Figurations are “partial visions” which “provide a sufficiently open space into which to project the possibility of as yet unchartable change” (Bammer). Figurations are “performative images that can be inhabited” (Haraway). They serve a purpose, and they are playful.
Synchronicity is co-happening, co-occurrence, co-articulation, co-operation. Synchronicity is “temporally significant occurrences of acausal events” (Jung). Synchronicity is not superstitious coincidence, but it is a meaningful coming-together of things.
Genealogy is the search for the reason of birth. Genealogy “operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments,” unconcerned with “the quest for origins.” Genealogy “disturbs what was previously considered immobile” (Foucault). It is the “strategic codification” of statements, actions, and things.
Figurations, we might say, are synchronic genealogies.
But what about a “transfiguration”? And I’m thinking of this both in the religious sense (see Matthew 17, Mark 9) and in the sense that Nietzsche uses it to describe the result of the conflict between the Dionysian and Apollonian.
Does transfiguration represent the beginning of something entirely new? Something that has no genealogy or time. A complete break from the past and the beginning of a new genealogy. The only time that matters in a transfiguration is the break between what came before and what came after.
To say that something has no genealogy, no time, no history to speak of, is only to say that it has not been spoken of. To say all genealogies are new is to waste words; all genealogies, of course, have only just now been spoken (or written, but that is another case entirely).
And was anything ever really new for Nietzsche? Everything, conflicts and all, seems to be the result of a kind of flowering, a mixing of soils. A “cultivation,” a “culture”?