Foucault, Derrida, and the Genealogy of Moralsl
Two cautions or warnings (at least) must be heeded in the attempt to do justice to Nietzsche’s project of a genealogy of morals in the text that bears that name. While the Genealogy is often regarded as the most straightforward and continuous of Nietzsche’s books, he tells us in Ecce Homo that its three essays are “perhaps uncannier than anything èlse written so far in regard to expression, intention, and the art of surprise” (EH “GM”).1 If we imagine ourselves successful in penetrating to these unsettling secrets and saying what Nietzsche’s text means, once and for all, we should have to read again its lapidary although parenthetical injunction that “only that which has no history can be defined.” When Nietzsche published the Genealogy in 1887, the main uses of the term arguably had to do with ascertaining family lineages to determine rights to titles, honors, and inheritances, as in the venerable Alrrianach of Gotha. But Foucault characterizes his History of Sexuality as a genealogy of the modern self, and Derrida describes a large part of his intellectual project as “repeating the genealogy of morals”; Nietzsche’s practice and example are invoked in both cases.
How might we proceed to assess the significance of Nietzsche’s “genealogy” in relation both to its mundane cousins and to such thinkers? I propose a partial, critical, and bifocal effort in that direction, consisting in a study of a few paradigmatic readings of Nietzschean genealogy. I begin with Jürgen Habermas, who assimilates Nietzsche’s project to the aristocratic attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the most ancient and archaic. According to Habermas, Nietzsche’s rejection of all rational and critical criteria for assessing values leaves him no other option:
What is older is earlier in the generational chain and nearer to the origin, the more primordial is considered the more worthy of honor, the preferable, the more unspoiled, the purer: It is deemed better. Derivation and descent serve as the criteria of rank, in both the social and the logical senses.
In this manner, Nietzsche bases his critique of morality on genealogy. He traces the moral appraisal of value, which assigns a person or a mode of action a place within a rank ordering based on criteria of validity, back to the descent and hence to the social rank of the one making the moral judgment.2
This may be the genealogical scheme of values of the Almanach of Gotha, but it is not Nietzsche’s. Despite his bursts of admiration for the “blond beasts” of early cultures, Nietzsche’s narrative never returns us to a point at which one single, pure form of morality obtains. Contrary both to theological ethics and to the hypotheses of the English utilitarian historians of morality, the Genealogy insists that there is no single origin but only opposition and diversity no matter how far back we go. There are, always already, at least two languages of morality, the aristocratic language of “good and bad” and the slavish language of “good and evil.” Where a Platonist would focus on the fact that “good” appears in both discourses and would search for its common meaning, Nietzsche notes that it is only the word shared by the two languages. One says “good” and happily designates its satisfaction with itself; the other reactively designates those who speak in such a way as “evil” and who define themselves as the opposites of the evil ones. Even within the aristocratic group, Nietzsche observes, there are again at least two varieties of the moral code “good and bad” which can be distinguished as the knightly and the priestly. Not myth, as Habermas would have it, but something much more like the structuralist analysis of myth is at work here.
While Habermas supposes that the rejection of the progressive and teleological enlightenment conception of history must entail a nostalgic valorization of the archaic, Michel Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche and his own development of the genealogical project are vigorously committed to avoiding the temptations of both nostalgia and progress. Genealogy is the articulation of differences, of affiliations that never reduce to a system or totality and of the transformations of power/knowledge in their unplanned and unpredictable concatenations. Foucault’s later writings, especially Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, acknowledge their indebtedness to Nietzsche with respect to these themes. Foucault sees his own distinctive contribution as the extension of the genealogical approach to the constitution of the human sciences and their associated disciplines and practices. In tracing out the “capillary” forms of power, Foucault exhibits that taste for the documentary, gray page of the legal text which, as Nietzsche indicates in his preface to the Genealogy, is the laborious side of the outrageous attempt to raise the question of the value of morality. These works might be called translations of the Genealogy into the worlds of the prison and surveillance, psychiatry and biopower. These translations of the Nietzschean genealogy are grounded in his essay of 1971, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” which is both textual commentary on the Genealogy, and a thematization of the principles that govern Foucault’s later studies.
Foucault distinguishes two words, Ursprung and Herkunft, which play important roles in Nietzsche’s text.3 To be concerned with Ursprung, or origin, is to be a philosophical historian who would trace morality—or any other subject matter—back to an original principle that can be clarified and recuperated. The genealogist will, however, be concerned with the complex web of ancestry and affiliations that are called Herkunft, those alliances that form part of actual family trees, with all their gaps, incestuous transgressions, and odd combinations. Here, Foucault tells us, the genealogist comes into his own: “Where the soul pretends unification or the self fabricates a coherent identity, the genealogist sets out to study the beginning—numberless beginnings whose faint traces and hints of color are readily seen by an historical eye” (NGH, 145).
Two possible points of view, two research programs, two types of inquirers are designated by these two words and concepts. If Nietzsche were misconstrued as one with a nostalgia for origins and an obsession with first principles, then his praise of “the blond beast” and the “artistic violence” of “noble races” would support something like the mysticism of racial purity for which some Nazis claimed his authority. Foucault tells us that Nietzsche’s preface rules out such a reading: “One of the most significant texts with respect to the use of all these terms and to the variations in the use of Ursprung is the preface to the Genealogy. At the beginning of the text, its objective is defined as an examination of the origin of moral preconceptions and the term used is Herkunft. Then, Nietzsche proceeds by retracing his personal involvement with this question” (NGH, 141). The point of that narrative, Foucault says, is to establish that even Nietzsche’s analyses of morality ten years earlier (in Daybreak) operated within the orbit of Herkunftshypothesen rather than the quest for origins.
Now isn’t it a bit odd that Foucault determines the nature of this Nietzschean text by what he takes to be its transparent beginning? What that beginning announces, so it seems, are the fundamental concepts of the genealogist and, even, the birth of the genealogist, his vocation toward a certain kind of scientific work. What will not be in question in Foucault’s reading of the Genealogy is the identity and voice of the genealogist. This search for a clear line, for a master speaker in Nietzsche’s text, is suspect: first, because it apparently exempts this text from the very same genealogical, or differentiating, imperative that it finds in the text; and, second, because it does not completely read or translate everything that is to be found in the preface. In fact, Foucault starts not at the beginning of Nietzsche’s beginning but with the second numbered paragraph of the “Preface.” At the very beginning of the preface, that is, in its first lines, Nietzsche writes: “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?” (GM P:1)
Might this not serve as a warning that the voice of the text is not to be identified simply as that of the genealogist who understands his business? Perhaps it is a warning that no single voice animates the Genealogy and that this text must itself be read dialogically, as what Foucault calls in another context a “concerted carnival” (NGH, 161). For shortly after the apparent confession of ignorance comes the bold sweep of the narrative to which Foucault directs our attention, the narrative in which Nietzsche explains the steps leading to his vocation. Yet these claims of dedication and discovery acquire an Oedipal tone in this context, suggesting a certain pride and self-assurance. This is a tragic voice. And it is not the only voice of the text, which alternates among a series of historical and fictional voices—those of the Oedipal scientist, the tragic dramatist, the buffoon of world history, the witnesses (real and imaginary) whom Nietzsche summons to testify about the manufacture of ideals—and doubtless there are others.
We might have begun reading the Genealogy at its subtitle, “Eine Streitschrift” (a polemical text). This agon or polemos is directed not only toward others, like the philosophical historian, who are on the outside of the text; we should also read the battle, the dialogue, the prosopopoeia, and exchange that goes on within the text itself. There are stylistic affinities between this text and some of Dostoyevsky’s, especially the latter’s Notes from Underground, which Nietzsche read just before writing the Genealogy. These affinities go beyond thematic concerns with such oppositions as the man of ressentiment and the normal man or the claim that consciousness is an illness (a productive, pregnant illness will be Nietzsche’s restatement of the latter). We could note what Mikhail Bakhtin has called the dialogical character of the Dos-toyevskean text.4 The Notes enacts an exchange between the narrator and his others, the “normal” men. Dostoyevsky’s normal man speaks for the progress of science and the utopia of the “crystal palace”; in Nietzsche’s Genealogy the voice who introduces the narrative claims to be a scientist of sorts, but his scientific authority is called into question by the articulation of the polemic.
At one point Foucault recognizes a certain plurality in Nietzsche’s text, noting that Nietzsche’s challenge to origins is confined “to those occasions when he is truly a genealogist” (NGH, 142), but does not explain what the other occasions are. From this genealogist qua genealogist, Foucault draws a number of principles of reading. Two of these principles could be usefully employed in reading the Genealogy itself as a pluralized text:
Does not the metaphorics of inscription, volume, and imprinting call for an application of this principle to the body of the text and, in particular to the inscribed textual body, the Genealogy, which would be the source of this principle? Foucault tends to localize this side of the text, confining it to the subject matter (assuming that such a subject matter can be isolated), rather than listening to its multiplication of voices. The upshot of the pluralization of voices in the Genealogy is the calling into question of a number of postures of inquiry, including that of the dedicated genealogist who is, insofar as he would practice a normal science of genealogy, not very different from the philosophical historian whom Foucault criticizes.
Consider for example the second volume of The History of Sexuality, which concerns the formation of a sexual ethos in fourth-century Greece, one that would be responsive to the apparent contradiction between contemporary sexual practices and the prevailing norms of responsible citizenship. How can the love of boys not lead to the habituation of a generation of prospective citizens to patterns of submission incompatible with their designated social roles? In the light of this question, Foucault undertakes a genealogy of the conception of the responsible subject that, as he sees it, is formed through discourses and practices that propose solutions to this dilemma. These formations of power and knowledge he distinguished as: (1) dietetics (prudential advice concerning the use and abuse of pleasure); (2) economics (the principles of the household); (3) erotics (the wise conduct of love affairs); (4) and “true love” (the philosophical transvaluation of the love affair into the mutual pursuit of truth).
The crucial evidence for Foucault’s analysis of this last discursive form comes from Plato, especially from the Symposium and Phaedrus. What is surprising about Foucault’s reading of these Platonic texts is the degree to which he flattens them out into a form that seems drastically to understate their internal plurality and complexity. Foucault simply opposes the false speeches on love to the true speeches (Diotima’s in the Symposium, Socrates’ second in the Phaedrus). Foucault constantly, and more than accidentally, uses various forms of the locutions “Plato says” or “Plato thinks.”5 Plato discovers that the truth of love is the love of the truth, even though Plato never speaks in his own voice in the dialogues. Foucault ignores the fact that Diotima’s speech is distanced from Plato by several degrees: it is reported by Socrates, and the dialogue as a whole is relayed to us through a series of less than completely reliable witnesses. Similarly, in the Phaedrus, Socrates’ speech is part of a very complex thematics of love and discourse, which raises questions about the self-sufficiency of the literary form in which it is embedded. This assimilation of the Platonic dialogues to the relatively linear development of a new ethics of love is at least as one-dimensional as the reading that sees them as nothing but preliminary versions of modern discussions of the universal and the particular.
Nietzsche, despite his anti-Platonic animus, had a more genuinely genealogical view of the matter when he distinguished between the Socratic and plebeian theme and its Platonic, aristocratic reworking and sublimation, or when he remarked that the Platonic dialogue was the vessel by which art survived the shipwreck of ancient culture (BT 14). This reading of Plato is continuous with Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche in the founding essay on genealogy. For example, in mapping Greek discourses on love and sex into the four categories—in ascending order—of dietetics, economics, erotics, and true love, Foucault seems to be under the sway of the “Platonic ladder” of the Symposium or perhaps of the divided line of the Republic. When the uncanny dimension of the text of the Genealogy is neglected, genealogy itself tends to degenerate into a mere method that circumscribes its subject matter all too neatly. After remarking on the uncanniness of the Genealogy, Nietzsche added, “Dionysus is, as is known, also the god of darkness.” Could it be that Dionysus lies in wait for the normal genealogist at the heart of the labyrinth into which he has strayed?
Earlier, Foucault and Derrida had an exchange concerning analogous issues in the reading and translation of Descartes. The questions hinge on knowing how many voices are speaking in Descartes’s First Meditation.6 The crux is the reading of the passage in which Descartes, or one of the voices of the Meditations, briefly entertains the possibility of doubting that he is sitting by the fire, only to elicit the reply that those with such doubts—who imagine that their heads are pumpkins or that they are made of glass—are mad and that he would be equally mad if he took them as a precedent for understanding his own case. For Foucault’s representation of Descartes as juridically excluding the possibility of madness from the rational course of his meditations, it is important that there be one commanding voice that can be read as emblematic of the “great internment” of the mad in the seventeenth century. For Derrida, in contrast, it is crucial that we see a series of objections and replies within the text itself, so that the Meditations, far from excluding any possibility of madness, push this possibility to a hyperbolical extreme through the hypothesis that we are always dreaming or deceived by an evil demon. So the philosopher’s voice would be always already juxtaposed to the voices of unreason, and his project would be one that proceeds whether or not he is may.7
There are resonances of this celebrated dispute concerning the reading of Descartes in the different readings or repetitions that Foucault and Derrida offer of the Genealogy. Unlike Foucault, Derrida does not explicitly devote an essay to the text. Instead he describes at least part of what he is doing in Of Grammatology as “repeating the genealogy of morals.”8 This self-description occurs at the end of the section “The Writing Lesson,” which interrogates Claude Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to distinguish naturally good cultures without writing and exploitative Western societies that make use of writing. This reference is rather oblique, for Derrida inscribes on his page not the title The Genealogy of Morals, in italics, but simply the phrase “genealogy of morals.” Yet there are reasons for taking even such an indirect reference seriously, for the reading of Lévi-Strauss has to do with the proper name and its possibilities of erasure or effacement. Why should Derrida repeat the genealogy (or Genealogy) in his analysis of Lévi-Strauss? In many ways Lévi-Strauss is a contempt-rary version of the normal scientist who appears in Nietzsche’s Genealogy as infected by ressentiment, in whom the reaction against the other has turned into a dislike of himself. As a spokesman for science, Lévi-Strauss is a universalist, a democrat suspicious of the ethnocentrism of the West.
“The critique of ethnocentrism,” Derrida writes, “has most often the sole function of constituting the other as a model of original and natural goodness, of accusing and humiliating oneself, of exhibiting its being-unacceptable in an anti-ethnocentric mirror.” Lévi-Strauss is one of those knowers, who are unknown to themselves. He repeats the gesture of the English moralists insofar as he believes in an original, natural morality that has been forgotten or effaced but which is capable of retrieval or at least reconstruction through memory. Here the place of historical memory is taken by the experiment of the anthropologist who, by introducing writing to a people previously innocent of it, is able to observe what he takes to be its characteristic sudden infusion of violence and hierarchy into a pacific, face-to-face society. Lévi-Strauss tells this story in the chapter of Tristes Tropiques called “The Writing Lesson.” Here the guilty anthropologist explains how the leader of the Nambikwara pretended to have learned the European’s art of writing in order to manipulate others with the promise of rewards and the mysterious aura of an esoteric code. Derrida’s genealogical reading of this Rousseauian confession focuses on the question of language; like the English historians of morality, Lévi-Strauss has taken it to be much simpler and more homogeneous than it actually is.
The English moralists, Nietzsche says, want to know what good is; like Plato, they suppose that it must have a single meaning. While Plato sought that meaning through transcendental memory, the English seek it through historical reconstruction of original experiences of utility. Yet there is no single language or discourse of the good that could support either project. There are at least two languages of morals, one that differentiates good from bad, another that differentiates good from evil. In the good/bad discourse, the speaker first, and affirmatively, designates himself as good. Only as an afterthought, does he call the others the bad. In the good/evil discourse the starting point is the characterization of the other (the master, the strong, or the noble) as evil, because he is envied, because he is violent or negligent in his dealings with us, the speakers of that language. “Good” is in each case part of a system of differences; not translatable from one moral language to the other while preserving its sense. It partakes of what Derrida calls the “proper name effect both demanding and resisting translation. Naming oneself and the other involve initial acts of violence and separation, which are not well served by either Platonic or utilitarian translations, for these assume incorrectly that there is only one voice, or one discourse, to translate.
Lévi-Strauss thinks of the Nambikwara, the people without writing, as good in a Rousseauian sense of primal innocence. So they must have a single language spontaneously and constantly animated by the intimacy of their daily life; their innocence can be read off from the fact that they have no writing, for writing would introduce a hierarchy of scribes and leaders, a differentiation that would disrupt an idyllic condition. In Lévi-Strauss’s own narrative we find the evidence of the Nambikwara’s own writing, double coding, violence, and hierarchy that the narrator would like to depict as specifically Western. There we learn that the Nambikwara language is spoken differently by men and women, who view each other as distinct species. The Nambikwara have secret proper names, disguised in most circumstances by substitutes. Revealing the proper name to inappropriate others or at inappropriate times sets off a long chain of reprisals. Similarly, Nietzsche had noticed that the spokesmen for an ethics of love often provide evidence of the desire for revenge (citing Tertullian and Aquinas on the pleasures of the blessed in the torments visited upon sinners). He observed the periodic recurrence of epidemics of revenge and scapegoating among our supposedly innocent ancestors. Lévi-Strauss would have us believe that violence arises among the Nambikwara only through the agency of the scientist who teaches writing or transgresses the law of the tribe by provoking young girls to reveal the secret names of comrades and parents.
Science will not hesitate to invoke the categorial apparatus of its own culture in order to protect the purity of the other culture that it studies. Yet Lévi-Strauss must account for their practice of “drawing lines.” Lévi-Strauss translates: “They called the act of writing iekariakedjutu, namely ‘drawing lines,’ which had an aesthetic interest for them” (cited in OG, 124). But what is aesthetic interest? Nietzsche sketches a genealogy of aesthetics that demonstrates its complicity with the culture of the eighteenth century, exemplified by the Kantian tripartition of knowing, willing, and an aesthetic experience devoid of knowledge and will (see GM III). “Aesthetics” is a recent invention, a concept built on the exclusion of desire, laughter, the festive, and the grotesque. Derrida asks, conerning Lévi-Strauss’s translation and aestheticization of “drawing lines”: “Is not ethnocentrism always betrayed by the haste with which it is satisfied by certain translations or certain domestic equivalents?” (OG, 123). Does not the existence of a double system of names, and a system of marking, indicate that language is, even here, always already multiple and so characterized by the possibility of transgression, aggression, and violence that the guilty anthropologist would like to keep at a distance from these people? This first repetition discovers plurality and violence where an idealistic nostalgia had found only peace and unity.
Lévi-Strauss also reveals that the Nambikwara became adept at producing explanatory diagrams of such cultural matters as their kinship relations that were extremely useful to the party of anthropologists. Should we think of them, like Meno’s slave boy, as being brought to discover a primal writing in the soul? Or as having been infected by the violence of the West? Or might we find Derrida to be the more insightful anthropologist here when he observes that “the birth of writing (in the colloquial sense) was nearly everywhere and most often linked to genealogical anxiety” (OG, 124)? This last suggestion, like Nietzsche’s critique of the Kantian-Schopenhauerian aesthetics of pure contemplation, indicates the ties between art and life. From the time of the Homeric catalogues of heroes to the nineteenth-century novel of marriage, property, inheritance and the discovery of unexpected blood relationships, writing—in the colloquial sense—has maintained its link to genealogical anxiety.
Derrida also repeats the Genealogy in its critique or self-critique of science. Science, when pushed to its limit, reflects upon itself and recognizes its indebtedness to the morality of ressentiment; the scientist’s dedication to the truth and his willingness to sacrifice himself for the truth are structurally identical with the asectic negation of one’s self and ones present life for the sake of God. The scientist’s final truth is one that he will never see, and its pursuit here and now requires the virtues of faith, hope, and charity: faith in the possibility that the truth will be attained, despite our present state of ignorance and error; hope that progress toward the truth will continue; charity as the willingness to abandon whatever is one’s own, one’s own favored hypothesis for example, for the sake of truth as an ultimate goal. “We knowers” are unknown to ourselves insofar as we fail to see these genealogical affiliations of our activity with that sacrifice of self. But when science becomes historical and genealogical it will discover these affiliations in a moment of tragic reversal and recognition. Science will become uncanny and undecidable: “The will to truth requires a critique—let us thus define our own task—the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question” (GM III:24).
Of Grammatology repeats or translates the Genealogy, then, by reconsidering the project of several putative sciences that are shown to be impossible. Insofar as anthropology operates with a distinction between nature and culture, or between Rousseauian innocence and civilized evil, it founders on the impossibility of these distinctions themselves; in the act of deploying such distinctions, it provides the impetus to question and deconstruct them. Of Grammatology is also concerned with the impossible science of grammatology. Since writing, thought seriously and essentially, is that which escapes presence, totalization, and the ideal of science that is indebted to these concepts, there can be no science of grammatology. But the experiment of attempting to construct a grammatology will disclose the questionability of any science of language that would segregate or compartmentalize writing as well as the problematic project of scientificity itself.
Derrida asks a Nietzschean question of Lévi-Strauss: “If it is true, as I in fact believe, that writing cannot be thought of outside the horizon of intersubjective violence, is there anything, even science, that radically escapes it?” (OG, 127). To suppose otherwise is to place one’s trust in “the presumed difference between language and power.” At the end of Lévi-Strauss’s most philosophical work, La pensée sauvage, there is a clear demonstration of the naivete involved in such trust that is reminiscent of the positivist metanarratives of science that Nietzsche attacks through his Genealogy. In the rhetorically magnificent but ultimately unpersuasive coda to Lévi-Strauss’s book, the claim is made that we are now witnessing the convergence of contemporary science and the timeless patterns of savage or untamed mythical thinking. According to Lévi-Strauss, information theory can offer a universal account of both the codes and messages of “primitive” peoples at one end of the spectrum, based as they are on the holistic, macroscopic, and sensible qualities of the perceived environment, with the general, instrumentalized study of the production and reception of biological and physical “messages” at the other end that reveal themselves only with the help of the abstracting methods of the hypothetico-deductive sciences. With such a convergence, we hear: “The entire process of human knowledge assumes the character of a closed system. And we therefore remain faithful to the inspiration of the savage mind when we recognize that, by an encounter it alone could have foreseen, the scientific spirit in its most modern form will have contributed to legitimize the principles of savage thought and to re-establish it in its rightful place.”9 This is utopian positivism because it takes the prevailing models in the sciences to be ultimately valid and because it supposes that we are on the verge of a total integration of various fields of knowledge, a “totalization” at least as extravagant as that practical, historical Sartrean totalization, which Lévi-Strauss criticizes in the same chapter. While rejecting Sartre’s appeal to social and political history as modern myth, Lévi-Strauss reverts to the scientistic version of this myth, unconsciously reviving the teleologies of Comte and Spencer. Nietzsche’s genealogy of such science aims at showing that it must founder as soon as its concepts and methods of inquiry are turned back upon itself, and it discovers its own genealogy in a morality that its inquiries have rendered suspicious. Derrida, a few years before Foucault’s programmatic essay on Nietzschean genealogy, makes a similar point in suggesting that the human sciences cannot innocently presume the distinction between power and knowledge that fuels the structuralist eschatology.
At the end of the Genealogy’s first essay, Nietzsche calls for a series of prize essays by philologists, historians, and philosophers on the question: “What light does linguistics and especially the study of etymology, throw on the history of the evolution of the moral concepts?” (GM I:17). One answer is supplied by Nietzsche’s first essay itself, with its analysis of the gutlschlecht moral system and the gut/böse moral system in terms of the social and ethnic differences of the ancient world; Foucault’s genealogical study of the constitution of the discourses of psychiatry, punishment, and sexuality can be read as extensions of this linguistic genealogy. But the third essay pushes the question further, asking what consequences such investigations have for the sciences that pursue them. Can they remain above the battle or must they, as Nietzsche says, submit to the law that they themselves have proposed” and, like all great things, “bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming” (GM III:27)? Derrida’s repetition of the Genealogy is a repetition of the third essay and of its uncanny ramifications for the inquiry itself. Here we might pause and read Nietzsche’s question about linguistics and etymology once more. Why this apparent repetition of “history” and “evolution”? Must we not remember, especially if we are giving the close attention to language that Nietzsche demands and which is the theme of that question, that “history” is a double-barreled word, alternately designating either the subject matter studied or the activity of studying it?
In Of Grammatology, we are constantly reminded that the de, the preposition, in its title, indicates a question rather than introducing a subject matter. It is not a “toward” in the Kantian sense of a “Prolegomena to Any Future Grammatology That Will Come Forward as a Science.” How should we translate the zur in Zur Genealogie der Moral? There has been some controversy among Nietzsche’s translators about how this zur might be rendered in English. Is it “On” in the sense of “concerning” or “about” or is it “toward”? “Toward” has been employed by those who favor a tentative reading of Nietzsche’s text as a contribution toward something still in the making. But can one go toward that which can never be reached? Or should the title self be said parodically? “On” is better in preserving an ambiguity with regard to the question of whether a genealogy of morals is possible, that is, whether we ought to take seriously the scientific rhetoric with which Nietzsche, especially in his first essay, attempts to situate his work in relation to historical and philological science. Similarly, there is, in Derrida’s repetition of the genealogy while effacing its title, both a linguistic prudence and respect that hesitates to violate this undecidablility and a mimesis of that act of the concealment of the proper name, which has been identified as the characteristic act of writing. So there is a motivated absence of the very name Nietzsche in this part of the Grammatology that repeats the genealogy. Derrida asks how Lévi-Strauss, while acknowledging Marx and Freud as his masters, can write the idyllic scenario recording his nocturnal observation of the Nambikwara as a nonviolent people of unsurpassed tenderness and intimacy. He can do so only because Rousseau has been substituted for Nietzsche in Lévi-Strauss’s trinity of names (Marx, Rousseau, and Freud rather than Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud).
Here we touch on the question of the genealogy of the text, a philological question inseparable from the genealogy of morals. Genealogy seeks out the unsuspected ramifications of proper names, whether present or absent. At the beginning of Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss, he suggests that “the metaphor that would describe the genealogy of a text correctly is still forbidden” (OG, 101). One might be tempted to say, for example, that “a text is nothing but a system of roots,” but to do so would be to contradict both the concept of system and the pattern of the roots. To read Lévi-Strauss genealogically is to see the resonances of Rousseau. What we learn from genealogy is the inevitability of one’s heritage, or Herkunft, and the impossibility of attempting to make an absolute beginning, or Ursprung. Lévi-Strauss assumes (as in his use of Rousseau), that one can determine and circumscribe precisely what use one will make of one’s intellectual roots, ignoring the complexities of their subterranean system. Nietzsche warns that “we are unknown to ourselves” and attempts to situate the many voices of his text in relation to their roots in (for example) science, tragedy, history, and the novel. Derrida’s effort to “repeat” the genealogy of morals arises within this context. It is not a question of whether he is consciously or fully aware of the Nietzschean roots, still less of his being in command of the entire array of a manifold Herkunft. For Derrida, it is a matter of the rigor and modesty of a confessed repetition and mimesis, one that makes no claims of origin-ality—that is, it makes no claim to restore the presence of an origin—and so helps us to think beyond the constant temptations of hope and nostalgia.
Making slight emendations, I have relied upon Kaufmann’s translations of EH and BT; and Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s translation of GM.
Jürgen Habermas, The Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 125–26. [Ed. Note—An excerpt of Habermas’s essay is included in this volume.]
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” (hereafter cited in the text as NGH) in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 140–42.
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Universiry of Minnesota Press, 1984).
See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 236, 238, 239.
See Michel Foucault, Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie (Paris: Pion, 1961). Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 31–63; Michel Foucault, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” trans. Geoff Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 4: 1 (1979): 9–28.
See Descartes: Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1954), esp. 61–65. Anglo-analyiic philosophers may want to take note of the fact that the translation of the Meditations by G. E. M. Anscombe and Peter Geach coincides in a general way with Derrida’s reading of the text. Anscombe and Geach pluralize the text’s voices by placing the objections concerning madness and dreaming in quotation marks. Perhaps Anscombe and Geach were aided in translating as they did by the example of the play of voices and question-and-answer style in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 114 (cited hereafter in the text as OG followed by the page number).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 269.