Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy. Joanne Faulkner
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the reader: thereby capturing his or her desire, such that one recapitulates subjectivity in terms of a relation to Nietzsche’s text. These “pure objects”—for instance, “the body” understood as a multiplicity of drives, or “the noble type”—beckon to the reader as objects of desire: states that he would like to attain. Yet what is attractive about these objects also renders them frightening to the reader. For, they are understood to exist in an incorruptible nook prior to interpretation. In terms of Nietzsche’s own critique of truth—whereby there can be no thing in itself; no fact without interpretation (Will to Power, §481, 267)—they are impossible objects. In the final, brief section of this chapter, I wish to interrogate further “the pure object” that Nietzsche dangles before his reader, by way of both carrot and stick. While I will elucidate here the operation of this textual excess within Nietzsche’s work, it is worth keeping in mind that Nietzsche’s use of this excess prefigures the plotting of desire as rendered by psychoanalytic theory, which will be dealt with in the chapters that follow.
Moments of Excess: The Making and Unmaking of the Subject
In keeping with the circular movement of origin and corruption in Nietzsche’s texts, the body, as a vision of plurality—caught, as it seems, only with the corner of one’s eye—in truth answers (but is not to be reducible) to a desire cultivated by language and subjectivity. Language indicates its origin in a place before its existence. But what must be comprehended is that this scenario is structured already in terms bestowed by language: “the host organism” for a metaphysics of presence. The relation between the body and language emerges as a question only because of a peculiarity of one of its terms. For, de facto, the matter is already organized from the perspective of language, which—in the attempt “to look around its own corner”—appoints itself as chief arbiter, thereby determining the findings in advance of a question having been posed. Language, which essentially organizes, defines itself in opposition to “a disorganized” body, and in this way the body comes to play the role of its abject term: as what resists the dictates of grammar. The body is conceived as the site of an aporia—or impassable point—which ultimately empowers language, because in it language sees itself reflected as the measure of all things. In terms of Nietzsche’s ontology, language exhibits the most voracious will to power, and as such represents the body’s overcoming of itself. This aggrandizement of language is hardly surprising, however, as the body is understood only in terms of language in the first place—even, and especially, within Nietzsche’s philosophy. Perhaps the conflation of body and language, as text and perspective, is Nietzsche’s gift to us as a philologist: he thereby provides a means by which we might rethink subjectivity as essentially a synthesis of—or a point of ambiguity between—the body and language.
Such conflation, however, is also moderated by a curious oppositional structure: a rupture that makes all the difference for subjection. The subject must understand itself to have been violently separated from its origin, for such violent separation in fact characterizes subjectivity. And as we saw earlier, for Nietzsche the rupture at the heart of subjectivity also founds all knowledge. With this in mind, I will outline Nietzsche’s acutely incongruous attempt at metaphysics, which he cautiously frames in terms of negative ontology. Nietzsche famously designated as “chaos” all that exists beyond the schematic (Apollonian) idealization of the self, and the equally idealized things accrued through everyday experience. Chaos is supposed to refer to whatever is not already incorporated, domesticated, or organized. Yet, we cannot characterize chaos without bringing it into our own field: which would be to interpret it, to organize it. Not without a certain irony, chaos, drawn by Nietzsche from the writings of Heraclitus, is then already a positive concept, with the positive quality of infinite mutability. It is almost axiomatic for Nietzsche that nothing can be said about chaos, that chaos discloses the indescribable. Yet, the word chaos already bespeaks the multiplicity of the river that is never the same; or the primordial swamp from which we pull ourselves by our bootstraps. In this way, chaos operates for Nietzsche precisely as the excess that both creates the subject and is its by-product. It is an inconvenient, yet necessary, remainder of his attempt to escape the antinomies of metaphysics.
Once “chaos” is revealed to be a positive concept, and so already subject to metaphysical interpretation, we find Nietzsche attempting to gesture beyond the reaches of language by substituting for “chaos” the negative concept of “the abyss.” This abyss aligns with many other impressions of the sublime found within philosophical discourse: as the source of all reason and identity that also threatens to annihilate reason and identity. For Nietzsche, every question posed to a human being—and each response that attempts to take the enquiry beyond its usual terrain—risks consigning the inquisitor to the abyss: that is, to a bodily excess, or destabilization, that would threaten subjectivity. This is why he warns the reader of the dangerous questions and perhapses at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, and also writes the short and enigmatic aphorism in that same book: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you” (§146, 89).
This passage indicates the element of risk that attends any mode of enquiry that draws too near to one’s own foundations: simply because what one might find is that there is no foundation, no substantive I upon which experience is grounded. For designated as the abyss, the body signifies for Nietzsche not a multiplicity of forces, but rather a constitutive nothingness. This bodily abyss persists in the subject as an anxiety respecting its identity without which, according to Nietzsche, there would be no impetus for thought. As a life form that inherently poses questions of essence to itself and the world, the human being situates itself anxiously and precariously over an abyss most fecund because of its fundamental indeterminacy and duplicity. All sense of boundary—and so the basis of conscious thought, language, and the subject—is dissolved in the abyssal body. But, at the same time, the abyss constitutes the boundary for language, as the outer space that surrounds it. The abyss laps at the shores of all sense, threatening to engulf it, but thereby providing it with a coastline or definition.
It is perhaps not coincidental that, in the quote considered above, Nietzsche articulates this abyssal excess with reference to the Oedipal myth, thus preempting the psychoanalytic tradition that would emerge in his wake.[25] For not only does that story deal with the ultimate social transgression—thereby acting as a cautionary tale to the moral being, know one’s place—but in so doing it also deals with what Freud maintained is the subject’s ultimate and most obscure desire: to kill the father in order to marry the mother. Nietzsche, then, implicitly refers the reader to what has become the paradigm of “excess” or “the sublime”: the child’s relation to the mother. Marriage to the mother would here signify a return to a primordial wholeness that is disturbed with the introduction to the scene of the father—representative of language and subjectivity. The relation to the figure of excess is thus always already interrupted, in virtue of the structures by which the self is ordered. By learning his or her relation to the parental figures, the subject comes to occupy a social role. Yet the process by means of which this occurs involves both punishment and love; pain, abstinence, and pleasure. Love and hatred of the parental figures comes to be felt with reference to the ideal self that, psychically, replaces them. The subject’s attachment to its subjection is thus essentially characterized by ambivalence.
We can learn much about the manner in which the reader is subjected to Nietzsche’s text if we consider the work of ambivalence in the formation of subjectivity. Instances of excess—“chaotic,” corporeal multiplicity, and the direct expression of power represented by the noble—promise the reader a return path to what one understands to be the primordial unity. At the same time, however, these figures represent a disturbing surfeit that threatens to undo the self. Likewise, the force of Nietzsche’s writing is that it keeps the reader guessing as to her place in relation to it: its polyvalence and duplicity provide a varied topography wherein the reader may invest her hopes and fears. This recalls the ambivalent parent–child relationship described above. For within this triad the means by which one gains recognition, and thereby love, is also the source of privation. Nietzsche withholds the promise of recognition from the reader with his avowal that only a very few will be admitted to his text’s inner sanctum. He thereby awakens the reader’s need to be