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The Promising Animal: Memory, Forgetting, and the Fragility of Sovereignty in Nietzsche

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Thesis In Nietzsche’s account, the capacity to promise does not rest on a stable, self-identical subject, but on a constitutive tension between forgetting and memory. The sovereign individual ( das souveräne Individuum ) emerges precisely from this instability: a subject produced through practices that regulate discontinuity rather than eliminate it. Read in this way, Nietzsche’s genealogy anticipates later critiques of the Cartesian subject in Freud, Foucault, and Derrida. The freedom of the sovereign individual is therefore neither original nor self-grounding, but the outcome of a long historical process that transforms instability into responsibility. Introduction: The Paradox of the Promising Animal “To breed an animal with the prerogative to promise—is that not precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind? Is it not the real problem of humankind?” (Nietzsche, 2006, p. 35). The opening of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morali...
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Art History II: Altamira, Egypt, and the Myth of Artistic Origins

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The Invention of Art. AI image Thesis This article argues that art history retrospectively projects the modern category of “art” onto symbolic systems that may never have understood images aesthetically in the modern sense. Through examples such as the cave paintings of Altamira and Egyptian wall paintings, it explores how Western culture transforms radically different symbolic practices into early stages of a universal narrative of artistic development. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s critique of alterity and Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of historically bounded systems of meaning, the article questions whether “art” can legitimately function as a transhistorical category at all. The Origins of Art or the Origins of a Narrative? In museums and art history textbooks, the cave paintings of Altamira and the wall paintings of ancient Egypt are frequently presented as the earliest stages of artistic development. Prehistoric animals painted on cave walls appear as the “birth of pai...
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Art History I: Primitive Art and the Museum

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Commercial African masks for sale. Source: Wikipedia Thesis This article argues that Jean Baudrillard’s critique of “primitive art” in The Mirror of Production challenges the very foundations of Western art history. According to Baudrillard, museums do not simply preserve cultural difference; they neutralize it by translating symbolic objects into Western aesthetic categories. Ritual masks, icons, tapestries, and ceremonial artifacts become intelligible only after being transformed into “art.” The museum therefore functions not merely as a space of preservation, but as a mechanism of conceptual domestication The Museum and the Question of “Art” One of the most provocative moments in The Mirror of Production appears in Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of so-called “primitive art.” At first glance, Baudrillard seems to be addressing anthropology or aesthetics. In reality, his argument reaches much further. What he ultimately questions is the universality of the category “art” itself. ...
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Marx Against Marxism III: The Museum, Primitive Art, and the Virus of Production

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Thesis This article argues that Jean Baudrillard radicalizes Karl Marx’s reflections on self-critique by showing that Western thought universalizes its own categories precisely through acts of criticism, interpretation, and apparent openness toward cultural difference. What appears as dialogue with alterity — anthropology, museums, aesthetic appreciation, or Marxist analysis — becomes a process of conceptual absorption. Ritual objects are transformed into “art,” while Marxism replaces aesthetic interpretation with the language of production. In both cases, difference survives only after being translated into Western systems of intelligibility. The result is not genuine confrontation with alterity, but its domestication. Self-Critique and the Universalization of the West One of the most significant moments in Jean Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production occurs when he returns to Karl Marx’s Grundrisse , this time not to question labor or historical evolutionism directly, but to in...
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Marx Against Marxism II: The Ape, the Human, and the Logic of Capitalism

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"Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relation, the comprehension of its structure, thereby allows insights into the structure and relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still un conquered remnants are carried along with it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known" (Marx, as cited by Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production). Thesis This article argues that Jean Baudrillard identifies within Karl Marx’s Grundrisse a hidden form of structural finalism. Although historical materialism rejects naïve evolutionary narratives, it nevertheless installs capitalist modernit...
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Under the Myth: Truth, Narrative, and the Fate of Historical Reality

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Introduction Carlos Alsina opened his radio monologue on May 26, 2026, by invoking the Battle of the Alamo. The episode quickly moved from historical summary to cultural memory: William Barret Travis, the siege in Texas, the famous letter in which he declared he would “never surrender,” and the later transformation of that episode into a foundational American myth. Between documented events and cinematic reconstruction, the Alamo has long oscillated between history and legend. Within that narrative space appears a striking remark attributed to Paco Ignacio Taibo II: “debajo de una gran mentira se esconden verdades tapadas” (“beneath a great lie, hidden truths remain”). The sentence carries immediate force. It suggests depth beneath surface, authenticity beneath distortion, something concealed by official accounts waiting to be recovered. Yet this intuitive appeal raises a more difficult question: what does it actually mean for truth to lie “beneath” a narrative? The archaeologic...
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