346 Epilogue
The basic outline of Dialectic of Enlightenment is thus Nietzschean,
because the book centers on the wrenching tension that was found in
Nietzsche. In Adorno and Horkheimer's study, the focus is power; in
Nietzsche, it was music. The twentieth-century text featured Odysseus
in chains; Nietzsche looked to Dionysus, the future god. In his way,
Adorno would become a disciple of this Dionysus, perceiving what was
once real life only as a remote echo from works of art.
Dionysus and power were the two themes that drew Michel Foucault
to Nietzsche as well. In 1961, Foucault published his first major work,
Madness and Civilisation, which analyzed the modern universe of reason
from its peripheries, from the perspective of the disenfranchised and
marginalized confines of madness. When he described "other" reason
as a negation of the civilization of the classical age and thus provided it
with an identity, it was not hard to recognize the face of Dionysus lurk-
ing behind this "other." Of course, it was Georges Bataille who had
brought the Dionysian Nietzsche to Foucault's attention as the voice of
"other" reason. Bataille also introduced the ecstatic and mystic
Nietzsche into French philosophy as early as the 1930s. Foucault built
on this philosophical foundation with his research into the birth of
modern reason. He contended that we need to retrace the history of dis-
persions and divergences and locate the moment at which Western rea-
son prevailed against the experience of tragedy, domesticated the "blithe
wodd of pleasure," and was no longer prepared to attend to the voice of
madness. Foucault considered his investigations a project of "great
Nietzschean research" that "seeks to confront the dialectics of history
with the fixed structures of tragedy" (Foucault, Wahnsinn 11).^3
When Foucault expanded on his project by making disenfranchised
forces his theme and conducting an analysis of power, he remained
(^3) This prefiactory remark by Foucault appeared in an introduction to the
German edition of Madness and Civilisation. —Translator