will to knowledge

is meant to designate not a striving for knowledge but the need to create knowledge.

Foucault saw it as fitting to use a phrase like 'the will to knowledge' to designate not a striving for knowledge but the need to create knowledge.

is not a driver to discover the truth... the will to knowledge is a drive to establish a discourse.

The phrase, 'the will to know,' as noted in Part I, is the French title of The History of Sexuality: Volume One, but it, and its variant 'the will to knowledge,' are dangerously misleading phrases. It may appear initially that the will to knowledge is, after all, a basically Cartesian conception: the will to learn the truth. But if the phrase is taken in this sense, the point of Foucault's work will be seriously missed. Foucault is precisely not speaking of knowledge as learning the truth. The whole point is to understand the structure of discourse that makes something count as knowledge and makes something count as truth. The will to knowledge is not a driver to discover the truth... the will to knowledge is a drive to establish a discourse. What Foucault wants to understand, then, is how we developed our discourse on sexuality and so made certain notions and ideas knowledge about sexuality: how we manufactured the truth of sex and sexuality, which we then reappropriate as knowledge about sex and sexuality. And here again one must guard against facile interpretation.

is not about knowledge as a means to learn the truth, but about how the structure of discourse is guided to make something count as knowledge and to make something count as truth.

The drive toward knowledge has a moral origin.

is the idea that the weapons of reason were forged as elements of the tactics of rule.

that Nietzschean notion that the weapons of reason were forged as elements of the tactics of rule' (Stoler 2001:863)

will to knowledge, n.Definitions

will to knowledge