How to convert the depression, the constant feeling of helplessness and inadequacy into such buffoonery? It must not be turned into the disinterested onlooker, the detached critic seeking truth. Rather, one must perform and relish in the buffoonery only through which one escapes the rusted manacles of inadequacy. To regard those very feelings of inadequacy as age-old and worn-out, as weapons and whips that either shackle or perpetually lash a soul tormented with its own pursuit of a singular identity that can surpass such haunting, imprisoning inadequacies. "To possess in oneself not an immortal soul but many mortal ones" -- that is the dissociative identity of the genealogist. Is the genealogist tormented by inadequacy? Never: he is constantly aware of the futility of the project. Inadequacy is his weapon that he no longer uses against himself, but a weapon with which he targets traditional history. Painting his face, he redirects the barrel of the gun from himself to the historians who are themselves deflecting their own feelings of inadequacy with universal theories and truths.
Madness is one way to escape inadequacy. The more my dad fits the pieces together, the more he reconstitutes the hatred he carried towards himself, the feelings of both guilt and inadequacy that face off in an Eternal duel where they keep shooting each other down, dusting each other off, and starting all over again. His only moments of bliss, so it seems, were those of total fragmentation of thought: when he could carry on conversations who weren't even there.
The methods of the genealogist is another way to break the shackles of inadequacy. The genealogist is not mad, though his parodying might make him appear to be so. To take control of the inadequacy by pointing its barrel at traditional history, and to implement inadequacy into his own process of "acquiring" knowledge ("the destruction of the man who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will of knowledge")--inadequacy is not altered: it continues to be a weapon of self-sabotage. But it is embraced by the genealogist, the one for whom the self is always already sabotaged, reveling in the noise of the sabots.
Much easier to write about than to convince oneself of the charade that starts with God and "oneself."
