"The Awful Difficulties of a Theory of the Will": Foucault's Nietzschean Critique of Ideology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.068 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".