Introduction

Abstract

This introduction lays out the book’s main thesis that Nietzsche is a thinker of the suffered social histories of subjectivity. It suggests that Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy needs the concept of convalescence to be coherent. Genealogy is a form of reflection that traces the suffered social scenes of which that reflection is symptomatic, whereas convalescence is the ordeal of the reflecting subject’s coming to bear its limits within scenes of suffered sociality . The imbrication of suffering , sociality, and history is traced through several passages from Nietzsche’s work, and Nietzsche’s kinship with Marx and Freud is discussed as being founded on the shared interrogation of metaphysical independence as a symptom of socio-historical dependence. This reading is then put in contrast with the subjectivist interpretations of Ricoeur, Kofman, and Foucault.