Genealogy Between Health and Illness: On the Ambiguity of the Historical Sense in Foucault’s 1969-1970 Vincennes Lectures on Nietzsche

This article revisits Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, with a special focus on the medical metaphors surrounding the definition and practice of genealogy. It argues that, in addition to the emphasis on the notion of diagnosis as a key medically inspired element of genealogy, it is important to consider an aspect that has been significantly less explored in existing scholarship on Foucault’s appropriation of Nietzsche’s philosophy: that of genealogy as a “curative” art or as a “science of remedies.” Hence the article presents Nietzsche as a thinker of health and disease, and his views on the philosopher as a kind of physician. Then, it moves on to examine the “historical sense” as a notion that plays a key role in Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche in his 1969-1970 lectures at Vincennes and his definition of genealogy as a practice of history that both emerges from epochal disease and points to possible forms of healing. My claim is that, in the Vincennes lectures on Nietzsche, the historical sense can be described as something that can poison and heal, and as a process of immanent critique of the present, carrying the possibility of its transfiguration.