Theater of the Absurd:

Nietzsches Genealogy as Cultural Critique

James I. Porter

Abstract. The paper seeks to demystify Nietzsches concept of genealogy. Genealogy tells the story of historical origins in the form of a myth that is betrayed from
within, while readers have naively assumed it tells a story that Nietzsche endorseswhether 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 actively
avoided and forgotten, for the most part in vain. The lessons are these: there is no
human time before consciousness; no unconscious activity that is uncontaminated
by consciousness or culture; no period of prehistory that isnt already historical or
historicized, hence subject to dehistoricization (for prehistory, Urzeit, always comes
after history, in the form of a myth); no primordial innocence of becoming, let
alone any future condition free of these same constraints. Genealogy is the critique
of the myth of knowing critique.

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 mount
a critique of moral values and the value of those values by reconstructing an
actual history of morality, the sources for which are to be found in what is
documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short
the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of
mankind.2 Genealogy tracks large expanses of time, millennia one can actually
count. Here we finally come to grips with agents who are driven by urges that at
least approximate to passions and instincts, as opposed to those ghostly agencies
The 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.
1
F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. W. Kaufman (New York: Vintage
Books, 1967), henceforth GM.
2
GM, Pref. 7.

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of the will to power straining to exert themselves against the background of some
metaphysical and barely imaginable flux.3 And we can speak about evolutionary
processes in the formations of character, class, race, and nation, with consequences
that are recognizably, or at least contestably, moral and political. However
unsettling it may prove as a cultural diagnosis, genealogy at least provides the
solace 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 the
familiar becomes almost banal, a repetition of itself, or as Nietzsche would say,
gray. At the extreme, genealogy is Nietzsches least original theory, in ways not
much different from Homeric and Hesiodic mythology, the Judaeo-Christian
story of the fall, or Marxian anthropology.

I.
Genealogy and the Sense of History. Genealogy does convey a sense of historical perspective. In what sense is it a history? It is doubtful that genealogy
is historical at all, although it is widely construed to be, just as Nietzsche is
widely assumedon Nietzsches own authorityto be a practicing genealogist, which is to say, a counter-historian, a historian of even the apparently
non-historical, of what we tend to feel is without history. That, at least, is the
view set forth by Michel Foucault in his immensely influential essay, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.4 And yet, it would seem heroic but in vain to try, as
3
See J. I. Porter, Nietzsches Theory of Will to Power, in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. K.
Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2006), 54864.
4
M. 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: The role of genealogy is to record
. . . the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty
or 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 seriously
and to find it where it has least been expected to be . . . . [Genealogy] tries to show how the way
in which [those institutions and practices, like morality] undergo changes as a result of historical
development; A. C. MacIntyre, Genealogies and Subversions, in A. C. MacIntyre, Three Rival
Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1990), 39: genealogy traces the historical genesis of the psychological deformation
involved in the morality of the late nineteenth century. B. Williams rightly cautions against
a narrow reading of Nietzsches view of history, but does not go far enough in recognizing the
degree 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, European
Journal of Philosophy 1 [1993]: 114, at n. 11). All these authors refer to Nietzsche or the recipient
of his program as a genealogist. Blondel goes so far as to coin the solecism, lhomme, en tant
qutre 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 from

Nietzsches 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 not
offer a recuperation of history, but only the caricature of one, as a moments
reflection on its bare plotline ought to remind us. Genealogy, the narrative or
ensemble of narratives through which Nietzsche purports to trace the dreary
historical evolution of current-day morality, is itself a summary, and so it lends
itself to easy encapsulation.
The story it tells is of a progressive degeneration over timefrom a culture
that once upon a time was knightly and aristocratic, exhibiting a healthy sense of
moral self-affirmation (it was strong, noble, and active), to a reactive slave revolt
by the oppressed caste comprised of the weak, the ascetic-priestly, and the reactive. Inverting this initial hierarchy and its values, the slave revolt begins when
ressentiment [the spirit of sickly, begrudging resentment and denial] itself becomes
creative and gives birth to values that are inimical to the values embodied in
the hitherto sovereign, and henceforward vulnerable, masters.5 Several millennia
on, 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. A
crucial point added by Nietzsche is that the slave revolt succeeds to the extent
that it is purely imaginary (it is an imaginary revenge),6 thus opening the door
to 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.7 But there
are other implications to this crucial qualification about the fantastic, or rather
phantasmatic, nature of the enterprise he is describing, and we will want to come
back to them below. A series of analyses, investigating the origins of punishment, contract, law, and other forms of institutionalized moral value, provides
the somber foreground to this memory of a brighter past. But these studies are
a curious lot. They follow no discernible and certainly no dateable progression,
and they seem if anything to be mere repetitions of the same story (the singular
slave revolt in morality), viewed from slightly different vantage points.
grounds his own evidence, given that his own arguments are couched in historicist, and not just
naturalistic, vocabulary. Thus, all appeals to naturally occurring phenomena as the source of
contemporary moral states (ibid., 189) make Nietzsches own appeals to time and history superfluous, when these latter are in fact crucial to his narrative strategies. Nor can such appeals account
for the presence of historical consciousness, which is in no way a naturally occurrent phenomenon,
and which is a frequent target of Nietzsches critiques.
5
GM I, 10.
6
Ibid.
7
Cf. 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, documentation, or the relentless erudition that Foucault, perhaps uniquely, finds so
inspiring about Nietzsches program.8 Instead, what we do find is a fair amount
of pseudo-erudition set forth in the apodictic mode and brazenly challenging
our sense of historical plausibility. The Celts, by the way, were definitely a blond
race, Nietzsche blandly claims at one point against the German pathologist,
anthropologist, and cultural warrior from the mid-nineteenth century, Rudolf
Virchow.9 Elsewhere we find judgments that inauspiciously begin, If we consider those millennia before the history of man, we may unhesitatingly assert
that it was precisely . . . .10 At the most critical junctures of his argument, and
in its many asides (assuming we can distinguish these), Nietzsches declaratives,
straining all credulity, have the same status as their close associate, his colorful
pseudo-etymologies, which make no effort to conceal their own dubiety, as they
pretend to plug gaps in the unknown (in Latin, Nietzsche opines, the word good
may be traced back to war, bad to black; esthlos, in Greek, signifies one
who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true).11 Nietzsche claims no
more historical truth for his project than his genealogy requires.
It is a fair question just how much historical truth is required. If the aim is
to critique the value of moral value, history would seem irrelevant or a distraction. The values in question are those of Nietzsches contemporary present. Why
should tracing them to their historical origins, or simply exposing their historically contingent character, count against them in any way? To map their history
would be to defer their critique, not to accomplish it.12 If the aim is to show the
effacement of the instincts, this event takes place with the onset of sociality if not
earlier, but at any rate it takes place sometime in our prehistory.13 And arguments
about that are inevitably of a piece with mythology, a mere projection of the
present.14 Historical knowledge, on the contrary, has only one valid function for
Nietzsche: it demonstrates, if not objectively then in the subjective act of historical knowing, how deeply ingrained the syndromes are that his moral critique of
Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 140.
GM I, 5. See H. Cancik, Nietzsches Antike: Vorlesung, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000),
47, with references to Virchow.
10
GM I, 14 (emphasis in original).
11
GM I, 5. The ungrounded, racist etymology of evilmelas (black)stems from G.
Curtius (see Cancik, Nietzsches Anitke, 128). I have been unable to trace the remaining etymologies, which may be Nietzsches own fanciful coinages.
12
Cf. Nietzsche, The Gay Science. With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 345; henceforth GS.
13
See, e.g., GM II, 89.
14
Cf. GM III, 9 on that vast era . . . which preceded world history and, Nietzsche assures
us, was the truly decisive history that determined the character of mankind.
8
9

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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 always
stood. 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. The question is not
whether Nietzsches genealogy is historical, but why anyone should think it is. In
a subsequent gloss on his project, Nietzsche spells out the actual parameters of
his critique of moral values and their value: morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as
cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as restraint, as poison.16 Later in the Third Essay
he 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; what
lies hidden behind it, beneath it, in it; of what it is the provisional, indistinct
expression, overlaid with question marks and misunderstandings.17 Nietzsche
plainly means to inquire not into the historical derivation of valuesand the
values in question are emphatically those of his contemporary presentbut
into their form, their illogic, and their hidden, because unconscious, scaffolding. 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 issue
of the continued adhesion to morality, its binding quality, even in the face of its
acknowledged valuelessness, whether that acknowledgment takes place in the
secrecy of our underlying awareness or more openly, be it cynically or from an
enlightened perspective.18 How is moral value imagined? What, in that precise
sense, are the conditions and circumstances in which [moral values] grew, in
which they evolved and changed, by which we may understand the ever new
ways in which values continually re-mask themselves and their ever unchanging vulnerability to critique? How is it that morality can appear as a cause or a
consequence of anything at all, or even as its own cause? Why does morality so
fascinate us? These, not historical origins, are the kinds of questions that drive
Nietzsches 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 the
principal ways in which morality misunderstands itself, deliberately and surreptitiously 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
GM, Pref. 4.
GM, Pref. 6.
17
GM III, 23.
18
GS, 345 (emphasis added) and 347.
15
16

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value. In that case, the question why Nietzsche should have chosen to present his
genealogy 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 that
the term genealogy invites. What Nietzsche most certainly does not have in mind
when he deploys the concept is a sequential, linear and developmental scheme
that traces contemporary appearances back to long-forgotten (and repressed) evil
causeshowever shameful, and ultimately banal, Nietzsche relentlessly points
out, most origins prove to be.19 But neither is Nietzsches genealogical analysis
a study in the shifting contingencies of value formations. What genealogy ultimately 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 the
repression of content but the misrecognition that constitutes repression. Forgetting is an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression, a kind
of incorporation.20 And 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 a
positive expression, from the past, of a present negation. It reveals only a stigmatic
positivity, a heritage that is never in any sense past or complete because it is always
present, in a state of unfinished completion, laboring under a pseudonym. Thus,
what is of interest in genealogy is not the appeal to the past as such, nor even the
suppression of past realities, but above all the way in which the contemporary
historical imaginary conspires with the contemporary moral imaginary.
Contemporary perceptions of value are intimately bound up with perceptions of history, for instance the view that morality, and moral culture
generally, represent an advance in civilization and a progressive domestication
of the instincts, that values and institutions have a certain utility, that culture
has transcended its historical origins, and so on. Such perceptions, which are
genealogical, Nietzsche roundly condemns for being unhistorical,21 and their
rejection constitutes the central argument of the Genealogy. By calling them
unhistorical (unhistorisch) Nietzsche does not only mean to suggest that contemporary 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 contemporary
19
Cf. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 42 and 44; henceforth D.
20
GM II, 1.
21
GM I, 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 of
ideology in the modern world.22
This is the same thesis that underlies Nietzsches earliest attacks on modern
classical philology,23 and it appears again in his arguments against the historical
disciplines in his essay from 1874, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History
for Life.24 In all three cases, Nietzsche is pointing, rather shrewdly, to a complicity between what he calls the historical sense (historical consciousness) and
contemporary blindnesses in the cultural realm. His argument is that historical consciousness is a form of forgetfulness, not of remembrance; it is, in fact,
ahistorical in its essence. But the illusion of historical awareness is vital: the
ahistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an
individual, of a people and of a culture,25 which is to say that ahistoricity, lived
under the illusion of its historical character, is essential to cultural and individual
existence. Now, modernity can in effect afford to be ahistorical so long as history
does the work of historical remembrance for it. And the belief in moral progress
is the way in which contemporary culture historicizes itself while projecting its
moral values sub specie aeternitatis.
Nietzsches untimely response is of course to say that culture has not
transcended itself, its shameful origins, its past or recent violences and barbaric
practices. On the contrary, the repudiated past, so avidly despised by the morally
upright, 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 in
a guilt-free way, with a good conscience26or as Nietzsche would elsewhere
say, it is a denial . . . in the form of an affirmation.27 This is the basis of moral
hypocrisy and of what might be called, following Nietzsche, moral cynicism
(that is to say, bad conscience).28 Nietzsches genealogy has as its primary aim
to 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
Cf. GM III, 26, devoted to the problem of modern historiography.
See 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 critiquing the desire for undisturbed complacency that motivates historical consciousness. This is what
a year later is called denial of the past, viz., an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a
past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate (UM
II, 3). The difference between denial and disavowal is only a rhetorical one in Nietzsche.
24
UM II.
25
UM II, 1 (emphasis removed from original).
26
UM II, 1; GM II, 14.
27
GM II, 22.
28
Cf. UM I, 2; II, 9; GM II, 11.
22
23

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sense can be. Genealogy mimics the fragility and the confusion of historical sense. It is
meant to be a symptom of the modern cultural subject and of the cunning artistry of
its unconscious mechanisms. So understood, genealogy is not some hidden weapon
in Nietzsches critical arsenal. Quite the contrary, it is a way of exposing a kind of
stupidity, or blindness, in contemporary historical and ideological thought.
This 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, and
lived is but the outward trace of subjectivity and its invariable delusions, and
it is these later which comprise the true object of Nietzsches critiques. Thus it
is not history but only its faintest echoes in the inner workings of the modern
mind that command Nietzsches attention. Nor is it historical consciousness
by itself that is of interest, but rather the imaginary logic of modern subjects,
made visible in the form of historical thinkingor rather, made invisible to
them by the very assumption of this form by consciousness.29 Finally, it is not a
historical 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 works
appear to be inerasably fixed, invariable, and virtually intemporal. The entire
past of the old culture was erected upon force, slavery, deception, error; but we,
the heirs and inheritors [literally, the concrescence, die Concrescenzen] of all
these past things, cannot decree our own abolition and may not wish away a single
part of them,31 for it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain.32 At
best, Nietzsche seems to say, one can hope for new ways of accommodating old
habits: for the habits of consciousness are themselves indelibly stained into our
subjective, human, all too human limits, which (as a later note reads) constitute
the Procustes bed of knowledge for us.33 To capture more satisfyingly the ahistorical core of historical awareness, an admittedly difficult idea, we might begin by
saying that different historical moments find ways to create their own ahistorical
illusions, but that every historical moment finds at least one way to do this. The
paradox is mainly an apparent one. The point is that ahistoricity is produced historiCf. UM II, 4.
Cf. UM II, 3.
31
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1: 452; henceforth HA.
32
UM II, 3.
33
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York:
Random House, 1967), 499; henceforth WP.
29
30

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cally, in part by virtue of the sheer weight of historical sediment pressing down
upon everyday awareness (with ahistoricity being produced, as it were, through
an 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 a
subject into a historical subject that is enveloped in ahistorical gauze.

III.
Polemics and Hypotheses. These multiple and contradictory logics are directly
embodied in Nietzsches genealogical writing. His practice of genealogy erodes
itself in a subversion that is both concealed and spectacular, which is why it
is so tricky a genre. To begin with, genealogy is an entirely polemical form of
discourse, as the frequently overlooked subtitle to the Genealogy spells out for
us. It is in polemics, not in positive writing, that Nietzsches desire to produce a
genealogy is conceived, and it is from this impulse alone that genealogy receives
its content and has to be understood. But Nietzsche is not only a consummate
polemicist: he is the hyperbole of one. And so it should come as no surprise that
Nietzsches project crucially coincides with the genealogical hypothesis of
contemporary moral speculation on the continent and in England, especially
with the work of Paul Re, The Origin of Moral Sentiments34to a degree that
Nietzsche would never acknowledge.35 Affecting moral outrage, he derides these
investigators and microscopists of the soul for doing what he does best himself,
namely, for constantly dragging the partie honteuse of our inner world into the
foreground and seeking the truly effective and directing agent, that which has
34
P. Re, Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (Chemnitz: Verlag von Ernst
Schmeitzner, 1877).
35
A 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 shrewdness of Nietzsches polemics. The point cannot be argued out here, but the following remark from
Res preface to Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen sets the tone for what follows it: The
moral man stands no closer to the intelligible world than the physical man (Re, Der Ursprung der
moralischen Empfindungen, viii). In the sequel, Re offers demystifying insights into the retroactive
derivation 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; and
the belief, which is purely an assuagement, that mankind is not invariably and universally driven
by 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 (the
logic 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, Smtliche
Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbnden, 2nd edition, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino
Montinari [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 of
man would least desire to find it.36 That is doubtless why he goes on to concede
that genealogists in the English tradition are (or rather may be) fundamentally
brave, proud, and magnanimous animals, who know how to keep their hearts
as well as their sufferings in bounds and have trained themselves to sacrifice all
desirability to truth, every truth, 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 as
they are the grinding of an axe. Elsewhere I have shown how it is in staging a
radical coincidence of opposites that Nietzsches writing most poses a challenge,
and often a threat, to its comprehension by readers. The situation is no different
here, for at this point Nietzsche has virtually become the genealogist he opposes
himself to. Can he actually be attackinghimself? The answer is, quite literally,
Yes.37 Quite apart from substantive overlaps and disagreements (and there is
plenty to be said on both sides), Nietzsches genealogy, transparently at odds
with itself, is a simulacrum of the logic and form of conventional genealogy.38
As Nietzsche wrote to Re, All my friends are now unanimous in the opinion
GM I, 1.
A 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: To the father of this essay, most gratefully from its mother (cited after W.
Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 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 Res
genealogy (whether he inspired them or notpresumably he did) and then reaffirming them
again, in a different form, in his own genealogy. (Re would have been struck by Nietzsches essay
from 1872, The 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 with
marked affinities to GM) had sent a panic into the Nietzsche camp. Rohde commented, Is it
possible to divest oneself so completely of ones soul and substitute another? Suddenly to become
Re instead of Nietzsche? (Translations from R. Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980], 2045; see these pages for a convenient summary of the earlier
scandal.) In the face of such precariousness, I think it a fair question to ask not What do these
English psychologists really want? (GM I, 1), but Just what does Nietzsche want?
38
He eventually does, after all, concur with the genealogists that morality is a matter of
forgetting, habit, error, and presumed utility (cf. GM I, 2); or that it is these things once they
have 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 ones
impulses can often be as active as it is automatic, which is to say that we are for the most part
spontaneously active agents in our actions, actively disavowing our own disavowals. (Cf. GM I, 3:
in judgments good and bad mankind has summed up and sanctioned precisely its unforgotten and unforgettable experiences, which points forward to the discussion of the manufacture of
moral memory in GM II, 3.)
36
37

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that my book was originated and written by you.39 Even the self-dissimulations
of Nietzsches discourse are a faithful reproduction of genealogy, which succeeds
to 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 mechanisms
and fictionsthe better to foreground those of its object, as if it were enacting
consciously the unconscious rifts in the position of his opponents.
Consider the historical pretensions of genealogy. Presenting their case as a
historical inquiry into the shameful origins of contemporary moral sentiments,
what moral genealogists in fact bring to light, without quite acknowledging this
to be the case, are not recorded events from the past but unwanted specters of
moralitys buried, repressed, and disowned nature in the present (morality as
a habituation in conduct, as a convention mistaken for a natural condition, as
egoismour true naturein disguise, etc.). Moral genealogy of the conventional kind thus furnishes a stigmatic evaluation of the present in the form of a
speculative history. By repeating these very moves in an exaggerated way, and by
scandalously affirming the speculative dimension of his own history, Nietzsche
is in effect giving us a correct reading of the genealogists designs.40 He is challenging not so much the thrust of their arguments, which is critical, as their
historicism, which is fictional and little more than a projection of first causes,
themselves hypothetically inferred, onto an imaginary historical dimension.
The fact that Nietzsche is trading one fiction for another (one error [for]
another),41 one falsified historicism for another, is irrelevant to his immediate
purpose. But there is an ulterior purpose as well, for Nietzsches parasitism and
his polemics cut two ways. His genealogy derives whatever coherence it has, and
indeed its very conceivability, only thanks to the modern imaginary that breathes
life into it, which must reenact its own disavowals in order to salvage Nietzsches
genealogy 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 and
strategic value, so too here: it is effective only in situ, as the site of a writing practice that opens itself up to self-betrayal in its readerly reception. The critique it
accomplishes is not one that it itself performs. It is the reader who must perform
that in her own person. Nietzsche simply provides the occasion and the bait.
Quoted in Hayman, Nietzsche, A Critical Life, 204.
So, for example, Res genealogy traces an evolution in moral ideology, not in human action. Our real natures, he shows, are contained rather than extinct: as long as people act, they are
egoistical, selfish, and envious; but as soon as they start to philosophize, they insist upon moral
progress (Re, Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen, 140; cf. viiviii).
41
GM, Pref. 4.
39
40

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Now, all the traits of reactivity isolated abovenavet, stupefaction, the

inability to keep anything straight for very long, the tendency to revise oneself
retroactively, 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 Nietzsches
genealogical discourse, which mimes the epigonal, late-born, or if you like
reactive modern consciousness that is the object of its critique. Genealogy
is a critique of modern historical consciousness in the disguise of that historical
consciousness itself. It is this self-reflexive dimension which makes wrapping our
minds 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 reason, it is only by retracing from close quarters the logical patterns of genealogy
that one can appreciate how genealogy anticipates its apprehension by a reader:
how it seductively courts readers into false certainties and how it disables their
readings at the selfsame stroke. In literary critical terms, Nietzsche is a most
unreliable narratora fact that complicates any attempt to read Nietzsche as
the 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 that
characterize history, culture, and genealogy in Nietzsche in order to demonstrate
their 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 feature of time under a genealogical description has to do with the way in which
genealogy traces the frustration of the two primary motions it describes, the
one characterized by decline, the other by overcoming and redemption: seemingly equally matched, they are in fact self-cancelling. The result is historical
stalemate: things flatline. This same pattern of narrative is matched at another
level 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 things
become more and more what they are, culture is always revealing not so much
what culture is but what it has always been.43 Secondly, and as a consequence,
it can be shown that the view of history as evolving and in motion, of decline
and hoped-for ascendancy, is a mere misperception of how things are. The two
motions of genealogy are not really motions at all (and for this reason, too, are
frustrated), but are only characterizations, mere psychological perspectives that
are, moreover, symptoms of each other. For ultimately it is in the nature of
reactivity to see things in the jaundiced perspective of decline and decay; it is to
look upon the world with a retrospective weariness, to feel that the future is a
Cf. UM I, 2; GM III, passim.
GM II, 12.

42
43

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thing of the past,44 and to believe that one is a latecomer and epigone45and,
conversely, that the future can revenge the past. This dimension of genealogy
cannot be simply waved away, and it has significant and puzzling consequences
for Nietzsches argument. One of these becomes immediately apparent, though
no less puzzling, if we rephrase the problem of genealogy in Nietzschean parlance:
what genealogy reveals is not the contrast between activity and reactivity, but
rather the activity of reactivity.

IV.
Actively Reactive. Perhaps the easiest, and bluntest, way of explaining what
this 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, in
Nietzschean parlance, it denies itself ). Nietzsches abundant commentary
on the suppressed present cruelty, violence, and hypocrisy of morality already
points in this direction. The argument underlying this account is that virtue
is always manufactured, always staged, always retains a component of violence
and cruelty, and not least in the violent contortions that the disavowal of
these motivations requires of putatively moral agents. In a word, morality is
founded upon disavowal, on a mendaciousness that is abysmal but innocent,
truehearted, blue-eyed, and virtuous.46 Nietzsche is keen to expose the hypocrisy of a moral culture whose agents, themselves black magicians, have a
special talent for making whiteness, milk, and innocence of every blackness,
especially their own.47 But from this easily acceptable fact (acceptable to
readers who would identify with Nietzsches critical posture, and disavow any
susceptibility to his criticisms) there follows a troubling consequence: reactive
agents 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 psychological
features of agents. For surely if reactive agents are caught up in the mechanisms
of disavowal, they are to be distinguished from agents who are forthrightly and
unabashedly active, untouched by disavowal because they are innocent of it (they
do not know what guilt, responsibility, or consideration are).48 The latters activity is, one might wish to say, unrepressed. But that wont do, for if all agency is
GM Pref. 5; III, 25.
UM II, 5.
46
GM III, 19. See further the brilliant remarks on Greek culture and its modern extension
in GM II, 7.
47
GM 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.
48
GM II, 17.
44
45

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essentially and irreducibly active as a matter of definition, at most we can hold

on to two ways of expressing activity, not to a radical distinction between activity
and 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, the
instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power). 49
This is, to be sure, no news. A monistic reading of the will to power (the
reduction of all there is to the will to power) can only claim as much. But the
monism of the will to power is itself a simplification, even if its simplicity comes
only at the cost of the most elaborate of falsifications. The present instance is
no exception. Activity, the very same activity in fact (Nietzsche postulates), is
the productive and constitutive force in masters and in slaves, for instance in
blond beasts of prey, who are cited as agents of the state50 and in agents
driven by ressentiment, the victims of this conqueror and master race and its
political and cultural activity. If the identity is puzzling, not to mention the
suddenness of the transformation, which is downright inexplicable (the most
fundamental change [man] ever experienced . . . when [man, once ruled only
by blond instincts] found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society
and of peace),51 the contrast seems straightforward: the violent organizers of
states turn their will to power outwardly onto others, while creatures of resentment focus their power inwardly, directing it backward on themselves, in
the labyrinth of the breast.52 This is at least consistent with some of Nietzsches
apparent views, for instance the claim that noble spirits act spontaneously and
immediately, without internalization, while slave spirits are consumed by internalized feelings. But elsewhere these criteria are reversed, and ultimately this
formal and psychological difference proves impossible to maintain. The contrast
between the two kinds of agency represents the divided agency of cultural subjects
generally, their disavowal of what they do, but also their disavowal of the very
mechanisms of disavowal.53
Consider how the difference plays itself out in the two passages just cited.
The same active force, Nietzsche writes,54 is at work on a grander scale in those
artists of violence and organizers who build states, and that here, internally, on
GM II, 18.
GM II, 17.
51
GM II, 16.
52
GM II, 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, 2
vols. [Paris: Plon-Nourrit et cie, 1920], 1:21).
53
See J. I. Porter, Unconscious Agency in Nietzsche, Nietzsche-Studien 27 (1998):
15395.
54
GM II, 18.
49
50

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a smaller and pettier scale, directed backward, in the labyrinth of the breast, to
use Goethes expression, creates for itself a bad conscience and builds negative
ideals. If it seems odd that Nietzsche should choose to cast blond beasts as the
agents of the state, we neednt look far for an explanation: we are in the midst of
yet another genealogy. I employed the word state: it is obvious what is meantsome
pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race.55 The point is startling,
but the logic is familiar by now. Naive moralists would have us imagine that political and cultural organization, a per se good, is grounded on polite contractual
norms, but they are wrong. What today pass for civil states are in essence violent
formations that do indeed civilize, which is to say they regiment social chaos into
social relations, but only through the most barbaric of means, through oppressive
fear and terror, which take the form of guilt, conscience, duty, and the painful
mechanisms of shame.56 Nor do states ground individual freedom; they actually
remove it through terrible repressions. Presenting the story of the expulsion of a
tremendous quantity of freedom . . . from the world, or at least from the visible
world,57 Nietzsches genealogy is a transparent parable for the shackles of political
and social obligation (the social straightjacket)58 brought to subjects courtesy of
the state. Nietzsche is not just reciting a clich from modern political thinking; he
is giving it a radical reinterpretation. Confounding the political wisdom not only
of naive moralists or of enlightened naturalists but even of prudentially minded
social Darwinists like Paul Re, who was by no means a complacent believer in
the natural goodness of mankind, Nietzsche places the beasts on the outside of
the social prison, not inside it. The blond beasts, instantiating the agency of the
state, are its wardens.59 They are the quintessential Beamter (civil servants).60
GM II, 17 (emphasis added).
GM II, 6.
57
GM II, 17.
58
GM II, 2.
59
Contrast 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 of
shame are the [iron] bars by means of which the beasts are prevented from tearing one another
to pieces. Occasionally these bars break open. The thought is Aristotelian (Res dissertation and
first book were on Aristotles ethics): in the absence of law and justice, man is the very worst of
all animals (Politics 1.3.1253a3233); but it also strikingly recalls Nietzsches The 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 the
state, 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 (KSA 1: 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).
60
To 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 at
random. After all, mans sufferings are self-inflicted: man suffers of man, of himself (GM II, 16).
55
56

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V.
Laying Down the Law. A parallel point is brought out a few sections earlier,61
where the system in question through which moral culture asserts itself is not that
of political obligation but the closely allied constraints of law and justice. Again,
Nietzsche asks, disarmingly, In which sphere has the entire administration of
law 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. This inversion of
weakness and strength might appear to be a polemically motivated reversal (in
this case, of a thesis by Dhring). But that is not the end of the story, for the logic
of genealogy is the logic of unwanted identification, not of expected difference. By the
administration of law Nietzsche means precisely thatnot the blind aggressions
of blond beasts, but the agency of reactive and resentful moral culture itself, its proper
activity. He is obviously playing havoc with the racial fantasy of Aryanism for
anyone who might be lured into such an identification, whether one admits it or
not. Inverting his own inversion, Nietzsche is not demonstrating how the strong
fulfill the expected role of the weak, even if that is the apparent, and admittedly
mind-boggling, sense of the text.62 Nor is he showing how justice is a later sublimation of a primary instinct for revenge (so Dhring) or how the (reactive)
demand for retributive justice is a rationalization, a mere feeling, imposed upon
the original deterrent and mnemonic function of punishment (so Re).63 To the
contrary, he is demonstrating how the strong and the weak are irretrievably one.
His argument is that reactivity is fundamentally active, which may well leave us
in doubt as to what, in that case, might constitute the relevant contrast to reactive
agency. That 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 mind
crimes perpetrated by reactive subjects who are driven, despite all their piety
toward justice, by the truly active affects, such as lust for power, avarice, and
the likeas in the burnings, tortures, dispossessions, and maimings so spectacularly 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 a
religious angle, the blond beasts of course make up the priesthood. It is worth noting that Nietzsche
elides the transition from beasthood to the new division of labor in II, 16 with suddenly and in
II, 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.
62
Compare the remarks on the rationale of active justice, which is to curb, like a dutiful
shepherd, the reactive feelings of ressentiment and vengefulness in the morally weak (ibid). This
practice resembles nothing so much as the ascetic training against states of depression described
in GM III, 18, a practice shepherded by the high priests of asceticism.
63
See GM II, 11 and previous note.

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its asceticism) or in those sufferings described in the lengthy excerpt from

Tertullian, in which pagan practices, not least the persecutions of Christians, are
matched in their degree of violence only by an imagined Christian revenge.64 But
also intended are the kinder, gentler, and more recent variants of these forms of
penalty: settlements, elevating certain equivalents for injuries into norms, and
most supremely of all, the institution of law, the imperative declaration of what
in general counts as permitted, as just, in accordance with which violence and
capricious acts on the part of individuals or entire groups are treated henceforth
as 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 be
disciplined 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,66 and this is nowhere more
apparent 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 associated with active aggression, or to the violent imposition of a non-violent law in
the more recent present (the whole cunning and underhand art of police and
prosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder,
practiced as a matter of principle).67 Meanwhile, there seems to be no space left
for an essential violence outside the mores of culture. Not even the outbreaks of
barbaric aggression and violence so terrifyingly portrayed by Nietzsche in the
earlier sections of the Genealogythe blond ambition and brutal marauding of
noble races in the wildernesscan count as an instance. For on a second look,
all this violence appears to take place within the well marked terrain of cultural
achievement, not outside of it (even their highest culture betrays a consciousness
of it and even a pride in it).68
The 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 fascinating and repulsive specter of violence erupting beyond the limits of culture or a
culture. Indeed, the image of blond bestiality seems to be a way of accommodating, through fantasy, the violence proper to cultures own activity. Barbaric
GM I, 15.
GM II, 11.
66
Ibid.
67
GM II, 14. Implicated, in other words, are both regimes of spectacle and regimes of a
more insidiously concealed power (surveillance), to phrase this in a Foucauldian idiom that owes
much to Nietzsche. See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Pantheon, 1977). Only, in Nietzsche these are not opposed as linear, historical developments, as
they are in Foucault; rather, each presupposes the other, and they are coexistent.
68
GM I, 11.
64
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lawlessness, at least in the Genealogy (which is to say, in the minds of the cultural
subjects depicted there) is in fact an entirely relative concept, no more than an
imaginary projection between cultures, or from within them: one victorious
cultures supremacy is another, downtrodden cultures barbarism, and the same
logic applies within a given culture.69 This convergence of outlawed violence
and cultures laws, which it would be wrong to take as an index of Nietzsches
own relativism, let alone as a condoning of violence, is wholly inexplicable in
terms of his categories (active and reactive), and in fact represents a paralysis of
them. But there is simply no way round the conclusion that noble morality70
and ascetic morality71 are indistinguishable qua positively enforced law. The
reason is as obvious as it is troubling: the two spheres, significantly actuated by
the selfsame need for law, are one. The 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 the
equation that is laid bare by genealogy, and the irony of power, its law, that
genealogy brings embarrassingly to light. Below, we shall consider the converse
of this irony, namely the sense in which the will to power is disguisedly moral
in its essence. These revelations point us back to the human dimension of
power, to the frailties of subjectivity and the actual impotence of power, aspects
that 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 of
power: no sooner does power assume a form than power, in that form, senses
its own restriction (this is the defining criterion and the literal meaning of ressentiment). 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: its
essence is always to be a falsifying and simplifying force), it is only logical that
the 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 been reactive, simultaneously a means and an impediment to the will to power. This is why the
conditions of law and justice, which Nietzsche has just shown to constitute
an expression of the will to power in its active form, can at the same time be
said to constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, the goal of which is to
69
This boldness of noble races, mad, absurd, and sudden in its expression . . . all this
came together in the minds of those who suffered from it, in the image of the barbarian, the evil
enemy, etc. (GM I, 11; emphasis added), where the suffering in question need only be imaginary and phantasmatic. An example of projection from within a culture is given by the allusion
to Hesiods genealogy of races in the same section. See Porter, Philology of the Future, 2425 for
a reading of this passage.
70
GM I, 10.
71
Cf. GM Pref. 4.

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creat[e] greater units of power.72 Law and life collide. But then life conflicts
with itself as well.
This purely formal shift, from law as active power to law as reactive power,
may look like a glaring contradiction, but the contradiction, which is genuine
and not merely apparent, is by no means alien to the logic of power. It simply
designates the self-contradictory logic of power, its law: patere legem, quam ipse
tulisti.73 When Nietzsche goes on to say that a legal order thought of as sovereign
and universal contradicts the actual goal of the legal order (and in this we may
overhear the parallel logic of cultures instruments and its goal), he is saying that
law is destined forever to be a victim of its own successes. Law, conceived as
sovereign, is beyond law. Law cannot justify itself, and so the conditions of law
remain precariously anomalous, unjustified, and outlawed even by law. Hence,
law is in its essence doomed to failand this failure, which is the failure of its
tyrannical 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 characterized, while justice, as the expression of law qua the supreme power itself, is the
violent codification of a contradiction, the attempt to ride over the impossible
logic of law. Sovereignty, apparently, comes at a fatal price, like all good things. Far
from 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 sense
that he is beyond the law,74 Nietzsches remarks on justice in these pages are
on the contrary saturated with irony, dark humor, and above all with complication. Justice conceived as the self-overcoming of justice, as the becoming just
of justice and the consciousness of [its own] power,75 is nothing other than
the rationale, and the hypocrisy, behind justice as we know it today and as it has
always ever been known.76 Thus, if the active aggressive, arrogant man is still a
hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive man,77 this is not because the
activity of the active subject represents the real essence of justice (justice in itself
is a meaningless concept),78 but rather because it represents the false (or falsified)
essence of justice in its purest formthat of a presumed right to sovereignty.79
Ibid.
GM III, 27.
74
GM II, 10.
75
Ibid.
76
Cf. II, 14 on the criminality of justice, practiced with a good conscience.
77
GM II, 11.
78
Ibid.
79
Differently, G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 1356; and M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. D. F. Krell (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 3: 13749; 23551. Cf. GS 49.
72
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To summarize briefly, the passage on the administration of law and justice

modulates gradually into a nice self-contradiction: the putatively active agents of
the law become agents of a putative reactivity and nihilism in the course of their
being narratedand in the course of their proper activity. The active, aggressive, arrogant man turns out to be no one else than the mild, impersonal, and
just-minded jurist, imposing law and order with an innocent mendacity, at the
height of laws dominion, and so driven down a secret path to nothingness80
in the very same way as the blond beasts dissolve seamlessly into Beamter.81 No
longer merely laws agent, he is now also its victim. It is, after all, the same active
force at work in both spheres (of agency and subjection). But worse still, from
the perspective of Nietzsches categories and their coherence, the two spheres
are blended into one. Strangely, Nietzsches genealogy of law is immune from
contradiction just by being as deeply incoherent as it is: the incoherencies of
his analysis, blatantly and cheerfully strewn throughout, exist only to signify
the incoherencies of the objects under analysis. Thus, elsewhere we find that a
reversed 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, an
outrage, an innovation.82 Which account is correct? Is it active agents or reactive
agents who reduce their opposites to submission through the constraints of law?
The answer to these questions is perhaps unsatisfying: the alternative accounts
are both false. But Nietzsche invites confusion by putting on offer only bad
choices, genealogies that are as confused as those found in the late religions
of syncretistic, greatly purified, and fully ripened culturescultures, moreover,
that are in themselves indeterminately strong and weak.83
The confused genealogy of law is, I believe, the most typical pattern of
Nietzsches genealogies, which offer no declarative truths, but instead merely
present, as if by analogy with their own deceptive form, the unpalatable truth of
culture: its false consciousness. Genealogies invariably imply that culture appears
to itself in an inverted form (its violences appearing as justified). And just as
invariably, by refusing to be possessed of a plain meaning, they add one further
braid of implication to the problem of alienated self-appearance: the inverted
GM II, 11.
GM II, 178. If the administration of law is handled by active agents, their purpose,
allegedly, is to discipline ressentiment out of existence (putting an end to the senseless raging of
ressentiment, GM II, 11). But note how the instruments employed by these agents are elsewhere
designated by Nietzsche as producing the same effect (ressentiment) they would rid the world of:
such are the light effects of law, for example, viz., elevating certain equivalents for injuries into
norms to which from then on ressentiment is once and for all directed and, of course, by which
it feels itself justified, not to say active (ibid.). The account of the goal of law given in this section
is indistinguishable from the ascetic practice described later on, e.g., in GM III, 15.
82
GM III, 9.
83
GM II, 20.
80
81

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logic of false consciousness cannot be corrected, as though with a more perfect

lens; it simply contains what has to be accepted as an imperfect truth. It is in
this sense that genealogy brings to light the constitutive confusions of a culture. What genealogy reveals are just so many obfuscations wrought by cultural
consciousness. But in no case does it offer up clear and distinct alternatives to
a false view of things.

VI.
The Debt-Structure of Consciousness. One might feel justified in saying that
the story of the modern subjects emergence as told in On the Genealogy of Morals is the story of its self-invention. But even that is to ascribe too much agency
and sovereignty, indeed too much originality, to the subject. The cause of the
subject, in Nietzsches eyes, are the general conditions of subjectivity that lie
beyond 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 disappointingly 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 schematization, these twin categories represent, in their very schematicity, the conditions
of consciousness itself, which only points to the limits of the imagination, of
its capacity to think contradiction, and to its incapacity to think beyond the
inveterateness of the minds own habits. Above all, it is the sign of a flight of
the imagination before the reality of its own primary processes, which operate
not along the lines of activity or of reactivity, but along the circular paths of
retroactivity and its simplifying, falsifying, and idealizing mechanisms. Nietzsches categories of action, in other words, are perfect examples of the logic
that is outlined in the first paragraph of the Genealogy. They are the product
of retroactive illusion, of a kind of absent-mindedness, like that of somebody
who upon hearing a bell that has just boomed with all its strength the twelve
beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: what really was that which
just struck? So we, Nietzsche goes on, sometimes rub our ears afterward
and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, what really was that which we have
just experienced? and moreover: who are we really and, afterward, as aforesaid,
count the twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our being
and alas! miscount them.84
Nietzsches genealogy not only abounds in instances of this model of the
mind. In many ways genealogy is about it. The primary processes of consciousness, in the expanded sense given above, have a thematic approximation in the
GM 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, genealogy 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 of
contradictions. Take the origins of justice. A moral sentiment arbitrarily imposed
on the essential violence of life, the (reactive) feeling of justice strains to see equalities where there are none.85 Justice is thus symptomatic of equivalence-models
of thinking, which Nietzsche derides unsparingly. The view that everything has
its price; all things can be paid for is, he claims, the oldest and navest moral
canon of justice, 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 noble
values.86 Characteristically, this decline also happens to be coterminous with
the 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 irremediable as consciousness itself; they appear to be just what consciousness is: they
constitute thinking as such.87
Nietzsches position, radically polemical as it is, is that consciousness and
its unconscious mechanisms are primordial and ineliminable, which is why we are
today still in the grip of that blunt consistency characteristic of the thinking
of primitive mankind, which is hard to set in motion but then proceeds inexorably in the same direction.88 The point is not, or not only, that our thought
is somehow crudely primitive. It is that morality, as it is imagined and in its
impure and contradictory actuality, is itself a primitive of thought. The noble
mode of valuation (noble morality) is scarcely an exception.89 And as valuation (the establishment of qualitative differences) also happens to constitute
the most basic activity of the will to power,90 it follows that the will to power is
willy-nilly a moral (or else moralizing) force. How, then, can justice dissolve the
noble system of values? It cannot, except in some fantastically imagined way.91
GM II, 11.
GM II, 8; cf. GM I, 14: the triumph of justice.
87
GM II, 8. This 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 disvalued
and suspended). But as I suggested earlier, suddenly begs the question just what unconscious
instinct it was that drove subjects to disvalue the instincts.
88
GM II, 8 (emphasis added).
89
Cf. GM I, 2: It was out of this pathos of distance that [the nobles] first seized the right to
create values and to coin names for values, etc. On the implied reactivity of this act, see above.
90
Porter, Nietzsches Theory of the Will to Power, 54864.
91
Justice is the province of the active, the spontaneous, and the aggressive (GM II, 11).
Translated out of mythology, what this means is that justice is always in contradiction to every
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335

And so, where genealogy ought, by its own reckoning, to trace the evolution
from primitive material debt to a more developed moral guilt, what it in fact
traces is the co-evolution of two tendenciesthe oldest kind of astuteness
and the feeling of pride, superiority, and self-satisfactionthat come out
as logically equivalent in the passage just cited,92 but as contradictories when
mapped onto the active/reactive or sovereign/slave schema they purportedly
exist to corroborate.
The tension is telling. Not only do debt (Schuld) and guilt (Schuld) remain
disturbingly proximate. Genealogical narrative cannot even imagine a difference
without creating an equivalence, so thoroughly indebted is it to the equivalencemodel 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 genealogy is the story of consciousness, which in many ways it is,93 it also happens
to be told from a point of view that is infected with consciousness, especially
in its modern (contemporary) historical form. Proffering seductive but equivocal reflections of the modern subject to that subject, images of sovereignty or
of self-overcoming, of raw power or its sublimation, of desired but disavowed
wishes, Nietzschean genealogy incites and betrays the imaginary logic of the
contemporary subject, whose simulacrum it is. Subtly repeating the very errors
of logic it attacks, genealogy is fashioned as a trap, luring readers, performatively
and demonstratively, into the hidden recesses of their own subjectivities, their
culture, and their conceptions of history. That is why I suggested earlier that
genealogy is a critique of modern historical consciousness in the very guise of
historical consciousness. In its naive simplicity, genealogy is the appropriate
product of an imagination that, already shaped into an instrument of ahistorical
thinking, attempts to reflect for once on the conditions of ahistoricity itself. The
seductive myth of sovereign and self-affirming nobles fulfills this impossibility
as 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 conditions
and 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 fundamentally
non-equivalent is an act of conceptual violence in itself, while its enforcement as a normative
standard (or right) is no less arbitrary or violent. To read this imposition of equivalence as a sign
of activity and not of reactivity is an example of mythopoetics par excellence.
92
GM II, 8.
93
See further GS 354 on the origins of consciousness, which effectively argues for its indispensability; the lack of this faculty is conceivable only for beasts of prey who live in complete
solitude (a mythical conceit); once they enter into a command chain, they are compelled into
consciousness (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),94 neither can there be any unconscious activity that is uncontaminated
by consciousness or culture, any period of prehistory that isnt already historical
or historicized, or rather dehistoricized (for prehistory, Urzeit, always comes
after history, in the form of a myth), any primordial innocence (Unschuld) of
becoming, let alone any future condition free of these same constraints. Quite
the contrary, the very wish for utopic moments like these is the sign of a flight
from the reality of conscious existence. The subject, Nietzsche is claiming, cannot imagine itself except in or through one of two forms, whether as ennobled
or debased. It cannot, in other words, imagine itself as it exists prior to this
self-imagining, prior to its retroactive definition, in a condition that is neither
noble nor enslaved but simply driven away from itself out of a compulsion to
ideality. Genuine self-apprehension is debarred to subjects by the very nature of
consciousness itself. This is the most difficult and painful truththe ultimate
justicethat underlies Nietzschean genealogies, and which it is impossible for
genealogical readings, and genealogical readers, to face. Such is the shabby, gray,
utterly banal truth about the human, all-too-human condition which genealogies
can 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, Irvine
Irvine, California

94
See 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 be
secondary 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 termed
hypothetical by Nietzsche (Schopenhauers own term, which is now turned against Schopenhauer). Other early writings by Nietzsche explore the same (il)logic, while also anticipating the
dilemmas of the will to power (see J. I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth
of Tragedy [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], 6773). Genealogies, we could say, rest
not on a singular prton pseudos, but on multiple false assumptions.