File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1995/nietzsche_Feb.95.8-15, message 15


Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 13:02:18 -0600 (CST)
From: Benjamin Erik Hippen <hippen-AT-owlnet.rice.edu>
Subject: Re: Nietzsche/Foucault/Genealogy (fwd)



Someone mentioned that it might be conducive to starting a discussion if 
some old messages were forwarded.  This is one I sent about five weeks 
ago.  There are three other messages (one from me and the other two from 
Sam Vagenas) that are relevent to this post, if anyone is interested.

Yours,
Ben Hippen
Rice University


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 1994 12:29:04 -0600 (CST)
From: Benjamin Erik Hippen <hippen-AT-owlnet.rice.edu>
To: nietzsche-AT-world.std.com
Subject: Re: Nietzsche/Foucault/Genealogy



On Tue, 13 Dec 1994, Sam Vagenas wrote:

> 
> Berkowitz argues that Nietzsche has two-sides:  "In sum, alongside and
> constant tension with Nietzsche's weighty cluster of opinions affirming that
> the world lacks a rational, natural, or divine order, that morality was an
> artifice and pathology, and that the will is soverign, is a rival and
> equally weighty cluster of his opinions asserting that the cosoms has an
> intelligible order, that there is a suprahistorical ethical order, and that
> knowledge of these matters brings health, liberates, and ennobles."
> 
> Remarking on Foucault's comment that "Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and
> patiently documentary" (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History), Berkowitz notes:
> "...the inspiring portrait of a genealogist as the exemplary scholar that
> Foucault draws is nonsense:  if genealogy consists in the careful gathering
> vast source material and patient attention to detail as Foucault says it
> does, then Nietzsche is genealogist.  For Nietzsche's genealogy is not gray."

Perhaps it would be helpful to draw a distinction between "genealogy" and 
"a genalogist."  Agreed, Nietzsche's genealogy is certainly not gray, but 
genealogy itself is, if genealogy is thought of as the process of 
careful, meticulous documentation.  In this, it is perhaps no different 
from history.  In fact, genealogy is linked to history insofar as 
genealogy requires the rules of history to proceed with its own 
analysis: genealogy is parasitic upon the genre of discourse by which 
truth claims are made in order to delegitimate the rules themselves by 
calling the value of such rules into question.

Recall in the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche's criticism of morality was 
not a criticism from another version of morality juxtaposed against the 
Christian version, but from the question of whether morality itself had 
value.  In Ecce Homo (sorry don't have the reference in front of me, but 
will get it later) Nietzsche offers us a "Definition of Morality" which 
he "attaches value to."  It is this value that informs his criticism of 
morality, as well as his criticism of a genre of discourse (in the 
Genealogy of Morals, the genre of academic categorial analysis).  What 
this boils down to is: genealogy qua method is "gray" insofar as it is 
parasitic upon the rules of discourse it is trying to delegitimate, but 
it is the experience of seeing the rules of discourse as illegitimate 
that gives genealogy its verve.  However, this delegitimation is informed 
by a value claim not inherent to genealogy qua method, but to the 
genealogist.


> 
> This footnote got me thinking.  Nietzsche's history of morality in the
> Genealogy of Morals is very dramatic and features epoch clashes between
> Aristocrats, slaves, ascetic high priest, etc.  It's hardly the careful
> anylsis you get in Foucault's Discipline and Punishment or History of
> Sexuality.  Foucault includes many documents and spends much time
> deciphering the complex web of power relations and the problemitzations
> which create change  -- there are no simple good guys and bad guys.  
> 

What Foucault might be doing is offering a genealogy in the gray sense.  
The reader's response to it would reflect the value claim that informs 
their interpretation of that genealogy.  Thus, if DP forced you to look 
at the history of punishment as it informs modern theories of punishment, 
this "being forced" is not a result of the genealogy itself, which does 
not presuppose this or that value claim in its reader, but instead arises 
out of the reader of the genealogy.


> There is also an anthropology that informs Nietzsche's Genealogy.  
> 
> You get the feeling that the values Nietzsche calls the
> knightly-aristocratic values is the dispostion he would like to recover:
> "...a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing
> health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure,
> hunting, dancing, war games, and in general all that involves vigorous,
> free, joyful activity (Kaufman, p.33)."  
> 
> Nietzsche laments the subversion of the knightly-aristocratic values by
> Christianity:  "For this is how things are: the diminution and leveling of
> European man constitutes our greatest danger, for the sight of him makes us
> weary.  -- We can see nothing today that wants to grow greater, we suspect
> that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more
> good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more
> indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian...We are weary of man (44)."
> 
> The more I read the Genealogy, the more I see distinct anthropology which
> asserts the "powerful physicality, a flourishing, overflowing health" as the
> ideal, and a teleology which sees all of history as the undoing of this
> personality type.  How could Foucault ignore this?  
>    
> 


I don't think he ignored this "anthropology" as much as he tried to 
bracket it in favor of a "grey" genealogy that did not presuppose a 
commitment to a particular anthropology in the reader.  In this way, 
analyses of the subject as instantiated in "games of truth" may or may 
not force the reader to rethink their presuppositions about the subject 
in light of their value claims.  Similarly, the Genealogy of Morals may 
not move a committed Christian to renounce their views.  One possible 
difference between Foucauult and Nietzsche is that while Nietzsche was 
not shy about the value claims that informed his critique, Foucault is 
merely trying to leave a placeholder for such value claims so as not 
artificially limit the scope of his genealogy.  By bracketing the value 
claims into a placeholder, the reader can fill in the placeholder with 
their own values and give their own "color" to a previously "grey" 
genealogy.  This color, in the form of liberating oneself from (or 
possibly reaffirming) the committments that the genealogy seeks to point 
out can then be traced back to the reader, rather than the genealogy.  
Whether or not Foucault is successful in this, or whether or not this is 
his project in the first place is another matter.

Just a thought. Thanks for the interesting post.

Ben Hippen
Rice University.


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