Nietzsche, Foucault, And Genealogy
By Brian Manning Delaney
Foucault uses Nietzsche, rather than interpret him – at least where interpretation is understood in the conventional sense. Foucault is less concerned with understanding the roots of Nietzsche’s thought, nor even “the thought itself,” than with that which might flower from it.
In this respect, there is a risk that Foucault might miss much of what was vital to Nietzsche himself. Indeed, Foucault rends Nietzsche’s ideas from their historical context, employs a highly selective reading of Nietzsche’s texts, and is often utterly insensitive to Nietzsche’s subtle rhetorical feints and dodges.
But is such interpretative “butchery” necessarily bad? Is interpretative fidelity, understood in the traditional sense, necessarily the best way to judge a commentary by one complex thinker on another complex thinker’s thought? Might “active interpretation” – that is, a violent, willfully violating use of such thought – be, in fact, the most Nietzschean of all?
Indeed, Nietzsche’s own understanding of “interpretation” is by no means conventional. In his book Zur Genealogie der Moral, which forms the center of Foucault’s essay, Nietzsche gives an odd example of Interpretation (Auslegung) in the third and final essay, “Was Bedeuten Asketische Ideale?” (What Is The Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?) Nietzsche explains the example – an interpretation of one of his own aphorisms – at the end of the Preface to the book:
An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been ‘deciphered’ just because it has been read out; on the contrary, this is just the beginning of its proper interpretation, and for this, an art of interpretation is needed. In the third essay of this book I have given an example of what I mean by ‘interpretation’ in such a case: – this treatise is a commentary on the aphorism that precedes it. (On the Genealogy of Morality, Preface, §8.)
The aphorism placed at the beginning of the essay is the well-known quote from Also Sprach Zarathustra:
Unbekümmert, spöttisch, gewalttätig – so will uns die Weisheit: sie ist ein Weib, sie liebt immer nur einen Kriegsmann.
[Unconcerned, mocking, violent – thus wisdom wants us; she is a woman, and always loves only a warrior.]
Give that the essay doesn’t even mention the aphorism, Nietzsche’s understanding of the nature of interpretation is thus itself perhaps in need of interpretation. The essay deals with, rather, the meaning of ascetic ideals, at least on the surface. Is Nietzsche telling us something about the need for highly indirect approaches to interpretation? Is he saying that the third essay is an interpretation of the aphorism because it exemplifies it in some way? Or is it rather that the theme explicitly explored – the meaning of ascetic ideals – is integrally, or thematically, related to interpretation per se?
There are thus many reasons to exercise caution in criticizing Foucault’s interpretation of Nietzsche. It may be that Nietzsche himself “is the aphorism” for Foucault, and that Foucault is “exemplifying Nietzsche,” in the most Nietzschean of ways. It may even be that such exemplification this is an important aspect of genealogy itself (at least as Foucault understands it).
In any event, although we might argue Foucault is Nietzschean in the use he makes of Nietzsche, he most decidedly does not appear to be the kind of reader Nietzsche so often explicitly calls for. At the end of the Preface to Morgenröte, Nietzsche stresses the importance of reading him carefully, which means, above all, slowly (“lento”). And in the preface to Zur Genealogie he stresses the importance of the art of reading. The passage quoted above continues as follows:
I admit that you need one thing above all in order to practice the requisite art of reading, a thing which today people have been so good at forgetting – and so it will be some time before my writings are ‘readable’ –, you almost need to be a cow for this one thing and certainly not a ‘modern man’: it is rumination . . .. (On the Genealogy of Morality, Preface, §8.)
Nietzsche almost wants his readers almost to be cows; they need, that is to “chew their cud.”
Foucault is not a cow. He does not chew his cud.
The task of genealogy, like the task of interpretation in general, is always partly relative to the time in which it is conducted. Much of Foucault’s work, including “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” was written during the late 1960’s and 1970’s, when Europe was either frantically on fire, or frantically examining the previous fires’ ashes. The influence of Hegel (if often via Marx) had been so strong in France for over a generation that any appearance of interpretative clumsiness is in actuality strategic violence: a stripping from Nietzsche of the heritage of the previous generations of German philosophy, in order to fashion new interpretative tools – new, lighter political weapons, those which can be wielded without the baggage of Kantianism and its outgrowths. Das Wiederkäuen was not a virtue in this fast-paced time.
But we live in a different age today. It might be time for a brief Wiederkehr to what is perhaps a prematurely rejected tradition.
Expression – or any intending at all – involves erasure. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Foucault stresses that one of the goals of genealogy is to uncover repressed histories, to recover that which other forms of history erase. In this brief essay I’d like to examine what Foucault himself might have erased or repressed in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”
Manuscript of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, extract p. 27
No degree of “butchery” discovered in Foucault’s work can erase its immeasurable value, which even today has yet to be uncovered in its entirety. His work with CERFI, for example, has only begun to be explored. Yet a brief examination of what, at the time, seemed like the undesirable scraps of the Nietzschean corpus, might help us set the stage for a new interpretation of Foucault – whatever “interpretation” shall mean.
Foucault’s essay glides along the smooth, unyielding rails of essentially one opposition, which finds various expressions: the totalizing vs. the contingent, the general vs. the singular, the subject vs. the non- or dissolving subject, etc. Like much other French philosophy of the time, a particular understanding – at times a caricature – of German Idealism, above all of Hegel, is associated with the former, and a particular understanding of Nietzsche is associated with the latter. Ironically, the opposition makes possible a kind of interpretation of Nietzsche which is not genealogical, but rather is restricted to just one of the kinds of historical interpretation Nietzsche analyzes in “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” “monumental” history: Nietzsche becomes a hero, the historical bearer of present aspirations. Such a use of Nietzsche is even more evident in Deleuze’s book, Nietzsche et la philosophie, where a caricature of Nietzsche is used, monumentally, to create an opposing caricature of Hegel. Of course, as Nietzsche points out, monumental history is of tremendous value during particular historical epochs. Nietzsche writes of monumental history:
History belongs above all to the active and powerful man, to him who fights a great fight, who requires models, teachers and comforters and cannot find them among his associates and contemporaries. (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, §2.)
Foucault, Deleuze, and so many of their contemporaries were “fighting a great fight.” Whether or not Nietzsche was the exemplar they thought he was, their understanding of Nietzsche may have been demanded by the age itself.
Nietzsche had, however, far more in common with Hegel than Foucault realized, or was willing to admit. Indeed, it was the relation between the two poles of the opposition itself which was a problem for Nietzsche: all of his work centered on the question of this relation, or, when it comes to history, the relation between what Foucault calls the “suprahistorical” (NGH, p. 152) and the particular. There isn’t the space here to do more than briefly gesture towards this thesis, but a little excavation at the site of Foucault’s essay will reveal aspects of the problem.
Before we dig in, we should consider the concept “genealogy” itself. The term “genealogy” apparently meant relatively little to Nietzsche. It didn’t appear until Zur Genealogie der Moral itself, and never appeared again in any of his published works. A brief look – more etymological than genealogical – at Nietzsche’s philosophical style might help us understand the way or ways in which he was a “genealogist.”
A theme running through Nietzsche’s work is health, above all, the health of a culture. Nietzsche does not “refute” claims with which he disagrees, he simply “puts on gloves” – that is, the gloves of the medical examiner – before them: “I do not refute ideals, I just put on gloves when I have to deal with them . . .” (Ecce Homo, Preface, §3; ellipsis Nietzsche’s). He even “smells” falsehoods, is if by dint of their rotting flesh:
I was the first to have discovered truth, since I was the first to have sensed – smelled – the lie qua lie . . . . My genius is in my nostrils . . . . (Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny,” §1; ellipses Nietzsche’s.)
This “medicalization” of philosophy might be part of what led Foucault and so many others to stress the singular in Nietzsche, as opposed to the total (the absolute, the suprahistorical, etc.): disease isn’t something one instinctively puts under a suprahistorical or otherwise totalizing category; pathogens typically aren’t, for example, teleological (except perhaps insofar as they partake in some “Thanatos”).
Yet it is inevitable that the diagnosis, like genealogy, invokes the non-singular, if not the suprahistorical itself, however much our attempts to think the two together seem in vain. Indeed, the word “genealogy” contains the tension itself between the general and the particular.
A “genealogy” is a logos of the genos. While the meaning of genos is relatively clear, logos has a wide variety of disparate meanings.
Genos can mean many things, but ultimately means “germ,” in the sense of “germ-line,” or “gen” of “generation.”
Logos is a far more complicated word. Beyond the cognate, “logic,” there are numerous other possible meanings. Goethe’s Faust struggles with the meaning of logos when translating The Book of John: after rejecting several of the many possible translations – “word,” “meaning” (Sinn), “force” (Kraft) – Faust is satisfied only with, as it happens, an astonishingly Nietzschean-sounding translation of “logos”: Tat.
If we consider the variety of meanings of logos, we can understand “genealogy” in two completely different ways, one which is opposed to the suprahistorical, and one which sounds almost like Hegel. Assuming genos is germ or seed, and we take logos to mean logic, or account, we could take “genealogy” to be a logical account of the straight-line development of a whole organism out of a seed, like Absolute Knowing coming into being from the seed of sense-certainty. If, however, logos is “act,” or “force” – or, more in the spirit of Foucault’s interpretation: if it can be, or simply is, all of the different possible meanings – then we might be led to think of genealogy not so much as a logical account, but rather as a compilation of various forces acting on a beginning, or even several beginnings, or even beginnings which can’t be definitively determined as such, which one might do best simply to archive, and then “sniff” with a diagnostic, Nietzschean nose.
The fact is, both senses of genealogy exist in Nietzsche: as indicated, it was precisely the relation between the two that was a vital question for Nietzsche. Let us now turn to “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” and try to show what of value in Nietzsche might have gone missing in the use to which Nietzsche was put in Foucault’s text.
The very beginning of Foucault’s text stresses an assiduous, almost old-fashioned, scholarly concern with accuracy:
“Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary.” Yet Foucault’s analysis is anything but patient. When turning to Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie, he writes: ”At the beginning of the text, its objective is defined as an examination of the origin of moral preconceptions [...]” (NGH, p. 141).
While Foucault describes a part of the text that is close to the beginning, it is not, in fact, the very beginning itself. Foucault is referring to the second section of the Preface. The first section of the Preface describes a much more classically philosophical problem, one especially relevant to the Kantian tradition to which Nietzsche was so often reacting: the problem and significance of self-knowledge. Of course, that it is a problem, that the difficulty of acquiring self-knowledge is stressed here, at the beginning, is clear. As any careful reader of Nietzsche – anyone who reads Nietzsche lento – knows, we must be patient and “meticulous.” Yet here, Foucault is the opposite of lento.
The second section of the Preface then opens with the “definition” to which Foucault refers. Yet Foucault has picked out a mere local eddy current in the stream of Nietzsche’s thought. The end of the first section is: “ – [für uns Erkennenden] sind wir keine ‘Er-kennenden’...” [ “ – for us who take ourselves to have knowledge, and search after knowledge, we are not ‘knowers’...”] (Ellipsis Nietzsche’s). And the beginning of the second section is:
– Meine Gedanken über die Herkunft unsrer moralischen Vorurteile – denn um sie handelt es sich in dieser Streitschrift – haben ihren ersten [...] Ausdruck in [Menschliches, Allzumenschliches].
[ – My thoughts about the descent/heritages of our moral prejudices – for this is what this polemic deals with – have their first expression in Human, all-too Human.]
Nietzsche ends the first section with a claim that we don’t know ourselves, followed by an ellipsis, then starts the second section with a dash (a “thought-line,” as this punctuation mark is called in many other languages), and then immediately begins discussing his thoughts about our moral prejudices! The punctuation, including the “thought-line,” suggests there is one continuous “line of thought.” Which is the primary concern here, and which is the secondary? One who reads meticulously would have to note one very important thing: Nietzsche introduces the work by suggesting the very stated goal of the work itself might be difficult to achieve, which might lead us to think the stated goal might not be the actual goal.
Yet even if we, with Foucault, ignore the qualification of the first section, we have a different problem. If it is in fact possible to know our thoughts, our thoughts about the descent or heritage (“Herkunft”) of our moral prejudices, if we can take what Nietzsche writes in this section at face value, then Foucault would have to admit the presence of an unmistakably Hegelian element just a few lines down in the same section, where Nietzsche writes that his thoughts about the Herkunft of our moral prejudices
from the first [...] did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but [stemmed] from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands. And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher. We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. (On the Genealogy of Morality, Preface, §2.)
The fundamental will to knowledge requires us to be systematic, compels our thought to be unitary, to grow up from a common root, and, by definition of “will,” to move towards a common end. This stands in sharp contrast to that which Foucault himself stresses about genealogy: that it must record the “singularity of events” (NGH, 139).
Within the first two sections of the book, then, we have at least two interpretative puzzles which are of relevance to us here: Can we know ourselves or can we not? And, much more importantly, if we can know ourselves, and we know our Grundwillen der Erkenntnis – both its modus operandi and its products – doesn’t this mean we can judge its truth? Or, if we wish to avoid the term “truth” (as Nietzsche sometimes does, sometimes doesn’t): doesn’t it mean we can say our Grundwillen der Erkenntnis has, to speak the language of Zur Genealogie, “value”?
It might be tempting to object here by first drawing a distinction between the Grundwillen der Erkenntnis of a particular thinker, Nietzsche – the systematic (“nicht beliebig, nicht sporadisch”) nature of his thoughts – and the kind of systematicity Foucault attributes to the thought of Hegel. The first would be just one of many attempts at systematicity by philosophers – each singular, each contingent, since each is just one singular philosopher among many. The second would be the sort of “suprahistorical” claim that there is one perspective that transcends all the particular attempts at systematicity. Then, on the basis of this distinction, we could say that Nietzsche is not making any suprahistorical claim, but is merely admitting that he, as a particular thinker, is of a unitary nature, that there is a systematicity to his thought, but that such a systematicity may not say anything about totality per se, or, indeed, about anything other Nietzsche himself. (And of course, under one interpretation of the first section of the Preface, what Nietzsche is saying about himself might even be wrong.)
However tempting it might be to strip Nietzsche of all Hegelian elements, it is precisely the relation between particularity and universality which was itself the fundamental problem of, and inspiration for, German Idealism. The problem could be framed as a problem of the categorization of a third element which doesn’t appear to fit neatly into either of the two categories. This element is that which is doing the assessing itself. It is under Hegel’s touch that this third element, along with its labyrinthine relation to the two others – the particular and general – finds its most thorough and fascinating exploration.
The question of this third element, “apperception,” as it was originally framed in Kant’s lingo, has been rejected by many philosophers today, by means of a defensive, dismissive gesture: they call this third element the “Cartesian ego,” and assert that the Kantian tradition is just an off-shoot of Cartesianism – which we all know is philosophically bankrupt – and thus that the question of this third element should be left to the dustbin of (decidedly non-monumental) history. (And many of those who do not reject the question, such as Habermas, treat it in an uninteresting way.) Even Heidegger, whose reading of Hegel in, for example, “Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung,” is both penetrating and faithful, wrote “Hegel was the greatest Cartesian.” (For an argument that Hegel – though perhaps not Kant – was not at all Cartesian, see Chapter 15, “On Being Anti-Cartesian: Hegel, Heidegger, Subjectivity, and Sociality,” in Idealism as Modernism, by Robert B. Pippin, Indeed, Hegel’s philosophy exists, we could say, in the space between an opposition which much contemporary philosophy doesn’t sufficiently question: the difference between “Cartesian representation” and “desiring production.”)
There is, according to Hegel, always a gap (at least implicitly, or apperceptively) between our perspective and what we take to be the measure of the perspective’s worth (correctness, beauty, or whatever). This gap means that we understand our perspective to be our perspective, and thus potentially not the perspective others might have. In Nietzschean language, we see the “perspectival nature” of our knowing (or loving, etc.). But to see the (merely) “for us” of our knowing requires that we see the idea of (if not the actuality of) the “in itself,” much like the grasp of my particular perspective makes no sense without a general idea of perspectivism per se, an idea which makes me aware of perspectives different from, and not consistent with, my own. The engine of Hegelianism is this problem of placement: that which beholds both the particularity of a perspective and the generality of perspectivism per se can’t itself so easily be regarded, beheld, reflected upon, in any way at all (and it certainly can’t so easily be represented in the Cartesian sense of representation). Yet the fact that something beholds in some way, or seems to be able to behold, these two difficult to unite things – a perspective and perspectivism – drives us continually to reconceive the relation between the two. The engine that drives us here is, per definition, teleological – the telos being the unity of the “for us” and the “in itself.” The meaning of “telos,” the question of what Hegel thought about the possibility of “arriving” at the telos – that is, of achieving satisfaction in some way that would still the restless drive – are thorny issues in German Idealism. But one can’t, as Zarathustra tries (and fails), merely “dance away” from the significance itself of the gap between the “for us” and the “in itself.”
Foucault would, however, deny this problem – or at least its importance – and contends that Nietzsche, too, would deny the problem. Foucault writes: ”Where religions once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge ” (NGH, p. 163).
If we do away with the “subject” of knowledge (the “beholder” of the gap), the peculiarly Hegelian relevance of gap vanishes.
After the word “ourselves” in the above citation, Foucault footnotes Morgenröte. Had he put the footnote after the next clause, he would have been lying straight out. Nevertheless, the next clause is placed in apposition to the foregoing. The passage Foucault cites suggests, however, nothing about sacrificing the subject of knowledge. The quote from Morgenröte is from a short passage entitled “Sterbliche Seelen!” which has nothing to do with sacrificing the subject of knowledge (as opposed to say, sacrificing the body). It is rather an argument that the absence of a belief in the eternal soul makes possible more daring experiments in knowledge. While the passage is sufficiently open to admit of many interpretations, nothing in it excludes precisely the opposite of what Foucault suggests: Nietzsche is not so limited as to rule out the cultivation of the subject of knowledge, of new kinds of subjects of knowledge, of even stronger subjects of knowledge, precisely in order to experiment with different ways of conceiving the relation between the subjects’ perspectives and perspectivism per se.
Finally, several lines down from the above passage, towards the close of his essay, Foucault butchers Nietzsche yet again when he writes:
We should now replace the two great problems of nineteenth-century philosophy, passed on by Fichte and Hegel (the reciprocal basis of truth and liberty and the possibility of absolute knowledge), with the theme that “to perish through absolute knowledge may well form a part of the basis of being” (NGH, 163; note, in Foucault’s French original, the first “absolute knowledge” is savoir absolu, the second is connaissance absolue).
The opposition between German Idealism and Nietzsche is forced, false, and, in the case of this particular passage, largely fabricated.
There at least two problems here. One, which there isn’t the space to explore fully, is that Foucault has, again, torn a fragment out of its context in a way that erases Nietzsche’s meaning. Not that Nietzsche’s meaning is easy to decipher. Jenseits von Gut und Böse is, after Zarathustra, probably his most complicated work. Nonetheless, a careful reading of the work shows that the point of the passage Foucault cites has nothing to do with any theme opposed to the traditional concerns of German Idealism. Indeed, the chapter, entitled, “The Free Spirit” [Der Freie Geist], concerns, among other things, precisely the relation between truth and liberty Foucault associates with Fichte and Hegel. Of course, Nietzsche questions both truth and freedom in new ways. But, pace Foucault, the relation between truth and freedom certainly is a “great problem” for Nietzsche.
Within this larger sweep of Nietzsche’s argumentation, §39 of Jenseits is addressing, at least on the surface of the mask, the question of how the pain or pleasure of a truth might affect whether we’re inclined to deny it. Nietzsche is in no way talking about “absolute knowledge” (be it connaissance or savoir). The German is: ”[Ja] es könnte selbst zur Grundbeschaffenheit des Daseins gehören, daß man an seiner völligen Erkenntnis zu Grunde gienge [...]”
“Völligen Erkenntnis” cannot be translated as “connaissance absolue” – certainly not here. The question at hand for Nietzsche is, first, what sort of people can bear up under painful truths, and whether bearing up under a large number of them might be a mark of strength; and then, second – a related, and more important question – whether the fundamental nature of existence is such that knowing all these truths would necessarily be fatal. But this has nothing to do with an absolute knowledge or knowing in Hegel’s sense. Absolute knowing, for Hegel, is a process: this is why Hegel uses a term, absolutes Wissen, which, in English, requires the gerund when translated. It’s not absolute knowledge. Absolute knowing, or, “The Absolute,” is not a complete, or full (“völlig”) collection of facts (painful or otherwise). The Absolute is rather the theoretical endpoint of a process where attempts to reduce the difference between the “for us” and the “in itself” merely recreate previously rejected ways of understanding the relation between the two. This has nothing to do with what Nietzsche is discussing in this passage. (Moreover, given that the Absolute in Hegel often appears to be merely theoretically regulative, it’s not clear that Hegel would disagree with Nietzsche, even if “völligen Erkenntnis” were absolutes Wissen. Might this even be an interesting interpretation of Hegel’s Geist: that entity into which the individual subject dissolves, once s/he has “connaissance absolue,” or even that which is a condition for the possibility of having “connaissance absolue”?)
Of course, this need not stop Foucault from, himself, calling for the replacement of the great problems of the Kantian tradition with a new one. But, 1) insofar as we are interested in understanding Nietzsche, we should note that this was not a replacement Nietzsche himself called for, and, more importantly, 2) insofar as we’re interested in understanding the world (or understanding itself), we should think about why Nietzsche did not call for this replacement.
Throughout the last two pages of Foucault’s essay, citations from Nietzsche involving the “dissolution of the subject” are opposed to a bogey man, Hegel. This opposition between Nietzsche and Hegel has no historical reality. First of all, the question of the fragmentary nature of the subject is, for Nietzsche, just that: a question. Never is it taken as a given, or as proved, or as genealogically revealed. To reveal the dark underbelly of opposed and contradictory forces which affect, dissolve, and perhaps even constitute the self is not to say there isn’t a subject. And, far more importantly, the very question of the relation between the structure itself of knowing and these forces which affect or constitute the subject is everywhere of paramount important for Nietzsche.
This is why Nietzsche believed that eliminating the “Hegelian” element from philosophy might be impossible, insofar as it might mean eliminating thought altogether. Whether or not the Hegelian element was essential for Nietzsche, it’s status was certainly always an important question for him, a question that runs through all his works. Near the end of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, in a section called “Our Question Mark,” Nietzsche explores precisely this question of the status of the knowing subject, as it has come to be formed in modernity. He says we seem compelled to choose between either 1) casting aside our esteem for all the values which sprung up out of Judaism, Christianity – the very values which led to the will to truth itself, and to the belief in the knowing, intending subject – or, on the other hand, 2) casting aside ourselves (we thinkers who have insight into the forces which constitute the subject as one which wills truth, which intends, and so on). He then writes:
Das Letztere wäre der Nihilismus; aber wäre nicht auch das Erstere – der Nihilismus? – Dies ist unser Fragezeichen (die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, §346, “Fünftes Buch: Wir Furchtlosen”).
[The latter would be nihilism; but wouldn’t the first also be – nihilism? This is our question mark.]
Nietzsche’s point is of course that the rejection of those values which, under the genealogical surgeon’s knife, appear to be nihilistic would also amount to nihilism, insofar as it seems to be the case – and this is precisely “our question mark” – that such a rejection is ultimately rooted in the nihilistic values themselves.
What would Nietzsche have been able to write without his will to truth? Whence the strength of his hortatory voice without a firmness to his subjectivity? Would the tools of genealogy themselves exist without that to which they are critically applied? Nietzsche here has arrived at precisely the Hegelian challenge of “thought thinking itself.”
Foucault, in his essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” has hacked off this vital Nietzschean question mark.
Of course, in order not to butcher Foucault, we need to be sensitive to his question marks, to the reasons why he felt he had to position himself in opposition to the great problems of 19th century philosophy – or, perhaps more accurately, had to recast the problems into simpler forms, simple enough that they could be chained, battened down, fixed in a way that made it possible to climb up on them, and reach ever higher – as long as the chains hold…
Brian Manning Delaney is a philosopher based in Stockholm. Among his publications are G W F Hegel, Andens fenomenologi (2008, trans. with Sven-Olov Wallenstein) and Translating Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit and Modern Philosophy (co-ed. with Sven-Olov Wallenstein).
Works cited:
Preuss, Peter (trans.), On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Hackett, 1980.
Ridley, Aaron (ed.); Norman, Judith (trans.), Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings. Cambridge, 2005. Cited as Ecce Homo.
“Nietzsche, Genealogy and History”, in Bouchard, Donald F. (ed.); Bouchard, Donald F. & Simon, Sherry (trans.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Cornell, 1977. Cited as NGH.
