ORIGIN AS A GRIMASE: NIETZSCHE’S VIEW OF GENEALOGY

Text topic: Context in Arts and Media

Text author: Милица Рашић

Classical understanding of genealogy sees it as a process of tracing an origin though lineage: a search for the beginning. It descends all the way to the first ancestor and tends to take the very beginning out of the lineage, to consider it as something atemporal, something that is created in itself, that has no origin, but produces one. That atemporal beginning is considered necessary. Since it has no origin, it has no context to come out of. Nietzsche’s genealogy, however, shows that the beginning is always arbitrary: it is always contextual, because it has its own history. There is always something that precedes that which is seen as an original, someone who is „more first“ than the first. Establishing a beginning is always a matter of convention. Classical genealogy de-contextualizes the beginning, while Nietzsche’s genealogy does exactly the opposite: it puts it in a context, it contextualizes it. The consequences of Nietzsche’s understanding of genealogy, as Foucault shows us, bring not only a radically different understanding of a method, but also crucially affect the understanding of the Greek arche – the basic principal that transcends time and any historical context. Genealogy shows how precisely that context determines even what is considered to be originless – something that escapes every context.