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Whenever a reader of Nietzsche confronts the problem of genealogy, it is tempting for her to assume that she is in familiar country. As we read in the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic from 1887, the aim of genealogy is to mount "a critique of moral values and the value of those values' by reconstructing "an actual history of morality", the sources for which are to be found in "what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind".¹ Genealogy tracks large expanses of time, millennia that one can actually count. Here we finally come to grips with agents who are driven by urges that at least approximate to passions and instincts, as opposed to those ghostly agencies of the will to power straining to exert themselves against the background of some metaphysical and barely imaginable flux.² However unsettling it may prove as a cultural diagnosis, genealogy at least provides the solace of a story with a familiar plot, one easily and intuitively followed: it is the well-worn tale of human decline and hoped-for redemption. Indeed, here the familiar becomes almost banal, a repetition of itself, or as Nietzsche would say, "grey". At the extreme, genealogy is Nietzsche's least original theory, in ways not much different from Homeric and Hesiodic mythology, the Judaeo-Christian story of the fall, or Marxian anthropology.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230357006_8

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