The concept ofgenealogy has come to be seen in continental Nietzsche studies as cen~al to Nietzsche's project, indeed as designating the philosophical approach ofthe mature Nietzsche. I explore how this state of affairs has come about by reading the texts ofthree French-language writers whom I take to have particularly influenced the way continental philosophy, and even to some extent analytic philosophy, has come to see Nietzsche. Gilles Deleuze was the first to make genealogy central to his view ofNietzsche, but Deleuze's tendency to misleading abstraction in reading Nietzsche can be seen to have far-reaching consequences for many aspects of his interpretation, including his famous reading ofeternal return. Michel Foucault reminds us ofthe properly historical aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy, but turns genealogy into a historicism based on presuppositions quite other than those ofNietzsche. And in Jacques Derrida's adoption ofNietzsche as a forebear genealogy becomes bound up with conceptions ofopposition and self-reference which are quite foreign to Nietzsche's way of thinking. In the process ofexploring these tensions I contend that 'genealogy' is for Nietzsche a particular word tied to a particular field, that field explored in the text ofNietzsche's which bears the word in its title, On the Genealogy ofMorals, and definitely not a word which designates his philosophy as a whole. The concept of''Nietzschean genealogy' is not a substantial and solid textual object offering itself to interpretations which could be construed as its 'shadows'; rather there is from the start something shadowy about the very idea of'genealogy'. In demonstrating this I hope to open the way for a reading of Nietzsche's philosophy in which 'genealogy' is seen as a single aspect ofa much broader philosophical project.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:487557 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Ward, Joseph |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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