Foucault's Nietzschean genealogy: A study of Michel Foucault's Nietzschean problematic, 1961-1975

This project is a study of the Nietzschean genealogical problematic as it informed the writings of Michel Foucault from 1961 to 1975. This problematic emerged in terms of three genealogical axes--truth, power, and the subject--as early as 1961. My concern, then, is Foucault's problematic, not his methodology; my project reveals the complex of axes into which Foucault was drawn, especially as a result of his early history of madness, which called forth his explicit adoption of a Nietzschean approach to his future work.;After tracing the gradual emergence of the three axes through Foucault's writings of the remainder of the 1960's, especially Les mots et les choses. I turn to his explicit methodological statements and his notion of genealogy. In the context of an analysis of Nietzsche's own comments on genealogy, I offer a reading of Foucault's L'archeologie du savoir, arguing that there is no chasm between Foucault's archaeological writings and his genealogies.;The project concludes with an examination of Nietzsche's and Foucault's respective practice of genealogy, emphasizing Foucault's focus upon the transformations of penal practices which give rise to the modern soul as individuality. Foucault's genealogy, his attempt to reveal the concrete, historical and practical conditions of existence, maintains a firm rootedness in penal practices, and this allows him to provide a genealogy of modern individuality more in keeping with the description of genealogy previously examined.;By interpreting Foucault's Histoire de la folie in the light of Nietzsche's genealogy of tragedy I try to show how the moral problematization of madness in history provides the historical conditions from which the three axes emerge. Power, manifest in the practices of interning the mad, functions positively by constituting mental illness as a phenomenon available to perception. Throughout the project I focus upon the role played by space and time and argue that Foucault's mature understanding of power arises from his attempt to rethink the transcendental aesthetic in a Nietzschean, radically historical fashion. The truth axis, secondly, emerges from the moral problematization of madness; in the soil of the moralization of madness mental illness can be problematized in terms of truth. Finally, the moral problematization of madness is constitutive of the modern individual; on the basis of the moralization of madness modern man finds himself categorized, located in space, constrained by time, disciplined, normalized, and individualized.