Provocations in the fi eld of History: Nietzsche and Foucault, thinkers of the present

Abstract

What is history? While thinking about the writings of history and the discourses that form it, I decided to start writing this text. I would like to enquire of the reader about his or her understanding of this fi eld of knowledge, thereby stimulating our own thinking in order to create other possibilities of creating the History of Education. Based on Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, I present the traces of a History of the Present as an opportunity for us to make history a fi eld of knowledge which resists the return to the origins, but which looks at the accidents, the drawbacks, the defl ections, the recurrences and the dispersions. It is a history that neither claims to seek a founding origin nor to disclose the truth that lies in its original essence. I also seek to show that the constitution of history has been produced by relations of power that cut across each other; relations of strength that are responsible for the meanings we attribute to the norms and rules, moving away from the understanding that these issues have an embryonic meaning. The text was therefore written with the greater purpose of provoking the thinking of the historian, and announcing the possibilities of using the concept of history of the present in Nietzsche and Foucault as a productive tool for the fi eld of knowledge in History. Perhaps through this provocative history, we might be able to answer how we became what we are, as subjects of knowledge and subjects of power in the present, stimulating us to think of history in a different way, and to become different from what we are at present.