> I think Foucault fits nicely alongside Marx rather than in opposition.
> Anyway that is my first cut at the problem you have posed.
Some time ago I pointed to an essay by James Miller tracing out the links between Foucault and Nietzsche, particularly as these are found in Discipline and Punish. Here are some extracts indicating the central thesis.
> "As we have seen, Foucault, at the outset of Surveiller et punir,
> declares his ambition to write, as Nietzsche did, a “genealogy” — a
> “genealogy of the modern ‘soul.’”11 Interpreting the eagle and sun as
> Nietzschean symbols suggests, more narrowly, that we read Surveiller
> et punir as a genealogy of a special type of modem soul, namely “the
> last man”— docile, oblivious, a stranger to creative energy, unable to
> take flight, unwilling to be different, serenely unaware of those
> “hair-raising and hazardous things” that have driven other men “into a
> madhouse.” In effect, Surveiller et punir would then become a sequel
> not only to Foucault’s own exploration of the madhouse in Folie et
> déraison but to Nietzsche’s original Genealogy of Morals — a sequel in
> which the French genealogist shows how the modern human sciences have
> taken over the role of Christianity in disciplining the body and
> constituting the soul, substituting for the Christian soul, “born in
> sin and subject to punishment,” a modern soul, born under surveillance
> and subject to an indefinite discipline, “an interrogation without
> limits.” “If I wanted to be pretentious,” Foucault remarked in an
> interview shortly after the publication of Surveiller et punir, “I
> would use ‘the genealogy of morals’ as the general title of what I am
> doing.”
> "Now, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals expresses the same disquieting
> transvaluation that I have already noted in Surveiller et punir.
> Nietzsche, too, expresses skepticism about the value of eliminating
> pain; he also expresses an unwonted, disturbing sympathy for
> institutions that promote public displays of cruelty.
> "Nietzsche, furthermore, explicitly places the phenomenon of cruelty
> at the heart of his genealogy. By cruelty, I mean (to modify slightly
> the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary) “a disposition to
> inflict suffering”; indifference to or delight in pain or misery;
> mercilessness, hardheartedness, especially as exhibited in action.
> “Man is the cruelest animal,” writes Nietzsche in Thus Spoke
> Zarathustra: “Whatever is most evil is his best power and the hardest
> stone for the highest creation.”
>
> "More fateful, because more fundamental, though, is Nietzsche’s
> proposition — at first advanced hesitantly — that the infliction of
> pain, to the extent it excites pleasure, ought not to be regarded as
> evil. When suffering is “accompanied by pleasure (feeling of one’s
> own power, of one’s own strong excitation),” writes Nietzsche in
> Human, All Too Human, “it occurs for the wellbeing of the individual.
> Without pleasure no life; the struggle for pleasure is the struggle
> for life. Whether an individual pursues this struggle in such a way
> that people call him good, or in such a way that they call him evil,
> is determined by the degree and quality of his intellect.”
> "This formulation, which yokes pleasure and pain together it a kind
> of Dionysian folie à deux, grows increasingly central to Nietzsche’s
> thought. To exercise actively the will to power, he regards as the
> essence of life. To exercise this power with abandon is not only to
> court being cruel but, when cruelty occurs, to enjoy the pain, the
> suffering, the agony that cruelty causes. “To practice cruelty is to
> enjoy the highest” — note the adjective: the highest —“gratification
> of the feeling of power.” To enjoy the exercise of power is, in
> effect, to be cruel: This is Nietzsche’s hard teaching."
>
> "Governed by the will to truth — a will nurtured and preserved by the
> practice of asceticism — the philosopher finally appears, who,
> recognizing that the idea of truth is itself a kind of fiction, spares
> nothing in telling us that everything we hold as solid and certain
> about the world is, on closer examination, demonstrably accidental,
> contingent, or false — laws, ideas, philosophies, religions,
> moralities, everything. Such honesty risks ending in nihilism — the
> catastrophic conviction that nothing is true and anything is
> permitted. Destroying, as it does, assumptions and essential
> convictions that enable societies to function and most people to feel
> at home in the world, the philosopher’s will to truth is “a kind of
> sublime wickedness.” But this final cruelty, unlike its Christian
> antecedent, does not incarcerate the will to power; rather, it
> promises to liberate this will from the shackles of groundless guilt,
> thereby restoring “its goal to the earth” by translating “man back
> into nature” — an animal nature’ characterized, among other things, by
> cruelty: the primordial pleasure to be found in causing pain."
James Miller "Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty" in
_Political Theory_, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), 470-491.
Ted