Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy. Joanne Faulkner
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plays the (paradigmatically parental) role of both destabilizing the reader’s sense of self and of reorganizing it—providing for them a place (or perspective) from which to speak and interpret.
The figures of excess with which Nietzsche intersperses his writings accord to the form of “the pure object,” existing prior to interpretation, and for this reason should arouse our suspicion. “The thing itself” is especially excessive for Nietzsche, having already been prohibited by him in accordance with his perspectivism. Nietzsche’s use of these figures, then, indicates a rhetorical aspect to his writings—and perhaps even an attempt to dissimulate, or to manipulate the reader, by means of the construction of fictive truths. These so-called truths capture our imagination and our desire, understood not simply as what one wants, but moreover as a relation to the object world through which the self is constructed. The discarded excess and the chaotic plenitude, beyond interpretation, can be understood to coincide: for each is only the surplus product of a so-called repressive process (language, or the subject) that they are deceptively understood to have preceded and provoked. In this respect, the conceptual content of Nietzsche’s philosophy is brought to bear in virtue of the manner of its disclosure to the reader: through an affectively charged relation to the figure of excess. Nietzsche gives ideas such as will to power, the Übermensch, chaos, and the abyss to be his philosophical purpose, and the limit points of his theoretical apparatus. In fact they are its points of impossibility. And this impossibility precisely designates the site of the reader’s desire, wherein the moment of rupture (separation from a mythical plenitude) that founds subjectivity is most likely to be rehearsed and recapitulated.
We have seen how Nietzsche’s account of subjectivity is intimately related to the subjugation of his reader. Nietzsche’s interest in the genealogy of “the moral subject” thus also serves his concern to generate a following of loyal subjects that might continue his name and legacy. In the chapters that follow, we will proceed to theorize how Nietzsche’s various “figures of excess” function as sites of identification for the reader, as well as repositories for the projection of material they would disown. These excessive moments of the text produce for the reader the illusion of a coherent identity that preexists their encounter with Nietzsche, whereas in fact this identity is only a textual effect. This retroactive movement conforms to what Butler designates as the circular figure of the subject in Nietzsche’s work, or the circuit of bad conscience: a concept that—caught within its own reflection—is inextricable from what is supposed merely to figure it.
Let us, in the next chapter, turn to the theory of subjection as it emerges from Nietzsche and extends to psychoanalysis. As we shall see, accounts of dangerous bodily excess are here integral to the emergence of the superego: the mechanism of interpellation, or socialization of the subject for Freud. Thus we will continue to develop and refine an understanding of subjectivity as a process driven by ambivalence, the better to understand various readers’ attachments to Nietzsche.
[1]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), preface, §5, 5.
[2]. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), “On the Prejudices of Philosopher,” §12.
[3]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 127.
[4]. The subtitle to Nietzsche’s “autobiography,” Ecce Homo, is ‘How to Become What You Are’—and thus could be mistaken, in the contemporary context, for a self-help manual. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989).
[5]. “[t]here is no being ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), I §13, 45.
[6]. Nietzsche’s role as guarantor of the future is discussed at more length in chapter 2, in relation to Derrida’s Otobiographies.
[7]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gasamtausgabe. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), 8;1: 2 [99]. My translation.
[8]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power. Walter Kaufmann, ed. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), §507. 275–76.
[9]. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), book 5, §374, 336. Nietzsche provides a more rough and ready explication of the interaction between will to power and perspective in his unpublished notes:
Perspectivism is only a complex form of specificity. My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on. (Will to Power, §636, 340)
[10]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” §13.
[11]. I have written elsewhere about Nietzsche’s use of digestive and reproductive metaphors for the intellect, and vice versa. See Joanne Faulkner, “The Body as Text in the Writings of Nietzsche and Freud,” Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy. 7, November (2003): 94–124.
[12]. See, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in their Extramoral Sense,” Essays on Metaphor. W. Shibbles, ed. (Wisconsin: The Language Press, 1972), 2.
[13]. For his account of the importance of forgetting, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 57.
[14]. See “Of the Despisers of the Body” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 61–63.
[15]. Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 128.
[16]. Deleuze argues that Nietzsche uses his account of the relation in order implicitly to criticize Hegel’s tendency to equate power with the representation (or recognition) of power. (Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983), 10). However, Genealogy may also be read as a “heuristic myth” wherein there is no possibility of a master type that “names” without a concern for the recognition of his power. David McNeill writes:
[T]he noble mode of valuation appears to be essentially, if only implicitly, comparative and relative. The nobles first come to experience