i am no man - i am dynamite

Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil:

“it is we alone who have devised cause, sequence…law, freedom, motive and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed ‘in itself,’ we act once more as we have always acted – mythologically” (219).

In his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,” Michel Foucault describes the historical development of humanity as a series of interpretations. Against those who “seek the soul in the distant ideality of an origin,” he writes, effective history “unearths periods of decadence, and if it chances upon lofty epochs, it is with suspicion --not vindictive but joyous-- of finding a barbarous and shameful confusion” (89). Although historians have generally taken great pains to remove that which reveals their grounding in particular time and place, “effective history is [an] affirmation of knowledge as perspective” (90).