Foucault, Genealogy, History

A couple of months ago I read a pretty convincing book on 'Foucault's Nietzschean genealogies'. It's no longer fresh in my mind and it was recalled to the library so I don't have it on hand to consult, but last night I read the most important essay Foucault wrote on Nietzsche - "Nietzsche, genealogy, history'. Foucault is almost remarkable in his generation for NOT having written a book on Nietzsche. At the same time, he's perhaps the most consistently Nietzschean. As the book I just mentioned (by Michael Mahon) argues, the main project that took up most of Foucault's career was a genealogy of morals. His essay on Nietzsche presents an extremely familiar and straightforward Nietzsche. He focuses mainly on the untimely meditation on the uses and misuses of history and the genealogy of morals, and he doesn't take many liberties with his interpretation. At times it feels like he's just paraphrasing Nietzsche. At the same time, when he's outlining what the aim of genealogist is, appropriate methodology. etc., you could forget he was talking about or through Nietzsche and imagine he was just explaining his own books, from the history of madness to the history of sexuality. The essay does place a lot of unnecessary emphasis on a dubious distinction to make its most basic (and obvious) point - it tries to distinguish the words 'Ursprung' and 'Herkunft' (or 'Entstehung')... the problem being not that he's wrong about what the words mean in German, where they come from and what distinction could be made, but rather that, as Foucault himself makes plain, Nietzsche actually uses Ursprung with both the negative meaning Foucault wants it tied to and the 'good' concept that Foucault is associating with 'Herkunft'... not that it matters all that much, since the concepts he is dealing with are indisputably present in Nietzsche.. 'Ursprung' is used by Foucault to designate a set point of origin that determines something once and for all, a mythical beginning before the fall or pretty much any a-historical/ trans-historical essence, where as 'Herkunft' is used to designate origin as a slow process of coming into being and transformation that shows all the accidents of history that explain how something got to be what it is at this moment, without any pretense of knowing what it will be or any particular interest in what it once was, except insofar as that contributes to its current state of being (or rather becoming). Of course, Nietzsche's anti-platonism is kind of old hat, and among historians in general, there is a general awareness of the dangers of creating a teleological narrative, of trying to eradicate chance and make everything leading up to the present seem inevitable (As a side note, something in both Bataille and Klossowski, that I haven't really explored enough is the conflating of chance and necessity of embracing chaos as a necessity - everything leading up to this moment being necessary not because a carefully laid out plan is being followed through but because allowing all the possibilities of chance to unfurl is necessary, because if all the things leading up to now hadn't been possible there would have been no chance, chance being life and becoming... not that this is exactly what's said by anyone anywhere, but it is pointing in the right general direction - necessary and inevitable are not the same, and there is a strong connection between the necessary and the arbitrary, the two are not mutually exclusive and this is part of the meaning of the eternal return - which has nothing much to do with Foucault). Anyway, Foucault and Nietzsche are unite in denying an essence of man, in looking into the construction of the self and in believing that beliefs, values and basic assumptions of all kinds are historically determined, that institutions, ideas, words and so forth do not necessarily keep their original meanings, that they are invested with new meanings by those who turn them to their own purposes, and both believe that this history is mainly driven by struggles for sovereignty and domination. Both believe that explaining values held by society today means revealing shifting constellations of force. Neither believes that there is some truer absolute system of values that has to be rediscovered or finally obtained that is being obscured by this interplay of forces and investment of institutions and ideas by interests. Neither wants to have anything to do with transhistorical constants like 'human nature'. In his book on Nietzsche and Foucault, Mahon at some point notes that Nietzsche is never closer to Foucault than in the passage in Genealogy of Morals where he talks about the different meanings societies have given to punishment, which he ties to an analysis of the word 'Schuld' - punishment initially being repayment for a debt, the joy that the creditor got seeing the debtor suffer being recompense for the property loss or pain inflicted, with a very belated idea of a person being punished because he was responsible for his actions (guilt being linked to responsibility), and punishment as a deterrent. I've never found the passage particularly convincing, but the basic idea of the same punishments being used by different societies with different intentions and different justifications inevitably makes you think of Foucault's book 'Discipline and punish' (which is a bad translation - it should be 'punish and surveil'), though Foucault is interested in shifting penal practices and what that says about intentions, and, of course, he actually does a lot of research and doesn't speculate as wildly... as you can see with the 'Schuld' and 'Herkunft' distinction, he isn't reading too much into a word and its origins (the idea that 'repayment' is a straightforward joy in the suffering of another), he's using those words as a logical way of maintaining a very clear conceptual distinction... of course, now that I think about the violence he does to 17th century theatre and renaissance paintings to make statements about how society deals with madness, I retract what I just said - Foucault goes at least as wild as Nietzsche on occasion, making baseless claims, and however much use he makes of the archive, he is guilty of considerable distortion and simplification. But still...