Une fidélité de Foucault à Nietzsche : le langage comme fil conducteur généalogique

This paper aims at showing that Foucault took seriously, in his own genealogies, a crucial methodological aspect of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, which is the fact that the relative stability of linguistic forms compared to semantic mutations can be used as a guiding thread by the genealogist in his quest for traces of becoming. To open this field of investigation, one must first overcome the prejudice of the word, namely the illusion that an unchanging universal is attached to every term (for example “the good” in Nietzsche or “the state” in Foucault). If words do not have an ideal meaning which would extract them by right from history, but are, on the contrary, a “power which is to be seized”, then the history of words is significant in itself, or better: it is, in many respects, the very history we have to tell.