ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s concept of willful forgetting is a useful metaphor for this chapter, which seeks to critically examine historically grounded Western cultural productions of othering. This is because it allows me to pay due attention to dominant tendencies of othering in modernist Western discourses, as well as to colonial constructions of exclusive identities and absolute difference based on ethnic or racial purity (Kawash 1997; Markell 2003; Weinbaum 2004). Nietzsche’s anti-Enlightenment critique in the Genealogy of Morals consisted in showing how Western discourses of scientifi c essentialism, rationality and logic are historically specifi c, and how they were secured by the willful suppression of ideas, practices and modes of knowing which were considered alien, superstitious, primitive, intuitive, emotional and excessive.
