Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy. Joanne Faulkner
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Corporeal differences are thus “subjected” to the need to communicate: language—through the subject—bridges differences, so adhering to the fiction of similarity and exchangeability between bodies in discourse. Nietzsche even suggested that language and morality are promoted by a specific bodily drive, which he calls “the herd instinct” (Gay Science, §116, 174–75). Language “hails” the body by picking out a particular drive within it. The body, in turn, has an interest in acceding to the herd instinct: for without to some extent annulling differences for the sake of communication, there is little chance of the organism’s survival.
The cost of survival, however, is that this “herd drive” would then suppress and reorganize in its image all other forms of corporeality. By this account, the body is at war with itself: not only because it is essentially an irreducible multiplicity—each element of which must engage in a struggle in order to prevail over the others—but also because of a tendency that conflicts with this multiplicity in order to compose the body as unified. This unified entity is, indeed, a fictive account of bodily being. Yet such a fiction, or “untruth,” is a necessary “condition of life” (Beyond Good and Evil, §4, 11-2) for the human as “herd animal.” In accordance with Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power, the body interprets itself as a unity that takes the form, in language, of the subject. The subject of language opposes itself to the body. Yet subjective being is not opposed to corporeality in any simple sense. Rather, consciousness and subjectivity are the foundational “truths” required by our species in order that its bodily existence is maintained—remembering that for Nietzsche “[t]ruth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive” (Will to Power, §493, 272).
In view of the body’s need to maintain “the untruth” of subjectivity, might we not venture that the subject acquires (or “returns to”) the depth from which it is understood to have emerged, and against which it opposes itself? For the body that resists subjection also comes to be invested in it for the sake of survival, “answering” to the designations by means of which language lays claim to it. The body is here language’s coconspirator, harking to its call. We might conjecture, pace Althusser, that language is installed within the subject as the other to whom he or she answers. Yet, clearly, the causality of this event is paradoxical, for this subject already presupposes language for its existence, and so cannot simply “await” being hailed by the call of language, as if it were walking innocently (though with a guilty conscience) down a crowded street in Paris (Althusser, “Ideology,” 162–63). The subject I is itself a linguistic element that gives rise to a particular modality of life: the living body inhabits language through the shifter, I. Yet, as Lacan points out (in apparent agreement with Nietzsche’s statements about consciousness), the accession to subjectivity always produces a remainder, or excess, which cannot be neatly incorporated, and separation from which indelibly conditions subjectivity. Interpreting Freud’s famous phrase Wo Es war, soll Ich werden (where “it”—the id—was, “I”—ego—should come to be), Lacan affirms the gap between the greater self (“the subject of the unconscious”) and the ego “as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications.”[15] By establishing a relation to language, the self is split—severed from the bodily multiplicity celebrated by Nietzsche—but it also comes to be as such.
We can reread Nietzsche’s invitation to his reader “to be your self!” in the light of this difference between aspects of the self, as an attempt to awaken a sense of this excess—that there is another, vaster self that the regularity of everyday existence obscures. “The self” to which Nietzsche’s writing appeals is then supposed to be drawn from this limitless reservoir to which language bars access, ironically, by the language employed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche thereby promises to reunite his reader with a “self” that transcends grammar and a particular historical milieu: a “self” that is not simply installed as a means of communication between bodies. The currency of this call, however, trades on the sense of loss that characterizes human subjectivity—so that Nietzsche exploits the readers’ felt disengagement from an unconscious and instinctual plenitude summarized by “will to power,” but fails to offer a viable alternative to such separation. By invoking a self that is always already constituted in its relation to language, however, Nietzsche also taps into the hidden and unexpected corporeal depth of language, evidenced in the pleasure that the subject feels respecting his or her subjection. The pleasure of being named—of being actualized through language—is a pleasure regularly set in motion by Nietzsche’s writing. Yet given his otherwise poor opinion of language and consciousness, how does Nietzsche account for the fact that the body comes to love what apparently disempowers it?
Nietzsche’s most systematic account of how the subject, as a denial of corporeal difference, is “born of” the body is contained in On the Genealogy of Morals. It is also the work in which we find both an explanation for, and mechanism of, the subjection of the reader to Nietzsche’s text. On the one hand, Nietzsche argues that the social requirement to understand and predict one another’s behavior suppresses differences between—and, indeed, within—individuals. Accordingly, language (in this case its exemplar is the promise) comes to represent a common ground that quite literally erases difference, by altering the way that the body organizes itself (58). For the society that runs smoothly demands not only an ontology of regularity (the institution of “natural laws,” like causation), but also a subjectivity of regularity. According to Nietzsche, social imperatives penetrate to the very body of the subject, by favoring its conformist (reactive) instincts over the active, “unruly” (and, for Nietzsche, more interesting), drives.
On the other hand, however, On the Genealogy of Morals treads a more complex path than to argue, simply, that the advent of modern man depends upon a mere suppression of instinctual strength, and oversimplification of the body. Arguably, there are two narrative threads in Genealogy: one of which appears to follow a clear, linear path, whereas the other loops back upon itself, in much the same way that Nietzsche represents the body to have done in his account of the subject. Indeed, if Genealogy is written as a dual discourse, this should not surprise, given Nietzsche’s preference for masks and duplicity (Beyond Good and Evil, 53; 213). If Nietzsche attempted to present “his truth” by means of this text, then it is also likely that he would have protected this truth from what he regarded as the common sensibility of most who would approach his texts. Moreover, in line with the strain within his philosophy that seeks to bring together the body and text—by conceiving of the body as an organism that interprets, and texts as expressive of drives—Nietzsche structured his text so as to attract a particular type, which manifests itself corporeally as well as textually. His writing would resonate with this “type,” even at the level of sensuality and desire. It is now a truism of Nietzschean scholarship that, although readers often describe the encounter with Nietzsche as intimate, for some this intimacy indicates a real connection to his philosophy, whereas others are merely seduced by the masks and “trappings” that populate his texts. The figures of “will to power” and “eternal recurrence” exemplify this difference: whereas for some they operate as tropes that indicate a movement of feeling [Gefühl] that might be shared by the (better) reader, for the majority they are to be understood literally, and so these superior vicissitudes of the soul are protected from those who would find them strange and even threatening. For this reason, Genealogy contains both “a truth” and a fairy tale. Predictably, the fairy tale is the best known, and most-often related, of these textual levels. I will, then, commence the section that follows by sketching the common interpretation of Genealogy, before elaborating the less-accessible, and ultimately circuitous, version of that text.
Of Slaves and Masters: The Birth of Good and Evil
As the story goes, the master-type, or noble, is Nietzsche’s appellation for those who accord with “active force.” The noble takes control of and determines his environment through the act of naming, evaluating whatever agrees with his constitution as good, and whatever does not agree—that is, whatever appears base, beneath consideration—as bad. This necessitates an under-class, the slave-type: those “ill-constituted” beings already labeled bad by the master, and upon whom this master will unleash spontaneous acts of cruelty in accordance with a social hierarchy that