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“Schuld” and the Limits of the Genealogy of Morality: A Saussurean Reading of Nietzsche

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Aber wie ist denn jene andre »düstre Sache«, das Bewusstsein der Schuld, das ganze »schlechte Gewissen« auf die Welt gekommen? Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (II §4) Thesis This article argues that Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt in On the Genealogy of Morality depends upon a distinctly nineteenth-century philological assumption: that the history of a word can illuminate the history of a concept. By tracing the moral notion of Schuld (guilt) back to Schulden (debts), Nietzsche reconstructs the emergence of conscience from economic and juridical relations. From a Saussurean perspective, however, this procedure is methodologically problematic. Meaning does not survive within words as a historical residue but emerges from differential relations within a synchronic linguistic system. Through a dialogue with Saussure, and subsequently with Lacan and Derrida, this article examines the tension between genealogical explanation and structural theories of signification. The issue...
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Historicizing Objectivity: Lenin, Poststructuralism, and the Loss of Epistemic Innocence

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Introduction: facts, interpretation, and an uneasy confidence In a recent televised exchange, a journalist invoked a familiar Leninist gesture: political claims, he suggested, must ultimately submit to facts; analysis begins and ends with what can be verified in practice. The appeal carried a certain force. It suggested clarity in a landscape often saturated with interpretation, narrative, and suspicion. Yet something in that gesture feels historically displaced. Not because facts have disappeared, nor because material reality has become secondary, but because the philosophical confidence that once accompanied such appeals no longer appears self-evident. The issue is not whether Lenin was “right” or “wrong.” It is that the conditions under which his epistemology could appear unproblematic have shifted. What once functioned as a relatively direct theory of knowledge now emerges as one articulation within a broader and more complex history of how truth is produced, stabilized, and ...
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The Blind Spot of the Sovereign Individual: Nietzsche and Derrida on the Limits of Self-Mastery

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Triple Self-Portrait. Norman Rockwell 1960. Source: Wikipedia Thesis Although Nietzsche's sovereign individual appears to embody self-mastery and responsibility, Derrida's analysis of blindness in Memoirs of the Blind reveals a structural limitation already operating within Nietzsche's account. Just as the self-portraitist cannot fully see himself while drawing, the promising subject cannot fully know the future self who must fulfill the promise. In both texts, selfhood emerges not from pure presence but from a relation to absence, interruption, and temporal distance. Introduction At first glance, Nietzsche's sovereign individual and Derrida's self-portraitist seem to inhabit entirely different philosophical worlds. One belongs to a genealogy of morality, responsibility, and promise; the other emerges from a meditation on drawing, vision, and memory. Yet both figures confront a surprisingly similar problem: the impossibility of complete self-presence. In th...
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Art History III: The Invention of Artistic Progress

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From Kouros to Contrapposto. AI image Thesis This article argues that what art history frequently describes as artistic progress is often the retrospective projection of modern aesthetic values onto radically different visual systems. Egyptian wall paintings, archaic Greek sculpture, and Renaissance perspective do not necessarily belong to a single evolutionary sequence leading toward realism. Rather, they represent distinct symbolic regimes that modernity reorganizes into a narrative culminating in its own ideals of representation. From Baudrillard's Ape to Art History's Renaissance One of Jean Baudrillard's most penetrating criticisms of historical materialism concerns a famous passage from Marx's Grundrisse . Marx writes that "human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape" (Marx, 1973, p. 105). The idea is straightforward: the most developed form allows us to understand earlier forms. For Baudrillard, however, this logic introduces a subtle...
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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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