theater of the absurd nietzsches genealo

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2010,American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 2

Teater of the Absurd:

Nietzsches Genealogy as Cultural Critique

James I. Porter

Abstract.Te paper seeks to demystify Nietzsches concept of genealogy. Geneal-

ogy tells the story of historical origins in the form of a myth that is betrayed fromwithin, while readers have naively assumed it tells a story that Nietzsche endors-eswhether of history or naturalized origins. Looked at more closely, genealogy,I claim, tells the story of human consciousness and its extraordinary fallibility.It relates the conditions and limits of consciousness and how these are activelyavoided and forgotten, for the most part in vain. Te lessons are these: there is nohuman time before consciousness; no unconscious activity that is uncontaminatedby consciousness or culture; no period of prehistory that isnt already historical orhistoricized, hence subject to dehistoricization (for prehistory, Urzeit, always comes

after history, in the form of a myth); no primordial innocence of becoming, letalone any future condition free of these same constraints. Genealogy is the critiqueof the myth of knowing critique.

W

henever a reader of Nietzsche confronts the problem of genea-ogy, it is tempting for her to assume she is in familiar country.Genealogy is after all akin to history. As we read in the preface

to Nietzsches canonical account from 1887,1

the aim of genealogy is to mounta critique of moral values and the value of those values by reconstructing anactual history of morality, the sources for which are to be found in what isdocumented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in shortthe entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past ofmankind.2Genealogy tracks large expanses of time, millennia one can actuallycount. Here we finally come to grips with agents who are driven by urges that atleast approximate to passions and instincts, as opposed to those ghostly agencies

Te following is drawn from a book in progress entitled Nietzsche and the Seductions of Metaphysics.Many thanks to Charles Bambach for the invitation to contribute to this special issue.

1F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. W. Kaufman (New York: VintageBooks, 1967), henceforth GM.

2GM, Pref. 7.


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of the will to power straining to exert themselves against the background of somemetaphysical and barely imaginable flux.3And we can speak about evolutionaryprocesses in the formations of character, class, race, and nation, with consequences

that are recognizably, or at least contestably, moral and political. Howeverunsettling it may prove as a cultural diagnosis, genealogy at least provides thesolace of a story with a familiar plot, one easily and intuitively followed: it is the

well-worn tale of human decline and hoped-for redemption. Indeed, here thefamiliar becomes almost banal, a repetition of itself, or as Nietzsche would say,gray. At the extreme, genealogy is Nietzsches least original theory, in ways notmuch different from Homeric and Hesiodic mythology, the Judaeo-Christianstory of the fall, or Marxian anthropology.

I.

Genealogy and the Sense of History. Genealogy does convey a sense of his-torical perspective. In what sense is it a history? It is doubtful that genealogyis historical at all, although it is widely construed to be, just as Nietzsche is

widely assumedon Nietzsches own authorityto be a practicing genealo-gist, which is to say, a counter-historian, a historian of even the apparentlynon-historical, of what we tend to feel is without history. Tat, at least, is the

view set forth by Michel Foucault in his immensely influential essay, Nietz-sche, Genealogy, History.4And yet, it would seem heroic but in vain to try, as

3See J. I. Porter, Nietzsches Teory of Will to Power, inA Companion to Nietzsche, ed. K.Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2006), 54864.

4M. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 13964, at 139; cf. 152: Te role of genealogy is to record. . . the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of libertyor of the ascetic life, etc. Similarly, A. Nehamas,

Nietzsche, Life as Literature(Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1985), 112: [Genealogy is] an effort to take history itself very seriouslyand to find it where it has least been expected to be . . . . [Genealogy] tries to show how the wayin which [those institutions and practices, like morality] undergo changes as a result of historicaldevelopment; A. C. MacIntyre, Genealogies and Subversions, in A. C. MacIntyre, Tree RivalVersions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and radition (Notre Dame: University of NotreDame Press, 1990), 39: genealogy traces the historical genesis of the psychological deformationinvolved in the morality of the late nineteenth century. B. Williams rightly cautions againsta narrow reading of Nietzsches view of history, but does not go far enough in recognizing thedegree of invention that colors this view: a Nietzschean genealogy can be seen now as starting

from Davidson plus history (B. Williams, Nietzsches Minimalist Moral Psychology, EuropeanJournal of Philosophy1 [1993]: 114, at n. 11). All these authors refer to Nietzsche or the recipientof his program as a genealogist. Blondel goes so far as to coin the solecism, lhomme, en tantqutre gnalogiste (E. Blondel, Nietzsche, le corps et la culture: La philosophie comme gnalogie

philologique [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986], 336). Appeals to naturalism (e.g., B.Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality[London: Routledge, 2002]) evade the question of how Nietzsche


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Foucault does, to extrapolate a theory and method of historical inquiry fromNietzsches genealogical writings when those writings are so obviously tainted

with features of myth and myth-making. Whatever other virtues it may have

as a critique of contemporary moral culture and its values, genealogy does notoffer a recuperation of history, but only the caricature of one, as a momentsreflection on its bare plotline ought to remind us. Genealogy, the narrative orensemble of narratives through which Nietzsche purports to trace the drearyhistorical evolution of current-day morality, is itself a summary, and so it lendsitself to easy encapsulation.

Te story it tells is of a progressive degeneration over timefrom a culturethat once upon a time was knightly and aristocratic, exhibiting a healthy sense ofmoral self-affirmation (it was strong, noble, and active), to a reactive slave revoltby the oppressed caste comprised of the weak, the ascetic-priestly, and the reac-tive. Inverting this initial hierarchy and its values, the slave revolt begins whenressentiment[the spirit of sickly, begrudging resentment and denial] itself becomescreative and gives birth to values that are inimical to the values embodied inthe hitherto sovereign, and henceforward vulnerable, masters.5Several millenniaon, the very idea of nobility has faded away into the misty past, a faint memory,and we modern men are today in the grip of a diseased, reactive culture. Acrucial point added by Nietzsche is that the slave revolt succeeds to the extent

that it is purely imaginary (it is an imaginary revenge),6thus opening the doorto a hoped-for return to master values, whether in the figure of the Overman,in some form of self-overcoming and self-affirmation, possibly in some rotation

within the Eternal Return, in any case a kind of second innocence.7But thereare other implications to this crucial qualification about the fantastic, or ratherphantasmatic, nature of the enterprise he is describing, and we will want to comeback to them below. A series of analyses, investigating the origins of punish-ment, contract, law, and other forms of institutionalized moral value, provides

the somber foreground to this memory of a brighter past. But these studies area curious lot. Tey follow no discernible and certainly no dateable progression,and they seem if anything to be mere repetitions of the same story (the singularslave revolt in morality), viewed from slightly different vantage points.

grounds his own evidence, given that his own arguments are couched in historicist, and not justnaturalistic, vocabulary. Tus, all appeals to naturally occurring phenomena as the source ofcontemporary moral states (ibid., 189) make Nietzsches own appeals to time and history superflu-

ous, when these latter are in fact crucial to his narrative strategies. Nor can such appeals accountfor the presence of historical consciousness, which is in no way a naturally occurrent phenomenon,and which is a frequent target of Nietzsches critiques.

5GMI, 10.6Ibid.7Cf. GM II, 20.


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Exactly when is the slave revolt in morality supposed to have taken place,and where? Nietzsche has precious little to show in the way of evidence, docu-mentation, or the relentless erudition that Foucault, perhaps uniquely, finds so

inspiring about Nietzsches program.

8

Instead, what we do find is a fair amountof pseudo-erudition set forth in the apodictic mode and brazenly challengingour sense of historical plausibility. Te Celts, by the way, were definitely a blondrace, Nietzsche blandly claims at one point against the German pathologist,anthropologist, and cultural warrior from the mid-nineteenth century, RudolfVirchow.9Elsewhere we find judgments that inauspiciously begin, If we con-sider those millennia before the history of man, we may unhesitatingly assertthat it was precisely . . . .10At the most critical junctures of his argument, andin its many asides (assuming we can distinguish these), Nietzsches declaratives,straining all credulity, have the same status as their close associate, his colorfulpseudo-etymologies, which make no effort to conceal their own dubiety, as theypretend to plug gaps in the unknown (in Latin, Nietzsche opines, the word goodmay be traced back to war, bad to black; esthlos, in Greek, signifies one

who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true).11Nietzsche claims nomore historical truth for his project than his genealogy requires.

It is a fair question just how much historical truth is required. If the aim isto critique the value of moral value, history would seem irrelevant or a distrac-

tion. Te values in question are those of Nietzsches contemporary present. Whyshould tracing them to their historical origins, or simply exposing their histori-cally contingent character, count against them in any way? o map their history

would be to defer their critique, not to accomplish it.12If the aim is to show theeffacement of the instincts, this event takes place with the onset of sociality if notearlier, but at any rate it takes place sometime in our prehistory.13And argumentsabout that are inevitably of a piece with mythology, a mere projection of thepresent.14Historical knowledge, on the contrary, has only one valid function for

Nietzsche: it demonstrates, if not objectively then in the subjective act of histori-cal knowing, how deeply ingrained the syndromes are that his moral critique of

8Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 140.9GM I, 5. See H. Cancik, Nietzsches Antike: Vorlesung, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000),

47, with references to Virchow.10GM I, 14 (emphasis in original).11GMI, 5. Te ungrounded, racist etymology of evilmelas(black)stems from G.

Curtius (see Cancik, Nietzsches Anitke, 128). I have been unable to trace the remaining etymolo-

gies, which may be Nietzsches own fanciful coinages.12Cf. Nietzsche, Te Gay Science. With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans.Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 345; henceforth GS.

13See, e.g., GM II, 89.14Cf. GMIII, 9 on that vast era . . . which preceded world history and, Nietzsche assures

us, was the truly decisive history that determined the character of mankind.


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the contemporary present brings to light. It thereby validates his judgment that,so far as anyone can know, things stand today pretty much as they have alwaysstood. But then genealogy, one tends to forget in the dazzling rush of Nietzsches

prose, is never anything more than a congeries of hypotheses.

15

Clearly, another approach to the problem is warranted. Te question is notwhether Nietzsches genealogy is historical, but why anyone should think it is. Ina subsequent gloss on his project, Nietzsche spells out the actual parameters ofhis critique of moral values and their value: morality as consequence, as symp-tom, as mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but also morality ascause, as remedy, as stimulant, as restraint, as poison.16Later in the Tird Essayhe restates his project again: It is my purpose here to bring to light, not what[the ascetic] ideal has done, but simply what it means; what it indicates; whatlies hidden behind it, beneath it, in it; of what it is the provisional, indistinctexpression, overlaid with question marks and misunderstandings.17Nietzscheplainly means to inquire not into the historical derivation of valuesand thevalues in question are emphatically those of his contemporary presentbutinto their form, their illogic, and their hidden, because unconscious, scaffold-ing. Even if a morality has grown out of an error, the realization of this fact

would not as much as touch the problem of its value, which is to say the issueof the continued adhesion to morality, its binding quality, even in the face of its

acknowledged valuelessness, whether that acknowledgment takes place in thesecrecy of our underlying awareness or more openly, be it cynically or from anenlightened perspective.18How is moral value imagined? What, in that precisesense, are the conditions and circumstances in which [moral values] grew, in

which they evolved and changed, by which we may understand the ever newways in which values continually re-mask themselves and their ever unchang-ing vulnerability to critique? How is it that morality can appear as a cause or aconsequence of anything at all, or even as its own cause? Why does morality so

fascinateus? Tese, not historical origins, are the kinds of questions that driveNietzsches inquiry.

But there is another, unstated question lurking within Nietzsches project,which is more like a suspicion and a doubt than a theme. What if one of theprincipal ways in which morality misunderstands itself, deliberately and sur-reptitiously masks itself, is by appearing, precisely, to have evolved and changed?Suppose, in other words, that history, or rather the sense of history and of historical

perspective, is the disguise of morality that sustains moral values and a belief in their

15GM, Pref. 4.16GM,Pref. 6.17GMIII, 23.18GS, 345 (emphasis added) and 347.


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value. In that case, the question why Nietzsche should have chosen to present hisgenealogy as a project in historical moral inquiry would indeed be perplexing.

And yet this sense of perplexity (corresponding to the entanglements underlying

it) is, I believe, precisely the effect Nietzsche sought to produce, or reproduce,in his readers. And that is a clue to the form his critique takes.

II.

Disavowals.It is crucial to clear off some of the potential misconceptions thatthe termgenealogyinvites. What Nietzsche most certainly does not have in mind

when he deploys the concept is a sequential, linear and developmental schemethat traces contemporary appearances back to long-forgotten (and repressed) evil

causeshowever shameful, and ultimately banal, Nietzsche relentlessly pointsout, most origins prove to be.19But neither is Nietzsches genealogical analysisa study in the shifting contingencies of value formations. What genealogy ulti-mately names are not sequences but their invention. What it labels is a repression,that of a disguised (or misrecognized) content. More precisely, it labels not therepression of content but the misrecognition that constitutes repression. Forget-tingis an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression, a kindof incorporation.20And so too, genealogy (unlike history) brings back to mind

not what is forgotten but the act of forgetting itself. Its function is not to recover apositive expression, from the past, of a present negation. It reveals only a stigmaticpositivity, a heritage that is never in any sense past or complete because it is alwayspresent, in a state of unfinished completion, laboring under a pseudonym. Tus,

what is of interest in genealogy is not the appeal to the past as such, nor even thesuppression of past realities, but above all the way in which the contemporaryhistorical imaginary conspires with the contemporary moral imaginary.

Contemporary perceptions of value are intimately bound up with per-

ceptions of history, for instance the view that morality, and moral culturegenerally, represent an advance in civilization and a progressive domesticationof the instincts, that values and institutions have a certain utility, that culturehas transcended its historical origins, and so on. Such perceptions, which aregenealogical, Nietzsche roundly condemns for being unhistorical,21and theirrejection constitutes the central argument of the Genealogy. By calling themunhistorical (unhistorisch) Nietzsche does not only mean to suggest that con-temporary values are based on bad history, which they may be. What he also

means to say, and what is more important to his argument, is that contemporary19Cf. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Toughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 42 and 44; henceforth D.20GMII, 1.21GMI, 2.


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historical thinking contributes to the ahistoricity of contemporary (modern)culture, that in fact historical thinking is an active agent in the construction ofideology in the modern world.22

Tis is the same thesis that underlies Nietzsches earliest attacks on modernclassical philology,23and it appears again in his arguments against the historicaldisciplines in his essay from 1874, On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historyfor Life.24In all three cases, Nietzsche is pointing, rather shrewdly, to a complic-ity between what he calls the historical sense (historical consciousness) andcontemporary blindnesses in the cultural realm. His argument is that histori-cal consciousness is a form of forgetfulness, not of remembrance; it is, in fact,ahistorical in its essence. But the illusionof historical awareness is vital: theahistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of anindividual, of a people and of a culture,25which is to say that ahistoricity, livedunder the illusion of its historical character, is essential to cultural and individualexistence. Now, modernity can in effect afford to be ahistorical so long as historydoes the work of historical remembrance for it. And the belief in moral progressis the way in which contemporary culture historicizes itself while projecting itsmoral values sub specie aeternitatis.

Nietzsches untimely response is of course to say that culture has nottranscended itself, its shameful origins, its past or recent violences and barbaric

practices. On the contrary, the repudiated past, so avidly despised by the morallyupright, is with us today, but in a repudiated form, in the form of a disavowal.History is the form that this disavowal takes, allowing the present to proceed ina guilt-free way, with a good conscience26or as Nietzsche would elsewheresay, it is a denial . . . in the form of an affirmation.27Tis is the basis of moralhypocrisy and of what might be called, following Nietzsche, moral cynicism(that is to say, bad conscience).28Nietzsches genealogy has as its primary aimto unsettle the claims of moral reason by unsettling those of historical reason.

And the latter is accomplished by illustrating how fragile any product of historical

22Cf. GMIII, 26, devoted to the problem of modern historiography.23See J. I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2000); and, e.g., Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, intro. J. P. Stern(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), I, 2; henceforth UM. Here Nietzsche is critiqu-ing the desire for undisturbed complacency that motivateshistorical consciousness. Tis is whata year later is called denial of the past, viz., an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, apast in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate (UM

II, 3). Te difference between denial and disavowal is only a rhetorical one in Nietzsche.24UMII.25UMII, 1 (emphasis removed from original).26UMII, 1; GMII, 14.27GMII, 22.28Cf. UMI, 2; II, 9; GMII, 11.


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sense can be. Genealogy mimics the fragility and the confusion of historical sense. It ismeant to be a symptom of the modern cultural subject and of the cunning artistry ofits unconscious mechanisms. So understood, genealogy is not some hidden weapon

in Nietzsches critical arsenal. Quite the contrary, it is a way of exposinga kind ofstupidity, or blindness, in contemporary historical and ideological thought.Tis at last begins to suggest a reason why the history purveyed by Nietzsches

genealogy is so obviously laden with myth. History as it is conceived, sensed, andlived is but the outward trace of subjectivity and its invariable delusions, andit is these later which comprise the true object of Nietzsches critiques. Tus itis not history but only its faintest echoes in the inner workings of the modernmind that command Nietzsches attention. Nor is it historical consciousnessby itself that is of interest, but rather the imaginary logic of modern subjects,made visible in the form of historical thinkingor rather, made invisible tothem by the very assumption of this form by consciousness.29Finally, it is not ahistorical sequence of interpretations that are of interest in Nietzsches critique,but the manner in which modern subjects willy-nilly construct for themselves,a posteriori, fantasies about the past and the present.30

Such fantasies are of course never free from prior historical determination,and they are invariably collective in nature as well. Nietzsches view, early and late,is that historical consciousness, for all its ahistoricity, is crucially overdetermined by

accretions over time, so much so that certain features of the way the mind worksappear to be inerasably fixed, invariable, and virtually intemporal. Te entirepast of the old culture was erected upon force, slavery, deception, error; but we,the heirs and inheritors [literally, the concrescence, dieConcrescenzen] of allthese past things, cannot decree our own abolition and may not wish away a singlepart of them,31for it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain.32Atbest, Nietzsche seems to say, one can hope for new ways of accommodating oldhabits: for the habits of consciousness are themselves indelibly stained into our

subjective, human, all too human limits, which (as a later note reads) constitutethe Procustes bed of knowledge for us.33o capture more satisfyingly the ahis-torical core of historical awareness, an admittedly difficult idea, we might begin bysaying that different historical moments find ways to create their own ahistoricalillusions, but that every historical moment finds at least one way to do this. Teparadox is mainly an apparent one. Te point is that ahistoricity is produced histori-

29Cf. UMII, 4.30

Cf. UMII, 3.31Nietzsche, Human, All oo Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1: 452; henceforth HA.

32UMII, 3.33Nietzsche, Te Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York:

Random House, 1967), 499; henceforth WP.


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cally, in part by virtue of the sheer weight of historical sediment pressing downupon everyday awareness (with ahistoricity being produced, as it were, throughan excess of historical awareness), and in part out of an aversion to this pressure.

Blank trauma and a naturalized awareness are the classic responses that render asubject into a historical subject that is enveloped in ahistorical gauze.

III.

Polemics and Hypotheses. Tese multiple and contradictory logics are directlyembodied in Nietzsches genealogical writing. His practice of genealogy erodesitself in a subversion that is both concealed and spectacular, which is why itis so tricky a genre. o begin with, genealogy is an entirely polemical form of

discourse, as the frequently overlooked subtitle to the Genealogyspells out forus. It is in polemics, not in positive writing, that Nietzsches desire to produce agenealogy is conceived, and it is from this impulse alone that genealogy receivesits content and has to be understood. But Nietzsche is not only a consummatepolemicist: he is the hyperboleof one. And so it should come as no surprise thatNietzsches project crucially coincides with the genealogical hypothesis ofcontemporary moral speculation on the continent and in England, especially

with the work of Paul Re, Te Origin of Moral Sentiments34to a degree that

Nietzsche would never acknowledge.35

Affecting moral outrage, he derides theseinvestigators and microscopists of the soul for doing what he does best himself,namely, for constantly dragging thepartie honteuseof our inner world into theforeground and seeking the truly effective and directing agent, that which has

34P. Re, Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (Chemnitz: Verlag von ErnstSchmeitzner, 1877).

35A fact that continues to elude scholars (e.g., R. Binion,Frau Lou: Nietzsches Wayward Disciple[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968]), who tend to underestimate the rhetorical shrewd-ness of Nietzsches polemics. Te point cannot be argued out here, but the following remark fromRes preface to Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungensets the tone for what follows it: Temoral man stands no closer to the intelligible world than the physical man (Re, Der Ursprung dermoralischen Empfindungen, viii). In the sequel, Re offers demystifying insights into the retroactivederivation of moral concepts, intuitions, and values; into moral freedom (as an illusory construct);the ethics of blame (anticipating Williamss recent criticism of this, in Nietzsches wake; see Williams,Nietzsches Minimalist Moral Psychology); into ascetic hypocrisy; notions of the Beyond; andthe belief, which is purely an assuagement, that mankind is not invariably and universally drivenby egoistic motives. Moral values, he holds, are mere feelings and unnatural habituations, indeed

mere errors and lies; in themselves actions and consequences have no intrinsic value, utility,benefit, or harm; etc. Not that Nietzsche wont have found much to contest in this treatise (thelogic of egoism or utility, which are a bit too Schopenhauerian and rational for Nietzsches taste,though not always; but he has far more of an ally in Re than he lets on. See Nietzsche, SmtlicheWerke: Kritische Studienausgabe in15 Einzelbnden, 2nd edition, ed. Giorgio Colli and MazzinoMontinari [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988], 10: 312; 7 [214]; henceforth KSA).


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been decisive in its evolution, in just that place where the intellectual pride ofman would least desireto find it.36Tat is doubtless why he goes on to concedethat genealogists in the English tradition are (or rather may be) fundamentally

brave, proud, and magnanimous animals, who know how to keep their heartsas well as their sufferings in bounds and have trained themselves to sacrifice alldesirability to truth, everytruth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian,immoral truth.For such truths, Nietzsche assures us, do exist.

Polemics, taken to such thrilling heights, are as much a theatrical act asthey are the grinding of an axe. Elsewhere I have shown how it is in staging aradical coincidence of opposites that Nietzsches writing most poses a challenge,and often a threat, to its comprehension by readers. Te situation is no differenthere, for at this point Nietzsche has virtually becomethe genealogist he opposeshimself to. Can he actually be attackinghimself? Te answer is, quite literally,Yes.37Quite apart from substantive overlaps and disagreements (and there isplenty to be said on both sides), Nietzsches genealogy, transparently at odds

with itself, is a simulacrumof the logic and form of conventional genealogy.38As Nietzsche wrote to Re, Allmy friends are now unanimous in the opinion

36GMI, 1.37A former close friend and companion since their days at Basel, Re was intellectually in

Nietzsches debt, so much so that he inscribed a copy of his book, which he gave to Nietzsche,with the following: o the father of this essay, most gratefully from its mother (cited after W.Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. [Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1974], 50 n. 28). Disowning any affinity to Re (perhaps I have never read anything to

which I would have said to myself No, proposition by proposition, conclusion by conclusion,Pref. 4), Nietzsche is effectively writing against some of his own ideas as they appear in Resgenealogy (whether he inspired them or notpresumably he did) and then reaffirming themagain, in a different form, in his own genealogy. (Re would have been struck by Nietzsches essayfrom 1872, Te Greek State, inter alia.) Nietzsche was reliving, rather than merely denying,a similar fusion of perspectives that a decade earlier (in Human, All Too Human, a work withmarked affinities to GM) had sent a panic into the Nietzsche camp. Rohde commented, Is itpossible to divest oneself so completely of ones soul and substitute another? Suddenly to becomeRe instead of Nietzsche? (ranslations from R. Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life[New York:Oxford University Press, 1980], 2045; see these pages for a convenient summary of the earlierscandal.) In the face of such precariousness, I think it a fair question to ask not What do theseEnglish psychologists really want? (GMI, 1), but Just what does Nietzschewant?

38He eventually does, after all, concur with the genealogists that morality is a matter offorgetting, habit, error, and presumed utility (cf. GM I, 2); or that it is these things once theyhave attained the level of a passive, automatic reflex, a kind of embedded spontaneity. He simply

adds the caveat, which is implied in any case by the genealogists he attacks, that forgetting onesimpulses can often be as active as it is automatic, which is to say that we are for the most partspontaneouslyactive agents in our actions, actively disavowing our own disavowals. (Cf. GMI, 3:in judgments good and bad mankind has summed up and sanctioned precisely its unforgot-tenand unforgettableexperiences, which points forward to the discussion of the manufacture ofmoral memory in GM II, 3.)


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that my book was originated and written by you.39Even the self-dissimulationsof Nietzsches discourse are a faithful reproduction of genealogy, which succeedsto the extent that it conceals its own illogic, its mechanisms, its circularities, its

ideological form, and so on. And Nietzsches counter-genealogy follows suit,mimicking its object down to this last detail, by concealing its own mechanismsand fictionsthe better to foreground those of its object, as if it were enactingconsciously the unconscious rifts in the position of his opponents.

Consider the historical pretensions of genealogy. Presenting their case as ahistorical inquiry into the shameful origins of contemporary moral sentiments,

what moral genealogists in fact bring to light, without quite acknowledging thisto be the case, are not recorded events from the past but unwanted specters ofmoralitys buried, repressed, and disowned nature in the present (morality asa habituation in conduct, as a convention mistaken for a natural condition, asegoismour true naturein disguise, etc.). Moral genealogy of the conven-tional kind thus furnishes a stigmatic evaluation of the present in the form of aspeculative history. By repeating these very moves in an exaggerated way, and byscandalously affirming the speculative dimension of his own history, Nietzscheis in effect giving us a correct reading of the genealogists designs.40He is chal-lenging not so much the thrust of their arguments, which is critical, as theirhistoricism, which is fictional and little more than a projection of first causes,

themselves hypothetically inferred, onto an imaginary historical dimension.Te fact that Nietzsche is trading one fiction for another (one error [for]

another),41one falsified historicism for another, is irrelevant to his immediatepurpose. But there is an ulterior purpose as well, for Nietzsches parasitism andhis polemics cut two ways. His genealogy derives whatever coherence it has, andindeed its very conceivability, only thanks to the modern imaginary that breatheslife into it, which must reenact its own disavowals in order to salvage Nietzschesgenealogy from its flaws and illogic. In this way, we can say that Nietzsche adds

nothing to his polemical objects. At one level, he is not even polemical any more,but merely a faithful mirror of his object (genealogical narrative) and his subject(his readers fantasies). And just as his writing in general has a purely local andstrategic value, so too here: it is effective only in situ, as the site of a writing prac-tice that opens itself up to self-betrayal in its readerly reception. Te critique itaccomplishes is not one that it itself performs. It is the reader who must performthat in her own person. Nietzsche simply provides the occasion and the bait.

39

Quoted in Hayman, Nietzsche, A Critical Life, 204.40So, for example, Res genealogy traces an evolution in moral ideology, not in human ac-tion. Our real natures, he shows, are contained rather than extinct: as long as people act, they areegoistical, selfish, and envious; but as soon as they start to philosophize, they insist upon moralprogress (Re, Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen, 140; cf. viiviii).

41GM,Pref. 4.


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Now, all the traits of reactivity isolated abovenavet, stupefaction, theinability to keep anything straight for very long, the tendency to revise oneselfretroactively, mythical projection, and quiet (calculating) elisionare the most

prominent features of modern consciousness, especially in its historical form.

42

And they also are, not coincidentally, the most prominent features of Nietzschesgenealogical discourse, which mimes the epigonal, late-born, or if you likereactive modern consciousness that is the object of its critique. Genealogyis a critique of modern historical consciousness in the disguise of that historicalconsciousness itself. It is this self-reflexive dimension which makes wrapping ourminds around Nietzsches critique so hard to do. Genealogy works against itself:it is tied as much complicitously as polemically to its objects. For the same rea-son, it is only by retracing from close quarters the logical patterns of genealogythat one can appreciate how genealogy anticipates its apprehension by a reader:how it seductively courts readers into false certainties and how it disables theirreadings at the selfsame stroke. In literary critical terms, Nietzsche is a mostunreliable narratora fact that complicates any attempt to read Nietzsche asthe literary author of his self, let alone of any narrative sequence.

Were there space, I would want to turn to some of the larger patterns thatcharacterize history, culture, and genealogy in Nietzsche in order to demonstratetheir essentially static structure, their lack of development and forward motion,

despite the otherwise overwhelming impression they give of motion and change,of a parabola of evolving tendencies. One explanation for this unexpected fea-ture of time under a genealogical description has to do with the way in whichgenealogy traces the frustrationof the two primary motions it describes, theone characterized by decline, the other by overcoming and redemption: seem-ingly equally matched, they are in fact self-cancelling. Te result is historicalstalemate: things flatline. Tis same pattern of narrative is matched at anotherlevel to which it is intimately linked. For it can be shown, first, that culture is a

process that is always culminating itself, always becoming what it is. And as thingsbecome more and more what they are, culture is always revealing not so much

what culture is but what it has always been.43Secondly, and as a consequence,it can be shown that the view of history as evolving and in motion, of declineand hoped-for ascendancy, is a mere misperception of how things are. Te twomotions of genealogy are not really motions at all (and for this reason, too, arefrustrated), but are only characterizations, mere psychological perspectives thatare, moreover, symptoms of each other. For ultimately it is in the nature of

reactivityto see things in the jaundiced perspective of decline and decay; it is tolook upon the world with a retrospective weariness, to feel that the future is a

42Cf. UMI, 2; GMIII, passim.43GMII, 12.


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thing of the past,44and to believe that one is a latecomer and epigone45and,conversely, that the future can revenge the past. Tis dimension of genealogycannot be simply waved away, and it has significant and puzzling consequences

for Nietzsches argument. One of these becomes immediately apparent, thoughno less puzzling, if we rephrase the problem of genealogy in Nietzschean parlance:what genealogy reveals is not the contrast between activity and reactivity, butrather the activity ofreactivity.

IV.

Actively Reactive. Perhaps the easiest, and bluntest, way of explaining whatthis means is to say that reactivity is a form of agency that disavows its own

activity. Quite simply, it disavows what it actually and actively does (again, inNietzschean parlance, it denies itself). Nietzsches abundant commentaryon the suppressedpresentcruelty, violence, and hypocrisy of morality alreadypoints in this direction. Te argument underlying this account is that virtueis always manufactured, always staged, always retains a component of violenceand cruelty, and not least in the violent contortions that the disavowal ofthese motivations requires of putatively moral agents. In a word, morality isfounded upon disavowal, on a mendaciousness that is abysmal but innocent,

truehearted, blue-eyed, and virtuous.46

Nietzsche is keen to expose the hy-pocrisy of a moral culture whose agents, themselves black magicians, have aspecial talent for making whiteness, milk, and innocence of every blackness,especially their own.47But from this easily acceptable fact (acceptable toreaders who would identify with Nietzsches critical posture, and disavow anysusceptibility to his criticisms) there follows a troubling consequence: reactiveagents are in some crucial sense themselves undeniably active agents. Why,then, do we need the distinction?

We can imagine one defense of the distinction in terms of the psychologicalfeatures of agents. For surely if reactive agents are caught up in the mechanismsof disavowal, they are to be distinguished from agents who are forthrightly andunabashedly active, untouched by disavowal because they are innocent of it (theydo not know what guilt, responsibility, or consideration are).48Te latters activ-ity is, one might wish to say, unrepressed. But that wont do, for if all agency is

44GMPref. 5; III, 25.45

UMII, 5.46GM III, 19. See further the brilliant remarks on Greek culture and its modern extensionin GM II, 7.

47GM I, 14; cf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans.Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 229; henceforth BGE.

48GM II, 17.


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essentially and irreducibly active as a matter of definition, at most we can holdon to two ways of expressing activity, not to a radical distinction between activityand reactivity. And as Nietzsche says at one point, fundamentally it is the same

active force that is at work in both active and reactive agents, namely, theinstinct for freedom(in my language: the will to power). 49

Tis is, to be sure, no news. A monistic reading of the will to power (thereduction of all there is to the will to power) can only claim as much. But themonism of the will to power is itself a simplification, even if its simplicity comesonly at the cost of the most elaborate of falsifications. Te present instance isno exception. Activity, the very same activity in fact (Nietzsche postulates), isthe productive and constitutive force in masters and in slaves, for instance inblond beasts of prey, who are cited as agents of the state50 and in agentsdriven by ressentiment, the victims of this conqueror and master race and itspolitical and cultural activity. If the identity is puzzling, not to mention thesuddenness of the transformation, which is downright inexplicable (the mostfundamental change [man] ever experienced . . . when [man, once ruled onlyby blond instincts] found himself finally enclosed within the walls of societyand of peace),51the contrast seems straightforward: the violent organizers ofstates turn their will to power outwardly onto others, while creatures of resent-ment focus their power inwardly, directing it backward on themselves, in

the labyrinth of the breast.52Tis is at least consistent with some of Nietzschesapparent views, for instance the claim that noble spirits act spontaneously andimmediately, without internalization, while slave spirits are consumed by in-ternalized feelings. But elsewhere these criteria are reversed, and ultimately thisformal and psychological difference proves impossible to maintain. Te contrastbetween the two kinds of agency represents the divided agency of cultural subjectsgenerally, their disavowal of what they do, but also their disavowal of the verymechanisms of disavowal.53

Consider how the difference plays itself out in the two passages just cited.Te same active force, Nietzsche writes,54is at work on a grander scale in thoseartists of violence and organizers who build states, and that here, internally, on

49GM II, 18.50GMII, 17.51GMII, 16.52GMII, 18. Nietzsche seems to be taking into account the formula of decadence described

by Paul Bourget in his essay on Baudelaire: If the citizens of decadent societies are inferior as

artisans of their countrys greatness, are they not superior as artists of the interior of their soul,etc. (P. Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine. dition dfinitive augmente dappendices, 2vols. [Paris: Plon-Nourrit et cie, 1920], 1:21).

53See J. I. Porter, Unconscious Agency in Nietzsche, Nietzsche-Studien 27 (1998):15395.

54GM II, 18.


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a smaller and pettier scale, directed backward, in the labyrinth of the breast, touse Goethes expression, creates for itself a bad conscience and builds negativeideals. If it seems odd that Nietzsche should choose to cast blond beastsas the

agents of the state, we neednt look far for an explanation: we are in the midst ofyet another genealogy. I employed the word state: it is obvious what is meantsomepack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race.55Te point is startling,but the logic is familiar by now. Naive moralists would have us imagine that po-litical and cultural organization, aper segood, is grounded on polite contractualnorms, but they are wrong. What today pass for civil states are in essence violentformations that do indeed civilize, which is to say they regiment social chaos intosocial relations, but only through the most barbaric of means, through oppressivefear and terror, which take the form of guilt, conscience, duty, and the painfulmechanisms of shame.56Nor do states ground individual freedom; they actuallyremove it through terrible repressions. Presenting the story of the expulsion of atremendous quantity of freedom . . . from the world, or at least from the visible

world,57Nietzsches genealogy is a transparent parable for the shackles of politicaland social obligation (the social straightjacket)58brought to subjects courtesy ofthe state. Nietzsche is not just reciting a clich from modern political thinking; heis giving it a radical reinterpretation. Confounding the political wisdom not onlyof naive moralists or of enlightened naturalists but even of prudentially minded

social Darwinists like Paul Re, who was by no means a complacent believer inthe natural goodness of mankind, Nietzsche places the beasts on the outside ofthe social prison, not inside it. Te blond beasts, instantiating the agency of thestate, are its wardens.59Tey are the quintessential Beamter(civil servants).60

55GM II, 17 (emphasis added).56GM II, 6.57GM II, 17.58

GMII, 2.

59Contrast Re, Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen, 45: Every civil society(staatliche Gemeinschaft) is a large menagerie in which the fear of punishment and the fear ofshame are the [iron] bars by means of which the beasts are prevented from tearing one anotherto pieces. Occasionally these bars break open. Te thought is Aristotelian (Res dissertation andfirst book were on Aristotles ethics): in the absence of law and justice, man is the very worst ofall animals (Politics1.3.1253a3233); but it also strikingly recalls Nietzsches Te Greek State(1872): Given this hidden connection [between the state and art], by state is to be understood,as was said earlier [769], only the iron fetters that enforce the social process, while without thestate, in a natural state ruled by the principle of bellum omnium contra omnes, society cannot take

root to any great extent and beyond the sphere of the family (KSA1: 772 [my translation]); cf.also Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Verstellung, in Werke in zehn Bnden: Zrcher Ausgabe,4 vols., ed. Angelika Hbscher et al. (Zrich: Diogenes, 1977), I, 61).

60o be precise, they are both wardens and prisoners, viz., agents of the state and its objects,as there is only one population on this mythical paradigm, and the roles have to be allotted atrandom. After all, mans sufferings are self-inflicted: man suffers of man, of himself (GM II, 16).


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V.

Laying Down the Law.A parallel point is brought out a few sections earlier,61where the system in question through which moral culture asserts itself is not thatof political obligation but the closely allied constraints of law and justice. Again,Nietzsche asks, disarmingly, In which sphere has the entire administration oflaw hitherto been at homealso the need for law? In the sphere of reactive men,perhaps? His answer, again genealogically comprehensible, runs: By no means:rather in that of the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive. Tis inversion of

weakness and strength might appear to be a polemically motivated reversal (inthis case, of a thesis by Dhring). But that is not the end of the story, for the logicof genealogy is the logic of unwanted identification, not of expected difference. By the

administration of law Nietzsche means precisely thatnot the blind aggressionsof blond beasts, but the agency of reactive and resentful moral culture itself, its properactivity. He is obviously playing havoc with the racial fantasy of Aryanism foranyone who might be lured into such an identification, whether one admits it ornot. Inverting his own inversion, Nietzsche is not demonstrating how the strongfulfill the expected role of the weak, even if that is the apparent, and admittedlymind-boggling, sense of the text.62Nor is he showing how justice is a later sub-limation of a primary instinct for revenge (so Dhring) or how the (reactive)

demand for retributive justice is a rationalization, a mere feeling, imposed uponthe original deterrent and mnemonic function of punishment (so Re).63o thecontrary, he is demonstrating how the strong and the weak are irretrievably one.His argument is that reactivity is fundamentally active, which may well leave usin doubt as to what, in that case, might constitute the relevant contrast to reactiveagency. Tat doubt, I wish to argue, lies at the heart of genealogy.

It is plain that in referring to the agency of law, Nietzsche has in mindcrimes perpetrated by reactive subjects who are driven, despite all their piety

toward justice, by the truly activeaffects, such as lust for power, avarice, andthe likeas in the burnings, tortures, dispossessions, and maimings so spec-tacularly described in GM II, 3 (the long litany of penal memnotechnics and

Such, at any rate, is the original scene as viewed under a political description. Viewed from areligious angle, the blond beasts of course make up the priesthood. It is worth noting that Nietzscheelides the transition from beasthood to the new division of labor in II, 16 with suddenly and inII, 17 with a break, a leap, a compulsiondescriptions that explain absolutely nothing at all,though readers have gone on blissfully undisturbed by this narrative legerdemain.

61

GM II, 11.62Compare the remarks on the rationale of active justice, which is to curb, like a dutifulshepherd, the reactive feelings of ressentimentand vengefulness in the morally weak (ibid). Tispractice resembles nothing so much as the ascetic training against states of depression describedin GM III, 18, a practice shepherded by the high priests of asceticism.

63See GM II, 11 and previous note.


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its asceticism) or in those sufferings described in the lengthy excerpt fromertullian, in which pagan practices, not least the persecutions of Christians, arematched in their degree of violence only by an imagined Christian revenge.64But

also intended are the kinder, gentler, and more recent variants of these forms ofpenalty: settlements, elevating certain equivalents for injuries into norms, andmost supremely of all, the institution of law, the imperative declaration of whatin general counts as permitted, as just, in accordance with which violence andcapricious acts on the part of individuals or entire groups are treated henceforthas offenses against the law.65

Who are these last-named victims of the reprisals of law? Is it active outlaws(blond beasts) or reactively if imperfectly shaped moral subjects who must bedisciplined into conformity with law? If the answer istellinglyuncertain,the drift of the passage is nevertheless plain as day. Life operates essentially . . .through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction,66and this is nowhere moreapparent than in the legal system that gives teeth to the system of morality,

whether we look to the crude violences of law in the past, more closely associ-ated with active aggression, or to the violent imposition of a non-violent law inthe more recent present (the whole cunning and underhand art of police andprosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder,practiced as a matter of principle).67Meanwhile, there seems to be no space left

for an essential violence outside the mores of culture. Not even the outbreaks ofbarbaric aggression and violence so terrifyingly portrayed by Nietzsche in theearlier sections of the Genealogythe blond ambition and brutal marauding ofnoble races in the wildernesscan count as an instance. For on a second look,all this violence appears to take place withinthe well marked terrain of culturalachievement, not outside of it(even their highest culture betrays a consciousnessof it and even a pride in it).68

Te wilderness outside and prior to culture is a figment and a phantasm. It

refers either to the violence enacted and disavowed by culture or to the fascinat-ing and repulsive specter of violence erupting beyond the limits of culture or aculture. Indeed, the image of blond bestiality seems to be a way of accommo-dating, through fantasy, the violence proper to cultures own activity. Barbaric

64GM I, 15.65GM II, 11.66Ibid.67

GM II, 14. Implicated, in other words, are both regimes of spectacle and regimes of amore insidiously concealed power (surveillance), to phrase this in a Foucauldian idiom that owesmuch to Nietzsche. See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Te Birth of the Prison(New York:Pantheon, 1977). Only, in Nietzsche these are not opposed as linear, historical developments, asthey are in Foucault; rather, each presupposes the other, and they are coexistent.

68GM I, 11.


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lawlessness, at least in the Genealogy(which is to say, in the minds of the culturalsubjects depicted there) is in fact an entirely relative concept, no more than animaginary projection between cultures, or from within them: one victorious

cultures supremacy is another, downtrodden cultures barbarism, and the samelogic applies within a given culture.69Tis convergence of outlawed violenceand cultures laws, which it would be wrong to take as an index of Nietzschesown relativism, let alone as a condoning of violence, is wholly inexplicable interms of his categories (active and reactive), and in fact represents a paralysis ofthem. But there is simply no way round the conclusion that noble morality70and ascetic morality71 are indistinguishable quapositively enforced law. Tereason is as obvious as it is troubling: the two spheres, significantly actuated bythe selfsame needfor law, are one. Te difference is in their perception alone;it is, we should say, a perspectival difference, not an essential one.

Law is the disguised moral equivalent of the will to power: this is theequation that is laid bare by genealogy, and the irony of power, its law, thatgenealogy brings embarrassingly to light. Below, we shall consider the converseof this irony, namely the sense in which the will to power is disguisedly moralin its essence. Tese revelations point us back to the human dimension ofpower, to the frailties of subjectivity and the actual impotenceof power, aspectsthat deeply tinge (or stain) the more abstract and rarified language of the will

to power. No expression of power (e.g., law) can be adequately expressive ofpower: no sooner does power assume a form than power, in that form, sensesits own restriction (this is the defining criterion and the literal meaning of res-sentiment). And since the will to power is forever qualified by its expressions,is always a falsification and simplification of its own essence (or better yet: itsessence is always to be a falsifying and simplifying force), it is only logical thatthe activity of law should so to speak get in its own way, produce its antithesis,indeed produce itself as its own antithesis; in short, that laws activity should

become reactive, should reveal itself in fact always to have beenreactive, simul-taneously a means and an impediment to the will to power. Tis is why theconditions of law and justice, which Nietzsche has just shown to constitutean expression ofthe will to power in its active form, can at the same time besaid to constitute a partial restrictionof the will of life, the goal of which is to

69Tis boldness of noble races, mad, absurd, and sudden in its expression . . . all thiscame together in the mindsofthose who suffered from it, in the image ofthe barbarian, the evil

enemy, etc. (GM I, 11; emphasis added), where the suffering in question need only be imagi-nary and phantasmatic. An example of projection from within a culture is given by the allusionto Hesiods genealogy of races in the same section. See Porter, Philology of the Future, 2425 fora reading of this passage.

70GM I, 10.71Cf. GM Pref. 4.


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creat[e]greaterunits of power.72Law and life collide. But then life conflictswith itself as well.

Tis purely formal shift, from law as active power to law as reactive power,

may look like a glaring contradiction, but the contradiction, which is genuineand not merely apparent, is by no means alien to the logic of power. It simplydesignates the self-contradictory logic of power, its law:patere legem, quam ipsetulisti.73When Nietzsche goes on to say that a legal order thought of as sovereignand universal contradicts the actual goal of the legal order (and in this we mayoverhear the parallel logic of cultures instruments and its goal), he is saying thatlaw is destined forever to be a victim of its own successes. Law, conceived assovereign, is beyond law. Law cannot justify itself, and so the conditions of lawremain precariously anomalous, unjustified, and outlawed even by law. Hence,law is in its essence doomed to failand this failure, which is the failure of itstyrannical sovereignty, is the only genuine mark of laws self-realization. In fact,law is the positivization of its own failure and of its innermost contradiction.Law is merely the way in which the very failure of law comes to be character-ized, while justice, as the expression of law quathe supreme power itself, is theviolent codification of a contradiction, the attempt to ride over the impossiblelogic of law. Sovereignty, apparently, comes at a fatal price, like all good things. Farfrom being a positive idealization of the cruelty of justice, of its self-overcoming

and self-transcending, the co-efficient of which is the powerful mans sensethat he is beyond the law,74Nietzsches remarks on justice in these pages areon the contrary saturated with irony, dark humor, and above all with complica-tion. Justice conceived as the self-overcoming of justice, as the becoming justof justice and the consciousness of [its own] power,75 is nothing other thanthe rationale, and the hypocrisy, behind justice as we know it today and as it hasalways ever been known.76Tus, if the active aggressive, arrogant man is still ahundred steps closer to justice than the reactive man,77this is not because the

activity of the active subject represents the real essence of justice (justice in itselfis a meaningless concept),78but rather because it represents the false (or falsified)essence of justice in its purest formthat of a presumed rightto sovereignty.79

72Ibid.73GM III, 27.74GM II, 10.75Ibid.76

Cf. II, 14 on the criminality of justice, practiced with a good conscience.77GM II, 11.78Ibid.79Differently, G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. omlinson (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1983), 1356; and M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. D. F. Krell (SanFrancisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 3: 13749; 23551. Cf. GS49.


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o summarize briefly, the passage on the administration of law and justicemodulates gradually into a nice self-contradiction: the putatively active agents ofthe law become agents of a putative reactivity and nihilism in the course of their

being narratedand in the course of their proper activity. Te active, aggres-sive, arrogant man turns out to be no one else than the mild, impersonal, andjust-minded jurist, imposing law and order with an innocent mendacity, at theheight of laws dominion, and so driven down a secret path to nothingness80in the very same way as the blond beasts dissolve seamlessly into Beamter.81Nolonger merely laws agent, he is now also its victim. It is, after all, the same activeforce at work in both spheres (of agency and subjection). But worse still, fromthe perspective of Nietzsches categories and their coherence, the two spheresare blended into one. Strangely, Nietzsches genealogy of law is immune fromcontradiction just by being as deeply incoherent as it is: the incoherencies ofhis analysis, blatantly and cheerfully strewn throughout, exist only to signifythe incoherencies of the objects under analysis. Tus, elsewhere we find that areversed scenario can be given as historical fact: noble races, disdainful of law,forbore from entering into its sphere; law was for a long time a vetitum, anoutrage, an innovation.82Which account is correct? Is it active agents or reactiveagents who reduce their opposites to submission through the constraints of law?Te answer to these questions is perhaps unsatisfying: the alternative accounts

are both false. But Nietzsche invites confusion by putting on offer only badchoices, genealogies that are as confused as those found in the late religionsof syncretistic, greatly purified, and fully ripened culturescultures, moreover,that are in themselves indeterminately strong and weak.83

Te confused genealogy of law is, I believe, the most typical pattern ofNietzsches genealogies, which offer no declarative truths, but instead merelypresent, as if by analogy with their own deceptive form, the unpalatable truth ofculture: its false consciousness. Genealogies invariably imply that culture appears

to itself in an inverted form (its violences appearing as justified). And just asinvariably, by refusing to be possessed of a plain meaning, they add one furtherbraid of implication to the problem of alienated self-appearance: the inverted

80GM II, 11.81GM II, 178. If the administration of law is handled by active agents, their purpose,

allegedly, is to discipline ressentimentout of existence (putting an end to the senseless raging ofressentiment, GM II, 11). But note how the instruments employed by these agents are elsewheredesignated by Nietzsche asproducingthe same effect (ressentiment) they would rid the world of:

such are the light effects of law, for example, viz., elevating certain equivalents for injuries intonorms to which from then on ressentimentis once and for all directed and, of course, by whichit feels itself justified, not to say active (ibid.). Te account of the goal of law given in this sectionis indistinguishable from the ascetic practice described later on, e.g., in GM III, 15.

82GM III, 9.83GM II, 20.


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logic of false consciousness cannot be corrected, as though with a more perfectlens; it simply contains what has to be accepted as an imperfect truth. It is inthis sense that genealogy brings to light the constitutive confusions of a cul-

ture. What genealogy reveals are just so many obfuscations wrought by culturalconsciousness. But in no case does it offer up clear and distinct alternatives toa false view of things.

VI.

Te Debt-Structure of Consciousness. One might feel justified in saying thatthe story of the modern subjects emergence as told in On the Genealogy of Mor-alsis the story of its self-invention. But even that is to ascribe too much agency

and sovereignty, indeed too much originality, to the subject. Te cause of thesubject, in Nietzsches eyes, are the general conditions of subjectivity that liebeyond the reach and power of a subject.

Above, I suggested that the active/reactive distinction is merely strategic.Here we can add that the range of Nietzsches typology of action is disappoint-ingly limited, which is both strategic (it makes for a clumsy classificatory tool)and a further sign of its origin. Mere perspectives on the world, its schematiza-tion, these twin categories represent, in their very schematicity, the conditions

of consciousness itself, which only points to the limits of the imagination, ofits capacity to think contradiction, and to its incapacity to think beyond theinveterateness of the minds own habits. Above all, it is the sign of a flight ofthe imagination before the reality of its own primary processes, which operatenot along the lines of activity or of reactivity, but along the circular paths ofretroactivity and its simplifying, falsifying, and idealizing mechanisms. Nietz-sches categories of action, in other words, are perfect examples of the logicthat is outlined in the first paragraph of the Genealogy. Tey are the product

of retroactive illusion, of a kind of absent-mindedness, like that of somebodywho upon hearing a bell that has just boomed with all its strength the twelvebeats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: what really was that which

just struck? So we, Nietzsche goes on, sometimes rub our ears afterwardand ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, what really was that which we have

just experienced? and moreover: who arewe really and, afterward, as aforesaid,count the twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our beingand alas! miscount them.84

Nietzsches genealogy not only abounds in instances of this model of themind. In many ways genealogy is aboutit. Te primary processes of conscious-ness, in the expanded sense given above, have a thematic approximation in the

84GM Pref., 1.


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historical layers uncovered by genealogy, as these recede back into a pre-historical,pristine, and terrifyingly unrepressed condition. But by the same token, geneal-ogy underscores the contrivances by which such a condition becomes enticing

and imaginable, and the price that has to be paid for imagining it, in the form ofcontradictions. ake the origins of justice. A moral sentiment arbitrarily imposedon the essential violence of life, the (reactive) feeling of justice strains to see equali-ties where there are none.85Justice is thus symptomatic of equivalence-modelsof thinking, which Nietzsche derides unsparingly. Te view that everything hasits price; allthings can be paid for is, he claims, the oldest and navest moralcanon ofjustice, the beginning of all good-naturedness, all fairness, all good

will, all objectivity on earth, and of the sense of exchange, contract, guilt,right, obligation, settlement, in short, it is the beginning of the decline of noblevalues.86Characteristically, this decline also happens to be coterminous withthe origin of all valuation simpliciter; worse, there seems to have been no time

when the activity of setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences,exchanging was never in effect. Not only are these mechanisms as irremedi-able as consciousness itself; they appear to be just what consciousness is: theyconstitute thinking as such.87

Nietzsches position, radically polemical as it is, is that consciousness andits unconscious mechanisms are primordial and ineliminable, which is why we are

today still in the grip of that blunt consistency characteristic of the thinkingof primitive mankind, which is hard to set in motion but then proceeds inexo-rably in the same direction.88Te point is not, or not only, that our thoughtis somehow crudely primitive. It is that morality, as it is imagined and in itsimpure and contradictory actuality, is itself a primitive of thought. Te noblemode of valuation (noble morality) is scarcely an exception.89And as valu-ation (the establishment of qualitative differences) also happens to constitutethe most basic activity of the will to power,90it follows that the will to power is

willy-nilly a moral (or else moralizing) force. How, then, can justice dissolve thenoble system of values? It cannot, except in some fantastically imagined way.91

85GM II, 11.86GM II, 8; cf. GM I, 14: the triumph ofjustice.87GM II, 8. Tis account conflicts with GM II, 16, where the unconscious and infallible

drives are said to give way suddenly to consciousness (suddenly all their instincts were disvaluedand suspended). But as I suggested earlier, suddenly begs the question just what unconsciousinstinct it was that drove subjects to disvalue the instincts.

88

GM II, 8 (emphasis added).89Cf. GM I, 2: It was out of thispathos of distancethat [the nobles] first seized the right tocreate values and to coin names for values, etc. On the implied reactivity of this act, see above.

90Porter, Nietzsches Teory of the Will to Power, 54864.91Justice is the province of the active, the spontaneous, and the aggressive (GM II, 11).

ranslated out of mythology, what this means is that justice is always in contradiction to every


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And so, where genealogy ought, by its own reckoning, to trace the evolutionfrom primitive material debt to a more developed moral guilt, what it in facttraces is the co-evolution of two tendenciesthe oldest kind of astuteness

and the feeling of pride, superiority, and self-satisfactionthat come outas logically equivalent in the passage just cited,92but as contradictories whenmapped onto the active/reactive or sovereign/slave schema they purportedlyexist to corroborate.

Te tension is telling. Not only do debt (Schuld) and guilt (Schuld) remaindisturbingly proximate. Genealogical narrative cannot even imaginea difference

without creating an equivalence, so thoroughly indebted is it to the equivalence-model of thinking.Are genealogies the sign of a reactive mind?Very likely they are.Here we have a further instance of the strategic navet of genealogy. If geneal-ogy is the story of consciousness, which in many ways it is,93it also happensto be told from a point of view that is infected with consciousness, especiallyin its modern (contemporary) historical form. Proffering seductive but equivo-cal reflections of the modern subject to that subject, images of sovereignty orof self-overcoming, of raw power or its sublimation, of desired but disavowed

wishes, Nietzschean genealogy incites and betrays the imaginary logic of thecontemporary subject, whose simulacrum it is. Subtly repeating the very errorsof logic it attacks, genealogy is fashioned as a trap, luring readers, performatively

and demonstratively, into the hidden recesses of their own subjectivities, theirculture, and their conceptions of history. Tat is why I suggested earlier thatgenealogy is a critique of modern historical consciousness in the very guise ofhistorical consciousness. In its naive simplicity, genealogy is the appropriateproduct of an imagination that, already shaped into an instrument of ahistoricalthinking, attempts to reflect for once on the conditions of ahistoricity itself. Teseductive myth of sovereign and self-affirming nobles fulfills this impossibilityas none other can: they are icons of forgetfulness, and thus of the historical

consciousness of modernity itself.Genealogy relates the story of consciousnessnot of its emergence (that

cannot be coherently imagined), but of the various ways in which the conditionsand limits of consciousness are actively avoided and forgotten, for the most part

system of values that it establishes: merely to impose an equivalence upon the fundamentallynon-equivalent is an act of conceptual violence in itself, while its enforcement as a normativestandard (or right) is no less arbitrary or violent. o read this imposition of equivalence as a sign

of activity and not of reactivity is an example of mythopoeticspar excellence.92GM II, 8.93See further GS354 on the origins of consciousness, which effectively argues for its indis-

pensability; the lack of this faculty is conceivable only for beasts of prey who live in completesolitude (a mythical conceit); once they enter into a command chain, they are compelled intoconsciousness (however unconsciously).


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in vain. For the same reason that there is no human time before consciousness(a position firmly maintained in the Genealogy and throughout Nietzsches

writings),94neither can there be any unconscious activity that is uncontaminated

by consciousness or culture, any period of prehistory that isnt already historicalor historicized, or rather dehistoricized (for prehistory, Urzeit, always comesafter history, in the form of a myth), any primordial innocence (Unschuld) ofbecoming, let alone any future condition free of these same constraints. Quitethe contrary, the very wish for utopic moments like these is the sign of a flightfrom the reality of conscious existence. Te subject, Nietzsche is claiming, can-not imagine itself except in or through one of two forms, whether as ennobledor debased. It cannot, in other words, imagine itself as it exists prior to thisself-imagining, prior to its retroactive definition, in a condition that is neithernoble nor enslaved but simply driven away from itself out of a compulsion toideality. Genuine self-apprehension is debarred to subjects by the very nature ofconsciousness itself. Tis is the most difficult and painful truththe ultimate

justicethat underlies Nietzschean genealogies, and which it is impossible forgenealogical readings, and genealogical readers, to face. Such is the shabby, gray,utterly banal truth about the human, all-too-human condition which genealogiescan only ever displace from view, and which all of Nietzsches writings tirelessly

work to convict, if not convince, his readers of again.

University of California, IrvineIrvine, California

94See his critique of Schopenhauerian Urzeiten from 1868, in On Schopenhauer (F. W.Nietzsche, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, vol. 15, ed. H. J. Mette, K. Schlechta,et al. [Munich: C. H. Beck, 193342], 3:35261), e.g., on 358, where the will is shown to besecondary to its being made phenomenal by some representational apparatus, namely our own;cf. ibid., 360 (because no consciousness was present); cf. ibid., 359; and note how the whole of

Schopenhauers construction, said to rest on a prton pseudos, or first false assumption, is termedhypothetical by Nietzsche (Schopenhauers own term, which is now turned against Schopen-hauer). Other early writings by Nietzsche explore the same (il)logic, while also anticipating thedilemmas of the will to power (see J. I. Porter, Te Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on Te Birthof ragedy[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], 6773). Genealogies, we could say, restnot on a singular prton pseudos, but on multiple false assumptions.

theater of the absurd nietzsches genealo

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