#foucault

[C. These four theses (that the origin holds: explanation, law, authenticity, and out task) have the consequences of opening time indefinitely: - cont'd]

[3. Undoing these four theses also undoes the connection established by metaphysics between truth, meaning, and history - cont'd]

b. Now, in Nietzsche, these three elements become external to each other:

i. meaning:

it has nothing to do with truth

it is the effect of processes without interpretation

ii. the truth:

it is only a product

it is the effect, through history, of a mask

iii. history: applied to previous forces and states, it is a series of hazards which

modify

transform

disguise

[C. These four theses (that the origin holds: explanation, law, authenticity, and out task) have the consequences of opening time indefinitely: - cont'd]

3. but these four theses [vis., the origin holds

the explanation (not fundamental meaning, but product of history)

the law (not a single line, but numerable crossroads)

the truest (not a privileged moment, but radically arbitrary)

our task (not return, but diagnosis)

] have yet another consequence: it is to undo the connection established by metaphysics between

truth

meaning

history

a. In a classical conception, of which Hegel gave the model, but which we find again well after him, these three elements

[they are not external to one another, as in Nietzsche

rather, they] belong to each other

i. meaning:

it is the way in which truth takes shape in history

it is given in a way that is both visible and hidden

it is the vein of truth that runs through history

ii. but history, in its turn, is an obscure meaning which little by little

moves towards its truth

will arrive there when all the meanings have been elucidated

iii. as for truth,

it is the law of meaning throughout history, it is what controls it from afar

it is what meaning, obscurely, is directed towards

[C. These four theses (that the origin holds: explanation, law, authenticity, and out task) have the consequences of opening time indefinitely: - cont'd]

2. which allows us to understand the Eternal Return;

if time is indefinite

if time holds however numerous the events we imagine

then these events will end up recurring indefinitely

a. Nothing is further from this Nietzschean repetition than the metaphysical theme (so frequent in the 19th and 20th centuries) of a return to the original.

b. Nothing could be further from the theme of a curve of time leading back to an original truth, to a unique and unprecedented event.

c. [In fact,] the return is the effect of the rarity of events in the indefinite opening of time.

C. These four theses [vis., the origin holds

the explanation (not fundamental meaning, but product of history)

the law (not a single line, but numerable crossroads)

the truest (not a privileged moment, but radically arbitrary)

our task (not return, but diagnosis)

] have the consequences of opening time indefinitely:

it is not blocked by any solemnity of origin

no door has ever opened history

this is nothing other than the indefinite flow of events

the beginning is only a fact, preceded indefinitely by other events

—and it is this indefinitely open character of time:

1. which allows us to understand the articulation of human history on animal history;

a. there was

not an establishment of humanity in its most general meanings,

but a perpetual interweaving of animal events and human events,

and the perpetual spanning of the biological over the historical

b. If there is something biological in Nietzsche, it is

not in the form: after the animal comes man

but in the form: animality is always recrossed with humanity

—(substitute

for the evolutionary anteriority of the biological

the spanning of the biological and the historical)

[B. To these theses (vis., the origin holds: the explanation, the law, the truest, our task), Nietzsche opposes four theses: - cont'd]

4. When we return to

the beginning

its arbitrariness

the adventures in which it found itself caught

a. It is

i. not

a return that we are talking about

the reappearance of a founding truth

ii. but a diagnosis of ourselves:

What forces have played and still play for us to be here?

What forces can we have at our disposal?

What recovery, and what reappropriation are possible?

b. Example: The errors of the world.

[B. To these theses (vis., the origin holds: the explanation, the law, the truest, our task), Nietzsche opposes four theses: - cont'd]

3. The first element:

a. When we manage to reconstitute it,

it is not truer, does not have a more decisive ontological content, nor of higher value, than the events which occur subsequently

it is without privilege; it might as well have been somewhere else in the series

it contains no less metaphor, displacement and illusion than any other

(Anfang exists, but not as an origin [i.e., not as a non-derivative source of truth])

b. Radical arbitrariness from the beginning: “Are moralities only a figurative language of passions?” (Beyond good and evil.)

[B. To these theses (vis., the origin holds: the explanation, the law, the truest, our task), Nietzsche opposes four theses: - cont'd]

2. What happens to the first element

it does not come to be located inside the field that it opens up;

but comes to intersect it with a whole series of other heterogeneous, discontinuous, random events

a. Between the beginning and us who seek to find it again, there is

not a single line

but innumerable crossroads, accidents, reversals, incursions (dispersal of events)

b. Example of the Good:

victory of the weakest,

confiscation by priests,

asceticism