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Andrew Cutrofello

Foucault on tragedy

Abstract Foucault never presented a systematic history of tragedy, but

reflections on the relationship between tragedy and the will to truth are
scattered throughout his writings. Given the Nietzschean inspiration of his
work, this is not surprising. Yet Foucault rarely referenced The Birth of
Tragedy, preferring to draw on Nietzsches later genealogical writings. In
this paper I highlight the importance of The Birth of Tragedy for understanding Foucaults entire corpus, suggesting that it can be read as a
sustained consideration on the political significance of the madness of
Orestes from Aeschylus to Racine.
Key words Aeschylus Euripides Foucault Nietzsche Racine
Shakespeare tragedy

Foucault never wrote a systematic study of the history of tragedy, but

remarks about tragedy are scattered throughout his writings. Given the
Nietzschean inspiration of his work, this is not surprising. The focal
point of Nietzsches The Birth of Tragedy is not the birth of tragedy
out of the spirit of music, as its original title proclaimed, but the birth
of science out of the spirit of the will to truth. As Nietzsche says in his
retrospective Attempt at Self-Criticism, the aim of his first book was
to look at science through the prism of the artist, but also to look at
art through the prism of life.1 Science is seen to have arisen from the
Socratic will to truth, which Nietzsche views through the prism of
Euripidean tragedy, whose differences from Sophoclean and, especially,
Aeschylean tragedy he regards through the prism of the Greek experience of the Dionysian. If tragedy thus serves as the middle term between
divine madness and the will to truth, then to thematize the birth of
tragedy or rather the birth of science is to try to return, in history,
to that zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself.2
This is how Foucault characterized his own project in the preface to
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 31 nos 56 pp. 573584
Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453705055490

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Histoire de la Folie a preface that he later retracted (in favor of
another), just as Nietzsche added a self-critical preface to the second
edition of The Birth of Tragedy. In what follows I will first say a few
words about the implicit presence of The Birth of Tragedy in Foucaults
own reflections on the relationship between Greek tragedy and the
Socratic will to truth. I will then discuss, and elaborate upon, his
remarks about Shakespeare and Racine, with the modest aim of concluding that reflections on the historicity of tragedy were central to
Foucaults thought as a whole.3
The Birth of Tragedy is implicitly present in Foucaults 1973 lectures
at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro. Instead of
focusing on differences between Aeschylus and Euripides, as Nietzsche
did, Foucault calls attention to what he regards as a crucial difference
between Homer and Sophocles.4 In the Iliad, a dispute about truth is
resolved by appealing to a divine witness rather than to a person well
situated to say what happened.5 But in Oedipus the King, the responsibility for bearing witness to the truth is shared by gods and mortals.6
Thus, as Foucault points out, Oedipuss downfall occurs not when
Tiresias, Apollos divine spokesman, announces that Oedipus is the one
responsible for the defilement of Thebes, but when two slaves confirm
this divine pronouncement by attesting to their own humble experiences.7 Sophocless play is said to reflect the transition from monarchy
to democracy in Athens.8 But it culminates not in the denigration of
divine spokesmen such as Tiresias but, on the contrary, in an alliance
between these spokesmen and the people against those with power.
Foucault suggests that this same alliance is to be found in Plato, who,
in granting both the people and a priestly caste of philosophers the right
to tell the truth, inaugurated the central myth that has sustained the will
to truth ever since, namely, the belief that power and knowledge are
opposed to each other: With Plato there began a great Western myth:
that there is an antinomy between knowledge and power. If there is
knowledge, it must renounce power. Where knowledge and science are
found in their pure truth, there can be no longer any political power.9
This great myth needs to be dispelled, since political power is not
absent from knowledge, it is woven together with it.10 Foucault
suggests that Nietzsche, more than any other modern thinker in particular Freud offers the most pertinent of the models that one can
draw upon for dispelling the Platonic myth.11 For this reason, he
characterizes his own work, like that of Deleuze and Guattari (whose
Anti-Oedipus had just been published), as operating in a Nietzschean
vein though it is noteworthy that Foucault preferred to reference other
works of Nietzsches than The Birth of Tragedy.12
The influence of The Birth of Tragedy is also felt in the lectures on
parrhesia which Foucault presented at the University of California in

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Berkeley in 1983.13 Here Foucault detects, as Nietzsche did, a decisive
difference between Sophocles and Euripides. In Oedipus the King,
Sophocles depicted the shift in the responsibility for truth-telling from
gods to human beings, but he stopped halfway, allowing the two parties
to share this responsibility. Euripidess Ion completes this shift by
allowing the responsibility for speaking the truth to devolve entirely on
Athenian citizens.14 In Sophocless play, slaves must confirm a truth
which Apollo has already spoken. But in Euripidess play, Apollo
remains silent, and is discredited as a rapist, liar, and coward.15 Thus it
is no longer a question of portraying a powerful human being who is
guilty for failing to heed a truth spoken by a god; on the contrary, Ion
is powerless because a guilty god has failed to speak the truth. Foucault
concludes that the main intent of Euripidess play is to portray a very
explicit shift from the oracular truth at Delphi to Athens: Athens
becomes the place where truth now appears.16
Euripides was the first to use the Greek word parrhesia, which
according to Foucault denoted not only free speech but a certain type
of attitude that the truth-teller was supposed to adopt in speaking the
truth.17 How this attitude changed over time is Foucaults principal
concern. In his play Orestes, Euripides contrasts the good parrhesia of
the honest citizen with the bad parrhesia of the demagogue.18 The first
significant modification of this political construal of the term can be
found in Platos representation of Socratic dialectics.19 Instead of
opposing human truth-telling to divine truth-telling (as in the Ion), or
political wisdom to political flattery (as in the Orestes), Socrates opposes
the philosophical quest for truth to the false rhetoric of the Sophists.20
In doing so he connects parrhesia to practices of self-disclosure and selftransformation, that is, to care of the self.21 In tracing the genealogy
of these practices from the Hellenistic period to early Christianity and
beyond, Foucault was implicitly reworking Nietzsches idea that modern
practices of truth-seeking have their roots in something that appeared
for the first time in Euripides and Socrates.
How the historicity of the will to truth is related to the post-Socratic
history of tragedy is a topic that Foucault touches on in other works.
For instance, in his 1976 lecture course at the Collge de France, Society
Must Be Defended (hereafter SMBD), he offers the tantalizingly brief
suggestion that from the Greeks to Shakespeare and Racine, tragedy has
always been concerned with problems of public right.22 In contrast
to a Hobbesian philosophico-juridical discourse that disavows sovereigntys roots in the violence of conquest, tragedy does not avert its gaze
from the role of domination in government (SMBD 57). Shakespeares
history plays are especially attentive to the wound . . . the repeated
injury that is inflicted on the body of the kingdom when kings die violent
deaths and when illegitimate sovereigns come to the throne.23 Racines

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tragedies also deal with the spectacle of fallen monarchs, but they pose
the problem as to whether or not starting from this decomposition of
the sovereign into a man of passion, the sovereign-king can be reborn
and recomposed (SMBD 176). The fact that Racine does not portray
French monarchs as Shakespeare did English kings is explained by
Foucault in terms of political differences. In England, debates about
sovereignty in the 16th and 17th centuries revolved around the Norman
Conquest of 1066, while in France they remained rooted in medieval
narratives concerning the Trojan origins of the Franks (SMBD 1634).
In the Middle Ages, all the nations of Europe claimed to have been
born of the fall of Troy, including England, which traced its ancestry
back to Brutus, a purported son of Priam (SMBD 75). After the Norman
Conquest, this myth ceased to be central to the discourse surrounding
sovereignty in England, but in France it came to function as a way of
legitimating the French states claim to be a second imperial Rome
(SMBD 117). Foucault suggests that by taking up classical themes in his
tragedies, Racine was able to depict the flip-side of the ceremonial at
the French court whereby everything pertaining to the mere humanity
of the king his food, his clothes, his sex life, etc. was transmogrified
into something royal (SMBD 176). The ceremonial of the court, in other
words, was designed to underscore the difference between the kings
earthly body and his sublime body. By dealing with the corruption and
resurrection of the sublime body of ancient kings, Racine indirectly
highlighted the magisterial glow of Louis XIV, whose own splendor
would have been (as it were) too bright to behold directly. By contrast,
Shakespeares history plays cast a harsh light on English monarchs
whose claim to sovereignty often rested (like that of Richard III) on
brittle glass (IV.ii.61).24
As Ernst Kantorowicz notes in his classic study The Kings Two
Bodies (which Foucault draws upon in Discipline and Punish), Shakespeares The Tragedy of King Richard the Second is a tragedy about the
kings two bodies.25 Up until Bolingbrokes successful rebellion, Richard
genuinely believes the English legal fiction according to which the king
had two bodies: one corporeal and finite; the other spiritual and incorruptible. Shakespeare portrays the spectacle of a king gradually discovering that in and of himself he is not a king but just a mortal human
being. In this respect, Richard represents the inverse of Racines Louis.
In order to convince the French citizens that he really was a king, Louis
had to masquerade as one. By contrast, Richard is so convinced that he
is a king, period, that he does the exact opposite, namely, acts as if he
were just an individual whose right to rule rested solely on contingent
relations of force. Long after his forces have deserted him, Richard continues to act on the essentially delusional belief that kings are kings by
divine decree. Yet this does not make him an unsympathetic character

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in Shakespeares eyes. On the contrary, as Richard slowly discovers that
he never had a sublime body but only an ordinary human one For
you have but mistook me all this while. / I live with bread like you
(III.ii.1745) his last loyal followers (the Bishop of Carlisle, Aumerle,
and Sir Stephen Scroop) play the role of an ancient chorus even more
reluctant than Richard himself to accept the bitter truth.
All of Shakespeares history plays even The Famous History of the
Life of King Henry the Eighth, which culminates in a prophecy of greatness for Queen Elizabeth (V.iv.1762) can be characterized as tragedies
of mourning rather than triumphalist tragedies of commemoration. The
problem that Shakespeare addresses is that of the contingency of sovereignty: how, after ceremonies such as the anointment of a king have
become merely ceremonial, can we distinguish between legitimate and
illegitimate rule? Richards uncle, the ineffectual Duke of York, deals
with this problem by taking himself to be duty-bound to whichever
faction happens to have been sanctioned by ceremony. Thus, after first
impotently condemning Henry Bolingbrokes unlawful usurpation, he
takes himself to be legally obliged to expose his son Aumerles plot to
restore Richard to the throne. This act proves to be more comical than
heroical, but it also underscores something that Henry has become all
too aware of, namely, the fragility of sovereignty. From the moment that
Henry takes the crown which Richard mockingly invites him to seize,
he finds himself in a situation in which power can no longer dazzle by
its splendor (IV.i.181). This is why he cannot execute Richard, let alone
make his dread power felt on Richards all-too-human body in the
manner in which Louis XV was to treat poor Damiens. On the contrary,
the once-dazzling English Sun King must be hidden from public sight in
Pomfret Castle, where Richard busies himself (several hundred years
before Foucault) studying how I may compare / This prison where I
live unto the world (V.v.12).
In his description of the execution of Damiens, Foucault contrasts
the sublime body of the king with the least body of the condemned
man, an abject body that had to be subjected to the exact inverse of
royal transubstantiation so as not to glorify the criminals power but on
the contrary to show that he had absolutely none.26 The great danger
was that this ceremonial might backfire, that at the very moment when
the empirical body of the prisoner had been destroyed, his sublime body
would come back to haunt the king. This is precisely what Henry fears
when he is told of Richards death. Shakespeares play ends with the
apprehensive king promising to make a voyage to the Holy Land / To
wash this blood off from my guilty hand (V.vi.4950); but as we learn
at the beginning of The First Part of Henry the Fourth, perpetual civil
strife will prevent him from ever making this pilgrimage (I.i.2830).
Instead, in The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Shakespeare derisively

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depicts the king dying in the Jerusalem Chamber in Westminster Abbey
(IV.v.240). Of all of Shakespeares English history plays, it might seem
as if The Life of Henry the Fifth comes closest to being a play of
unabashed triumphalism rather than a Trauerspiel. But although the
play has as its central theme Henrys heroic victory over the French, the
Chorus pointedly reminds the audience at the end of the play that this
victory was short-lived, for so many had the managing of the affairs
of the young Henry VI that they lost France, and made his England
bleed; / Which oft our stage hath shown (Epilogue, 1113). The insistent theme of all of Shakespeares history plays including those depicting ancient tragic heroes such as Brutus, Coriolanus, and Titus
Andronicus is that the body politic is in a constant state of war. Hence
Richmonds promise (in The Tragedy of Richard the Third) To reap the
harvest of perpetual peace / By this one bloody trial of sharp war
(V.ii.1516) rings just as hollow as had Edward the Fourths Sound
drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy! / For here I hope begins our
lasting joy (V.vii.456) at the end of The Third Part of Henry the Sixth.
Foucault suggests that the representation of power in Shakespearean
tragedy is fundamentally different from that in Hobbes. Hobbes does
not claim that war is perpetual; on the contrary, his entire discourse is
geared toward showing that from the very moment of our birth, when
we fall under the sway of our parents, we are constantly subject to a
sovereign power of some sort. Even the fictitious warre of all against
all involves not genuine warfare but only the threat of war, a threat
which is both sustained and averted through acts of dissembling: There
are no battles in Hobbess primitive war, there is no blood and there are
no corpses. There are presentations, manifestations, signs, emphatic
expressions, wiles, and deceitful expressions (SMBD 92). By disavowing powers dependence on the violence of conquest, Hobbes defends
the absolute legitimacy of the sovereign. In this respect his discourse is
far removed from the tragic dimension of Shakespeares history plays.
Foucault suggests that Hobbess Leviathan, published in 1660, was
written in response to the political struggles surrounding the Levellers
and the Diggers during the English Civil War (SMBD 98). In contrast
to the royalists and the parliamentarians, who despite their differences
agreed on the legitimacy of the reign of William the Conqueror (or
William I), the Levellers and the Diggers argued that the Norman
Conquest was an act of domination against which the English Saxons
had never ceased to struggle (SMBD 107). From this they concluded
that all the laws of England were illegitimate and should be rebelled
against: The social order is a war, and rebellion is the last episode that
will put an end to it (SMBD 110). Hobbes responded to this threat of
rebellion by putting forth the reactionary thesis according to which
we are always in a state of legitimate submission to a power that is

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sovereign. On this view, the society that must be defended is a unitary
one with a common history centered on the continuity of sovereign
power.
Foucault claims that until the beginning of the 16th century, all
historical discourses were histories of sovereignty in both senses of the
genitive of, their aim being to bind and dazzle, that is, to tie subjects
to the law and immobilize them through the splendor and glory of the
sovereign (SMBD 68). The English radicals were among the first to
subvert this paradigm by putting forth counter-histories of race (SMBD
66). To the purportedly universal and inclusive discourse that said
We are all English; we are all subject to the same king, the Levellers
and Diggers responded with an explicitly partial and divisive counterdiscourse that said We are Saxons suffering under the Normans. Such
counter-histories of race served not to commemorate a shared history but
to attest to the ignominious history of a defeated faction, a history
recounted from a prophetic rather than a triumphalist point of view.
These counter-histories interest Foucault for a number of reasons. First,
because they are the first historical discourses to acknowledge the partiality of their own place of enunciation; second, because they call the
bluff of the discourse of sovereignty, showing that it too is articulated
from a partial point of view; third, because they prefigure the hypothesis that Foucault says he would like to explore in his lectures at the
Collge, namely, the idea that we are always in a (not Hobbesian but
Nietzschean) war of all against all; fourth, because they provide him with
a point of departure for a genealogy of modern racial discourses from
19th-century eugenics to the normalizing discourse of biopower in postfascist liberal societies; and finally because they serve as a model for
Foucaults own counter-historical discursive practice. Like the Levellers
and the Diggers, Foucault wants to say that all law is illegitimate, or
rather that if the condition of war is perpetual, there is never a rigorous
or non-partial way of distinguishing the violence of domination from
the legitimate power of sovereignty. The fact that Foucault hesitates to
endorse the antecedent of this conditional i.e. what he calls the inverted
Clausewitzian thesis that politics is a continuation of war by other means
does not imply that he has any lingering nostalgia for a Hobbesian discourse of sovereignty, something he would have been likely to impute to
Habermas (SMBD 1516). Rather, it attests to his uneasiness with the
category of domination, and specifically with the Freudo-Marxian
category of repression that seems to go hand in hand with the inverted
Clausewitzian hypothesis. Hence the exploratory character of the 1976
lecture course. The question that Foucault repeatedly asks himself is
whether it is possible to say that war is perpetual without thereby subscribing to the repressive hypothesis which he subjects to such a withering critique in the first volume of the History of Sexuality.27

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If Shakespeare really does offer a non-Hobbesian, and hence nonjuridical, representation of the relationship between power and the
claim to sovereignty, perhaps his plays offer a clue to this problem. If
so, it might be found in the fact that Shakespeare was no less skeptical
of counter-historical discourses than he was of reassuring histories of
sovereignty. While he pokes fun at the comically convoluted justification
which the Archbishop of Canterbury gives in persuading King Henry V
that he is justified in his claim to certain lands in France (I.ii.3395), he
is equally contemptuous of the rhetoric of rebellious mobs. Shakespeare
died some 30 years before the Levellers and Diggers were active, but he
was familiar with other popular rebellions against the purported legitimacy of English law, such as the peasant rebellion of Jack Cade in 1450.
His dramatization of this rebellion in The Second Part of Henry the
Sixth contains Dick the Butchers memorable line The first thing we do,
lets kill all the lawyers (IV.ii.767), an exhortation that is similar in
spirit to the tracts of the Surrey Diggers. But unlike Foucault, Shakespeare expresses more apprehension than enthusiasm for his populist
rebels, who, when they discover that the Clerk of Chatham can write
and read and cast accompt, immediately sentence him to death for
being a villain and a traitor (IV.ii.856, 1078). Shakespeares sympathies are entirely with the poor clerk, as they are with the unfortunate
Cinna the poet, whom the angry Roman citizens (in The Tragedy of
Julius Caesar) decide to tear with fire-brands not because they confuse
him with Cinna the conspirator (as they do at first) but for his bad
verses (III.iii.301, 356). In depicting the hostility of unruly mobs to
those who are literate or literary, Shakespeare suggests that although no
state power can count itself above the condition of perpetual war
though no sovereign power can claim to rule without an effect of domination it does not follow that we would be better off in a condition
of untrammeled war. A pastoral ideal of stateless utopia is evoked in
comedies such as A Midsummer Nights Dream and As You Like It, but
in the tragedies and histories his hapless citizens whenever they appear
in twos or (more typically) threes, as opposed to disappearing in riotous
crowds express as much anxiety about anarchy as they do tyranny.
Typical is the response of one of the citizens to the death of King Edward
in Richard the Third: Ill news, byr lady seldom comes the better. / I
fear, I fear twill prove a giddy world (II.iii.45). Foucault does not
comment on this dimension of Shakespearean drama, but perhaps it
would have enabled him to say something about alternatives to the
repressive hypothesis.
In Histoire de la Folie, Foucault takes Ophelia, Lear, and Lady
Macbeth to exemplify the literary experience of madness in the Renaissance, but he grants an especially privileged place to the madness of
Orestes in Racines Andromache (Madness and Civilization, hereafter

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MC, 31). After killing Pyrrhus and being spurned by Hermione, Orestes
succumbs to the Erinnyes. To Foucault, this represents both the end of
reasons dialogue with madness and the end of tragedy itself (MC 112).
Racines play is said to be suspended between night and day, between
the night of error, dream, and delirium, and the pitiless clarity of truth,
reality, and reason. When Orestes goes mad he falls into that night from
which there is no return, the night of an incessant devouring (MC 115).
This division between day and night also governs the structure of
the first surviving Greek tragedy of right (SMBD 175), namely, Aeschyluss Oresteia cycle (hereafter O). Agamemnon begins with the enforced
insomnia of the Watchman who must lie awake/ . . . to mark the grand
processionals of all the stars of night/ . . . nor ever with dreams for
company. At last he sees the long-awaited flare, the blaze of the
darkness, harbinger of days / shining.28 Night has been pierced with
the promise of day. Yet when this day dawns and Agamemnon returns,
he immediately disappears into the darkness of the domestic hearth
where he is ruthlessly murdered by Clytaemestra. Each act of violence
in Aeschyluss trilogy is carried out in the dark; only the corpses are
exposed to the brutal light of day. When the Furies come to terrorize
Orestes, they emerge from the dark, threatening never to return to their
proper abode. Only after being mollified by Athene do they willingly
descend back into the underworld, grave goddesses whose path is lit
by flamesprung / torchlight, like the final flare in the sequence from
the fall of Troy to the advent of Athenian democracy (O 171).
The Oresteia culminates in Athenes assurance to the Furies that the
Athenian citizens will heed their advice to Refuse the life of anarchy; /
refuse the life devoted to / one master. / The in-between has the power
/ by Gods grant always, though / his ordinances vary (O 153). As
Athene puts it: No anarchy, no rule of a single master. Thus / I advise
my citizens to govern and to grace, / and not to cast fear utterly from
your city (O 160). Not to cast fear utterly from your city: this means
not to act with hubris or in the manner of a lawless tyrant. Aeschyluss
trilogy commemorates the advent of Athenian democracy, and it does
so not only when Athene constitutes the jury that will absolve Orestes
of his guilt (after Athene herself casts the deciding vote) but just as
importantly when Athene placates the wrath of the Furies, promising
them a place in the Athenian hearth. Agamemnon begins in medias res,
in the wake of three successive acts that can be thought of as crimes of
sovereignty: Atreuss slaughter of the children of his brother Thyestes
(whom Atreus feeds to the unsuspecting father as revenge for Thyestess
attempt to usurp his throne), Agamemnons sacrifice of his daughter
Iphigeneia (in order to launch the Greek ships bound for Troy), and the
Greeks annihilation of the Trojans (an event communicated by a relay
of flares to the Watchman who, at the beginning of the Agamemnon,

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crouches, dog-like, on the roof of the palace of Argos). Like a chain
reaction akin to the lighting of the successive flares, these actions spark
a series of acts or rather discourses of revenge: Clytaemestras
justification for her revenge for the death of Iphigeneia; Aegisthuss
justification of his revenge for the death of his brothers; Electra and
Orestess justification of their right to seek revenge for the death of
Agamemnon; Orestess justification of the revenge he is about to take
on his mother; and the Furies justification of their right to seek revenge
for the death of Clytaemestra. This cycle of revenge and justification is
interrupted only with the appeasement of the Furies and their consecration of the Athenian state: There shall be peace forever between these
people / of Pallas and their guests (O 171). The question that Foucault
invites us to ask is whether Aeschylus accounts for the impurity of the
passage from the cycle of revenge to the constitution of the law. For at
the very moment when the law claims to suspend the reign of unmitigated violence, violence is present in its most unmitigated form.
What interests Foucault about the Andromache is another final
descent, not that of the Furies (or Erinnyes) to the underworld but that
of the madness with which they terrorize Orestes, who is himself cast
into an unremitting night. The end of Racines play is said to represent
the moment when madness ceased to be the sign of another world, and
. . . became the paradoxical manifestation of non-being (MC 115).
Henceforth, to confine the mad meant not to participate in a complex
mediation between the human and the divine as when Orestes appeals
first to Apollo and then to Athene, who constitutes a jury of Athenian
citizens, but then casts the deciding vote herself but to exclude from
the light of day anyone who does not conform to the dictates of reason.
Foucault suggests that it is at this precise historical moment that tragedy
disappears as the dominant form of artistic expression, to be replaced
by the novel, which has as its central theme not the problem of right
but the norm, a term that he associates with the advent of biopower
(SMBD 175). Thus the end of tragedy occurs, for Foucault, not with
Euripides as it did for Nietzsche but with Racines appropriation of
Euripidean tragedy (for Euripides also wrote an Andromache). Just as
Orestes departure from the stage exhibits the logic of the great confinement, so Racines play conveys a new understanding of what it
means to speak the truth.
Unfortunately, Foucault never presented a sustained genealogy of
tragedy. But from Histoire de la Folie to his lectures on parrhesia, his
entire corpus can be read as a sustained reflection on how to disentangle the complex relationship between the madness of Orestes the
madness of Dionysus and the sobriety of Socrates, Descartes, Kant,
and Freud. And if this is so, then everything that Foucault wrote (to

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quote Foucault on everything that Nietzsche wrote) is related to The
Birth of Tragedy.29
Loyola University, Chicago, IL, USA

PSC

Notes
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and other writings, ed. Raymond
Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 5.
2 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the
Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988),
p. ix. Hereafter cited in the text as MC. The quoted passage, like the rest
of the preface, is in italics.
3 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Foucault Circle in
December 2004. For helpful comments I am grateful to Jim Bernauer, Laura
Hengehold, Ed McGushin, Dan Price, Brad Stone, Joseph Tanke, and
Shannon Winnubst.
4 Michel Foucault, Truth and Juridical Forms, trans. Robert Hurley, in
Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, Volume
Three, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1994).
5 ibid., pp. 1718.
6 ibid., pp. 312.
7 ibid., p. 23.
8 ibid., p. 31.
9 ibid., p. 32.
10 ibid.
11 ibid., p. 5.
12 ibid., p. 16.
13 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2001).
14 ibid., p. 38.
15 ibid., p. 41.
16 ibid., pp. 378.
17 ibid., p. 11.
18 ibid., pp. 5774.
19 ibid., p. 91.
20 ibid., p. 102.
21 ibid., p. 92.
22 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de
France 197576, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David
Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 175. Hereafter cited in the text as
SMBD.

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23 SMBD 174. Cf. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collge de
France 19741975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003): This problem of the infamy
of sovereignty, of the discredited sovereign, is, after all, Shakespeares
problem: It is precisely the problem posed by the royal tragedies, without,
it seems to me, the sovereigns infamy ever having been theorized (13).
24 All references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
25 Ernst Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political
Theology, with a new preface by William Chester Jordan (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 2441.
26 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 29.
27 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 15ff.
28 Aeschylus, Aeschylus I: Oresteia, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 35. Hereafter cited in the body of the
text as O.
29 It is of little importance on exactly which day in the autumn of 1888
Nietzsche went mad for good, and after which his texts no longer afford
philosophy but psychiatry: all of them, including the postcard to Strindberg,
belong to Nietzsche, and all are related to The Birth of Tragedy (MC
2878).

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