Standing Problems 247to power and eternal recurrence should not be viewed as metaphysical categories or
essences. For Derrida, Nietzsche was suspicious of all totalizing metaphysical categor-
ies. He seems to be the epitome of the attempt to become postmetaphysical. However,
in both Derrida and Nietzsche we still seem to be permanently strung out between
metaphysics and the postmetaphysical world.
Mentioning Nietzsche marks a convenient point to turn to Foucault’s work. Fou-
cault is one of the most consistent and preeminent Nietzschean thinkers in the
twentieth century. He commented, ‘I am simply Nietzschean, and I try to see, on
a number of points, and to the extent that it is possible, with the aid of Nietzsche’s
texts’ (Foucault 1988: 250–1). He claimed to have been converted by reading Nietz-
sche’sUntimely Meditationsin the late 1950s, although his actual direct commentaries
upon Nietzsche are rare. However, in substance all his writing bears witness to the
influence and many have regarded his work on asylums, prisons, hospitals, and the
like, as an extension of Nietzsche’sGenealogy of Morals. Foucault in effect tried to
look at society through the eyes of a Nietzschean genealogist. Like Derrida, he also
resisted the humanistic perspective, however, he was more historically and—and in
terms of Derrida’s earlier work—more politically focused than Derrida.
One essay Foucault devoted to Nietzsche is characteristically focused on genealogy.
He sees the source of genealogy in Nietzsche. Genealogy unpacks the fundamental
ideas through which humanity constitutes itself. It also aims to make us critical of
our present discourses. In other words, it destabilizes the present as much as the
past. It is not the same as orthodox history. It does not discover any sequence or
chronology. It is not a search for origins.^14 In fact, genealogy teaches us to laugh at
the solemnities of historical origins, great individuals, and great events. It ‘rejects the
metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies’. Genea-
logy does not capture the essence or teleology of anything, because nothing has an
essence, telos, chronology, or underlying sequence. Essences assume immobility and
secure identities. What one finds, for Foucault, as regards human thought and action
in general is ‘the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in
a piecemeal fashion’. There is no inviolable identity to events, only disparity. In rend-
ing the veil of the past we do not then encounter any universal truth about humanity
or history. For Foucault, ‘the very question of truth, the right it appropriates to refute
error and oppose itself to appearance, the manner in which it developed (initially
made available to the wise, then withdrawn by men of piety to an unattainable world,
where it was given the double role of consolation and imperative, finally rejected as
a useless notion, superfluous and contradicted on all sides)—does this not form a
history, the history of an error we call truth?’ (Foucault 1986a: 76–80). This quote,
which Foucault uses as a motif for his own thought, is a direct exegesis of Nietz-
sche’s one-and-half-page history of Western metaphysics (referred to earlier in the
Nietzsche section) from theTwilight of the Idols. In substance, it is an exemplification
of Nietzsche’s doctrine of ‘perspectivism’.^15 One of his earlier and most brilliantly
executed booksLes Mots et Les Choses(1966)—translated asThe Order of Things—
is in some ways a book-length expansion of the same Nietzsche passage. This is a
passage that Derrida amongst others also refers to with admiration. Essentially it is