It might have been Marx who first said he saw the clothes, bereft of their
emperor. Art, culture, religion and philosophy, these did not determine the
financial relations of the world, but rather the other way around. Critics soon
contended that a direct correlation between the economic base and the cultural
superstructure was too simplistic, but the pattern had been set. The root would
be determined by its branches, the specific forms of the material dictating the
formlessness of the immaterial – and never the other way around.
In Nietzsche’s cryptic, arrogant brilliance, these genealogies reached their
apogee. Unearthing the supposed origins of Western moralities, Nietzsche
transformed these into exposed, rotten cavities: What was good, just and
beautiful was often the exercise of the victim against the otherwise
unstoppable victor, the loser’s revenge on the winner. Today's scholars have
inherited this legacy, and like the unquestioning sons of errant fathers before,
are obsessed only with faithfulness. After all, if morality is just an exercise
of power, or of restraining power, then that morality must be found and
trivialized.
To try to find the roots of ideas from the appearances of their branches is
akin to making obvious the immanence of those ideas. Mapping out the history of
something is establishing its historicity, its reassuring lack of normativity. Writing
the genealogy of a concept sounds unfortunately like performing the examination
of an interesting corpse. It may be interesting, but it is still dead. It
doesn't transcend us, as people, because it is the result of us, as
people. Perhaps this is why, when societies reach the extreme of
amorality, they endure the revenge of the opposite extreme.
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