The Promise of Cruelty: The Second Essay of Nietzsche's 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Acid Horizon

On this episode, we discuss the second essay of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals and the question of the developmental origins of responsibility and conscience from the moral point of view. To bring responsibility under the knife, Nietzsche focuses on a paradigm case of morality playing itself out on the field of responsibility on the levels of both Being and Acting. This paradigm case is the promise. So, to account for the origins of the moral value of responsibility, Nietzsche asks us, what kind of animal can make promises? What are the conditions of possibility that make any promise reliable such that promising as a practice could survive? In answering these questions, we’ll take you through Nietzsche’s account of the origins of the promise in the faculties of memory and forgetfulness, and the motor of their growth which Nietzsche reveals as the primordial cruelties at the heart of human animal. With insights from Kant, Hegel, Hobbes, Foucault, and Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus guiding our way, we aim to deliver from Nietzsche’s text a notion of morality that could only ever be the promise of cruelty.
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