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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...

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...