Taking this as my lead, I will draw on the Jewish tradition of lamentation to propose a reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Instead, by turning weakness into strength-and specifically by discovering a strength of an utterly different kind than that of the masters-they took revenge in the most imaginative way possible, namely, by transvaluing preexisting values, in fact by revolutionizing a whole culture of judgment. 1 Nietzsche characterizes the Romans as those who claimed the right to create values out of the “pathos of distance,” while the Jews are presented as the ones who were unable to undertake a real (physical) action against their suppressors. ![]() The Jewish “ slaves’ revolt in morality” is praised as “the most spiritual revenge” ever performed against the Roman rulers whom he refers to as the “masters” (Nietzsche 2007, 20, 17). Two years later, in the first essay of his famous work On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche presented us with the original scene of what he calls a successful revolt against injustice. ![]() “The sense of right is a ressentiment it belongs together with revenge,” or, in German: “Das Rechtsgefühl ist ein Ressentiment, gehört mit der Rache zusammen”: Nietzsche made this note in the summer of 1875 while reading Eugen Dühring’s The Value of Life (1865) (see Thatcher 1989, 589 my translation of Nietzsche).
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