Nihilism, seen via the lens of Foucault’s reinterpretation of the death of God, is not a belief, not a sickness, not even a radical scepticism towards truth claims. Instead, it is a historical horizon in which man experiences and comes to know his own subjectivity through various games of truth, discourses and disciplinary regimes, such as the medical discourse of mental illness, the hermeneutics of desire or the normalizing techniques of (bio)power. In this history of subjectivity, the process of self-discovery can hardly be understood via existentialist vocabulary, as something that gives unique meaning to our lives. The reason for this is because self-knowledge is possible only through specific terms which govern the relations between the subject and the object, even the relation of the self to itself (such as the relation of the individual to his/her own sexuality, complicated via the pastoral and psychiatric practices of confession). In this sense, as long as the main question facing philosophy is ‘what is man’, as long as we ask ‘why’ rather than ‘how’, and as long as man as the speaking and living subject is the foundation for his own knowledge, God and his murderer are engaged in a deadly contest with more than one round.

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Yet nihilism carries with itself the liberating promise that man himself will also disappear, ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’, once we draw out the most radical consequences from the death of God and recognize contingency as a source of infinite possibilities in the field of knowledge, in which man is just a transitory figure. [4] What is at stake here is nothing less than the promise of a fundamental rearrangement in the conditions that govern the relations between the knowing subject and known object, intimately linked with the affirmative aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In his book on Foucault, Gilles Deleuze interpreted the death of man in terms of knowledge coming in relation with ‘new forces’ from the outside, radically different from the forces of infinity and finitude that were at work in the classical and modern epistemes under the God-form and Man-form. [5] In this movement of epistemic revaluation, we can glimpse the world of becoming and affirmation, symbolized in the figure of the never-attainable Übermensch.

On Foucault’s reading, the teaching of self-overcoming offers us a model for a radical critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity, which paves way towards a new economy of power-knowledge relations. Here finitude would no longer be what founds and limits man’s knowledge ‘but rather that cumber and knot in time when the end is in fact a new beginning’. [6] With the stark realization that truth grounded in empirical finitude falls back on itself, the death of God restores us ‘not to a positivistic world but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits’, the limits of what can be known, said and written in a given moment of history. [7]

The modern episteme opens up towards the Nietzschean figures, but not to incorporate them into the order of discourse in a way that produces the most sure and legitimate ways of knowing. Rather, it does so to sacrifice the disembodied and unified subject of knowledge in that brief moment when discourse breaks down, precisely at the limits of what can be said in a way that is intelligible, when a certain risk of unrecognizability is put into play. This experience of the limit wrenches the subject from itself, as he finds himself ‘upon the sands of that which he can no longer say’. [8] In this sense, nihilism emerges as a critical force that undermines epistemological authority not to deny the possibility of knowledge per se but to point towards radically different ways of knowing that might emerge at the limits of philosophical subjectivity.

Yet Foucault remains careful in his discussions on the prophetic role of the Nietzschean figures, not sure if the approaching light is ‘the reviving flame of the last great fire or an indication of the dawn’. [9] On this point, he seems to be following Nietzsche quite closely: both authors dedicate only a few brief (though vivid) passages to the figure of the Übermensch. When it comes to Foucault, it is tempting to read this as a hint that he is just as deeply implicated in nihilism as the universal modern subject. After all, the most telling manifestation of nihilism is its all-pervasive yet unconscious working upon the bodies and souls of the last man who cannot recognize himself in the murderer of God. The doubly murderous gesture is an event that is too distant for many ears: provoking laughter rather than sympathy, the madman fears that ‘the tremendous event [the death of God] is still on its way’. [10]

We are trapped in an episteme that is deaf to the Nietzschean figures precisely because of their transgressive status as those who speak from outside of discourse, from the other side of that normative divide between madness and reason, perhaps from the other side of knowledge. The only way in which we can attempt to make sense of madman’s words, or, more broadly, of signs that are not yet discursive statements, is to radically question the terms on which they become naturalized in discourse and through which we come to recognize ourselves as legitimate subjects. The madman’s voice is prophetic in this context precisely because of his liminal position as someone who has been marginalized, excluded and silenced over the entire history of the Western episteme, whether he becomes locked into an asylum, sent away onto the dark night on a ‘ship of fools’, or diagnosed with mental illness. [11]