Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 38, No. 1, January 2007 I OWE YOU: NIETZSCHE, MAUSS RAFAEL WINKLER The Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, “’Schuld,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and the Like,” 1 is no doubt one of the more remarkable texts in Nietzsche’s entire corpus. With no more than a few meager texts on Germanic, Roman and Hindu law, Nietzsche traces the genesis of the human to the dynamics of an economy of debt. The Nietzschean discourse on ‘Schuld’ – a word whose translation we shall defer until later – resonates with a number of related discourses, Marcel Mauss’ The Gift, 2 George Bataille’s The Accursed Share, 3 and Jacques Derrida’s Given Time, 4 on which we intend to draw in this essay, in part as a comparative exercise, in part so as to shed some unexpected light on the Nietzschean concept of ‘Schuld’. One of the more intriguing thoughts that run through the Nietzschean text is that a system of reciprocal obligations, an economy of debt, remains impossible without the operation of technics and time, without the work of mnemotechnics. What we intend to bring out therefore is a genealogical account of the passage of the animal to the human, or better, of the technological invention of man, on which Nietzsche begins to ponder in the first few sentences of the Second Essay. To breed an animal with the right to make promises – is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man? (GM 57, KG 307). An animal with the right to make promises, with a memory, a memory stored with dues, debts and obligations, certainly stands as a paradox in nature, as something para physin, as Aristotle says of nature’s production of monsters, as something beyond or in excess of nature – provided it is true that the animal, if not the essence of animality itself, is determined by forgetfulness, Vergesslichkeit, to the point that it even forgets the fact that its nature, its essence, is to forget. No light, no world, perhaps deprived of world, in any case, a total darkness appears to rein in and reign over the animal world. Nietzsche had already remarked on this in one of his Untimely Meditations, in which a man is said to have once asked a cow: “Why do you not speak to me but only stand and gaze at me?”, to which the cow would have liked to answer: “The reason is I always forget what I was going to say” – but then the cow forgot this answer too, and stayed silent. Psychologists are wrong to see forgetfulness as a form of inactivity, as a form of mental passivity, or as a passive faculty. On the contrary, it is an active and in the strictest sense positive power of inhibition, of repression (positives Hemmungsvermögen), which is responsible for the fact that what is experienced and absorbed enters consciousness (Bewusstsein) as little while we are digesting it, which Nietzsche suggests we call a process of “inpsychation” (Einverseelung), as 90 JBSP jan 07 pages 19/1/07 22:28 Page 90