A submersed trajectory: Michel Foucault's "Nietzsche hypothesis" in his courses at the Collège de France between 1970 and 1976

• Grant number: 19/22639-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: June 01, 2020
• End date: February 28, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Monica Loyola Stival
• Grantee: Rafael Gironi Dias
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

From the analysis of Lectures on the Will to Know, first course taught by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France in 1970-1971, we see how the "Nietzsche hypothesis" was initially built on the philosopher's research. By "Nietzsche hypothesis" we understand the analysis of history "disimplicated" of certain assumptions of origin, as the relation of truth to the subject of knowledge, which conducts the will to know to a will to truth. From this "disimplication", the notion of event, precious to history, can assert the materiality of discourses, direction proposed by Foucault in The Discourse on Language, inaugural class in that institution. The materiality of discourse, as it appears throughout the classes, is the multiplicity of relations with which a discourse considered truthful abandons its state of purity, allowing the real struggles that make up discursive practices to appear: the scope of domination, conflicts, violence. Hence, the "Nietzsche hypothesis" makes a genealogy of history, in which the will to know is done through the will to power. In 1976, in the course 3Society Must Be Defended3, Foucault announces the desire to abandon the "Nietzsche hypothesis" as an analytical key to the power relations, whereas he makes, throughout the course, a genealogy of history from the operator of the "war". Thus, in this project we propose to analyze the Foucault courses at the Collège de France between 1971 and 1976, in order to understand how the "Nietzsche hypothesis" was led by the philosopher to its abandonment as a submersed trajectory, it seems, and as a critique of Nietzsche. (AU)