It is enough for people to dominate over other people for the differentiation of values to arise. It is enough for certain classes to dominate over other classes for the idea of freedom to emerge. It is enough for people to appropriate and subjugate the things they need to live, enough for them to impose a duration that the things themselves do not possess, or to forcibly assimilate them, and here is the genesis of reason.

The relationship of domination is not a "relationship," just as the place where domination is exercised is not a place. This is precisely why, at every moment in history, the "relationship" of domination is solidified into a certain ritualistic form; it imposes obligations and rights; it establishes procedural practices. It engraves marks, imprints memories onto things, even onto bodies; it takes charge of the management of debts.

The rule is the calculated enjoyment of savagery, the promised bloodshed. It allows for the unceasing rekindling of the game of domination; it orchestrates precisely repeated violence. The tendency towards peace, the sweetness of compromise, the silent acceptance of the law, are far from that great moral transformation or that useful calculation that would supposedly generate the rule.

With the texts of this volume, Foucault seeks to negotiate certain fundamental aspects of Nietzsche's work, freeing it from the narrow confines of academic literary-philosophical commentary and applying it to the entirety of theories and practices of discourse, especially in the realm of philosophy.