For Foucault, Nietzsche is the philosopher who has broken with the modern concept of philosophy, with philosophy as a movement of totalization with a universal claim. Since Nietzsche, thinking is satisfied with establishing the particular. It is itself perspectival instead of assuring itself of its origin and its plausibility or truth in the transcendental subject. The paths of thinking no longer allow themselves to be bundled and organized from a central perspective. They are dispersed into the variety of the manifold phenomena themselves. From now on, philosophy is exhausted in a diagnostic procedure. It becomes a genealogy of the present-day after it has rejected the possibility of a transcendental grounding of truth in the principle of the subject. “I therefore think that the idea of a philosophy that comprises the whole is relatively new; I think that the philosophy of the twentieth century is about to fundamentally change itself anew and that not only with respect to its limits and extent, but also in the sense of its relativization. For, what does philosophizing mean today? It does not mean creating a discourse of the totality, a discourse which takes up the world in its totality, but it means exercising quite concretely a certain activity, a certain form of activity. To put it in a somewhat truncated way, I would say that today philosophy is a form of activity which can be exercised in various areas.” The problem with this truncation is obvious. In order to release philosophy from its desire for the totality, it seems to be necessary to deny it in its original, in no way simply Hegelian dimension as prote philosophia or prima ontologia. A philosophy can only hope for a necessity and future for itself if it liberates itself from the claim to totality and universality. It can no longer present itself as the investigation of principles. It must renounce the study of first principles. Its narratives must open up to the beyond of the totality, to the experience of what is incommensurable. It opens up to the experience of irreducible contingency. But was it not precisely Nietzsche who raised contingency to the status of a principle by welcoming the constancy of becoming as the eternal recurrence? Perhaps Nietzsche, without therefore necessarily being the last metaphysician, the thinker of consummating Platonism in the Heideggerian sense, is the philosopher who is distinguished by a special insistence onphilosophy as the question of principles, precisely when he presents himself, as he always does, as the subject of the radical questioning of first principles. For Nietzsche, philosophy means perhaps nothing less than consent to the ontological facts. Nietzschean ethics would be nothing other than the ethics of the affirmation of recurrence. It would appeal to the subject’s courage to affirm the indifference of the multiplicity of beings or of what is not the same. It would urge that this affirmation be conceived of as the origin of an ethical or aesthetic or political construction.