetting are equally necessary to human life as such. This is not a matter of the arbitrary or voluntaristic forgetting of particular episodes, but rather of taking responsible agency over one’s relationship to the past – as Ward puts it, an injunction ‘that we should gain a full consciousness of the extremely complex relation which binds us to the past in various respects, and by doing so enable the possibility of a certain control over that relation’ (p. 70).

The ahistorical is not the only unifying counterpart to history for Nietzsche; on the far side of the historical view, we find the ‘suprahistorical’ perspective that Foucault references. By the suprahistorical, Nietzsche (1995 [1874]) means to invoke that perspective which takes historical events to form a chaotic, directionless churn on the mere surface of an underlying eternal edifice of transcendent truths: ‘I term “suprahistorical” those powers that divert one’s gaze from what is in the process of becoming to what lends existence the character of something eternal and stable in meaning, to art and religion’ (p. 163, emphasis in original). The core of the suprahistorical view is the idea that ‘the past and the present are one and the same [. . .] in all their diversity, they are identical in type, and as the omnipresence of imperishable types they make up a stationary formation of unalterable worth and eternally identical meaning’ (p. 94). Nietzsche illustrates the distinction between the historical and suprahistorical with an early version of his thought experiment of eternal return: posed the question of whether they would choose to relive the previous 20 years, the historical and suprahistorical human would both answer ‘no’ – but for different reasons. The historical human thinks of history as progressive and processual; ‘a glance into the past drives them on toward the future, inflames their courage to go on living, kindles their hope that justice will come, that happiness is waiting’ (p. 93). The historical human does not want to relive the previous 20 years because they are confident that the next 20 will be better. The suprahistorical human, on the other hand, offers a rather more cynical ‘no’; given that ‘the world is complete and has arrived at its culmination in every individual moment’, the previous 20 years have nothing to offer that the forthcoming 20 will not also contain (p. 94). The suprahistorical human is not captured by the illusion that anything meaningful changes as the years pass – except insofar as they express a certain set of static truths and ontological forms, the events of any 20 year span will be arbitrary.

As in the case of the ahistorical, Nietzsche takes the suprahistorical to offer an indispensable yet dangerous antidote to the excesses of history. In the face of zealous historical confidence in the progressive developments of the future, the suprahistorical view offers wisdom and perspective – a sobering reminder that some things never change, a crucial recognition of the a priori and ontological features of our world. It is true that, for Nietzsche, just as any attempt to live purely ahistorically like the cow would destroy the human, an undiluted suprahistorical standpoint induces life-denying nausea: ‘anyone who occupies it could no longer be seduced into continuing to living on [sic] and taking part in history, since he would have recognized the single condition of all events’ (p. 93). Nevertheless, the alternative historical standpoint as Nietzsche presents it is not a wholesale rejection of the suprahistorical, but merely a tempered recognition of its wisdom. As Nietzsche suggests, it might be possible to ‘leave the suprahistorical human beings to their nausea and their wisdom’ and instead ‘make things easier for ourselves by playing the roles of those active and progressive people who venerate process’ (pp. 94–5). This ‘active and progressive’ historical view is not one that has abandoned or dissolved those pillars of the suprahistorical perspective – it doesn’t object to unities, but to figuring them as purely static. And crucially, it opposes the static view of such unities not on the basis of a claim to contingency in history, some rejection of the necessity of any particular unity, but rather on the basis of a claim to progress and development, the assertion that such unities have an unfolding teleological structure. Still, such a historical position must heed the lessons of the suprahistorical on this point – recognizing that change might not happen the way it hopes, that its beliefs about progress and development may never be actualized. For Nietzsche, the lively unwisdom of historical humans has ‘more of a future’ than suprahistorical wisdom on its own – but only because historical humans recognize the necessity of suprahistorical forms in the project of history, with their sobering lessons about the inevitability of progress (p. 95).

Foucault, it seems, reads Nietzsche one-sidedly. In his rejection of traditional history, he emphasizes the negative, stifling aspect of those metaphysical unities introduced by the ahistorical and suprahistorical, while omitting entirely their positive, life-affirming moments. Nowhere in Foucault’s essay does he address Nietzsche’s claim to the necessity of an ahistorical positing of metaphysical unities against that view of history as pure and arbitrary contingency; nowhere does he confront the fact that for Nietzsche, the suprahistorical view is precisely the antidote to a one-sidedly continuous, progressive, developmental narrative. Indeed, it is only by avoiding Nietzsche’s requirement of a constructive impulse in history that Foucault can present effective history as an exclusively disunifying practice. To be sure, Foucault’s concerns about these metaphysical aspects of history have real basis in Nietzsche’s essay. But he picks out what are ultimately only minor moments within the larger and far more dynamic analysis. With Nietzsche, one gets the strong sense that the dangers of the ahistorical and suprahistorical are only a secondary concern – rather, it is their real necessity, in spite of those dangers, that is at the heart of his argument. With Foucault, we lose the dialectical dynamism of Nietzsche’s essay; he reads these metaphysical moments of history as just poison, when everything hinges on the fact that they are also cure.

Modes of History: Monumental, Antiquarian and Critical

Foucault’s selective emphasis on the negative, dangerous moment in Nietzsche’s dynamic categories is apparent in his transformation of the three modalities of history. In ‘Utility and Liability’, Nietzsche outlines three archetypes of historical thinking: monumental, antiquarian, and critical history. As with history in general, each archetype has an important, positive function – indeed, with them Nietzsche suggests that he has delineated ‘the services that history is capable of rendering to life’ – yet each poses a parallel danger when not treated with caution (1995 [1874]): 108). The monumental mode traces history through world-historical events and great agents of change. As the history of those who act and strive, monumental history can offer courage and the ‘inspiration to emulate and improve’ (p. 96). Unchecked, however, it becomes destructive, washing away swaths of history in favor of a few embellished facts and dismissing the new on the basis that greatness has already been achieved. Second, the antiquarian designates that mode of history concerned with the preservation of old customs and documents, out of loyalty to the tradition that produced the present. At its best, the antiquarian offers joy and satisfaction with one’s roots, unifying ties with one’s community – at the same time, it always risks an obsessional veneration of the old that turns into hostility to change. Finally, with critical history, someone who suffers under injustice can interrogate, condemn, and shatter a past. Critical history offers the power of constructing a new past from which we would prefer to have descended – an operation with the potential to be liberatory, but which always risks becoming overzealous. Every past, after all, is worthy of condemnation – and shatter as we may, it is in the end impossible to completely free ourselves from them.

In transforming the monumental, antiquarian, and critical into the parodic, dissociative, and sacrificial uses of genealogy, Foucault leaves out the positive moments of Nietzsche’s categories, focusing only on the dangers posed by the unities they produce. From the monumental, Foucault (1984 [1971]) derives the parodic use, a carnivalesque production of historical masks, the excess of which unsettles any simple identification: ‘no longer the identification of our faint individuality with the solid identities of the past, but our “unrealization” through the excessive choice of identities’ (p. 94). Through this masquerade, the parodic uses the very figures of the monumental to ward off the danger posed by over-investment in them. Yet that neutralization cuts both ways: by unsettling identification, this carnival of monuments short circuits any courage it might otherwise inspire. This loss does not register in Foucault’s text; when he offers a short synopsis of Nietzsche on the monumental, he addresses only its now ameliorated risks: ‘Nietzsche accused this history, one totally devoted to veneration, of barring access to the actual intensities and creations of life’ (p. 94).

Foucault next outlines the dissociative use of genealogy, which sifts and separates the artificially constituted identities of the antiquarian. In place of the soul with roots in tradition, it discovers ‘a complex system of distinct and multiple elements’; its goal is not merely to trace the contours of that soul, but ‘to commit itself to its dissipation’; against the homeland promised by metaphysicians, it ‘seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us’ (p. 95). The operation here parallels the sacrificial: faced with the conservative and even reactionary tendencies of the antiquarian, Foucault turns its material against it. He neutralizes those dangers by leveraging the artificiality and ahistoricity of antiquarian identity to dissociate its multiple components and interrupt its production. That in so doing he also undermines the affirmative possibilities for community and solidarity offered by the antiquarian passes without comment.

Finally, Foucault replaces critical history with the sacrificial use of genealogy. Not only does every past rest on injustice, he points out, but the purportedly neutral, dispassionate historical inquiry that seeks to uncover those injustices rests on injustice as well – founded as it is on a violent will to knowledge. Taken to its limit, Foucault argues, the critical interrogation of the past undoes the inquisitor as well. From the critical to the sacrificial, we get a movement from a practice of ‘judging the past in the name of a truth that only we can possess in the present’ to one of ‘risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment of the will to knowledge’ (p. 97). If the risk of critical history is that it might turn against human life in the name of some newly constructed truth, Foucault points out that at a limit, it also sacrifices truth to itself – for the very will to knowledge that stands behind the production of truth is itself to be shot through with malice and injustice (p. 95). With the sacrificial use of genealogy, truth can no longer stand against life in an overzealous revisionism – but neither, we must remember, can it serve those projects of justice that seek to cultivate new social forms of life or narrate new historical lineages.

The parodic, dissociative, and sacrificial uses of genealogy were directed in turn against reality, identity, and truth (p. 93). With all three, Foucault turns the material of Nietzsche’s modalities of history against the categories they construct, demonstrating how they undermine their own claims, picking apart the seams of their carefully stitched-together unities. Certainly, he is not wrong that this defuses the dangers posed by each: the monumental historian’s erasures, the antiquarian historian’s conservative obsession with the past, and the critical historian’s overzealous judgments are all quite effectively destabilized. But he pays no mind to the fact that this unravels every life-affirming function they perform as well. In the final paragraph of his essay, Foucault suggests that genealogy returns to the modalities of history in spite of the objections to them Nietzsche had raised ‘in the name of the affirmative and creative powers of life’ (p. 97). He omits, here as in the rest of the essay, Nietzsche’s emphatic insistence that the modalities – precisely because of their ahistorical component – simultaneously offer those powers of life an essential service. ⁷

In his one-sided emphasis on the disunifying uses of history, Foucault’s account of genealogy reproduces precisely those liabilities and abuses that Nietzsche criticizes so vehemently. Take Nietzsche’s first example of the dangers of excess history – the person who cannot forget, and who as a result cannot believe in her own existence, who sees everything fracturing into elements, who loses herself in becoming. A monumental, antiquarian, or critical approach to her past might aid in constructing a self precisely to the degree that it enables her to forget – picking out pivotal moments, narrating certain customs and traditions, shattering the rest. Parodic, dissociative, and sacrificial history, on the other hand, will only magnify her issues. Indeed, her predicament finds a certain echo in Foucault’s view of the historicity of the body. Against any transhistorical or ontological account of human form, Foucault claims that effective history ‘introduces discontinuity into our very being – as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself . . . [it] deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature’ (p. 88). Foucault has in mind here the long historical trajectory of humanity, but it takes only a small interpretive leap to read it as a description of Nietzsche’s totally historical human – her body divided, multiplied, deprived of reassuring stability by ‘effective’ history. In excising the ahistorical from Nietzsche’s modalities of history, Foucault’s account of genealogy describes a procedure for producing exactly that excess of history Nietzsche warns is hostile to life.

Origins in History: Ursprung, Entstehung and Herkunft

Foucault begins his essay with the analysis of Nietzsche’s terms for origin, distinguishing between two uses of Ursprung in Nietzsche’s corpus. On the one hand, Foucault claims, we find an unmarked use of the term, referring to a common and unproblematized concept of historical origin – the ‘real’ sources of guilt or logic, for example, that Nietzsche seeks to identify. This unmarked Ursprung is used interchangeably in Nietzsche’s writings with the terms Herkunft and Entstehung. On the other hand, we find a marked or ‘stressed’ use of Ursprung, one that evokes this concept of origin in an ‘ironic and deceptive manner’ (Foucault, 1984 [1971]: 77). Unlike the first use of Ursprung, this marked one is crucially not synonymous with Herkunft or Entstehung – indeed, Foucault identifies it by locating those moments where Nietzsche sets Ursprung in opposition to Herkunft. This marked use of Ursprung, Foucault claims, functions to challenge the very notion of origin as hopelessly metaphysical and idealist – marking Nietzsche’s opposition to any attempt ‘to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities’, for such an inquiry must assume ‘the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession’ (p. 78). If it seems strange that Foucault chose to open his essay with such a narrowly terminological and somewhat speculative reading, this is the claim that justifies its placement. Foucault argues that in the marked use of Ursprung, we find Nietzsche’s implicit undoing of all those artificial unities, identities, and continuities challenged by effective history. The analysis of Ursprung thus suggests the presence of a disunifying spirit at work in the background of Nietzsche’s genealogy – one operating at the level of language, separate from and perhaps prior to Nietzsche’s explicit claims about the dangers of history. In this sense, the analysis might lend credence to the historicist approach Foucault takes in the remainder of the essay. Yet even in this section where Foucault most explicitly thematizes his approach to reading Nietzsche, the reading is partial – and, indeed, finally unable to live up to Foucault’s own standards on terminological or conceptual grounds.

The first and perhaps most striking limitation of Foucault’s analysis has to do with the textual legitimacy of the distinction between the marked and unmarked Ursprung – and the privileging of the marked one – in Nietzsche’s writing. After identifying these two uses of Ursprung – apparently indicating two different relations to the notion of origin in Nietzsche’s genealogies – Foucault proceeds to include just one in his account of the properly genealogical approach. Foucault poses a simple question with a telling caveat: ‘Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of the origin (Ursprung), at least on those occasions when he is truly a genealogist?’ (p. 78, emphasis added). Foucault makes his own position clear – only the marked use of Ursprung, the challenge to origin and unity, is proper to the genealogical method; as he puts it later: ‘What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity’ (p. 79). Here as elsewhere, Foucault takes a Janus-faced Nietzschean figure and extracts just one side, the anti-metaphysical operation of dissolution.

Yet unlike those previous cases, Foucault touches here on the partial, selective nature of his own reading, though in disavowed form. The caveat in his question implies that his selection of only the marked use of Ursprung is justified because that first relation to origin – Nietzsche’s unmarked Ursprung – is not truly genealogical. On what basis does Foucault distinguish between the truly and falsely genealogical concepts in Nietzsche’s genealogical writings? In a brief reading of the preface to the Genealogy of Morals, Foucault suggests that Nietzsche makes a break with his earlier genealogical work, substituting the term Herkunft for what he had in earlier works (especially Human, All Too Human) referred to as Ursprung – thus ‘[validating] an opposition between Herkunft and Ursprung that did not exist ten years earlier’ (p. 78). This might substantiate a distinction in Nietzsche between the earlier, unmarked, non-genealogical Ursprung and the later, marked, proper Ursprung. However as Foucault then acknowledges but does not elaborate on, ‘immediately following the use of the two terms in a specific sense, Nietzsche reverts, in the final paragraphs of the preface, to a usage that is neutral and equivalent’ (p. 78). In an even more striking concession, in his footnote to this line, Foucault states that Ursprung and Herkunft continue to be ‘used interchangeably in numerous instances’ throughout the first and second essays of the Genealogy (p. 98n10). These caveats seem to undermine Foucault’s suggestion that the separation between these notions of origin was introduced by Nietzsche himself – not to mention the priority given to the marked one. And indeed, subsequent scholarly analyses of the use of Herkunft and Ursprung in the preface to the Genealogy suggest that Nietzsche intends to use them as synonyms throughout – even in the very moments Foucault claims that he opposes them. ⁸ Already in the line that Foucault identifies as the founding moment of this distinction, Nietzsche presents a ‘sequence of equivalent reformulations in which the terms are used interchangeably’ (Rockhill, 2020: 93).

Rather than introducing a sort of epistemological break in Nietzsche’s concept of origin, the stronger reading of the preface to the Genealogy of Morals seems to be that Nietzsche’s use of Ursprung always involves both the marked and the unmarked senses. Ironically, then, it seems that Foucault’s passing and implicit justification for his very one-sided inheritance of Nietzsche betrays a sort of idealism in his own account of genealogy: in claiming to select the truly genealogical side of Nietzsche’s dual evocations of Ursprung, Foucault treats genealogy as an arbitrary unity, a suprahistorical concept with an essence separable from its historical vicissitudes. In spite of himself, Foucault is unable to separate history from its ahistorical moment.

The second limitation of Foucault’s analysis has to do with the conceptual coherence of his delineation between different notions of origin. On the basis of this account of the marked use of Ursprung, Foucault draws out the proper objects of genealogical inquiry: Herkunft and Entstehung. Though in translation the two terms are commonly collapsed into Ursprung – all three converted to ‘origin’ – for Foucault they are better understood to designate, respectively, ‘descent’ and ‘emergence’. Properly distinguished, the inquiry into Herkunft and Entstehung promises to ground a genealogical analysis untethered from the metaphysical unities of the origin and the telos. Foucault’s account of the two, however, retains at least one such unity at its core: the figure of life, with its errors and polarities.

Herkunft, or ‘descent’, is opposed directly to the concept of origin and those false continuities it produces – instead, it evokes the contingent collection of traits, the arbitrary affiliation with a group. Against the traditional notions of a soul which ‘pretends unification’ or a self with its ‘coherent identity’, the genealogist’s focus on descent attends to ‘numberless beginnings’, ‘liberating a profusion of lost events’, and in so doing produces ‘the dissociation of the self, its recognition and displacement as an empty synthesis’ (Foucault, 1984 [1971]: 81). Genealogy disarticulates the various traits that constitute the identity of a person, a people, a concept. And it goes further, subjecting even those traits to its scalpel – permitting ‘the discovery . . . of the myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which – they were formed’ (p. 81). Here as elsewhere, Foucault’s genealogy stands firmly and exclusively on the side of disunity: this investigation into descent ‘disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself’ (p. 82). Crucially, however, in this dissection of false unities into so many tangled and knotted lines of descent, genealogy replaces the linear unfolding of an origin with the contingent and arbitrary production of organization through error:

to follow the complex course of descent . . . is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents. (p. 81, emphasis added)

In place of the teleological unfolding of a form, the motif of error and accident comes to the fore as an organizing principle of genealogical explanation.

We might recall, in this context, Foucault’s memorable formulation in the introduction to Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological that ‘life is what is capable of error’ – or, to shift the standard emphasis, life is what errs (Foucault, 1989 [1966]: 22). Life, Canguilhem teaches us, is that which is not indifferent to its conditions, which can become monstrous or pathological – that thing for which there can be errors and accidents. A given trait or concept, we might say, has to take on a certain life of its own – a certain normativity or polarity – in order for there to be deviations in its historical trajectory. This holds even for the apparently more neutral sense of the accidental as contingent, for contingency can only be distinguished from necessity on the basis of a claim that the development did not follow from some essence. This connection of error with life can be supplemented by Nietzsche’s formulation, included with his remarks on forgetting, of a ‘universal law’ of life: ‘every living thing can become healthy, strong, and fruitful only within a defined horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself and too selfish, in turn, to enclose its own perspective within an alien horizon, then it will feebly waste away or hasten to its timely end’ (Nietzsche, 1995 [1874]: 90). Life requires a horizon, a boundary that delimits what it properly is, what concerns it, what counts as normal, what it should remember – and conversely, crucially, forget. ⁹ Error requires life, and life requires a horizon – one that establishes dialectical unity, however false such unity may appear to the historical judgments of an ‘apocalyptic objectivity’ (Foucault, 1984 [1971]: 87). In approaching history through error and accident rather than essence and origin, the genealogical analysis of Herkunft does not manage to escape those idealist unities Foucault thinks he has left behind.

The situation is similar in the case of the second proper object of genealogical analysis, Entstehung, or emergence. If the study of Herkunft challenges the myth of the origin and the essence contained in it, the turn to Entstehung challenges its identical twin – purpose, telos. Just as descent is not a matter of continuity, emergence should not be understood in terms of a final cause orienting historical development: ‘the eye was not always intended for contemplation, and punishment has had other purposes than setting an example’ (Foucault, 1984 [1971]: 83). Instead, the study of emergence attends to the dynamic play of forces and wills, the subjugations that produce purpose as local and temporary effects: ‘These developments [the eye and punishment] may appear as a culmination, but they are merely the current episodes in a series of subjugations . . . [genealogy] seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations’ (p. 83). Emergence, that is, is ‘always produced through a particular stage of forces’, through ‘the struggle these forces wage against each other or against adverse circumstances’ (pp. 83–4). With emergence as with descent, the narrative structure that Foucault invokes to displace the idealist, teleological account ultimately contains its own idealist moment. The introduction of those forces whose struggle generates emergence is a sort of deus ex machina, solving the problem of a unified purpose by introducing a play of dueling purposes, without any non-purposive account of the emergence of those antagonistic wills themselves.

The consequence of these two limitations, taken together, is that Foucault does not succeed in establishing a separation of a marked from an unmarked concept of origin. Textually speaking, Nietzsche’s writing does not separate a marked Ursprung that stands apart from descent and emergence, and an unmarked one that is used interchangeably with Herkunft and Entstehung as three equivalent terms for the origin. Conceptually, the metaphysics of origin continues to haunt Foucault’s own alternative account of Herkunft and Entstehung as proper objects of genealogical analysis. Foucault’s attempt to identify a historicist spirit at work behind Nietzsche’s resolutely anti-historicist genealogical writings thus seems to fail by its own lights. What is more, this apparent inseparability of teleological origin from contingent descent offers a neat demonstration of Nietzsche’s own more dialectical formulation of the relationship between the ahistorical and history.

Conclusion

In his account of effective and traditional history as well as his treatment of the three historical modalities, Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche’s second Unfashionable Observation brackets the positive, constructive functions of the ahistorical and suprahistorical in favor of a concern with the danger their formal unities pose. On the basis of this partial reading, Foucault develops an account of genealogy concerned entirely with dissolving those unities, negating both their danger and their utility to life. As a result, Foucault’s genealogy ultimately recapitulates the deadening historicism that Nietzsche’s essay is so concerned with escaping. At the same time, in Foucault’s analysis of the origin we have found an unwitting demonstration of Nietzsche’s argument, illustrating the inextricable link between history and the ahistorical. Nietzsche, of course, recognizes the partiality and danger of the formal unities and teleological continuities offered up by the ahistorical and suprahistorical moments of history. But he nevertheless insists on them, because of their utility and indispensability to life. Foucault, on the other hand, never moves past that falsity – the ahistorical and artificial element of those unities – turning them against themselves in the name of their dangers. It is difficult not to conclude, in the end, that what Foucault calls genealogy has very little to do with Nietzsche’s project, offering little to life except an enervating historical fever.

In the register of intellectual history, this split is instructive in making sense of the French reception of Nietzsche as a great philosophical alternative to Hegel. ¹⁰ Accounts of this reception tend to emphasize the distortions to Hegel’s thought involved in establishing this opposition. The case of ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ suggests, however, that this purportedly Nietzschean turn depended on significant distortions to Nietzsche’s thought as well; Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche does not simply discover an anti-dialectical spirit, but rather depends on a highly partial reading of the text in order to extract one. To be sure, in this case as in others, the fault for this erasure of the dialectical movement of Nietzsche’s text cannot be laid solely at Foucault’s feet. As Barzilay (2023) has suggested, Foucault’s invocations of the Nietzschean concern that one might ‘perish from absolute knowledge’ – a phrase he used to cast Nietzsche as a methodological ally, including at a key moment in ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ – was premised on a translation of Nietzsche that gave his text a far more anti-Hegelian tone than the original holds. Barzilay (2023) argues that ‘this creative misreading would prove to be crucial: Foucault both used this phrase to posit Nietzsche as an alternative to Hegel while tying Nietzsche’s rejection of “absolute knowledge” to “being” itself’ (p. 203). Still, while translation might have suggested certain tendencies in Nietzsche’s work, it is evident that Foucault also had to overlook a number of crucial claims and examples in order to follow through on his historicist and anti-dialectical Nietzsche. Contrary to his inheritance by Foucault as well as Deleuze and other French scholars of the period – and to be sure, contrary to Nietzsche’s own suggestions – it appears that Nietzsche’s thought is in many ways compatible with that of Hegel, at least with regards to the philosophy of history. ¹¹

In the register of philosophy, the historicism of Foucault’s approach to genealogy is paralleled by the nominalism of his theory of power. In the reflections on power that frame The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault writes: ‘One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical position in a particular society’ (Foucault, 1990 [1976]: 93). Just as in genealogy every figure of essence must be decomposed into its constituent historical vectors, the analysis of power must reach beyond social structures and willful subjects to identify the particular relations and arrangements that produce their real existence: ‘It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization’ (p. 92).

It is for this reason that some Marxist and psychoanalytic thinkers find Foucault’s method ultimately inadequate to their objects – a useful supplement to or moment in the analysis, but finally incapable of explaining the phenomena they seek to address. Mau (2023) expresses this clearly: in the attempt to analytically dissolve structures of property and class into the mechanisms and microphysics of power, Foucault is left ‘incapable of identifying the underlying social logic of precisely those “infinitesimal mechanisms” of power which he is so eager to place under the microscope’ (p. 36). For example, while Foucault can offer a vivid analysis of the disciplinary forces at work on the factory floor, without addressing the structures that permeate the social field, he is left ‘unable to answer the question of why workers show up at the factory gates in the first place’ (p. 36).

Joan Copjec (1994) levels a similar criticism in the psychoanalytic register: by displacing the internally constitutive and fractious dynamics of a psyche with the external, disciplinary moulding of a subject, it becomes difficult to explain the phenomena of guilt and bad conscience. In light of Foucault’s reluctance to view power as a dynamic of institutional repression and psychic resistance, the disciplinary subject seems to be formed too neatly; conscience – as well as the prohibitions with which it tangles – are made superfluous and even inexplicable. On Copjec’s view, this produces a certain conceptual tension within Foucault’s own account of the panopticon, which depends on the effects of conscience for its operation: ‘the model of self-surveillance implicitly recalls the psychoanalytic model of moral conscience even as the resemblance is being disavowed. The image of self-surveillance, of self-correction, is both required to construct the subject and made redundant by the fact that the subject thus constructed is, by definition, absolutely upright, completely correct’ (p. 26).

Copjec puts forward a strong version of the criticism – but on this point, her analysis is echoed by Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power. Butler (1997) writes that, for Foucault, normalizing discourses ‘are said to imprison the body in the soul . . . and to that extent reduce the notion of the psyche to the operations of an externally framing and normalizing ideal’ – a move that ‘appears to treat the psyche as if it received unilaterally the effect of the Lacanian symbolic’ and thus posits a ‘malleable surface for the unilateral effects of disciplinary power’ (pp. 86–7). Like Copjec, Butler insists on a ‘psychoanalytic criticism of Foucault’ on the grounds that ‘one cannot account for subjectivation and, in particular, becoming the principle of one’s own subjection without recourse to a psychoanalytic account of the formative or generative effects of restriction or prohibition’ (p. 87). ¹² Butler’s essay goes on to break with Copjec’s Lacanian alternative – yet while the two follow different paths away from it, they nevertheless share this internal critique of Foucault’s theory of power, one that follows from its historicist, nominalist, and indeed anti-Nietzschean character. ¹³

Like Nietzsche’s own, ours is a moment enchanted by history and its abuses. Across the humanities and social sciences, historical narrative substitutes for critique; following Foucault’s model, ‘genealogical’ accounting of the finally historical character of every apparently natural form serves as the final goal for countless works of scholarship. The sharp tension between Nietzsche and Foucault’s understanding of genealogy, however, opens the question of the adequacy of this historicist approach – and the possibility of an alternative. Perhaps, following Nietzsche, the properly genealogical stance does not seek to dissolve every metaphysical unity in the acid bath of history but inquires after which unities must be retained in order for history to be intelligible, or to serve the purposes of life. Indeed, perhaps the first such unity to be retained would be that of life itself – for as Nietzsche insists, it is life that gives history its purposes, that renders any concept of origin coherent. This would be a genealogy that could not adopt the constructivist stance from the outset; that could not assume every development is contingent because it follows a historical path; that could not neatly oppose natural essence and historical existence. Even with its insistence on certain idealizations, perhaps this would be the properly materialist genealogy. For in spite of the appearance of a thoroughgoing materialism at work in the Foucauldian approach to genealogy, such analyses invariably lapse into idealism; as Mau points out, Foucault’s concern with the concrete turns out to be highly abstract. Against the historical sickness of its day, and against the historicist fugue into which it has been recruited, Nietzsche’s genealogy begins from the dialectical recognition that we must forget in order to remember, that history requires its opposite, that genuine materialism contains an idealist moment.