Abstract

While traces of a post-metaphysical political theory are to be found throughout his oeuvre, Nietzsche himself never explicitly elaborates any such comprehensive theory. Yet, this chapter argues, it is possible to discern a politics beyond ressentiment and the ascetic ideal, which must be both experimental and pluralist. Inspired by Nietzsche, Foucault thinks the political as a play of force relations immanent to a concrete strategic field, and thus as a multiplicity of power relations existing in agonistic tension rather than as a duality in antagonistic opposition. This makes him one of the most significant inheritors of the Nietzschean challenge to overcome the politics of ressentiment and to think instead a politics of affirmation that makes difference constitutive of the political.