Thibaut Bardon and Emmanuel Josserand (2011). “A Nietzschean reading of Foucauldian thinking: constructing a project of the self within an ontology of becoming”. Organization, 18 (4), p. 497-515.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508410384758
Abstract
As influential as Michel Foucault may be in organization theory, several critics have seriously questioned the epistemological foundations of the Foucauldian philosophical project (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1995, 1999; Caldwell, 2007; Habermas, 1990; Newton, 1994, 1998; Reed, 2000; Thompson, 1993). If these remain unanswered, the Foucauldian approach could be relegated to a self-contradictory, ultra-relativist and partial reading grid of ‘reality’. In this article, we develop a Nietzschean reading of Foucault’s thinking that offers answers to these criticisms, and reinstates it as an independent philosophical project grounded in epistemological assumptions that are coherent with its ontology and methodology. Finally, we suggest that, following Nietzsche, the whole Foucauldian project can be approached as a genealogy of morals. Subsequently, we call on scholars to further explore the ‘third generation’ of Foucauldian studies which would study management practices as morals understood as an ‘art de vivre’.
Foucault News 
A Nietzschean reading of Foucaultian thinking is the proper way to read Foucault’s work: it has never been otherwise, no secret revealed for those that have been always close to Nietzsche. It is fully doubtable that any of Foucault’s detractors would really ‘seriously’ question Foucault’s epistemological departures at the end of the day: we should take their statements more like a way they have to defend their positioned academic parcel, at the time that they would always be tempted to say anything to dismiss Foucault’s work. Like Richard Rorty, who considered that Foucault’s contribution to philosophy was only regarded to the topic of homosexuality (!).
So it is better to make it clear more like an affirmation than just a simple suggestion: Foucault’s work was all too ascribed in terms of the Nietzschean investigations! and this is something that should be always affirmed rather than suggested. There should be no doubt about this fact. We even can easily see how Nietzsche’s prose in Genealogy of morals preludes Foucault’s investigative-writing style. Both styles have and were articulated with the same discoursive ‘effect’, so to speak 😉 We also can see how, in the last phase of his philosophical research and after knowing he had got the AIDS, Foucault turned his back to Nietzsche, or to better say: the event that Nietzschean philosophy meant for him was eclipsed by the event of he having AIDS. The ‘last Foucault’ overturned his own nietzschean investigation emphasizing an apology towards his life and in terms of the ‘care of the self’ etc, etc. But this ‘turn (to the subject)’ had anything to do with Nietzsche or against him: it had to do with Foucault recriminating himself about how he finally disposed his nietschean life.
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