From a Biopolitical Point of View: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Crime

Although Michel Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche is involved in the reasoning of this essay, this paper does not deal with the topics most philosophers focus their attention on when they praise or severely criticize Foucault’s so-called “Nietzscheanism.” As a matter of fact, Foucault made rather scholarly use of Nietzsche. By “scholarly” I mean that he did not celebrate à la française, the famous “will to power” as a principle of heroic vitalism like so many of Nietzsche’s enthusiastic readers throughout the last century. What really interested Foucault was the less apparent aspect of this famous “principle of a new evaluation” as Nietzsche himself conceived of the “will to power.” Foucault did not seek this principle in the mountainous regions where Zarathustra and his author preferred to live; instead, he searched for it in those environments of enclosure where the air is impure and almost no sunshine penetrates. As we all know, around the year 1800, the prison was starting to become the preeminent instance, the model and ideal, of all the enclosed environments used by the so-called disciplinary societies to organize their (vital) forces. All his assertions to the contrary cannot obscure from the reader that in the case of the criminal, Nietzsche, in both his effects and his thoughts, moves again and again into a zone of indifference, which at the same time is a zone of the utmost difference. In his writings, Nietzsche takes both the position of the highest and the healthiest, and the position of the lowest and most underprivileged, and alternates abruptly and in an unusual way between the two. Nietzsche dismisses the crime but not the criminal. Although the criminal is without an essence and all the moral ways of suppressing him are of course forbidden for a free