73 ISSN 1392–1274. PROBLEMOS 2009 75 POWER, HISTORY AND GENEALOGY: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND MICHEL FOUCAULT Andrius Bielskis ISM Vadybos ir ekonomikos universitetas Arklių g. 18, LT-01129 Vilnius El. paštas: andrius.bielskis@ism.lt The essay explores Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Michel Foucault’s accounts of genealogy. It argues that ge- nealogy sees human history not in terms of events, battles and wars (i.e. through empirical facts), but in terms of discursive regimes and practices which form our subjectivity. The link between knowledge/ truth and power plays crucial role in both Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s accounts of genealogy. Foucault’s notion of dispositive (the regime of intelligibility) serves as a key concept in his approach to history. The Nietzschean idea of the will to power is transformed into the idea of strategies of relations of forces sup- porting and supported by types of knowledge. The essay concludes that Foucault’s genealogy reduces meaning to power relations. It argues that in Foucault’s thought human history is intelligible not because of its inner meaning, but because knowledge and discourses, which play a key role in human history, are understood in terms of tactics and strategies. Keywords: genealogy, philosophy of history, power, discourse. introduction the essay aims to address a genealogical approach to history originated by Friedrich Nietzsche and further advanced by Michel Foucault. at the core of their conception there is a specifc genealogical notion of power. Michel Foucault has once claimed that power is a sort of generalized war which takes the forms of peace and the state and that “[p]eace would then be a form of war, and the state a means of waging it” (Foucault 2002: 124). To conceptualise peace in terms of war and the sate as a means to wage war points to a radical break in the way we see social and political relationships. Even Thomas Hobbes, who argued that life in the sate of nature was “nasty, brutish, and short”, did not consider peace to be another form of war. The state of nature and “war of all against all” argument for Hobbes was an excuse to propose the necessity of the strong sovereign state to guarantee peace and order. Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogical projects transform and go beyond the modern understanding of power as embodied in the sovereign state. Foucault, for example, claimed that in political theory the king’s head should still be cut off (Foucault 2002). Thus the issue I want to explore are, frst of all, some of the reasons for this transformation, and then what Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s projects of genealogy are about as well as how their accounts of power infuenced the specifc genealogical understanding of history. Thus Nietzsche’s thought in the On the Genealogy of Morality will be set