James I. Porter

The paper seeks to demystify Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy. Genealogy tells the story of historical origins in the form of a myth that is betrayed fromwithin, while readers have naively assumed it tells a story that Nietzsche endorses—whether of history or naturalized origins. Looked at more closely, genealogy,I claim, tells the story of human consciousness and its extraordinary fallibility. It relates the conditions and limits of consciousness and how these are activelyavoided and forgotten, for the most part in vain. The lessons are these: there is no human time before consciousness; no unconscious activity that is uncontaminated by consciousness or culture; no period of prehistory that isn’t already historical or historicized, hence subject to dehistoricization (for prehistory, Urzeit, always comes after history, in the form of a myth); no primordial “innocence of becoming,” let alone any future condition free of these same constraints. Genealogy is the critique of the myth of knowing critique.

Rather than representing a break with his earlier philosophical undertakings, The Birth of Tragedy can be seen as continuous with them and Nietzsche's later works. James Porter argues that Nietzsche's argumentative and writerly strategies resemble his earlier writings on philology in his 'staging' of meaning rather than in his advocacy of various positions. The derivation of the Dionysian from the Apollinian, and the interest in the atomistic challenges to Platonism, are anticipated in earlier works. Also the theory of the all-too-human subject is a thread that runs throughout Nietzsche's oeuvre, critically undoing what his philosophy appears to erect, confirming that Nietzsche is a most unreliable witness to his own meaning. As well as studying the relation of The Birth of Tragedy to later writings, the author examines it on its own terms as a self-standing and complete piece of imagining, with close regard to the self-presentation of the work itself.

Current understandings of the sublime are focused by a single word and by a single author. The sublime is not a word: it is a concept and an experience, or rather a whole range of ideas, meanings and experiences that are embedded in conceptual and experiential patterns. Once we train our sights on these patterns a radically different prospect on the sublime in antiquity comes to light, one that touches everything from its range of expressions to its dates of emergence, evolution, role in the cultures of antiquity as a whole, and later reception. This book is the first to outline an alternative account of the sublime in Greek and Roman poetry, philosophy, and the sciences, in addition to rhetoric and literary criticism. It offers new readings of Longinus without privileging him, but instead situates him within a much larger context of reflection on the sublime in antiquity.