Foucault X3
Descent attaches itself to the body.1
It inscribes itself in the nervous system,
in temperament, in the digestive apparatus;
it appears in faulty respiration,
in improper diets,
in the debilitated and prostrate body of those
whose ancestors committed errors.
Fathers have only to mistake
the effects for causes,
believe in the “afterlife,”
or maintain the value of eternal truths,
and the bodies of their children will suffer.
The body
— and everything that touches it:
diet, climate, and soil — is the domain of Herkunft.
the body manifests the stigmata of past experience
and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors.
…The body is the inscribed surface of events
(traced by language and dissolved by ideas),
the locus of a dissociated Self
(adopting the illusion of a substantial unity),
and a volume in perpetual disintegration.
…a body totally imprinted by history
and the process of history’s
destruction of the body.
1 The Gay Science, aphorism 348-349
Nietzsche, Genealogy, History by Michel Foucault, trans. by D. Bouchard and S. Simon
How long to dwell upon a single topic, and when to move on? The question arose as I considered further comment upon the essay written by Michel Foucault which treats The Genealogy of Morals authored by Friedrich Nietzsche. Still I am moved, intrigued by Foucault’s reflections so I resist moving on. In the above quote Foucault criticizes our inclination to believe that history amounts to events that are “over and done with,” that one is absolved of past events, free to make of one’s own life, to create a Self according to one’s wishes.
Foucault following the reasoning of Nietzsche offers a full-out rejection of ideas which are typically held by us Americans. Nietzsche and Foucault observe that the body, the physicality of our one life, is inexorably, unavoidably imprinted by the past. The German word Herkunft, translated “descent”, amounts to a matrix of class, where your parents, grandparents, even yet distanced relations, – figured into society’s pecking order. Descent is a matter of blood, an unstable layering derived from your stock. It is clear from the quotation that descent comes down to disintegration, a dispersion that is inscribed into your body, into my body. “The stigmata of past experience.” Could a more vivid phrasing be possible?
Survival, from generation to generation means doing the best that you know to do. One never knows enough. Failure and error leave durable scars. Scars are inherited.
A phrase, “how your parents fuck you up” just occurred to me. The language comes from a Phillip Larkin poem that I read long ago. There’s no better way to conclude this post than by sharing the poem.
One thought on “Foucault X3”
An interesting juxtaposition of fault lines within the human genome. I both agree and disagree with Mr. Larkin’s poem. Many times parents, without meaning to, pass along the dysfunction they themselves have sworn not to hand down to their children. On the other hand, I know that in my own family history, there has been slow but steady progress in healing the wounds received by my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. I chose not to have children, not for the reasons suggested in the poem, but more by happenstance. I like to think that if I had progeny I would have given them the gift of greater mindfulness, an ability to assess their own behavior in a way that would allow them to lead a more productive and happier life. Perhaps that’s just my own musings about a path that I did not take, so who knows?
In reading the Nietzsche quotes you have posted over the past few months I have come to believe that he must have suffered from being hyper-empathic, an ailment I have myself. I am no Nietzsche, but I can assume he felt compelled to communicate his point of view through extensive writing with a need to try and make sense of a nonsensical world, a world which he saw through a lens unfogged by the machinations of a crippled culture. This perspective would explain the story you told me yesterday about his reaction to the horse being mercilessly whipped and his subsequent collapse into mental decay. Pain can take many forms. To have one’s desire to right the world ignored, to want to warn others about a march towards potential oblivion and have that land on deaf ears is beyond frustration. And so I ask myself if this is just an aspect of a delusional, self-aggrandizing personality, as I suspect Nietzsche must have wondered with regard to the warning flags he waved.
The cynic might ask if, in the end, any of this matters. Since it does not seem possible to turn a Ship of Fools that is headed toward the edge of a flat earth, why not just sit back and enjoy the bits and pieces of life that we have remaining? I wish it were that simple, to just turn off and let humanity take its course. I know that I have misread the path before and perhaps I’m just off course in the future I see today. Time will tell.