Metaphor as an Artistic Means of Speaking in Nietzsche’s Genealogy

In On the Genealogy of Morality , Nietzsche treats metaphor as a methodological instrument: an artistic means of speaking that reshapes readers’ affects and renders difficult contents approachable. Drawing on his lecture notes on rhetoric, and on the synopsis of the On the Genealogy of Morality in Ecce Homo , I reconstruct a dual conception of metaphor. In a structural sense, “metaphor” names the unavoidable Übertragung – the “carrying over” from impulses and images to words – that underlies all language. In an artistic sense, it designates a conscious trope deployed within a wirkliche Redekunst in order to activate and reconfigure affects and to mediate access to unsettling insights. The paper focuses on this second, artistic sense. I argue that On the Genealogy of Morality ’s metaphors are methodologically significant for its project of revaluation. First, given Nietzsche’s account of the primacy of drives and the affective basis of moral evaluation, a text that seeks to revalue must intervene in the reader’s affective economy, and metaphor is one of its principal instruments. Second, I argue that metaphor, in On the Genealogy of Morality , functions as a mode of “revelatory concealment”: by presenting its object as other than it literally is, metaphor both veils and renders bearable contents that, if stated baldly, would be rejected or prove intolerable.