When God died, what happened to the people?
Therefore neither can an animal move about in the closed as such, no more than it can comport itself toward the unconcealed. The animal is excluded from the essential domain of the conflict between unconcealedness and concealedness. The sign of such an exclusion is that no animal or plant “has the word.
(Heidegger: 1992:159-60)
The concealed in Heidegger is that which conceals from us its being.What emerges in Heidegger, in his pursuit of this clearing, is the slimline - the slippery border, between human and animal. The animal inHeidegger cannot see the sun as it rushes towards it: it can neverdisconceal the sun as a being. It is at once open and non-open, orrather, it operates in an ambiguity between the two fields. Man inHeidegger becomes that which is produced precisely at this border: atthe moment of caesura and articulation between human and animal: it isthis that passes for man, and it is this than expresses well therelationship of man to language. Man is never outside language:language is always already expressed as a radical exclusion of thatwhich is not which operates as a fundamental category of exclusion(Agamben: 2004a: 91)
The last century and a half have been full of attempts to moveoutside of language: to pass into new notions of subjectivity that moveoutside of what it is to be human. Nietzsche's attempt to destroytraditional notions of subjectivity stands out as a crystallisationpoint in a process that sees Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, to name thethree philosophers this essay will discuss, move outside notions of thehuman trapped within language and the creation of the subject. In doingso they criticise a notion of the subject trapped within binaryconstructions and the hierarchical notions of the subject that onefinds in Hegel; in doing so they echo the criticism of Christianitythat Nietzsche made. This essay will analyse the reasons for whichNietzsche attempts to destroy the traditional notion of the subject andreplace it with a particularist notion of the subject: forever in astate of becoming that escapes binary configurations. We will evaluateto what extent he was successful in his enterprise, and what type ofsubjectivity was brought forth. In analysing the ways in which Deleuze,Foucault and Derrida take up his project, we will analyse a genealogyof thought that attempts to successively move beyond what we understandas human. These three methods open up a series of liberatingpossibilities to philosophy and politics, and the configurations ofthese possibilities we be analysed.
However, in the radical indeterminacy of Derrida, in thepessimistic, frantic activism of Foucault, and in the schizo-analysisof Deleuze we can detect the same problem that we find in Nietzsche: atwork in him is that oblivion (or as Bataille would term it, thatexcess) “which lies at the foundation of the biologism of thenineteenth century and of psychoanalysis” and what produces “amonstrous anthropomorphization of… the animal and a correspondinganimalization of man” (Heidegger: 1992:152). Heidegger still believed,as none of the philosophers considered in the essay do, in thepossibility of a good project of the polis; that there was still a goodhistorical space in which one could find a historical destiny groundedin being. He, later in life, realized his mistake. In this, he comes toa point where his criticism of Nietzsche becomes most pointed.Nietzsche's eulogisation of man is that which pre-empts the emptyingout of value we find at man at the end of history. Nietzsche is blindto what the caesura of naming man as such might mean: in doing so, andin asserting the relativisation of the truth of the polis, theambiguous border between man and animal collapses. It is precisely the“essential border between the mystery of the living being and themystery of what is historical” (Heidegger: 1992:239) that is not dealtwith by Nietzsche's work and it is thus constantly exposed to thepossibility of an “unlimited and groundless anthropomorphization of theanimal” that places the animal above man and makes a ‘super-man' (ibid:160) of it. Life becomes reified over and above the precise conditionof its existence; that very condition which makes it always already ina dependency on those very grounds of its existence.
We will find this same problem repeated in Foucault, who in hiscriticism of the construction of the subject in modernity illustratesthe way in which modern notions of sovereignty act directly on the biosof modern man; this is where modernity begins to act on animal life(this time where equivalence has rendered the possibility of time null)and what is at stake in the construction of the subject is thepossibility of his life. Yet, Foucault, like Nietzsche, illustratesthis genealogy of dependence without being able to elucidate itshistorical specificity, which is in its construction of a zone ofexclusion at the basis of ontology itself (this can be seen inFoucault's error in treating biopower as a modern phenomenon). Thissame problem is manifest in the differand of Derrida, and in Deleuze'snotion of the organs without a body: each in turns finds itself thesymptom of the radical historicism. Each proclaims this symptom a cure,without realising that the cure they offer is precisely that which isthe symptom. In all these theorists what this amounts to is amisunderstanding of the nature of language. Thus, while Nietzschemanages to destroy stable notions of the subject, the unstable notionhe replaces them with, while apparently liberating, exists within thesame binaries he seeks to destroy, and moreover, allows for the exactlythe same herd instinct that he seeks to overcome.
What, in all strictness, has really conquered the Christian God? (…) Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken more and more strictly, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience translated andsublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectualcleanliness at any price. To view nature as if it were a proof of thegoodness and providence of a God; to interpret history to the glory ofa divine reason, as the perpetual witness to a moral world order andmoral intentions; to interpret one's own experiences, as pious men longinterpreted them, as if everything were preordained, everything a sign,everything sent for salvation of the soul—that now belongs to the past,that has conscience against it…. In this way, Christianity as a dogmawas destroyed by its own morality….
(Nietzsche: 1969:160)
Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals outlines the way in whichChristianity formulates its notion of the subject. The Christiansuper-ego is posited as salvation, as the point towards which oneworks. Thus, the Christian subject exists as, first and foremost, alack: it is not what it wishes to be. Yet, as Nietzsche points out,this lack is a condition and construction of the subject withinChristianity: one resembles oneself and yet in order to finddeliverance must become more of oneself and in doing so one finds ajustification for the present order of things. The Christian superegois to be found in God, and then, surprise, surprise, the Christian egocan be found placed in the soul of the body. This parallels theanalysis that Foucault makes of the subject (1999, 1975). The lawconstruct the subject as normal (and in doing so sets up an exclusionof the abnormal, or that which is not: that which has no voice - isnon-human) and in this process creates a desiring-subject, who desireswhat the law has not given it. Yet these desires are what are createdby the notion of the subject placed upon one: one is created absent, oras not that, not this, but always awaiting a day when one can be calledby a proper name. It is this awaiting a proper name that Nietzscheattacks most strongly, and in this theory of language we shall seeNietzsche allows no place for such a proper name. A proper namerelation, Nietzsche argues, is always a relationship between a creditorand a debtor; it is always typified by the dependence or lack, and assuch prevents the possibility that of morality to be free and joyous.
Nietzsche though, and is not commented on very much, reserves sometender thoughts for Christianity. It is a primal Christianity, aDionysian Christianity, that Nietzsche can endorse. As much can be seenin the quote that started this section: Nietzsche's criticism ofChristianity should not be seen to be limited to Christianity. Rather,it extends to all relationships of debt and obligation to a structuringsuper-ego. It was not Nietzsche, he claims, that killed Christianity,it was Christianity itself, and Nietzsche loathes the nihilism thatreplaces it just as much. We can discern three criticisms ofChristianity/nihilism in the quote that started this essay.
Nietzsche elaborates that one of the structures of Christianity is theidea of a puritanical truthfulness, which has been sublimated into ascientific consciousness. Nietzsche's primary criticism of thistruthfulness is that is relies upon a correspondence theory of truth:it requires an external state that can be matched in some way to aninternal state (which then requires a subject to have such an internalstate). For Nietzsche, consciousness created in such a way in simply asham, an intentional lie: consciousness lies free and unbounded - ithas no centre around which it can orientate itself. Furthermore, themapping between a real world of existent things (Kant's ding an sich)and a subjective world of language is not possible. It is not possiblebecause language only ever refers to itself. To use Saussure's(1995:12) terminology, a sign can only have meaning within another setof signs; it has no essential relationship to the world that issignified. A correspondence theory of truth attempts to hold up asstatic a world that is in constant flux and in doing so negates thepossibility of human freedom, which Nietzsche opposes to belief. Theimportance of this critique of the Christian subject will be returnedto later in the essay when we consider Nietzsche's theory of language.
The second crucial critique of Christianity made in the quote thatbegins this essay is of history as possessing meaning, as divineprovidence being read into history as if it were a series of signs.This resembles the structural properties of psychoanalysis that Deleuze(1983a, 1983b, 1984) was so devastatingly to criticise. One can readone's entire life as a history of redemption, as Benjamin (1986:112)comments. In this reading, every moment of one's life in which onefails, feels regret of guilt because one is not conterminous with thenotion of the subject given to you, can be read as a sign of amessianic moment to come: it is to deny the contingent and necessaryexistence one has in favour of a reified notion of being that removeslife from life. Nietzsche realises that such a realisation about lifeis scary, and he realises that people will cling onto a Christiannotion of belief even if it has no rational foundation: that is why inThus Spoke Zarathustra (1969) he attempts to convince people throughrhetoric rather than argument.
Several elements of Nietzsche's thought here are important to note.While he attacks Christianity, in the long quote we started the sectionwith he already observes that the technological-scientific paradigmreplaces Christianity while adopting all of its tenants. As Nietzsche(1974:108) comments: “after Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shownfor centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead;but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands ofyears in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have tovanquish his shadow, too.” Science is this shadow: it refuses anengagement with the world in favour of a mystified detached observerwho can sit back and observe the world rather than engage within itscontext. This decontextualisation actually ends up relativising theworld. This is a radical historicism that believes the role of the pastis to come to the rescue of the future: temporality is shortened toallow only a present, an immediate process of desiring-lack andsustenance. It allows for the feigned equivalence of all men, as theyare all equal as subjects, and as all in this equivalence all notionsof importance and goals are emptied of meaning by an effectivelymoribund set of values that deny life in favour of a search forauthentic experience.
This search for authentic experience is termed active nihilism inNietzsche: it is an attempt to confront the emptiness of valuecategories with frenetic action: this is what Zizek (2001:48) calls thepassion for the real: the passion for frenetic experience thatultimately culminates in its simulacrum. It culminates in itssimulacrum because the passion for the real (as opposed to the emptyappearance people inhabit) eventually becomes the passion for the realwithout risk - for one only risks if there is something one is willingto die for: for Nietzsche the chance and contingency of the eternalreturn - and thus we see the Nietzschean concepts of passive and activenihilism end up, in late modern capitalism, becoming one. We can seethat the co-existence of what we could term the correspondence theoryof truth and the history as destiny theory (where everything is able tobe reconciled to the present) inevitably end up in this structure ofnihilism.
Both of these theories rely on several underlying structures ofthought that Nietzsche was also quick to criticise in Christianity. Inhis analysis of the origins of Christianity, he notes (1956:112):“Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally,life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, maskedby, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.” Christianitywas always underlined by a series of binary logics: this is not theright life: this one is better; hate: love, God: Satan. It is thisbinary thinking that comes in for a huge amount of criticism fromNietzsche. It is these binaries that ignore that the world is in astate of becoming, that it is forever in a state of flux. Nietzschenotes (1966:12): “it may be doubted, firstly whether there exists anyantithesis at all, and secondly whether these popular evaluations andvalue anti-thesis, on which the metaphysicians have set their seal, arenot perhaps foreground valuations, merely provisional perspectives.”Therefore, Nietzsche's criticism is not simply of our values, as wehave seen in the previous paragraphs, but of the way in which ourvalues are constructed.
Nietzsche's theory of language illustrates that each of the terms in abinary series is dependent on the other. Butler (1990,1993) undertakesa similar enterprise inspired by Nietzsche when she investigates thedependency of the category women on the category man and visa versa.Power is exercised, Nietzsche understands, in the formation of the verycategories themselves, not merely in the ascription of certain peopleto good and certain people to bad. It is a mistake to fight for thecategory of lack, because the detestable thing is the very category: byfighting against the lack (e.g. of women for rights) one is acceptingthe terms of the herd mentality; that one must accept the givens of thesituation and its binary categories.
This is why a genealogy of morals is necessary, to (Butler: 1990:ix)“investigate the political stakes in designating as an origin and causethose identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions,practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin.” Sucha pursuit unseats the claim of a binary logic to an objective reality:they show them as temporal formations that constitute a world for thesubject. However, such a world is always shot through with lack. Onecan illustrate this using Lacan's (1981) theory of mirrors, which hederives from Nietzsche's view of the subject. In Lacan's view, one isnever identical to the role one has been assigned in life. The socialformation of life (which is an appearance) is full of inconsistency andincompleteness. As Christina Wolf (1980:151) comments in her novel:
Nelly couldn't help it: the charred building made her sad. But she didn't know thatshe was feeling sad [my emphasis], because she wasn't supposed to feelsad. She had long ago begun to cheat herself out of her true feelings….Gone, forever gone, is the beautiful, free correlation between emotionsand events…. It wouldn't have taken much for Nelly to have succumbed toan improper emotion: compassion. But healthy German common sense builta barrier against it: anxiety.
The character Nelly feels the dissonance between the world she is inand the world she experiences: she experiences anxiety over it. Suchanxiety is the mark of the problem of binary categorisation. Thiscategorisation does not resemble the world, which is in flux, but itplaces over it a series of categories that are power relationshipsdesigned to constitute you as a subject. We can perhaps draw a parallelhere between what Nietzsche analyses in his philosophy of language asthe productive power of the grammar of an age and what Laplanche(1989:130), following Lacan, calls the source-object of drives. Theseunconscious formations are an encounter between an individual whose psycho-somatic structures are situated predominantly at the level of need, and signifiers emanating from an adult.Those signifiers pertain to the satisfaction of the child's needs, butthey also convey the purely interrogative potential of othermessages—and those other messages are sexual. These enigmatic messagesset the child the difficult, or even impossible, task of mastery andsymbolization and the attempt to perform it inevitably leaves behindunconscious residues…. I refer to them as the sourceobjects of thedrives.
What one must be careful to do here is to distinguish between theearly Nietzsche and his later work. In early work such as the Birth ofTragedy (1956), Nietzsche can still talk about an essential essencethat the Christian or Apollonian reasoning hides. In his later work hefully endorses the view that consciousness is but surface: a radicallyanti-essentialist position that refuses the possibility of an outsideof language or of consciousness. There is then, no real that one canbreak through the appearance to get to, as one might in psychoanalysis.However, that does not necessarily mean the psychoanalytic reading weare doing here is incorrect. Lacanian analysis departs from theFreudian analysis that Deleuze criticizes in its conception of thesubject. For Nelly, the character in Wolf's novel, the state ofpre-anxiety might be referred to as true, but a sense of what it iswould be to call it uninhibited: free from the strictures of power. Inthe later Nietzsche, the ability to escape the possibility of thesubject is ambiguous. What Nelly asks for is not an absolute escape, asLaplanche does not ask that the child can master the symbolization ofhis parents and escape the drives. Rather, what is inferred is acontinual tension and thrust against that which claims to be objectiveand masks desire, put in a Deleuzian idiom: it is the consistentschizoid refusal to stasis.
As such, it parallels the construction of the subject in Foucault.Like Nietzsche and Butler, Foucault performs a genealogy. Like thelater Nietzsche, Foucault realizes the impossibility of breakingthrough language. One is always already constructed as a subject: anyattempt to break out of this trap relies on an exterior moral frameworkthat simply replicates the binaries of an existing power discourse.Foucault (1979:178) notes that “discourse creates the object of whichit speaks.” Discourse gives rise to a subject, and an attempt to breakout of the subject through a call to a value (such as revolutionarypurity, truth) falls into the same power trap as existing politicaldiscourse. What Foucault and Nietzsche both call into question is thenotion of valorization itself: that which always assumes a dichotomousbinarisation. However, rather than placing their project within anappeal to the real outside of language, both claim the most one can dois attack language through language. This task means to constantlyreveal that which appears as objective as actually a temporallystructured mask of power. Thus for Foucault (1984:217):
The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticizethe working of institutions which appear to be both neutral andindependent; to criticize them in such a manner that the politicalviolence which has always exercised itself through them will beunmasked, so that one can fight them.
This task has no end or limit: indeed, an end or limit is part ofthe notion of the structure of power; that there is this goal that youmust attain, that you are not this, though at a certain point you mayindeed attain it. We can see such notions of end goal rely on theinterpretation of history as divine providence (or in the secularhistoricist version, history being called to the rescue of the present)that Nietzsche was so quick to criticise as ignoring the contingencyand chance of existence. Both of these parallel Deleuze's criticism ofhierarchical structure as that which inhibits desire and presses itinto the service of power. What this entails is not simply therefutation of God at the centre of the world, defining the notion ofour being. It is a refutation of a centre of the world. Secularismsimply replaces God with man, and declares that the self-autonomous manis that which defines our values, when we do not act in a way accordedto by the hegemony, then it is us who are lacking. Thus, Nietzsche(1962:346) makes a comment much like Marx when he says “we now laughwhen we find ‘Man and World' placed beside one another, separated bythe sublime presumption of the little world ‘and.'
Thus, in Nietzsche it is not simply Christianity but its zombiereplacement rationality that needs to be criticised. Foucault continuesthis task in The Order of Things (1994), attacking the Humean accountof causality and truth than requires a one to one mapping betweenthings and their referents. This criticism is possible because, asNietzsche notes (1968:616) “the world with which we are concerned . . .is not a fact . . . it is 'in flux,' as something in a state ofbecoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near thetruth: for—there is 'no truth'.” This is the strongest statement ofNietzsche's project. He wants to undermine the notion of truth andreveal it for a set of power constructions and particularities. Withthe notion of truth, the notion of the proper name (the proper placefor the human subject) becomes impossible, and what opens up is adecentred multitude of consciousness like that which Deleuze (1980:332) outlines in Mille Plateaux. This project would have what isproductive as that which is nomadic, which refuses all forms ofhierarchy in favour of that which is additive. To carry out such aproject it is necessary to destroy the possibility of belief.
If there is today still no lack of those who do not know howindecent it is to "believe"--or a sign of decadence, of a broken willto live--well, they will know it tomorrow.
(Nietzsche: 1990:3)
For Nietzsche, belief requires something outside of oneself. Indeed,belief can be understood as the opposite to freedom in Nietzsche'sthought. To believe in something is to believe in what that thing hasmade you into: it is to believe that one has something internal (abelief) that can be referred to the world. As Nietzsche notes (ibid:347):
Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he mustbe commanded, he becomes 'a believer.' Conversely, one could conceiveof such a pleasure and power of self determination, such a freedom ofthe will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wishfor certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantialropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses.
As we have noted above, it is not enough to simply get rid of God.What happens to the people after we get rid of God? They run together,as a herd, scared, into other formations of command, such asnationalism. It is interesting to note here Foucault's comment, thatthe challenge of nationalism (1994:228) was to “establish a system ofsigns in congruence with the transcendence of being.” It was to believein a new grammar that replaced the old certainties of life with newcertainties: the certainty of the glory of the death of the unknownsoldier for the transcendent nation. That is why Nietzsche says,(1990:15): “we are not getting ride of God because we still believe ingrammar.” Nietzsche's real challenge is almost a challenge againstlanguage: it is an attempt to consistently run up against the limit oflanguage and refute its hegemonic possibilities (e.g. in thedistribution of tenses) at every turn. A grammar forces one to give lieto a reality: the only such lies Nietzsche thinks are acceptable areinnocent lies, those lies that enable communication in contingentfashion, that are not totalising and do not exceed the moment of theirown expression.
What happens with the new certainties is that they still rely on aconcept of will. They ask one to partake in a world in which one isnecessarily excluded (you are not this, yet…). For Nietzsche (1924:14),to believe in the will is to believe “every individual action isisolate and indivisible .” Thus runs counter to the idea of fluxNietzsche takes from Heraclitus. Actions are not simply formed but arealways already part of a social world that means individual isolatableaction is impossible. As is thinking. Thinking (Nietzsche: 1968:477)“as epistemologists conceive it, simply does not occur, it is a quitearbitrary fiction, arrived at by selecting one element from the processand eliminating all the rest, an artificial arrangement for the purposeof intelligibility.” This process of intelligibility constructs a worldin which one is dependent on the process of selection: thought, likeand will, becomes a tool to be used: a means-end relationship thatrequires the a priori separation of subject and object, thought andworld, that Nietzsche so convincingly refutes. He notes (1990:54) that“the man of faith, the 'believer' of every sort is necessarily adependent man--such as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The'believer' does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he hasto be used, he needs someone who will use him.” In the hands of God, orsecularism, agency is always placed outside yourself in the objectiveworld that you lack. The weak believer who does not think that he wills(which is already a mistake) at least (ibid: 18) “puts a meaning intothem: that is, he believes there is a will in them already (principleof “belief”).”
To change this it is not enough to attack reason (as Adorno andHorkheimer do in The Dialectic of Enlightenment [1972]) but to attackthe notion of the instincts. Instinct, while normally associated withthat which is most natural, is in Nietzsche a product of discourse andhabit over centuries, it is an unthinking subjectivity masquerading asthe natural order of things. It is given by the law, and (Nietzsche:1990:57) “the authority of the law is established by the thesis: Godgave it, the ancestors lived it.” To free habit, as we noticed earlier,requires not an attack on reason but an attack on habit, on unreflexiveaction: we need to liberate man from cause and effect. This taskrequires that man be liberated from the notion of the name. AsNietzsche (1956:20) claims:
The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one shouldallow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as anexpression of power on the part of the rulers: they say 'this is thisand this,' they seal every thing and event with a sound, as it were,take possession of it
This feat requires a liberation from language. Here Nietzsche is athis most powerful, for he realises that it is in the very nature oflanguage itself that the origin of power lays. Indeed, there is astrong correlation between the attack on the sovereign in Nietzsche andFoucault and Saussaurian linguistics. In both the argument relies onthe non-relation between signs and what they represent, and yet thecontinued claim of signs to be coterminous with what they represent,taking possession of it. Against this, Nietzsche wants to liberate usfrom names (1990:8).
That no one is any longer made accountable, that the kind of beingmanifested cannot be traced to a causa prima, that the world is a unityneither as sensorium nor as "spirit," this alone is the greatliberation.
This flux of things, clearly prevents the emergence of a subject:consciousness here, and for Nietzsche's thought as a whole has, has nopredetermined pattern. What we need to fight, for Nietzsche, is thegiving of the pattern, the idea that the whole is no longer whole(1974:22).
What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longerdwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of thesentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of thepage, the page gains life at the expense of the whole--the whole is nolonger a whole.
Life (Nietzsche: 1990:11) is a “continuous, homogenous, undivided,indivisible flowing.” For it is not the world that is simple and exact(what one could call the assigning of the world to the word: or to itslieu propre), rather through words we “are still continually misledinto imagining things as being simpler than they are, separate from oneanother, indivisible, each existing in and for itself.” When Nietzschewrites this, he has abandoned the distinction between the apparent andthe real world. There is no ideal for (ibid: 6): “with the real worldwe have also abolished the apparent world.” Such a world allows nonotions of predestination, and no correspondence theory of truth.Anyone who speaks of such things is a liar (ibid: 38):
One must know today that a theologian, a priest, a pope does notmerely err in every sentence he speaks, he lies--that he is no longerfree to lie 'innocently,' out of 'ignorance.' The priest knows as wellas everyone that there is no longer any 'God,' any 'sinner,' any'redeemer'--that 'free will,' 'moral world-order' arelies--intellectual seriousness, the profound self-overcoming of theintellect, no longer permits anyone not to know about these things.
What do we replace this metadiscourse with? We cannot replace itwith a singular subject: a new revolutionary ideal or perfect subject,for this would be to become but another priest. Nietzsche (1968:490)argues: “the assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary;perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects,whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and ourconsciousness in general? . . . My hypothesis: the subject asmultiplicity. . . The continual transitoriness and fleetingness of thesubject.” This is precisely what Deleuze echoes half a century laterwhen he claims (1983a: 5): “production as process overtakes allidealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship todesire is that of an immanent principle.” This multiplicity, one mightask: how does one get there, and what does one do when one is multiple,when one is the Dionysian figure who Nietzsche claims (1956:45) is in aconstant state of becoming, who is “the noumenal “I” that is alwaysbecoming and his intoxicated state sounds out the depth of Being.”
In one sense for Nietzsche this is an idle question: one cannot assumemultitude is something in itself, indeed (1968:560): “that thingspossess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretationand subjectivity is quite an idle hypothesis: it presupposes thatinterpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freedfrom all relationships would still be a thing.” Thus, the task forNietzsche is one of a continuing freeing: of making morality (1966:228)“something questionable, as worthy of question marks.” However, theprocess with which that is done is problematic for Nietzsche. It is notproblematic for Nietzsche because it leads to nihilism, as we haveseen, nihilism is a problem that relates to those paradigms of thoughtthat refuse life, that are drawn from a disgust at life (e.g. the moralPuritanism of Christianity and the detached removal of Science).Rather, it is a problem of how to achieve a freeing from subjectivityfrom within subjectivity.
To return to our theses at the start of this essay, this is whereNietzsche makes his biggest mistakes. He fails to understand that partof the creation of the subject is precisely the recognition andforeclosure of that element which is silent and refuses to disclosebeing. Nietzsche claims the way we can free ourselves from thissubjectivity is through the notion of the eternal return: to chooseevery action as if it was the eternal return of the same. The thoughtof the eternal return means one's leaves nihilism and embraces thecontingency and necessity of life: one should understand it as anevent: as a mode of being which offers up the world one's ownuncertainty. As Heidegger (1991:32) comments on the eternal return,Nietzsche refuses to have life come to a standstill at one possibility, one configuration; Iwill allow and grant life its inalienable right to become, and I shalldo this by prefiguring and projecting new and higher possibilities forit, creatively conducting life out beyond itself.
But though this is a step that seems to embrace becoming, itparadoxically only does so through an act of the will: the very thingNietzsche criticised. It is this will to power that spreads from themoment: it has no objective truth, but reaches out from the moment.Thus, it is not simply the assertion that everything turns in a circle,as easy readers of Nietzsche might have it. Rather, the eternal returndoctrine preaches that there is a dual movement in which the act andthe doer, and thought and thinker are recoiled and drawn together atthe same moment. It is a step towards immanence: it is againsttransience and all that passes because it offers itself up as preciselythat moment: the eternal return of the same. Yet, this eternal returnseems flawed in two important senses we will briefly explore here.
Agamben (2004b:8) notes that “for Nietzsche, the doctrine of theeternal return is designed to overcome the will to power's inability tomaster the past, the "it was" that names the "will's gnashing of teethand most secret melancholy ", the fact that "the will cannot willbackwards.” In Nietzsche's voice, there is a vitalism that all hislater statements on the impossibility of the real are unable to efface.It is in this form that we must understand contingency in Nietzsche: itis only in this form that we can understand what might have been: wherethe present moment of being-in-itself is effaced in terms of what is.Every that happened then becomes, I have willed it: this is Nietzsche'sway out of the problem of the past. At this moment Nietzsche'spromising project collapses: for though he decries truth, it is at thismoment that he says yes to truth, to a whole history of potency andwill that his work had previously rejected. For what Nietzsche did notto was to say yes to what had not been. In this way, Nietzsche'sdoctrine would have broken with the notion of the will and embraced arealm of pure potentiality. This is a problem that Foucault, especiallyFoucault, Deleuze and Derrida cannot quite avoid.
Nietzsche's task is to transmit something that does not and will notallow itself to be codified. To transmit it to a new body, to invent abody that can receive it and spill it forth; a body that would be ourown, the earth's, or even something written.
(Deleuze: 1970:142.)
Deleuze sees Nietzsche as the prophet of deterritorialisation. Deleuze,who aims his guns at Hegel, asks Nietzsche to triumph over thedialectic. He does this, Deleuze claims, through the doctrine of theeternal return. This doctrine is most explicitly analysed in Differenceand Repetition (1995). Chance and necessity are united in the doctrineof eternal return: what has happened, must have happened. This is not adialectical resolution of the situation, but a resolution of them intheir constitutive difference. The doctrine of the eternal returnconstitutes a model of repetition, which of course for Deleuze isprecisely where one locates the production of difference (Deleuze:1994:37). The constitutive difference here is between the affirmationof becoming and the affirmation of the being of becoming (1983a: 24).Will to power here becomes simply a force, a differential elementsimply expressed as difference.
Deleuze uses Nietzsche's doctrine to foreground all of his work withGuattari. Deleuze argues for a politically militant unbound desire. Allof Anti-Oedipus (1984) is written under the sign of Nietzsche. Itcompromises an attack on the slave mentality of the day: that ofpsychoanalysis and the twin pillars of lack and excess in capitalismthat finds it's structural parallel in Nietzsche's attack onChristianity and Reason. Deleuze and Guattari also want to free desirefrom repressing structures. They find that scientific knowledge asnonbelief (1984:111) “is truly the last refuge of belief, and asNietzsche put it, there never was but one psychology, that of thepriest.” The desiring machines of Deleuze and Guattari pick up thetheme of Libidinal economy and ask for desire to be set loose, anomadic desire that is prefigured in Nietzsche's Der Wanderer (1924).Time after time in Mille Plateaux, they return to their theme. Thisreoccurrence is neither accidental nor repetitive, for Deleuze andGuattari understand it to be constitutive of difference: this is thepath of enabling positive flow disavowing power at each step.
To what extent are Nietzsche's children successful in theirenterprise? They do not make the mistake of Nietzsche, asking theover-man to become a vitalistic cure, but there treatment of theeternal return is noticeably uncritical. Nietzsche sets up the teachingof eternal recurrence as a teaching of immanence, the ability toeternalise with a single act of will. This is why Heidegger (1966:95)detects in Nietzsche's thought a residual subjectivism that means allhis attempts to free himself of the subject ultimately founder. Deleuzehas no act of will in his ontology; instead, he has set up a plane ofpure immanence. This plane of immanence resembles the particularism ofNietzsche: on its, all relationships are entirely contingent andrelational. On such a plane, there is no possibility of subject-objectrelations; it is anti-state thinking in its purest form. That is whythey quote Nietzsche so approvingly (1987:376) when he says “privatethinker, however, is not a satisfactory expression, because isexaggerates interiority, when it is a question of outside thought.”Thought with no outside; action with no time, both Nietzsche andDeleuze attempt to actualise a plane of immanence that means noconception of the subject is possible outside of flow. In doing so theyboth fall pray to the same two sets of problems.
For Nietzsche, writing against God: the free could only seemwonderful. Was not it his kindred spirit Dostoevsky who wrote: “Ifnothing is true, everything is permitted.” It took us until Lacan(1981:35) to reverse the motto and realise: “If nothing is true,nothing is permitted” because it lacks any basis for possible action.Nietzsche failed to understand that the herd instinct that wasundermined in Christianity and Science would fail to find its freedomin freedom, in the absence of any restraint. Instead, that very freedomwas taken by hegemonic power as a matrix for further domination. Now,rather than people told one cannot do that (while secretly beingextolled to do so, as in classic Superego relationships), one isextolled to do something (within secretly modified limits). The spaceoutside of belief (the nonbelief in science that Deleuze alludes to) isnot the space of freedom. Rather it is the space of what Nietzschecalls passive nihilism: the space where every possibility of action isforeclose and people sit and wait for the end. It is what is called theend of man in Kojeve (1980:158). The end of history presupposed by theimmanence of the eternal return leads not to the liberation of a newform of values but the value of non value: the ‘violence of a societywhere conflict is forbidden' (Baudrillard: 2004). This indicates theextent to which Nietzsche failed to consider the critical question ofthe animal, as we remarked in our introduction. By failing to considerthe bounds of language properly, he made the mistake of assuming an actwithin the Aristotelian logic of will could break through that whichcontinues (transience). Thus, man was reduced to what is animalistic,and that which is past, that which is redundant, simply became anexcess with no use.
Do we not find the same problem in Deleuze? Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes what might happen if a yuppy reads Deleuze on the train:
The incongruity of the scene induces a smile after all, this is a bookexplicitly written against yuppies.... Your smile turns into a grin asyou imagine that this enlightenment-seeking yuppie bought the bookbecause of its title.... Already you see the puzzled look on theyuppie's face, as he reads page after page of vintage Deleuze
Yet, what we find is precisely the opposite of this occurring. Thosevery concepts Deleuze uses, such as the intensity of affect, we findtoday in modern capitalism. Modern capitalism undermines all limits,runs through a process of equivalence all differences (is this not anightmarish version of Deleuze's difference as repetition?): so thatyou may purchase a McDonalds burger in 10 different yet identical formsin ten different countries. The decentred capital flows of the net,without agency or subject, the slowly greater inclusion ofmore-than-human forms of sex within pornographic capitalism; all theseindicate the extent to which Deleuze has provided us with a mirrorimage of capitalism today. The difference between the two is that onedecentres within a structure of power (and power does not abhordifference, it merely wants to structure its flows), while the otherexists on a purely immanent level. Today, desire seeks to realiseitself as the actual limits of possible expression (that which is leftas natural) and at the same time remove itself from being a goal withinthe horizon of capitalism itself. We can see at this point that thebody-without-organs, that moment of absolute foreclosure of desire(what for Deleuze and Guattari is a sort of living death), resemblesthe organs without bodies. It is here we see the doctrine of eternalreturn most prominently displayed: it is in the unrestrained emphasison immanence as a solution to hegemony that we can find the emergenceof a hegemony founded on that very immanence.
For both Deleuze and Nietzsche, the problem remains that of time;how to find a way out of time without calling on a tradition thatdesires its own repression.
Derrida takes up and uses Nietzsche extensively in his concept ofthe differand. He attacks the notion of plat in contemporary philosophyat stemming from that same emphasis on productive action and will(which we noted earlier that Nietzsche founders on) that turns playinto something where a subject manipulates an object, thus playing intoall the dichotomies we have observed Nietzsche wanted to avoid. Thespace of play then becomes dominated my meaning. What Derrida does itto take up Nietzsche to show that play is a permanent property of anyset of dichotomous categories. As Nietzsche notes in Ecce Homo, he isat once (1992) his mother, his father, a Pole, Julius Caesar andAlexander. He is beyond opposition and to be found in the play betweenthem. As Nietzsche notes (1966:34): “it is no more than a moralprejudice that truth is worth more than appearance; it is even theworst-proved assumption that exists... Indeed, what compels us toassume there exists any essential antithesis between 'true' and'false'.” This play, for Derrida, is what we should be engaged in. Itis this Difference that prepares us for venturing beyond binary thought(1973:154) that is “for a différance so violent that it refuses to bestopped and examined as the epochality of Being and ontologicaldifference, is neither to give up this passage through the truth ofBeing, nor is it in anyway to 'criticise,' 'contest,' or fail torecognize the incessant necessity for it.”
Derrida here assumes a more subtle position than Nietzsche does. Henever fails to recognise the necessity for a subject, though herecognises that it is empty. He claims (ibid: 146) the speaking orsignifying subject would not be self-present, insofar as he speaks orsignifies, except for the play of linguistic or semiologicaldifference.” However, in his later work (1997:287) he outlines areversal of Nietzsche that space does not allow us to go into here. Henotes “The Superman. To be sure, he is awaited, announced, called, tocome, but - contradictory as it may seem - it because he is the originand the cause of man.” Derrida, using his strong links to Levinas,returns from the notion of a man-beyond-man to the centrality ofinterlocution, of man as man, to find a stable way to break with ahegemonic subject: he construes the subject precisely as the differencethat emerges in the co-substantiability of being.
This essay has shown that Nietzsche does a powerful job ofdestroying the traditional morality of Christianity. However, hisproject founders on his inability to carry through a notion of humanpraxis that escapes the notion of will he so rightly criticises. Thisfailure is bound up with the problem of how to relate to the past. Theimmanent ontology of Deleuze and the eternal return of Nietzsche allowfor no messianism other than that of the will, which proclaims, “I didit.” This allows them to foreclose the realm of the symbolic (thatwhich, as Lacan notes, breaks with the appearance) in favour ofasserting the totality of a decentred consciousness. The eternal returnbecomes like dialectics im standen (Benjamin: 1987:118): it would allowa final resurrection of the past no place apart from as a project of animmanent will: and as such, repeats the problem of a Christian notionof eschatological time. Nietzsche offers us a new form of expression;he is, in Malraux's words, a great teacher, but the task of finding athought beyond the human founders here.
To exist in language without being called there by any Voice, simplyto die without being called by death, is, perhaps, the most abysmalexperience; but this is precisely, for man, also his most habitualexperience, his ethos, his dwelling. .
(Agamben: 1991:160)
It also founders on an even more foundational issue, which we noted atthe start of this essay, and has been running as a leitmotif throughit. Nietzsche finds his legacy of self-made morality in the worldtoday: and yet he finds docile herds, paralysed by comfort and anabsence of barrier. They are beings-without-centre. That Nietzsche didnot appreciate this is because he did not seriously consider theexclusion of silence that lies at the heart of the human experience:rather, he assumed, being talks too much, it is an inexhaustiblemuttering of Dionysus or the learned whisper of Apollo. Withoutconsidering the emergence of a tradition as the emergence of a radicalspace of exclusion of the animal, he failed to see the principlequestion of ontology. If we analyse the word we understand what is atstake: the meta that forecloses the animal physis (Agamben: 2004a: 79).Nietzsche's refusal of metaphysics looked to a new humanity: it shouldhave looked at how is what made as such, the paper bridge he placedover this caesura is where Nietzsche's scheme fails.
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