Maria Mourtou-Paradeisopoulou

In this paper I argue that Nietzsche treats metaphor as a methodological instrument of the Genealogy: an artistic means of speaking that reshapes readers’ affects and renders difficult contents approachable. Drawing on his lecture notes on rhetoric, and Ecce Homo’s synopsis of the Genealogy, I reconstruct a dual conception of metaphor. In a structural sense, “metaphor” names the unavoidable Übertragung ―the “carrying over” from impulses and images to words― that underlies all language. In an artistic sense, it designates a conscious trope (for example, “sick sheep,” or the master-slave types) deployed within a wirkliche Redekunst in order to activate and reconfigure affects and to mediate access to unsettling insights. The paper focuses on this second, artistic sense. I argue that Genealogy’s metaphors are methodologically significant for its project of revaluation. First, given Nietzsche’s account of the primacy of drives and the affective basis of moral evaluation, a text that seeks to revalue must intervene in the reader’s affective economy, and metaphor is one of its principal instruments. Second, I claim that metaphor in the Genealogy functions as a mode of “revelatory concealment”: by presenting its object as other than it literally is, metaphor both veils and renders bearable contents that, if stated baldly, would be rejected or prove intolerable.