Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy. Joanne Faulkner
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When frustrated, enjoyment that would have been thrust outwardly, and so immediately dissipated, is stored up to create an interior reservoir of pleasure. Accordingly, abstinence also becomes a manner of (ascetic) pleasure, in the realm of sexuality as well as violence: “there is no necessary antithesis between chastity and sensuality; every good marriage, every genuine love affair, transcends this antithesis” (98). Both cruelty and sensuality are allowed to ripen and gather force by means of abstinence. When placed in these terms, it is difficult to imagine a being with the requisite power for greatness in a period historically or ontologically “prior” to the slave moral revolt. The conditions for the body “becoming what it is” are prepared by slave morality; that is, by the body’s subjection—and active participation in such subjection—to language.
Let us examine more closely the narrative that Nietzsche presents here. For the order of priority, both temporal and ontological, is precisely what he puts into question. In presenting us with a genealogy—a search for origins—Nietzsche reveals the paradox of any narrative of origin: for the narrative must always presuppose its remainder, which is produced “after” the account, retroactively. The narrative of origins is always circular, assuming what it purports to explain. In the case of the conventional myth of origin, the social contract relies upon the existence of an animal that can make promises, and as such can consider the needs of others, and retain an image of itself through time, even to the extent that this ideal determines future events. The social contract anticipates the type of being that it sets out to explain. But even Nietzsche’s critique of the social contract—which presents us with the circularity of the appeal to natural law, and undercuts the social contract with his presentation of a man even more primordial than Rousseau’s essentially good noble savage—even this critique sets itself within the parameters that it ostensibly seeks to explode. For Nietzsche’s good noble is a product of the slave system of evaluation, as its moment of excess. The noble, as the one that created value through the act of naming, could only have been the slave’s invention. For, to wield language in positing what is good, he must already have been subject to it.[20] The noble is thus the slave’s dreamed-of ideal; a remainder produced by the very process of socialization.
Are we not, then, all fallen masters when we read Nietzsche’s Genealogy? “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”: Does the child become a social being by means of the same painful internalization by which the master becomes a slave? The reader who desires the noble situation might thereby feel contaminated by the slave perspective—reminiscing a great loss of power as the price of knowledge. The hidden truth of Genealogy, however, is that we must first have been fallen masters before owning the capacity to become, or even to imagine, this “original” sense of mastery. Judith Butler argues a similar case in The Psychic Life of Power. In the essay on Nietzsche and Freud,[21] Butler draws our attention to the circular figure of the subject, as a body turned back upon itself,[22] but suspends the status of this figure by asserting the counterintuitive hypothesis that this trope “makes no ontological claim” (69). The figure performs its meaning in the circuit, but there is no substance behind this performance; no subject that preexists the figure that pretends merely to represent it. What this figure reveals consists in the subject’s circular, or self-founding structure: in a relation of reciprocity, language and the subject establish one another; and together they provide the foundation for all ontological claims. Butler articulates this with reference to “bad conscience” (for Nietzsche synonymous with modern subjectivity):
[F]or Nietzsche, the writing of such figurations, and figuration in general, are part and parcel of the “ideal and imaginative phenomena” which are the consequences of bad conscience. Hence, we do not come to know something about bad conscience when we consider the strange figure of reflexivity that Nietzsche offers us. We are, as it were, caught up in the luring effects of bad conscience at the very textual moment when we seek to know what, precisely, this bad conscience is. (69)
According to Butler, Nietzsche’s insight is that the subject (bad conscience) only becomes a question for us once we are already caught within its circular movement. I would add that once the subject is produced by this self-reflexive moment, it takes on a life of its own, albeit situated within language. The question of bad conscience orients us to and keeps us engaged with language as such, but it does so through the invention of an affective dimension as full and diverse as the bodily multiplicity that Nietzsche’s philosophy both describes and initiates. If Nietzsche deploys the question of subjectivity in Genealogy, it is little wonder that this text affects its reader. Because there is no subject apart from the performance of subjectivity in relation to some discourse or other, the subject must continually recapitulate itself by means of subjection. The text activates the reader’s desire, which only emerges in relation to language, by posing itself as the perennial question of the reader’s own origin as subject.
This desire for itself that inaugurates psychic interiority is not without its corporeal contours. Nietzsche’s masterstroke in Genealogy is to demonstrate how consciousness emerges in its opposition to the body, yet remains a mode of bodily enjoyment, albeit differently articulated. With the advent of bad conscience, the drives that once ordered the life of the master-type go to ground, resorting instead to covert means of satisfaction: “as a rule they had to seek new and, as it were, subterranean gratifications” (Genealogy, 84). And Nietzsche’s explanation of this process resonates with Freud’s account of the vicissitudes of the drives:
All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization [Verinnerlichung] of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his “soul.” The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. (84)
Simply, when we are compelled not to act, we turn the charged drive inward as thought. Subjectivity (the soul) thus constitutes a reservoir for the conversion of active force into an internalized reactivity.[23] For Nietzsche, we create an inner world to the extent that we fail to create in the outer world. The expansive economy of “will to power” carves out its new domain within its own flesh as the unconscious, so that an economy of sameness can operate at the level of consciousness. This “economy of sameness,” according to Nietzsche, is the domain of the subject and of language. Language, subjectivity, and philosophy—the most exalted achievements of humankind—are thus the outcome of a long and punishing negation and redeployment of the human organism’s inner plurality.
Yet one would be mistaken to think simply that the history Nietzsche lays forth in Genealogy is to be regretted: that it would be better had the slave never transfigured the moral landscape, or converted the noble to slavery. Rather, that the greatest value is bestowed upon the product of the body’s self-effacement demonstrates, for Nietzsche, how “the body” creates. Truth, imagination, philosophy, and value are only possible from the point of view of the slave. The revaluation that Nietzsche incites amounts to yet another slave revolt. Nietzsche may have imagined himself to be like a Greek god, a Hyperborean, and even an Antichrist, but perhaps it makes better sense to think of him as—like Christ—a king of slaves and a founder of cults.[24]
This chapter is intended to demonstrate the manner in which Nietzsche’s writing promotes a critical philosophy and, concomitantly, a program of recruitment of readers to see through to completion the promises Nietzsche makes of this philosophy. Especially where his most obvious meaning contradicts the subtler currents of the text, Nietzsche engages in a program of subterfuge against some readers, and conspiracy with others, to the purpose of achieving through these readers—and by means of their interpellated positions within his texts—different, but nonetheless complimentary, tasks. This argument will be pursued further in chapter 3, wherein I consider some esoteric readings of Nietzsche. In the main, by playing various threads of Nietzsche’s texts against one another, the present chapter has demonstrated