Outline

§ 1: The Nature of Genealogy (pp. 139-40)

§ 2: Nietzsche opposed the search for origin (Ursprung) (pp. 140-45)

The pursuit of the origins "is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession" (p142). "If he listens to history, he finds that there is 'something altogether different' behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal from alien forms" (p. 142).

The lofty origin is no more than, in Nietzsche's words, "a metaphysical extension which arises from the belief that things are most precious at the moment of birth" (The Wanderer and His Shadow, 3). Historical origins are lowly and derisive. (p. 143)

The idea of an 'origin' brings about a field of knowledge whose whose purpose is retrieve it, but as something that has been "lost" (p. 143). "Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history" (p. 144; cf. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 265, 110). But "a genealogy of values, morals, asceticism, and knowledge, will never confuse itself with a quest for their 'origins' . . . will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning" (p. 144).

§ 3: Nietzsche’s use of the term Herkunft (pp. 145-48)

“Entstehung and Herkunft are more exact than Ursprung,“ but “we must attempt to reestablish their proper use” (p. 145). Herkunft = “stock or descent; it is the ancient affiliation to a group ... But the traits it attempts to identify are not the exclusive generic characteristics of an individudal, a sentiment, or an idea, . . rather it seeks the subtle, singular, and subindividual marks that might possibly intersect in them to form a network that is difficult to unravel” (p. 145). The beginnings of things are "the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that exist and have value for us (p. 146).

"This heritage" is not "an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies; rather, it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within and from underneath" (p. 146).

"Finally, descent attaches itself to the body (cf. The Gay Science, 348-49). It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate body of those whose ancestors committed the errors....the body maintains, in life as in death, through its strength or weakness, the sanction of every truth and error, as it sustains, in an inverse manner, the origin—descent" (p. 147).

"The body . . . is the domain of Herkunft. The body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to the desires, failings, and errors" (p. 148). "The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body" (p. 148).

§ 4: Nietzsche's use of the term 'Entstehung' (pp. 148-52)

Entstehung = "emergence, the moment of arising" (p. 148). Emergences are not final states, but "merely the current episodes in a series of subjugations" (p. 148) arising from the difficulties of eating, shelter, revenge, wars, disease, natural disasters, etc. "Genealogy, however, seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjugation: . . . the hazardous play of dominations. Emergence is always produced through a particular stage of forces" (pp. 148-49). "As descent [Herkunft] qualifies the strength or weakness of an instinct and its inscription on a body, emergence [Enstehung] designates a place of confrontation but not as a closed field offering the spectacle of a struggle among equals.

Rather, as Nietzsche demonstrates in his analysis of good and evil, it is a 'non-place', a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belong to a come space. Consequently, no one is responsible for an emergence . . . since it always occurs in the interstice" (p. 150). In that space, is "the endlessly repeated play of dominations" (p. 150 quoting Nietzsche, The Wanderer, 9).

This "relationship of domination" is not really a "relationship" at all. "It is fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies" (p. 150). It "gives rise to the universe of rules" (p. 150).

"Humanity installs each of its On genealogy and interpretation: "If interpretation were the slow exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin, then only metaphysics could interpret the development of humanity. But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations. The role of genealogy is to record its history: the history of morals, ideals, and the metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process" (p. 152).

On genealogy and interpretation: "If interpretation were the slow exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin, then only metaphysics could interpret the development of humanity. But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations. The role of genealogy is to record its history: the history of morals, ideals, and the metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process" (p. 152).

§ 5: The relationship between genealogy (seen in an examination of Herkunft and Entstehung) and traditional history (pp. 152-57)

Nietzsche (beginning with the second of the Untimely Meditations) "always questioned the form of history that reintroduces (and always) assumed) a suprahistorical perspective: a history whose function is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself" (p. 152).

"Effective history" (wirkliche Historie) differs from traditional history in being without constants (p. 153). It excludes "rediscovery of ourselves" (p. 154, see "What is An Author?", 134; AK 130-31, 206).

This "history" introduces discontinuity into our very being, deprives the self and nature of a sense of stability, refuses to see an end or goal to which history moves. "An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked 'other' " (p. 154). The world as a profusion of haphazard conflicts" (p. 154, cf. Nietzsche, The Genealogy, II, 12).

There is only "the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance" (Nietzsche, The Dawn, 130).

Events are not reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial or final value. The world is really a profusion of entangled events (p. 155). It continues its existence through a "host of errors and phantasms" (Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 16).

Traditional history looks for "the noblest periods, the highest forms, the most abstract ideas, the purest individualites. . . Effective history, on the other hand, shortens its vision to those things nearest to it—the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies" (p. 155) . . . "to disclose dispersions and differences, to leave things undisturbed in their own dimension and intensity" (p. 156, cf. "Theatrum Philosophicum", 183).

"The final trait of effective history is its affirmation of knowledge as perspective. Historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy—the unavoidable obstacles of their passion" (pp. 156-57).

§ 6: Nietzsche challenges the role of the historian as it is customarily understood and performed (pp. 157-60)

Nietzsche's historical sense is explicit in its perspective and acknowledges its system of injustice. Its perception is slanted, being a deliberate appraisal, affirmation, or negation. It does not efface itself, or submit to the processes it observes (p. 157). Effective history complses genealogy of history as a vertical projection of its position.

The traditional historian reduces everything to the lowest common denominator , he is above everything. "This demagogy, of course, must be masked. It must hide its singular malice under the cloak of universals. . . The historian must invoke objectivity, the accuracy of facts, and the permanence of the past . . . He is divided against himself: forced to silence his preferences and overcome his distaste . . . to mimic death in order to enter into the kingdom of the dead, to adopt a faceless anonymity" (p. 158). His objectivity: 1) inverts the relationships of will and knowledge; 2) has necessary belief in causes and teleology (Providence).

§ 7: Three uses of historical sense which oppose the three Platonic modalities of history (pp. 157-64)

Parodic: the parodic opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition. This is the double of what Nietzsche, in the second of his Untimely Meditations, calls "momumental history". In other words, parodic history creates a double of the high points of historical development, as recovered in the works, actions and creations of great men. Monumental history is devoted to veneration, and is in actuality itself a parody which bars access to the actual intensities and creations of life (pp. 160-61). The parodic modality is a rejection of the traditional attitudes of reverence. Contrasts the veneration of monuments versus parody of this veneration

2. Dissociative: opposes history as continuity or representative of a tradition. "This is necessary because the rather weak identity, which we attempt to support and to unify under a mask, is in itself only a parody: it is plural; countless spirits dispute its possession; numerous systems intersect and compete" (p. 161). "The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity," but "to make visible all those discontinuities" (p. 161), to dissipate our identity, to examine separately the various stages of our evolution (pp. 161-62). "Antiquarian history", according to the Untimely Meditations (II, 3), is the opposite of this. It seeks continuities; it shows how our present is rooted in the past; it demonstrates the conditions under which we were born. According to Nietzsche, antiquarian history blocks creativity in support of the laws of fidelity. Later, in Human, All Too Human (1878), Nietzsche considers the task of the antiquarian with a difference emphasis. Genealogy calls into question these connections with the past, revealing heterogenous systems which, masked by the historian, inhibit the formation of an identity based on the past.

It liberates humanity by presenting it with other origins than those which it prefers to see itself. Respect for ancient continuities versus systematic dissociation and fragmentation

3. Sacrificial: historical consciousness appears to be neutral, devoid of passions, and committed solely to the truth, but in fact all the forms and transformations which mark the construction of fields and traditions, etc., of knowledge are aspects of the will to knowledge, of violences. "The historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice (there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or to a foundation for truth) and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind)" (p. 163). (Genuine) knowledge calls us to the sacrifice of knowledge (as a system of totalizing, classifying, etc, hence oppression) (pp. 162-64). It does not create a universal truth, but breaks down illusory defenses, and dissolves the unity of the subject. Nietzsche criticized history for sacrificing this present life to the exclusive concern for truth. This is a critique of injustices of the past by a truth held by modern historians versus destruction of the modern historian who maintains knowledge by the deployment of the will to knowledge

(The pagination refers to English translation in Language, Counter-memory, Practice)