Nietzsche once said: “I am not a man; I am dynamite!” - an image that suggests that in overcoming ascetic ideals he was destroying himself as well. Despite the influence of Nietzsche and his own interests in self-overcoming, when referring to his own work Foucault preferred the less explosive metaphor of the toolkit. Foucault invited his readers - after all, in order to use him we must read him - to pick up what they found usable and ignore or discard the rest.

To be sure, self-overcoming was a central feature of Foucault’s project as he described it toward the end of his life. Moreover, in the Nietzschean vein, he privileged critique over efforts to establish procedures and norms necessary to legitimate social and political order – destabilizing rather than securing our identities as human beings. In referring to his works as part of his biography, he was suggesting not only that the problems he targeted were based on his own experiences, but also that the very practice of doing archival research and writing genealogies altered his self-understanding – his works literally “worked” to transform the self.