The Hidden Asceticism of Knowledge: Rereading The Gay Science Genealogically with Nietzsche and Foucault

From the first edition of The Gay Science (1882) to the second (1887), Nietzsche gave considerable thought to the problem of how a will to truth emerged in the history of knowledge. In this article, I advance a threefold thesis: first, I argue that in 1887 Nietzsche reread his own Gay Science genealogically, and that it is within this new context that he uncovered a hidden asceticism of knowledge, inherent in the will to truth "at any cost." Second, I show that Foucault grasped this shift as early as his work in the early 1970s, where he in fact describes Nietzsche's history of truth as an ascetic history. Third, I seek to highlight the implications Foucault drew from this analysis for the genealogical project of The Will to Know , the first volume of The History of Sexuality .