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The Problem: When Critical Concepts Become Obvious My first encounter with Marxism was not through the unfinished movement of a thinker searching for concepts, but through an already organized intellectual structure. Like many students introduced to Marxist theory through university courses, I encountered a system divided into three interconnected fields: dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and political economy. The first presented the general laws of development governing nature, society, and thought; the second applied those principles to the historical organization of human societies; the third examined the internal logic of capitalism through concepts such as commodity, value, labour, capital, and surplus value. This organization had a clear pedagogical function. It offered students a map. Complex ideas could be located within a coherent architecture, and a vast body of writing could be approached through a limited number of fundamental principles. Such organizati...

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...

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...

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...