The Promise of Cruelty: The Second Essay of Nietzsche's 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

On this episode, we discuss the second essay of Friedrich
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals and the question of the
developmental origins of responsibility and conscience from the
moral point of view. To bring responsibility under the knife,
Nietzsche focuses on a paradigm case of morality playing itself
out on the field of responsibility on the levels of both Being
and Acting. This paradigm case is the promise. So, to account for
the origins of the moral value of responsibility, Nietzsche asks
us, what kind of animal can make promises? What are the
conditions of possibility that make any promise reliable such
that promising as a practice could survive? In answering these
questions, we’ll take you through Nietzsche’s account of the
origins of the promise in the faculties of memory and
forgetfulness, and the motor of their growth which Nietzsche
reveals as the primordial cruelties at the heart of human animal.
With insights from Kant, Hegel, Hobbes, Foucault, and Deleuze
& Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus guiding our way, we aim to deliver
from Nietzsche’s text a notion of morality that could only ever
be the promise of cruelty.

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