GUIDANCE NOTES FOR 'WORK IN PROGRESS' PODCAST OF 14/03/2026

1.

Given that the topic is a difficult one, perhaps it is best to spend this session focusing in on the main text we’ve already touched on:

Nietzsche’s “Genealogy”.

Specifically, what I have called the “kingfisher” notion of historical meaning that I pointed up as being expounded in the twelfth section of the second essay:

What I mean by it becomes clear, I hope, when we juxtapose the two passages from Nietzsche and Saussure:

Nietzsche:

there is no more important proposition for every sort of history than that which we arrive at only with great effort but which we really should reach,– namely that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, impounded anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning’ [Sinn] and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.. ..Every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing’, an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The ‘development’ of a thing, a tradition, an organ is, therefore, a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing in question.

Now, I suggested that if this passage were placed next to a passage printed, indeed, only thirty years later but setting ideas that might have initially taken form at the same time (mid-1880s), namely Saussure’s

La première chose qui frappe quand on étudie les faits de langue, c’est que pour le sujet parlant leur succession dans le temps est inexistante : il est devant un état. Aussi le linguiste qui veut comprendre cet état doit-il faire table rase de tout ce qui l’a produit et ignorer la diachronie. Il ne peut entrer dans la conscience des sujets parlants qu’en supprimant le passé.

and some pages further on :

Par opposition à l’idée fausse que nous nous en faisons volontiers, la langue n’est pas un mécanisme crée et agencé en vue des concepts à exprimer. Nous voyons au contraire que l’état issu d’un changement n’était pas destiné à marquer les significations dont il s’imprègne. Un état fortuit est donné…et l’on s’en empare pour lui faire porter (une) distinction…

this “kingfisher” analogy” comes out all the more clearly.

We have correspondences here between, on the one hand,

faire table rase

supprimer le passé

l’on s’en empare

and, on the other

impounding,

overpowering,

dominating,

subjugating,

obliterating (of former meaning)

§

This, as I say, is what I have called the “kingfisher” notion of human historical experience that I noted becomes strangely omnipresent in the period 1875-1900.

I am at present, here in the Hungarian woodland springtime, more under the spell of another powerfully beaked bird, the woodpecker.

But the “kingfisher” image/notion preoccupies me as well:

A form of being that plunges down out of its element into an element alien to it – the plunge out of the static, aerial element into the kinetic, flowing, liquid one – and plucks out of this latter “Dinge”

– Nietzsche really does use the very generic term “Dinge”

(compare Heidegger “Was ist ein Ding?”) –

whose being has thitherto been defined in terms of the “liquid” element and redefines them in terms of their own “aerial” one.

More abstractly expressed, what we have to do with in both cases is a notion of

history as successivity without continuity

§

Now, there are several interesting points to be made about this “Saussurean innovation” that Nietzsche makes in 1886 already if we look at it backwards from this point, i.e. in terms of its prefigurations in earlier works of Nietzsche’s

This “kingfisher” notion that is evoked for history in section 12 of the second essay of the “Genealogy” here has in fact haunted Nietzsche’s thought for years by this time.

We find something like it it in the second “Untimely Meditations” essay.

So long as we are immersed in the stream of history we are incapable of real historical action.

The real moment of historical action is a moment in which this flux of history is brought to a Stillstand – or, in the terms of the essay itself, the weight of historical awareness is lifted off of Man.

§

It is also, I would argue, the basic idea of the Eternal Return as a genocidal idea that will “split the history of humanity in two”.

The “Missrathener” is brought to destroy himself by being cut off from the “saving” axis of historical continuity.

§

(incidentally, the Eternal Return idea is first evoked in the “Historie” essay – but as a reductio ad absurdum)

It shows up the necessary limitations of what he calls, in this work, “monumental history”

And yet -to learn something new straightaway from this example - how inexact, fluid and provisional that comparison would be! How much of the past would have to be overlooked if it was to produce that mighty effect, how violently what is individual in it would have to be forced into a universal mould and all its sharp corners and hard outlines broken up in the interest of conformity! At bottom, indeed, that which was once possible could present itself as a possibility for a second time only if the Pythagoreans were right in believing that when the constellation of the heavenly bodies is repeated the same things, down to the smallest event, must also be repeated on earth: so that whenever the stars stand in a certain relation to one another a Stoic again joins with an Epicurean to murder Caesar, and when they stand in another relation Columbus will again discover America. Only if, when the fifth act of the earth’s drama ended, the whole play every time began again from the beginning, if it was certain that the same complex of motives, the same d e u s ex machina, the same catastrophe were repeated at definite intervals, could the man of power venture to desire monumental history in full icon-like veracity, that is to say with every individual peculiarity depicted in precise detail: but that will no doubt happen only when the astronomers have again become astrologers. Until that time, monumental history will have no use for that absolute veracity: it will always have to deal in approximations and generalities,

§

But my last remarks relate rather to the resurgence of the “Eternal Return” idea in quite another mode after “Zarathustra”.

§

The final stage in the intra-Nietzschean pre-history of this notion is, admittedly, especially disorienting.

If we consider the first essay of the Genealogy to be the “final stage in the prehistory” of this notion introduced in the second essay of the Genealogy, then it is striking how Nietzsche seems in this essay to stay mired in the very notion of history and meaning that this notion transcends.

The first essay in G. is etymological

(Saussurean linguistics is the very antithesis of “etymology”)

and even ends with a Preisausschreibung for etymological research – i.e. research based on truth defined in terms of continuity of historical meaning.

§

But things become still more interesting if we consider the idea expounded in the twelfth section of the second essay of the Genealogy in terms of its posterity

Even though Nietzsche really only uses the term “genealogy” in this one book of 1886, he is considered, from our 21^st-century perspective, to have founded, with the essays in this book, a completely new approach to historical truth: precisely, “genealogy”.

It is very striking, though, that the idea of Nietzschean “genealogy” circulating in 2026 is more or less diametrically at odds with the notion of “how to do history” that Nietzsche sketches out in the passage from the twelfth section of the second essay of the eponymous book from which I quoted at length at the start (and it is in this passage, after all, that Nietzsche evokes the idea of

no more important proposition for every sort of history than that which we arrive at only with great effort but which we really should reach).

We can see this if we look at the entry on “genealogy” in Wikipedia – the real barometer of the state of “normie” understanding as regards cultural and philosophical matters.

It runs throughout directly contrary to the very moments of discontinuity and violent decontextualization that I have stressed above.

In philosophy genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to account for the scope, breadth, or totality of discourse, thus extending the possibility of analysis. Moreover, a genealogy often attempts to look beyond the discourse in question toward the conditions of their possibility. Genealogy is opposed to the Marxist use of ideology to explain the totality of historical discourse within the time period in question by focusing on a singular or dominant discourse (ideology).

For example, tracking the lineages of a concept such as ‘globalization can be called a ‘genealogy’ to the extent that the concept is located in its changing constitutive setting. This entails not just documenting its changing meaning (etymology) but the social basis of its changing meaning.

“Normie consciousness” about this idea, then, has somehow contrived to restore to it everything that, as I argued above, Nietzsche – especially when read in a Saussurean light – eliminates from it.

It is even seen here as a form of etymology – i.e. everything that, on the “Nietzscho-Saussurean” understanding, it is defined against.

How did this come about?

The answer certainly lies, at least in large part, in Foucault’s 1977 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, which we will need to devote a separate session to examining.