Nietzsche’s own example of tracing the origins—and not just the subsequent genealogy—of bad conscience, his own reckoning with the power of mnemotechnics, where meaning is generated by the hideous pain of memory, went missing altogether in deconstruction: “How … meaning ever gets started … is quite unanswerable upon deconstructive terms.” This was Nietzsche’s great moral and aesthetic contribution, wholly obliterated in what Bloom regarded as the excessive historicism of poststructuralism in particular, where every stance an author makes in a text can be traced “home” to a political, social,
...more
