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CHAPTER 1

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Ontology for Philologists: Nietzsche, Body, Subject

Philologist 1648. 1. One devoted to learning or literature; a scholar, esp. a classical scholar. Now rare. 2. A person versed in the science of language; a student of language 1716.

—The Oxford English Dictionary

It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:— in the end I also write slowly [. . .] For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento [. . .] this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers [. . .]

—Friedrich Nietzsche[1]

Everything Nietzsche published, he intended to be read. This may seem a banal observation, yet commentators frequently deem as extraneous and impertinent Nietzsche’s more “stylish” prose: whereby he sets a scene for his philosophy, or instructs his reader in the art of reading his books—as in the passage quoted above. As a philosopher who also self-identified as a philologist, Nietzsche was acutely aware of his dependence upon his readers: not only in terms of his reputation, but also the meaning of his philosophy. Nietzsche’s writings thus enact a grand seduction of his audience. If they are to be charged with responsibility for the meaning of his works, then they must love Nietzsche—the better to approximate a fidelity to his purpose.

But the reader’s love was not enough for Nietzsche: he wanted to possess them, body and soul. Nietzsche needed the reader to identify with his philosophy, in their very subjectivity. For this reason, he could not take the reader just as she or he is: Nietzsche’s texts demand of readers that they apply themselves to it—to the extent even of rearranging their “order of drives,” or constitution. Accordingly, a principal element of his writing is not only to communicate his ideas, but also to communicate a way of being through which his reader is subjected to, and subjected by, his thought. In this way, Nietzsche’s theory of the subject does more than simply explain how the subject comes into being: it also galvanizes a particular mode of subjectivity. Furthermore, other currents of his philosophy contribute to this experiment, whereby his writing exerts a formative force upon its readership. Let us, then, foreground Nietzsche’s account of the subject with a consideration of his appeal to the reader’s subjectivity, before turning to what are considered to be more “proper” components of his philosophy: his concepts of perspectivism and will to power.

“Be Your Self!”: Nietzsche as Educator

“Be your self!” Nietzsche offers this sage—yet, today, relatively commonplace—advice at the beginning of “Schopenhauer as Educator.” We can be sure, however, that the meaning of this adage is anything but commonplace for Nietzsche. He is not reassuring his reader that they should take it easy. We cannot draw closer to this self by consulting a life coach. Still less does he appeal here to an immutable kernel of being that we might call the self, resting like a seed at the core of one’s everyday experience. For Nietzsche there is no soul-atom, no unitary monad to which we refer when we speak of the self.[2] Rather, this self would be the end result of a difficult labor. Nietzsche’s advice is issued as a challenge to the reader to differentiate self from others, and actively to create them-selves in the light of this difference:

The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: “Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.”[3]

Nietzsche’s call to his reader “to be your self,” as well as his later directive “to become what you are,”[4] are fascinating not only because they gesture toward the more-often neglected (by traditional philosophers) lived experience of the reader, but also to the extent that these commands are completely empty of normative content. One may say that this is precisely the point: that Nietzsche was not one to prescribe how one ought to live, and that, anyway, one does not “become who one is” by following the dictates of others. Perhaps more significantly, however, by leaving a gaping chasm at the site of the reader’s self—that is, by abstaining from telling the reader who they should be—isn’t it possible that Nietzsche thus primes his reader for a more radical subjection to his will? More precisely, we could read this content-free imperative “to be your self” as initiating the disarticulation of self in the present through which the self can then be reconstituted for a more ‘Nietzsche-an’ future. Nietzsche could be read, thus, to enact an intervention in the nihilistic present through the reorganization of his readers’ wills and capacities, and it is his text that would achieve such a coup.

This permission “to be your self”—taken together with other more-explicit instructions regarding how one should read, how one should philosophize, create art, play music, evaluate life—opens the reader to Nietzsche’s subjection of them in their doing, thinking, and desiring, such that even if, as he writes, these elements are “not you yourself,” they might as well be. Or at least, in line with his critique of the distinction between “deed” and “doer”[5] we might conjecture that what Nietzsche suggests here is a new mode of doing, thinking, and desiring that would create a better self: a break with present styles of living, led by his interruption of the reader’s self-reflection. For it is precisely the reader’s doing, thinking, and desiring to which Nietzsche lays claim with his challenge to examine and to become their self, in contradistinction to all with whom they share a world and a time. Bidding his reader to transcend the laziness characteristic of fashionable men, who are turned out like “factory products,” Nietzsche gestures toward an alternative future: a future of the artisan philosopher instead of a temporality of mass production, for which there is no future.

[H]ow right it is for those who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time to harbour great hopes; for if they were citizens of this time they would be helping to kill their time and so perish with it—while their desire is rather to awaken their time to life and so live on themselves in this awakened life. (Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 128)

In so doing, Nietzsche appoints himself the seer of a future that can only be actualized by his readers, and even then, only by the ones who can envisage a future as free and novel as the one Nietzsche foreshadows. This is “judgment day,” and only those who subscribe to an open future, rather than the closed circularity and nihilism of everyman’s temporality, can truly live. As we shall see, however, such a future falls short of the open insecurity this vision promises to the extent that Nietzsche already underwrites it.[6] He could as well ask us, “Have you heard the Good News?,” thus heralding himself as a new savior.

But if Nietzsche’s appeal to the reader to invent a new temporal horizon and trajectory seems vaguely eschatological, the reference point for this quiet revolution is immanent to the reading of his texts. With a view to reevaluating his or her own self and role in human history, the reader should submit to Nietzsche’s teaching. For through his account of Arthur Schopenhauer’s formative influence upon him, Nietzsche offers himself as educator, benefactor, and even liberator.

[Y]our true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is, something in itself ineducable and in any case difficult of access, bound and paralysed: your educators can be only your liberators. (Untimely Meditations, 129)

What must be understood is that Nietzsche’s appeal to this liberated self is not only an antimetaphysical, or deconstructive, gesture (as so many have already argued). But also, Nietzsche sets out here to liberate the reader’s self for his own higher purpose. By divesting oneself of parochial commitments, as Nietzsche bids the reader to do, one is opened to a training, or education, that requires a commitment instead to Nietzsche’s cultural and philosophical project. The spirit of self-transformation that Nietzsche’s philosophy is renowned for promoting, is not simply a mode of freedom, but more accurately prepares the reader for subjugation to Nietzsche.

How would such a process of subjugation occur? If we were to take our cue from Nietzsche’s own account of the self—as a confederation of diverse impulses or wills—then what is necessary is a reordering of his readers’ drives. A reordering, that is to say, which would render them better suited to executing the vision of culture Nietzsche’s philosophy foretells. Yet importantly, the process of reorganizing his reader’s self, however indifferent to the individual this would seem to be, is, rather, deeply personal. In order to gain a sense of the exclusive character of this process, it is perhaps best to turn to Nietzsche’s own subjection to his philosopher–teacher, as described again in “Schopenhauer as Educator”:

I am one of those readers of Schopenhauer who when they have read one page of him know for certain they will go on to read all the pages and will pay heed to every word he ever said. I trusted him at once and my trust is the same now as it was nine years ago. Though this is a foolish and immodest way of putting it, I understand him as though it were for me he had written. (Untimely Meditations, 133)

By reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche thus discovered his “true self.” Or perhaps, rather, Schopenhauer’s writing beckoned to a self that Nietzsche did not even know he had in him. It is by means of a similarly revelatory experience of self-discovery that Nietzsche’s readers find in him a teacher and formative influence. Let us keep in mind, however, that if Nietzsche chanced upon Schopenhauer, and upon himself in Schopenhauer, his own reader’s reception of him is not left to chance. For Nietzsche anticipates his reader’s response to him by building into his philosophy its many trajectories and futures. Nietzsche’s philosophy needs to be variously interpreted: if it is to beget a culture, then it must also be able to support a diversity of mutually conditioning—symbiotic—life forms. The interpretation, viewed as an artifact, is symptomatic of the form of life that produced it. Yet for Nietzsche interpretation also expresses the encounter that constitutes life forms: between a will and what feeds it. Nietzsche thus wishes to nourish, with his philosophy, the forms that best promote his revalued future; and to order, or classify the rest—thereby neutralizing their power and domesticating them to his goal. To gain insight into how this is achieved, we will need to review Nietzsche’s contention that life is interpretation, and the subject only a particularly limited and mean interpretation of life.

The Life of Thought: Nietzsche’s Truth Perspectivism

and the Will to Power

How did the whole organic process stand itself against the rest of nature?—so revealing its fundamental will.

—Friedrich Nietzsche[7]

Nietzsche’s account of subjectivity germinates in his conception of life as interpretation (perspectivism), and the organism as an arrangement of drives (will to power) that grows and sustains itself by “interpreting” its environment. Life functions only by means of interpretation, converting its environment into something that is of use to it: for instance, air is filtered by the lungs to become oxygen; a plant nourishes by means of digestion; and light is a source of vision only for a creature with an optic nerve. Nietzsche’s perspectivism emphasizes the body’s role in discourse: it is the principle of embodied interpretation, or the postulate that every truth is constructed within a particular vital milieu, according to particular needs and desires. Our so-called truths reflect what is needed for the species to survive. Nietzsche writes in a posthumously published fragment: “In valuations are expressed conditions of preservation and growth. All our organs of knowledge and our senses are developed only with regard to conditions of preservation and growth.”[8] Interpretation thus occurs always from a viewpoint derived from the needs and desires contingent to the organism that interprets.

Likewise, Nietzsche understood bodies as ”systems” of difference that interpret themselves as a unity. His concept of “will to power” attempts to elucidate the internal processes of all living things and the manner of interaction between organisms. As partner concepts, perspective (truth as “interpretation”) and will to power (“that which interprets”) are not easily distinguished. For while perspective is the “effect” of wills to power interpreting, it is also the mechanism by which bodies constitute themselves as such.

How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without “sense,” does not become “nonsense”; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation—that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner.[9]

Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power—: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this.[10]

With the concept of will to power, Nietzsche attempts to describe the dynamics between various bodily instincts and organisms. Optimally, the organism is a complex arrangement of forces, which are better able collectively to appropriate—that is, form in their image—whatever surrounds them. The body is thereby a composition of “forces” that have formed strategic alliances with one another, and to map its prehistory, one would have to relate a brutal struggle, literally involving death for some of these forces. According to Nietzsche, the arrangement of drives also necessitates a division of labor between them: active, form-giving force, which compels the allegiance of others that it encounters; and reactive force, which strategically obeys active force in order to obtain sustenance only indirectly, after satisfying the force that commands. Significantly, for Nietzsche perspective (interpretation) and the formation of the body (will to power) are only conceptually separable: interpretation expresses the means by which the drives articulate their relations to one another, and thereby also exercise their power.

Nietzsche’s concept of will to power, in addition to describing biological organisms, includes within its scope behaviors and events in the different “spheres” of the organic world: animal, political, social, and philosophical (Will to Power, §423, 227). Will to power (as the material struggle of forces) and perspective (as the effect of relations between these forces) become for Nietzsche a substratum for both body and thought. They are two sides of the one phenomenon: life.[11] When he turns, then, to philosophy, text seems to have become a visceral remainder. Philosophical texts reflect, by Nietzsche’s account, a truth about the philosopher’s body, which provides the “real germ of life from which the whole plant has grown” (Beyond Good and Evil, “Prejudices,” §6, 13). Yet, even here the relation between body and language is not simple; nor is it unidirectional. As he writes in The Gay Science, “I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body” (Preface, §2, 34-5).

Philosophy often relates a fantasy of overcoming the body, and this narrative, also, plays a part in the agonistic drama of a body pitted against itself. What we find in the philosopher’s language is a movement of both revealing and concealing of the drives. The body, which according to Nietzsche is a thriving multiplicity, is inhibited by “reason,” and is thereby forced to conform to a linear and possibly torpid viewpoint. Reason ostensibly provides an imperative that one’s thoughts and values should be mutually coherent—or in other words, that one thought should follow logically from the last—but what reason actually provides is the paradigm for what is recognized as coherent: there is no coherence in itself, apart from the constraints, or form of life, through which it is perceived. As such, philosophy represents for Nietzsche an egalitarianism of the soul: that is, an attempt to render bodies equivalent to one another, by means of “the impartial” discourse of reason. By devaluing bodily differences—“the passions”—the philosopher attempts to master them. For Nietzsche, conversely, difference is the source of the body’s power and creativity.

By continually contrasting the healthy body to “philosophy,” conceived as a degenerate form of corporeality, Nietzsche promotes a notion of the body as a source of power, figured as difference. Nietzsche charges philosophical thought with the disempowerment and normalization of the body, reflected in the metaphysics inherent in grammar. Philosophy renders explicit “truths,” or viewpoints, humanity already tells itself in the very form of language. Language and subjectivity, Nietzsche held, implicitly reduce bodily diversity to sameness: otherwise communication and understanding would not be possible. The root of thought’s movement away from bodily multiplicity can be traced to the advent of consciousness according to Nietzsche. He discusses the possibility of a thinking being without consciousness in The Gay Science. Yet, what he describes is not usually considered as “thought” by philosophers, who tend to confuse thought with consciousness and reason:

[W]e could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous? (Gay Science, §354, 297)

Nietzsche then attributes consciousness’s superfluous “mirror effect” to the turn to language: “only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness” (Gay Science, §354, 298).

According to Nietzsche, the necessity for communication represents a regrettable “loss of contact” with our individual, bodily being. Such a loss, however, is ambiguously situated in this text. For it is not the case that one once had perfect knowledge of the body, and that language and consciousness then intervened and despoiled such perfect knowledge. Rather, the condition of knowledge is precisely this despoiling; consciousness represents the only means of “knowledge,” which Nietzsche defines as essentially a reduction of multiplicity, for the sake of conscious thought (Gay Science, §355, 300). Knowledge is for Nietzsche already the province of the herd animal. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre, the body is figured in excess of our knowledge of it. Nietzsche frequently comments upon the epistemic gap between the body and consciousness. Following Spinoza, he relates that we cannot observe the simplest bodily functions as they occur within us, nor can we understand the vast complexity of our own corporeality with such an inadequate instrument as consciousness.[12]

That knowledge in general is limited is a necessary adjunct to Nietzsche’s perspectivism because, as finite beings, the needs that determine the truth available to us cannot exhaust all potential aspects of “the thing.” But more precisely in the case of knowledge of our own bodies, consciousness necessarily simplifies and conceals in its perceptions of the body. Consciousness exists principally as a simplification of, and mantle for, the body, of which it is merely the most surface aspect. For the sake of the mind’s proper functioning, the life of the body must for the most part remain obscure—otherwise, not only would the mind become overstimulated, but also it would cease to perform its vital role as interpreter of bodily needs. And here Nietzsche’s dual vocations—as philologist and philosopher—come more apparently to work together. For as with texts, so with bodies, interpretation is a selective process in which the work of excluding superfluous material, or information, is equally as important as including what is relevant. Thus, much of the work of consciousness, according to Nietzsche, is actively to forget whatever does not accord to a simplified schema of what the self is.[13]

Yet more significantly, in order to know itself—to become self-conscious—the body undergoes a transformation that renders it unrecognizable “as such.” “The ideal of the self”—for Nietzsche a very limited aspect of “the whole self” (what he calls “the great intelligence” of the body)[14]—acts as a measure for the selection and interpretation of the surrounding environment and, indeed, of the body itself. This ideal through which perceptions are mediated is the “I”: the subject, or “self” to which Nietzsche appeals when addressing his reader. This subject begins only as a surface projection: the body’s interpretation of itself for the purposes of communication—as Nietzsche points out, not only with others, but also within itself. 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 renders the slave at the master’s disposal. Thus, from the point of view of the slave, the master’s morality must pose a threat to his existence.[16] The reactive slave evaluates not from his “highest pleasure,” or jouissance—which would involve being able to lay claim to one’s environment, already owned by the noble[17]—but rather, the slave’s values are constructed out of a sense of fear and self-preservation, and in inverse relation to the master’s values. The slave-type evaluates backward, in Nietzsche’s terms, demarcating first whatever intimidates it as “evil,” whereas what appears most harmless becomes its highest virtue.

By means of what Nietzsche calls “the slave revolt in morality,” the ill-constituted slave achieves a reversal of all values, and thus triumphs over the master. The master is better constituted as his confederacy of wills (will to power) strikes a productive balance between the active force that commands, and the reactive force that obeys. Conversely, the circuitous process by which the slave moral system develops reroutes the drive so that “life”—that is, difference, power, creativity—is inhibited. This means that in the slave-type the most passive (or reactive) drives dominate and subdue the most active. Like a herd animal, the slave lives so as not to draw to himself the attention of the stronger, better constituted, beast of prey. Thus life in the main is reduced to a mode of self-preservation rather than increase, or greater perfection. The master-type, on the other hand, will come to be “tamed,” alienated from his power, through the acquisition of conscience, or more precisely “bad conscience”: the feeling of guilt that serves to reign in the expression of power. The victory of slave morality is to universalize the viewpoint of the servile, the downtrodden, the victim, and to install this viewpoint in the master, at whose hands the victim had suffered. In grammatical terms, guilt consists in identification with the object of an action rather than its subject, and thus all become passive, so unable to give expression to their impulses. Yet, the conversion of the noble to slave morality is not figured simply in terms of suppression. The twist to the plot of Genealogy consists in the master’s coming to be libidinally attached to this guilt—taking pleasure in the bad conscience—and thus it is through a positive expression of his impulses that he succumbs to slave morality. The master is accomplice to his subjection.

I will return momentarily to the noble’s libidinal investment in bad conscience. At this stage I would like briefly to pause and consider the reader’s subjection to Nietzsche’s text, in terms of how she might encounter this discussion of noble and slave. Nietzsche seems clearly to favor the master type—the one who engenders her environment—over the slave type, presented as a mangled organism. Yet desire for nobility presents itself as a problem in Genealogy: for how are we to negotiate a path from this botched, slave mode of life, back to something more original and pure? Moreover, desire for the place of the noble is often contaminated by ambivalence. The master mode of evaluation may be more direct—a healthier expression of corporeality—yet it also necessitates behavior repugnant to the modern (already servile) sensibility. As indicated earlier, however, ambivalence is vital to the success of interpellation. Whereas the reader finds himself or herself caught between admiration for the master type and guilt at the prospect of inflicting suffering upon another, the interpellation is contingent upon an ambiguous and unstable (and thus incomplete) resolution of such conflict. Indeed, “the success” of the interpellation depends precisely upon the reader’s ambivalence toward Nietzsche’s most exalted (and excessive) figures, into which she works to propel herself, through identification, in order to assuage the anxiety induced by such ambivalence. The reader might tell herself that a negative response to the noble is merely a hangover from her slave upbringing—that she can work through this discomfort by devoting herself to Nietzsche’s works. Or, she might deny the unbridled malevolence that Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote of the noble as “a beast of prey.” Yet either way, the noble is the ambiguous object of the reader’s aspiration and fear: a figure of excess through which he or she casts subjectivity.

Furthermore, the noble is not only the excess of the narrative structure—not strictly making sense in terms of Nietzsche’s argument—but also comes to resonate with what the reader identifies as her own excess, or own lost origin. In the first instance, the noble is a glitch in Nietzsche’s system: the piece of the puzzle that does not quite fit, or does not make sense. Perhaps this figure is merely remnant of Nietzsche’s nostalgia for ancient Imperialism:[18] yet it also performs a function for the text in recruiting readers and advocates. This is because the figure of the noble performs a function for the reader. It represents a glitch in the reader’s system, or a stain upon her field of vision, at once fascinating and repulsive. As will be theorized in the chapters that follow, “the excess” figured by the noble reminisces an aspect of the reader that must be discarded and hidden within “the object” (or text) in the very production of her subjectivity. In this respect, the reader identifies with the figure of excess, yet ambiguously, as it represents a lost wholeness and what she must disavow, in order to ensure the integrity of the self. Accordingly, it makes sense that the noble would not tally in terms of Nietzsche’s argument, but could only emerge after the historical process of servility had already taken place. In keeping with the logic of excess, the relation of affect with the figure of the noble can be produced only from the slave point of view. As will become clear, the noble is impossible as an event of prehistory since the conditions of its advent arise from within slave morality: and more precisely, from the slave’s guilt regarding the noble’s possibility.

This adds a different inflection, and another degree of complexity, to Nietzsche’s genealogical narrative. For if the noble is a product of the slave’s guilt—a retroactive projection from the point of view of the victim who imagines herself as the aggressor—then the genealogy must be read in reverse, or even as circular, rather than as a lineage beginning with the master and ending with the Übermensch. It is at this point, then, that we can begin to tease out a second order narrative from Nietzsche’s text: a fairy tale whose monsters arise from the fantasies of good, Christian folk. Arguably the most interesting section of Genealogy is also its most oblique. The second essay describes the condition of socialization of the human, who would have to become “calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is to be able to stand security for his own future” (58): in order, that is, to have the right to make promises. Nietzsche’s variation on the theme of the social contract, therefore, demonstrates what must have occurred before we were able to make a contract in the first place. We must have had to install a sense of the other’s well-being into ourselves at the expense of our own “free” expression of power, and this is exacted at the level of corporeality, according to Nietzsche: whereby the body is forced to work against itself, in what must have necessitated an extremely painful and protracted process of shaping the individual as a more or less exchangeable type within the social economy. “‘If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory’—this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth.” (61) Only in the context of a social economy of sameness could the notion of guilt arise, according to Nietzsche, out of the concept of debt (the German for both guilt and debt is Schuld) (62–63). Punishment thus consists in the creditor’s right to extract from the debtor’s body the pleasure of freely discharging one’s power at the expense of another. The nature of the economy is that all are exchangeable, and the juridical system regulates this principle by converting masters into slaves and slaves into masters, in what Nietzsche calls a “carnival of cruelty” (65).[19]

In order to become a social animal—and thus a regular participant in the economy of the social contract—the master has had to renounce its own stake in life as will to power: that is, the enactment of jouissance upon the other’s body. For the wielding of force has come to be regulated by the law rather than by individuals, and the master is thus equally subject to law as the slave. This is where we find the subject returning to its bodily depth: for this enjoyment through the infliction of pain upon the other is redeployed to become the very impetus of social behavior. Enjoyment is reconfigured as bad conscience, wherein the persecutor takes her or himself as the object of cruelty. In bad conscience, “will to power” turns in upon itself—makes itself its own victim—in order to practice a cruelty that is not only socially permissible, but also necessary to the formation of the subject. 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 how his writing produces a textual remainder. This textual excess gives itself to be a pure object, which exerts the force of the sublime upon 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 interpellated, and so to negate and suppress whatever does not fit to the ideal promoted by his writing. And Nietzsche’s text thus 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 themselves as noble only in contradistinction to a lower social stratum to which they oppose themselves . . . it seems that what Nietzsche says about ‘slave morality,’—that ‘from the outset (it) says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed’—is just as true of ‘noble morality’ as it is of ‘slave morality.’ (“Moral Psychology and Transcendental Philosophy in Nietzsche’s Genealogy,” unpublished manuscript).

[17]. The French jouissance incorporates a legal sense, of use and ownership—having something at one’s disposal for free enjoyment—as well as pleasure.

[18]. See Daniel Conway, “Ecce Caesar: Nietzsche’s Imperial Aspirations.”

[19]. Significantly in this context, the carnival was originally a festival that involved the ritual reversal of social hierarchy, through the playing of roles. Nietzsche’s usage of the term here indicates a relation to this tradition, albeit concerned with the reversal of privilege through the infliction of suffering rather than excessive drinking, and so forth.

[20]. See David McNeill, as referred to in note 16.

[21]. “Circuits of Bad Conscience: Nietzsche and Freud,” in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) 63–82.

[22]. In this book, Butler focuses upon the figure of “the turn” as it is used to demonstrate psychic interiority in the texts not only of Nietzsche, but also of Hegel, Freud, Foucault, and Althusser.

[23]. Freud uses the term Verinnerlichung, “internalization,” to explain the authority of the superego. (See Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Civilization, Society and Religion, Penguin Freud Library vol 12. Albert Dickson, ed. Trans. James Strachey [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991], 72).

[24]. For an evocative depiction of Nietzsche as a leader of cults, see Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophes; or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

[25]. In the story of Oedipus, a monster (sphinx) poses him the question of mortality, and whoever cannot answer it correctly is cast into the abyss.