Department of Narcotic Rhetoric
The So-Called Trouble With Nietzsche
"He only is the Sea, holder of treasures; born many a time he views the hearts within us [...] Seven are the pathways which the wise have fashioned; to one of these may come the troubled mortal. He stands in the dwelling of the Highest, a pillar, on sure ground where paths are parted." --Rig Veda [Book X, Hymn V]
I.OUR initial research shows a series of "troubles" with Nietzsche and Nietzschean-ism: 1/ The Big Lie; 2/ The Double Code; 3/ The Master/Slave Thing; 4/ The So-Called Secret Agenda; 5/ The Will to Power; 6/ The Hellenic Thing; 7/ The Migraines and the Pain; and 8/ The Proto-Postmodernism.
Initially, WE have looked into Geoffrey Waite's masterful tirade against the Nietzscheans, in Nietzsche's Corps/e, and Pierre Klossowski's (in)famous Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969). Findings, thus far, are provisional but the damning evidence of a misappropriation of Nietzsche (most tellingly by poststructuralists and the Left) is fairly conclusive. It seems there was a very famous symposium in July 1972 at Cerisy-la-Salle (Normandy) attended by the illuminati of the French structuralist-poststructuralist camp - Derrida, Nancy, Klossowski et alia -- and that Klossowski first broached his idea of the "secret" Nietzsche in this setting.
Waite's book is a demolition of this edifice constructed by the French illuminati and a denunciation of Nietzsche Himself by way of a high-rhetorical romp through the drug-like nature of Nietzsche's thought: "Nietzsche is a type of H/Meth, arguably the major type of post/narcotic 'quiver between history and ontology'." Waite is quoting Avital Fonell's "Our Narcotic Modernity" from Rethinking Technologies (1993) and setting the stage for his investigation of how Nietzsche's writings insinuate themselves into consciousness without necessarily being processed by the rational vectors of the brain. Waite's premise is that Nietzsche indeed, pace Klossowski, encoded a subliminal message into his work. The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and The Gay Science (1882) -- plus Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85) -- are the principle examples of this narcotic prose style.
Perhaps the most rewarding portion of Waite's book is the section "Nietzsche's Esoteric Semiotics", wherein he takes on Klossowski's reading (and thereby the poststructuralists en masse) and goes about the ravishing analysis of the secret agenda. Nietzsche, it would seem, is the true avatar of postmodernism (nihilism and/plus relativism) and purposely buried his message in the paradoxical, ironic posturing of his works. His message is, in Waite's reading, proto-deconstructivist and attempts to condition all possible futures. Nietzsche has become second nature to our collective postcultural selves -- essentially self-deconstructing selves -- underwriting almost every discourse that pretends to demolish power in the name of heterogeneity. Perhaps Waite is at his best when he is positing what has been lost; i.e., a possible communism and/or a possible utopian project called enlightenment. Nietzsche, in other words, demolished all pretexts that might underwrite such an agenda.
Instructive, here, is Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and especially the section on the concept of ressentiment. This concept relates to Nietzsche's dyadic idea of Master and Slave and embodies "a typology of forces, an ethic of the corresponding ways of being." Ressentiment is the condition of the Slave, who conceives of a non-ego (to oppose) in order to posit self. This non-ego is the so-called "Adversary" and is the shadow of the unhappy state of the Slave. The Slave invents the Adversary to justify his/her misery. Deleuze describes the state of the Slave as an outcome of a double negative (think, here, perhaps of the cunning world of negative dialectics): "The negative contains the essential and the positive only exists through negation." The Slave embodies the principle of non-action or reaction without effect, while the Master (the Adversary) is the progenitor of meaning and value. Thus, the Slave is also the critic that would demolish without creating.
Waite's idea that Nietzscheanism is the pervasive force of a negative double bind is therefore -- at least -- the condition of the oppressed (and the condition of the Left who have set themselves up as the spokespersons of the oppressed). The Left, as a result, has fallen into the trap of ressentiment and inaction. Criticism is not enough unless it also leads to construction. The ideal (Hegelian) world of Spirit is demolished in such a double bind and history succumbs to the ideology of the Slave. The Master (the neo-capitalist today!) is content to have the Left sink into its own swamp of negative dialectics and remain impotent. It may, as a result, continue to construct its master narrative while co-opting anything that smacks of anarchy or revolution simply by converting it to a thing that may be exploited (or attacked). Such things are the products of the subculture which exists only as a subclass of the master narrative.
According to Deleuze, "The one who is good is now the one who holds himself back from acting." He is also the one who "desires little from life." What is fascinating is that this very condition is the system of things exposed by Nietzsche as the running sore of culture itself. His famous anima contra the idea of culture is based on the unearthing of this dubious double bind and its stealth technocratic edge. To Waite the "City of Refuge" for the disenchanted is also "the blueprint of the Nietzschean 'city' [that is] so complex, it is both necessary and possible to describe it using otherwise incompatible discourses." Curiously, Waite describes this 'city' as the nexus of architecture and video (the videodrome). It is in this virtual reality that the most pernicious forms of the master narrative hold sway. One thinks immediately of the film The Matrix (or any of the vast number of violent video games) and other post-utopian nightmare scenarios. That architecture has so solidly embraced the virtual is evidence that the luscious nature of this virtual world is perceived as a refuge from the world of physical artifacts. Nietzsche foresaw this turn toward high artifice as perhaps the most vicious form of programming and mind control due to the conditions of his own time when capital (and culture) was becoming abstract and highly malleable.
II.
The mis-appropriation of Nietzsche is -- at least -- two-fold. One, the Left has valorized his demolition of the master narrative and seized on the relativism that underwrites the discourses of heterogeneity (multi-culturalism). Two, the nihilist interpretation only goes so far, as Nietzsche developed his philosophy of the Overman as a response to his own terror with the nihilist abyss. Klossowski suggests that Nietzsche was so shaken by the idea of the Eternal Return (the Vicious Circle) that he inverted the idea of the inexorable and produced a virtual set of makeshift principles in the form of his transvaluation of all values -- an unwritten work but something that runs through all the work.
Nietzsche, in fact, inverted so much of his own thinking that any appropriation is automatically problematic because an appropriation is usually selective and intentional (has an agenda of its own). To appropriate Nietzsche's nihilism is to take only his own morbid fear of the meaninglessness of everything and stop before the gate of the creative Nietzsche, who would re-enchant the world and re-colonize thought with an ultra-quixotic transfiguration of the subject (self). Nietzsche's manic side countered his depressive side -- Klossowski's high-structuralist reading of this process is the point of the entire operation of his analysis of Nietzsche's psychic states -- not so much as the typical manic-depressive is whipsawed by his own mood swings but as a pre-emptive strike on his own fatalistic interpretation of the world. (As with Wagner, Nietzsche first embraced and then denounced Schopenhauer.) The inversions in Nietzsche's thought make it impossible to excise a moment or an article and re-deploy it without essentially violating the nature of the origin of the concept. Nietzsche apparently feared that he was -- in his own right -- a slave, a victim of ressentiment, and struggled to overcome this pessimistic contagion by constructing a joyous art of the fabulous. A curious prerequisite for most appropriations of Nietzsche, from the Left, is that the appropriating party be none other than Nietzsche's double -- or "the most interesting men" -- i.e., the sick and the enfeebled. (Conversely, appropriations from the Right tend to be those of Nietzsche's Adversary -- i.e., the arbitrary masters and dead souls of the ruling hegemony.) His game was to suggest an alternative to remaining sick and enfeebled (or dead and in charge) by becoming "superhuman" -- superfluous -- and he did so through the strenuous, hilarious, despotic and crazed figure of Zarathustra -- prophetic fool and/or King Lear on mescaline.
Perhaps at the heart of Klossowski's overwhelming critique of Nietzsche's anti-system (and its origin in Nietzsche's struggle with his own descent into madness) is that the target of all of it is/was subjectivity itself, or the self-conscious subject, which, according to Nietzsche is the ultimate fabrication. The singular may be required to accomplish or will life but it is a phantasm that has risen above a sea of drives and suppressed other histories and other selves. The gregarious and the singular are Nietzchean terms that vouchsafe the eternal struggle between the species and the individual, and illustrate a mostly useless struggle that exists in the face of the Vicious Circle -- the ultimate origin and end of all things. The return of the revelation of the Vicious Circle in the rounds of any one person's lives and deaths is the point of renunciation of the self and its illusions and the reconnection to the catastrophic vision of the Eternal Return. This revelation -- too powerful to sustain -- will always disappear into the makeshift realities of the day-to-day experience of the world and the life-to-life rounds of the so-called individual until it resurfaces at a later stage to savage and destroy the pretexts of the erstwhile provisional systems. This ravaging process is Nietzsche's embrace of the inexorable or what Klossowski has indicated is the fond (ground) -- "the unexchangeable depth" or "the unintelligible depth" -- illuminating all of Nietzsche's antics.
Perhaps the only appropriate appropriation of Nietzsche is from above, versus below (Left or Right). The essence of Nietzsche's elitist philosophy is that it is ideologically promiscuous and cannot be rightfully utilized by Master or Slave. This strangely mirrors the mythos of the Mahatma (Great Soul) or even the bizarre manifestations of the self-same in the form of Ascended Masters and such on the far side of the New Age. Nietzsche's philosophy of the Higher Man is not for the making of higher men; it is for the superhuman race he foresaw (however polemical this vision ultimately was meant to be). In many ways this super race resembles the Hellenic pantheon of anointed ones -- gamboling about in the clouds above Olympus and interfering in human affairs as whim and/or caprice. Nietzsche hated Socrates for revealing the nature of the Greek gods and the nature of the master narrative that produced them. He was (perhaps) annoyed with Socrates for pulling back the screen that covered the whole daemonic other world and revealing the game. He might also be deemed jealous of Socrates for accomplishing what he himself sought -- to condition all possible futures -- albeit, in Socrates' case, by exposing the extra-subjective nature of the divine drama.
Gavin Keeney / DRAFT
"To see the Moment means to stand in it." --Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol 2, trans. David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 57; cited in Genevieve Lloyd, "The Past: Loss or Eternal Return?", Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 115
For the essay "Moravian Shadows" (initially written while sitting in a garden in Moravia, the Czech Republic, while reading Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy), cliquez ici ...
OUR PROVISIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
VERTIGINOUS BLACK - The cover of René Girard's extraordinary book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999/2001) is a 'variation' on Parmigiano's painting 'The Conversion of St Paul' ... The landscape has been totally removed ... The 'ground' beneath his feet (to which he has fallen) is erased, and the whole becomes a hole, a vertiginous black abyss ... GK (05/08/06) ... - NIETZSCHE / THE MADNESS - "In certain unedited writings just before his final breakdown, Nietzsche escapes the twin errors of the positivists and the nihilists, and he discovers the truth [...,] in the Dionysian passion and in the Passion of Jesus there is the same collective violence. But the interpretation is different: 'Dionysos versus the 'Crucified': there you have the antithesis [antidote]. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom -- it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering -- the 'Crucified as the innocent one' -- counts as an objection to this life, as a formula to its condemnation.*'" (p. 172) ... "Nietzsche had to trick himself to avoid clearly seeing this. To escape the consequences of his own discovery and persist in a desperate negation of the biblical truth of the victim, Nietzsche resorts to an evasion so gross, so unworthy of his best thinking, that his mind could not hold out against it. " (p. 173) --René Girard, "The Twofold Nietzschean Heritage", I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), pp. 170-181 ... Je vois Satan tomber comme l'éclair (Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1999) - *The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 542-543 ... / Conversion of St Paul (Parmigiano) ... / More René Girard (Yellow Pages) ...
Clément Rosset, Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real, trans. David F. Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) - "In Joyful Cruelty, Clément Rosset attempts to formulate a philosophical practice that refuses to turn away from the world and thereby accepts a confrontation with reality (what he calls real) in all of its immediacy. Such a direct confrontation, in the absence of all mediating theories or representations, is cruel because it destroys all illusions. It exposes one to the full, unmitigated violence of the real and allows neither reassuring distance nor space for retreat. And yet it gives rise to a sensation of joy, of approbation for what exists. Nietzsche's philosophy provides a fertile ground for exploring the joy at the heart of Rosset's practice. Beginning with the Nietzschean notion of beatitude, Rosset offers an interpretation of Nietzsche that goes against the grain of modern and postmodern philosophical critique and negativism or a postmodern nihilism. In a surprising and original twist, Rosset shows how Nietzsche's thought revolves instead around an acceptance of the real as the only source of experience without illusion." (OUP)
Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)
Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)
Jean-Luc Marion, “The Collapse of the Idols and Confrontation with the Divine: Nietzsche”, The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham, 2001); Originally published as L’Idol et la Distance (Paris: Editions Grasset, 1977)
Genevieve Lloyd, "The Past: Loss or Eternal Return?", Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 96-122
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)
David B. Allison (ed.), New Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985
Alexandre Kostka and Irving Wohlfarth (eds.), Nietzsche & 'An Architecture of Our Minds' (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999)
Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, Daniel W. Conway (ed.), Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
Geoff Waite, Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, Or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996)
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles = Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)
Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies: L'enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Galilée, 1984)
Christopher E. Forth, Zarathustra in Paris - The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891-1918 (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), Reviewed in the The Times Literary Supplement, 03/08/02
Geoffrey Waite's Nietzsche's Corps/e (Review, The Thing, 08/23/96)
NIETZSCHE OUTTAKES
Nietzsche Spuren
Nietzsche Archiv
La République des Lettres
Goethe Institut
For Edward Said on Nietzsche's "Untimely" in Beethoven (The Nation, 09/01/03), cliquez ici ...
TITILLATING TITBITS - Yes / Amen: “Nietzschean distance maintains, to be sure, a relation with the divine, but within onto-theology, on the basis of equivalence. Thus it reinforces the metaphysical idolatry where ‘God’ is defined as a state of the will to power. Within that grade-related function, the ‘feeling of distance,’ far from taking its distance from the metaphysical face of the divine elaborated (and presupposed) by the will to power, radically ignores the distance of God. The Nietzschean distance intervenes only to censure the distance of God, or more, to obliterate it, within the evidence of the text, by substituting itself for it.” Jean-Luc Marion, “The Collapse of the Idols and Confrontation with the Divine: Nietzsche”, The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham, 2001), p. 77 / “It was necessary that Nietzsche collapse into the divine in order that he might hear his voice say in concert with Dionysus the Yes that creates a world at the very heart of nihilism.” (Ibid., p. 55) / “Ariadne becomes the place for meeting with Dionysus, a place that only I, that is Nietzsche, knows […] Why does Nietzsche not proclaim Ariadne, whom he nonetheless knows? Perhaps because he knows her too well.” (Ibid., p. 50) / “Light without shadow allows the world to freeze, or to dissolve -- it doesn’t matter which, precisely because a world demands a perspective. Only shadow establishes relief, delimits forms, puts things in place. The true world, now rejected, will project that shadow further along the bias of its grim and low-angled light.” (Ibid., p. 39)TIME ITSELF - “Granted, we live in time, but every moment opens onto a neutral realm [the Real], a time with no arrow, that we cannot master because no dialectic can get a foothold there, and that we cannot undergo because with respect to it there is no ‘I.’” --Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 75 / “Presence is sacred.” (“The Impossible”, ibid., p. 84) / And yet, the Real is not, apropos of Bataille, “pebbles along a path, or a gleam in the water” (Ibid., p. 84). ‘It’ is, instead, simultaneously in and outside of every nominal thing (named thing). Therefore, ‘it’ (the Real) is an indefinable some-thing else, only apparently ‘archaic’.
ENJOY YOUR SYMPTOMS! - “The hedonism of postmodern society, far from representing a step out of the framework of what Nietzsche calls the ascetic [anti-aesthetic] ideal, is deeply rooted in this framework [not unlike Weber’s critique of the Protestant ethic]. In order to see this, we must first understand that for Nietzsche, the ascetism involved in the ascetic ideal does not simply involve a renouncement of enjoyment; it involves, above all, a specific mode of articulation of enjoyment.” Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow (p. 47)
After God - Review of Rüdiger Safranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch (New York: Norton, 2002) - "Perhaps the most important question about the influence of the life on the work is how much Nietzsche's ideas may be understood -- rather like Freud's -- as a response not only to the universal condition but to the specific, extraordinarily repressed conditions of his era. Many critics have complained that Nietzsche offered no new values to put in place of those that he aimed to destroy. Yet it could be argued that his master plan to spring the cultural trap and release the darker instincts -- aggression, sex, power -- would have not only lent these instincts honest shapes but restored the virtues that had been so long debased by the pretenses of bourgeois life. It is from the most powerful, and those most capable of evil, that Zarathustra demands, 'I want the good from you.' It is their strength that makes their goodness valuable, because it is freely chosen." (The New Yorker, 04/08/02)
Oguz Erdur, Nietzsche and the Body of Knowledge (PDF / 99 KB) - Abstract: "The point: One says 'I,' whereas it is the body that does the 'I' that speaks (Nietzsche 1954:146). The same holds for those other bodies of knowledge called the 'disciplines.' In either case, the voice that speaks on behalf of the body is always-already ontologically justified by the body itself. This self-referential semiotic matrix, even when it produces self-doubt or a self-critique, is a performance of the body, through which the conflicting energies of that very body are ritualistically reaffirmed and reunited. Reflexivity thus is more about functionality and instrumentality than about truthfulness." Stanford Journal of Archaeology 2 (Spring 2003)
"[T]he judgement 'this is beautiful' is only one type of aesthetic judgement. We must examine the other type; 'this is sublime'. In the Sublime, imagination surrenders itself to an activity quite distinct from that of formal reflection. The feeling of the sublime is experienced when faced with the formless or the deformed (immensity or power). It is as if imagination were confronted with its own limit, forced to strain to its utmost, experiencing a violence which stretches it to the extremity of its power." --Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) / Regarding the two kinds of nothingness, the sublime kind and the abject kind, see Sublime Scare Tactics (Soma) and Appropriating Pascal (Anti-Journal) ...
For details of Gerhard Richter: Sils (2003), a book based on the exhibition of Richter's paintings and photographs exhibited at the Nietzsche Haus (Sils-Maria) in 1992, cliquez ici ...
Regarding the Apollinian-Dionysian dyad: "The Apollinian, like the Christian martyr but unlike the Dionysian, turns away from this world and looks to another: 'The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence; in order to be able to live at all, he had to interpose between himself and life the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians.' To the extent that the 'terror and horror of existence' are affirmed, they are affirmed not 'for themselves,' but rather -- like the martyr's torments -- for sake of the visions they make possible." Alan White, Apollinian Veil (Williams College) / Excerpts - Alan White, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth (London: Routledge, 1990) ...
