"The Awful Difficulties of a Theory of the Will": Foucault's Nietzschean Critique of Ideology

ABSTRACT: This paper starts from an enigmatic passage from Foucault's 1971 lectures on Nietzsche at McGill University about "the awful difficulties of a theory of the will" raised by the attempt to reduce Nietzsche's critique of knowledge to the signifier and the effects of meaning. I shed light on his reference by resituating it in the French interpretative context of the time. Then, through a comparison with Foucault's lectures at SUNY Buffalo given a year later, I highlight how this question also targets Lacanian psychoanalysis and, above all, Althusser's theory of ideology. I show that the conceptual scope of Foucault's critique of ideology can be better grasped if we link it to his interpretation and reworking of Nietzsche's thought during these years. Finally, I argue that the masking effects often evoked by Foucault in his genealogical research are incompatible with the notion of ideology. Yet they can be explained through the reference to Nietzsche's falsification apparatus that produces knowledge and its marks, by situating the emergence of knowledge and truth in the relationship between the "enchantment of the false" and the "domination of the will," which supports Foucault's genealogical aim of writing a history of truth and of the relationship between knowledge and power in Western culture.