It Is Time To Toss The Dice How Nietzsche’s Philosophy Inspires Anarchist Practice

Catherine Hooijer

Master Thesis of Philosophy University of Amsterdam Dr. Robin Celikates / prof. dr. Yolande Jansen

05-07-2019

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Abstract In a precarious world where almost everyone is affected by discrimination, oppression and insecurity in some way or another, more and more people want to change their situation. However, many of those people are turning to right-wing, conservative ideas or conspiracy theories. Anarchism has until now not been able to come up with an alternative to the current way of living together that attracts people in the same way. In my thesis, I argue that this is partly due to anarchist practices based on what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche calls ressentiment, and that anarchists should drastically change the fundamentals of those practices if anarchists are to change the world for the better. For the purpose of this thesis I will focus my discussion on two prevalent practices within anarchism, namely identity politics (or more aptly named, privilege politics) and accountability processes. However, this is not to say that only these practices are to blame, nor that they should be completely abandoned. I will argue that anarchists need to radically transform these practices. To go beyond my critique, I will explore a Nietzschean “affirmation of life” as this new ground on which to build. In the process I will also show that this new basis of anarchism will be distinctly feminist in character.

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Foreword – Acknowledgements ‘It is time to toss the dice’. This statement is made by one of the characters in the book-series The Wheel of Time written by Robert Jordan. The character in question uses it as a mantra whenever he makes risky gambles or goes into battle. This thesis was a gamble for me from the start, and often it was a battle. Having never extensively read Nietzsche’s works, I took the opportunity of this thesis to explore this fascinating philosophy and using it to develop thoughts on my political interest in anarchist practice. It has been six months of laughter and joy, but also of frustration and suffering. Quite early after starting on this path, I realised it was more dangerous than I could have anticipated: it is so easy to become lost in Nietzsche’s writing, to be sucked into it, even more so because it is sometimes nice to get lost in Nietzsche’s writing. I want to thank Robin Celikates for giving me the chance to start on this project and pushing me beyond my limits. I also want to thank Yolande Jansen for agreeing to serve as the second reader of my thesis despite having a busy schedule. However, I could not have seen the project through to the end without my friends being around, being both my harshest critics and best resting place. Above all Eleni Kouvelas, my reading partner for Nietzsche’s philosophy. We have cried from laughter and danced through the frustration of reading Nietzsche’s books. I hope that by the end of this she will also have finished her thesis with the same feeling of joy as I do. And I want to dearly thank Sigmund Schilpzand who, from all the way over in Southampton has been able to evoke reflection with a few words, while at the same time providing the music to see it all through. Now, at the end I feel like I know what it is to affirm life in the Nietzschean sense. At least, I have learned that tossing the dice makes winning or losing not just a random chance; it all depends on the game one is playing – which is something you can decide for yourself. For me, this was a winning toss. 3

Contents Contents ...... 3 Introduction ...... 4 The will to power ...... 8 Anarchism ...... 10 Chapter One: ‘People Not Profit’ ...... 14 1.1 Creating the Subject ...... 14 1.2 The Neoliberal Subject ...... 16 Chapter Two: ‘Bigger Cages! Longer Chains!’ ...... 21 2.1 When Identity Politics Become Privilege Politics ...... 21 2.1.1 Essentialising Identity...... 22 2.1.2 Claiming Rights Instead of Freedom ...... 23 2.1.3 Identity for Ascribing Blame ...... 25 2.1.4 Using Safe Spaces for Escape ...... 27 2.2. When Accountability Becomes the Justice System ...... 29 2.2.1 Restorative Justice ...... 29 2.2.2 Punishing the Guilty ...... 30 2.2.3 The Evil One ...... 31 2.2.4 The Victim ...... 32 Chapter Three: ‘No One Is Free Until All Are Free’ ...... 34 3.1 Ressentiment and Bad Conscience ...... 35 3.1.1 Internalising Suffering ...... 36 3.1.2 Punishing and Bad Conscience...... 37 3.2 Ressentiment in the Justice System ...... 40 3.3 Ressentiment as the ‘peacefulness’ of the State ...... 43 Chapter Four: ‘Love Is Its Own Protection’ ...... 47 4.1 Affirmation: Life as Becoming ...... 47 4.1.1 The Eternal Recurrence ...... 49 4.2 The Revaluation of Suffering ...... 54 4.3 The Revaluation of Mitleid ...... 58 4.4 The Psychology of the Tragic, Dionysus ...... 59 4.5 Communities of Friends ...... 61 4.6 To Empower ...... 62 Conclusion ...... 65 Bibliography ...... 70 4

Introduction People all over Europe live in precarious situations; poverty, insecurity, and feelings of non- belonging are apparent almost everywhere. People are discriminated against because of social-economic status, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability or some other aspect of one’s life. A growing number of people, however, want this situation to change. At the same time, more and more people seem to be turning towards conservative, right-wing ideas or conspiracy theories in order to try to change this precarity. Blaming refugees for lack of jobs and housing, blaming feminism for not having the romantic relationships one sees on TV, blaming diversity policies for not receiving a promotion at work, all are examples of attempts to reclaim some mythical past in which everything is supposed to have been good. The alternative offered on the other side of the political spectrum, “left” as it is often called, seems unable to attract as many people to their vision of living together. The question that started out this thesis is why this is the case. At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, lots of people joined in an effort to change the way society was organised. This is often called the anti-globalisation movement and it had distinct anarchist tendencies, as such organising in an anti-authoritarian, horizontal fashion intermixed with plenty of direct action.1 Anti-globalisation activists aimed at structurally changing society and everything seemed possible. Now, years later, politicians on the far-right of the political spectrum are gaining influence, neo-nazis are openly marching on the streets in several European countries, borders are being closed to migrants, and people’s lives are becoming ever more precarious, whilst thousands are displaced and dispossessed. The anarchist practices that seemed so promising during the anti-globalisation movement are no longer viewed as viable alternatives to organising society. In this thesis, I will explore the idea that these practices are no longer deemed viable because they are possibly based on what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche calls ressentiment. Whilst reading Nietzsche, it seemed to me that his diagnosis of ressentiment in morality is also accurate for the anarchist practices in Europe today. In this, I follow Saul Newman, Lewis Call and Thomas Conte who have suggested that anarchism is indeed based on ressentiment.2 By investigating this, I hope to not only come up with an answer to the question why

1 Corradi, L. (2013). Black, Red, Pink, and Green: Breaking Boundaries, Building Bridges. In: The Anarchist Turn [J. Blumenfeld, C. Bottici, & S. Critchley, eds.], pp. 125-142. London: Pluto Press.; Newman, S. (2010). Introduction. In: The Politics of Postanarchism, pp.1-14. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2 Newman, S. (2000). Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment. Theory and Event, 4, 2.; Call, L.(2001). Towards an Anarchy of Becoming: Postmodern Anarchism in Nietzschean Philosophy. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 21, 48.; Conte, T. (1999). Nietzschean Anarchism and the Possibility of Political Culture. New Political Science, 21, 378. 5 anarchism does not seem to be a viable alternative anymore, but also if and how it can become such an alternative. To do so, my approach will differ from Newman, Call and Conte. Newman and Call focus mostly on the theoretical problems of anarchism, looking at those problems from a Nietzschean perspective. For instance, Newman argues that anarchism often creates ‘an essential, moral opposition between society and the State’ which is a sign of ressentiment according to Newman.3 Call focuses on the way in which Nietzsche criticises subjectivity and the creation of a Subject. Conte, on the other hand, focuses mainly on to what extend Nietzsche endorses anti-authoritarian and anti-statist ideas. However interesting these topics are, – and I will certainly draw on some of their ideas – I want to approach anarchism and Nietzschean philosophy from a more practical perspective to arrive at a politics that can serve as an alternative way of living together. I will therefore focus on two prevalent practices (or practices based on) identity politics and accountability. I will discuss how identity politics and accountability are now practiced within anarchism, and if or how Nietzschean philosophy can help anarchists to arrive at a better practice. To answer the question how Nietzschean philosophy can inspire this new anarchist practice, I will first address several other questions. In chapter one I will first explore why anarchists would want to change society as it is now. To answer this question I will draw on the works of Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, and David Graeber. In the second and third chapter I will consider why the current practices of identity politics and accountability that anarchists engage in in order to change the status quo are not suited to create an alternative way of living together. Coming up with an answer to this question will require a reading of anarchist texts on the topic and Wendy Brown’s States of Injury4, and a diagnosis of what exactly is wrong for which I will use a Nietzschean perspective. The last question I will try to answer, in chapter four, is how Nietzschean philosophy can offer a solution to the problems that I have discerned in the earlier chapters, namely what an anarchist practice should be based on if it wants to change the current way of living together. In the remainder of this introduction, I will explain some of the philosophical choices I have made to answer these questions and what, in my view, anarchism is.

To address the problems sketched above, I have chosen to draw heavily on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His work is a critique and revaluation of Judeo-Christian moral values

3 Newman, Politics of Ressentiment, 6. 4 Brown, W. (1995). States of Injury. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 6 that still percolate in modern (mainly Western-European) society. Struck by his diagnosis of our situation, I saw a resemblance to the anarchist movement I know in the Netherlands. Nietzsche shows that morality has a history and is not given, natural or teleological, that there is neither an inherently “good” morality, nor a given individual that is separate from its actions.5 Decades later, the philosopher Michel Foucault takes up the genealogical ‘stick’ from Nietzsche in his project of showing how a Subject is created. 6 I have chosen to incorporate his work because of his analysis of power and society and the way power develops in contemporary history that is still recognisable today. However, I turn back to Nietzsche for a thorough diagnosis of what is wrong with anarchist practice and how to arrive at an alternative. I do this because Foucault’s concepts of “speaking truth to power” and “care of the self” feel to me as distinctly individualist and I want to formulate an alternative that accounts for living together. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality elaborates on the ressentiment that Nietzsche has diagnosed the modern Western-European culture with. The ressentiment he shows to be prevalent in many aspects of thinking and acting – in science, philosophy, morality, religion – might still be prevalent today within anarchist practice (and elsewhere). I will therefore, in chapter three, investigate what ressentiment is and if and how it is apparent in identity politics and accountability in anarchist practice. The concept of ressentiment is tied up with Nietzsche’s ideas on the creation of a Subject, Truth, a valuation of life, suffering, pain, compassion, strength and weakness, happiness and friendship. While the Genealogy is quite structured, many of Nietzsche’s other works are (purposefully) elusive. Especially when it concerns the topic of chapter four, the affirmation of life, which draws on the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, having multiple perspectives on what Nietzsche writes is important. Besides, Nietzsche’s oeuvre is extensive, the different books connected and sometimes (seemingly) contradictory, which would require an extensive reading of all his works (multiple times). 7 Since this is hardly a reasonable requirement for this thesis, I have drawn on multiple interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy – also to prevent tunnel-vision. For this

5 I will elaborate on this throughout my thesis, this section is only to situate my choices for certain philosophies. 6 I will differentiate between the “Subject” that Foucault describes and that Nietzsche criticises, and the “individual” or person that I will describe in chapter four. This latter idea is another form of subjectivity that is not – as we will see the Subject to be – a unified “I” and a universalized Being. Therefore, I will capitalise the Subject. Since this description of universalised being also applies to some forms of “Truth”, I will also capitalise this term. 7 For this I have used the English translations by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, with the exception of the Genealogy of Morality for which I have used the translation by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Please note that in the footnotes, the numbers that are referred to in Nietzsche’s work are not page numbers, but the numbers of the statements he makes. 7

I have made us of the works of Gilles Deleuze,8 Bernard Reginster,9 Robert Pippin,10 and Henry Staten.11 Below I will give a short outline of these philosphers’ interpretations of Nietzsche so as to give a basis on which to start my own project. I will use Deleuze and Reginster’s interpretations most extensively, since both cover the topic of ressentiment and the affirmation of life. While Staten and Pippin help to put these two interpretations into perspective. I have chosen to use both the interpretation by Deleuze and Reginster to complement them; as we will see, Deleuze’s interpretation is a more metaphysical interpretation, while Reginster’s interpretation explains Nietzsche in a more practical way which can be more easily translated it to everyday life. On the other hand, both create a theory based on the will to power as the driving force of life.12 This is why I will elaborate on this concept as interpreted by both philosophers below. First, I will explain more about the interpretations by Staten and Pippin. Staten approaches Nietzsche’s philosophy in a psycho-dialectical way, which means that he focuses primarily on the tone of Nietzsche’s writings to highlight important concepts. Staten also pays considerable attention to points on which Nietzsche (seemingly) contradicts himself, which he places within the ‘economy’ of Nietzsche’s work. An economy, according to Staten, is a relative unity, a whole that needs to be read as such. Nietzsche’s Voice is therefore of great help in interpreting concepts like Mitleid, affirmation and love.13 Pippin, like Staten, focuses on love as a driving power in our lives. In Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy he focuses on the way in which our conception of morality is based on the Subject as a causa sui. His work is useful for formulating a critique of the Subject and for constructing an alternative to this individualised Subject without stripping them of agency and responsibility for their actions. Pippin avoids a theory on the Will to Power, as does

8 Deleuze, G. (2006). Nietsche & Philosophy. [trans. Hugh Tomlinson]. New York: Columbia University Press. 9 Reginster, B. (2006). The affirmation of life: Nietzsche on overcoming nihilism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 10 Pippin, R. B. (2010). Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 11 Staten, H. (1990). Nietzsche’s Voice. New York: Cornell University Press. 12 Pippin criticises this, especially since it is in both cases based for a large part on the ‘book’ The Will to Power by Walter Kaufmann which is highly controversial according to Pippin and for instance, Souladié. Souladié (2015), even calls it ‘the fake book’, since it is actually a collection of notes that were never published. It is controversial to base an interpretation on this, because Nietzsche’s style of writing is important for the interpretation of what is important (Pippin, 2008 in his book review of Reginster’s The Affirmation of Life). Besides, the Will to Power places importance on this concept of the will to power as if the book is actually some kind of realisation of ‘what they believe Nietzsche planned as his magum opus, Der Wille zur Macht’ (Pippin, Review The Affirmation of Life, 87), while he never finished it, whether he gave up the project as Pippin argues, or did not have the chance as Reginster says (Reginster, The Affirmation of Life, 103). 13 I will use the German word for ‘pity’ or ‘compassion’ since it expresses best the ressentiment form of empathising when someone is hurt, while reserving the term compassion for the new way of doing so. 8

Staten. Moreover, neither Staten nor Pippin proposes a systematic theory of the whole of Nietzsche’s work as do Deleuze and Reginster. However, I will elaborate on the systematic theories Deleuze and Reginster for reference. This helps to introduce several important concepts in a coherent manner.

The will to power ‘The will to power ‘What is good? – everything that enhances people’s feeling of power, will to power, power itself. What is bad? – Everything stemming from weakness. What is happiness? – The feeling that power is growing, that some resistance has been overcome.’14 Reginster interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy by placing it in the context of Schopenhauer’s work. According to Reginster, Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power is a response to Schopenhauer’s will to live and the latter’s pessimism. According to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is a philosophy of ressentiment, since the definition of happiness in Schopenhauer is one of the satisfaction of one’s desires: happiness is ‘a final satisfaction of the will, after which no fresh willing would occur, […] an imperishable satisfaction of the will’ or ‘a contentment that cannot again be disturbed.’15 To be happy, to strive for happiness, is therefore to strive for not-being according to Nietzsche because this permanent contentment is only possible in a world-beyond, a world that does not exist. Schopenhauer’s idea of happiness is life-denying since it denies the value of this life in favour of a life of permanent peace. It also denies the value of suffering because suffering is defined as ‘the displeasure caused by the sole frustration of a desire’.16 It is therefore directly opposed to happiness and should somehow be eliminated. Pessimism is then the realisation that permanent contentment is impossible because the character of life is a will to will17: ‘the basis of all willing, however, is need [Bedürftigkeit], lack [Mangel], and hence pain [Schmerz], and by its very nature and origin, it is therefore destined to pain.’18 This is why Schopenhauer creates a morality of compassion, to which Nietzsche is opposed.19 Such a morality makes it impossible according to Nietzsche to experience actual happiness or joy (I

14 Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, 2. 15 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I 65 as cited in Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 108. 16 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 113. 17 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 122. 18 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 120. 19 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 161. 9 will elaborate on this point in chapter four). Nietzsche’s will to power, according to Reginster, however, assumes that there is no will to ‘live’, since only that which already has life also has will.20 In Reginster’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the will to power is the will to overcome resistance. Therefore, life is one of permanent striving for ‘expansion, incorporation, growth’ which is driven by displeasure.21 In its fundamental form, the will to power is therefore already one of affirmation; it is to will willing, to will resistance be overcome.22 On this basis Reginster gives a very interesting theory on the revaluation of the values of suffering and Mitleid to which I will return in chapter four, where it will be supplemented with Staten and Pippin’s interpretations on suffering and love. Via this path, Reginster comes to an understanding of the affirmation of life. Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche’s philosophy, albeit a use of Nietzsche to create Deleuze’s own philosophy, helps to understand why it is important to view life as becoming when considering affirmation. His work, though more ontologically disposed than Nietzsche, sees life as ever-changing relations of forces. 23 It is based on Nietzsche’s critique on searching for fixed, permanent states and beings. If, for instance, a person is always in a state of becoming, they are always changeable.24 The way these relations are intersecting depends on an ‘open field of encounters in which new relations are formed, new connections are made and new life-experiments can take shape.’25 According to Deleuze, forces can be “active” or “reactive”. Active forces are those that make a person create, go beyond their limits26, whilst reactive forces focus a person to conserve what is, prevent change, create stability and strive for eternal peace.27 The way these forces are related to each other is determined by the will to power. Determining here means that because of the quality prevailing in the will to power, forces that have an affinity with that quality become constitutive for the relation.28 The will to power can be affirming or negating depending on function, time and place. For Deleuze, there is an affinity between active forces and the affirming quality of the will to power, and

20 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II On Self-Overcoming: ‘Only where life is, is there also will; but not will to life, instead – thus I teach you – will to power!’. 21 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 126. 22 Pippin criticises this ‘almost intentional’ outlook on the will to power, as if one is ‘trying to create suffering for yourself’ (Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy, 117 footnote 11). I agree with Pippin on this, but I do think that this conception of the will to power as overcoming resistance is helpful in the notion of an affirmation of life, without this intentionality. 23 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 6. 24 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 188. 25Pisters, P. (2009). Micropolitiek. In: Deleuze Compendium [E. Romein, M. Schuilenburg, & S. van Tuien, eds.], pp.224-236. Amsterdam: Boom., 235. 26 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 59. 27 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 100. 28 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 50. 10 there is an affinity between reactive forces and the negating quality of the will to power. A relation of forces can be a becoming-active or becoming-reactive depending on which forces are in play and which quality the will to power has.29 The relationships which forces form are at the same time ‘random’ and necessary; it is all in the toss of the dice.30 The number of possibilities for forming these relations are in principle endless and not determined by a causa sui that has intentions and tries to produce a certain outcome. If one wants to affirm life, one needs to be able to play. This means to affirm all possibilities for acting before the act because your intention only becomes visible in your action.31 It is thus via another route than Reginster that Deleuze comes to the affirmation of life: by an emphasis on the creation of a Subject on the one hand and a sovereign individual on the other, be instead of a revaluation of compassion and suffering. As such, Pippin’s interpretation shares this with Deleuze. As Pippin says: ‘it is “in” the deed. […] Once we “launch” a deed, it takes on a life of its own in the world […] taken up by others in ways we could not have anticipated, perhaps manifesting aspects of our own character that we would not have anticipated. The image further deflates any notion of a strict individual ownership of the deed’32

Anarchism The remainder of this introduction concerns a definition of anarchism and its subsidiary concepts. The definition of anarchism I will use can be called applied anarchism 33 : ‘anarchism is a socio-political theory [and practice] which opposes all systems of domination and oppression.’34 This means a fundamental change in the way people currently live together and exist in the world. It is also necessary to have an intersectional practice to oppose all systems of domination and oppression. Intersectionality is to take into account the ways in which systems of domination are connected and can intersect in the lived experience of people.35 It is as such that anarchist practice requires feminist, black, queer- and trans-, and other liberating movements. 36 This definition of anarchism shifts the focus away from

29 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 63. 30 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 25-27. 31 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy, 75. 32 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,75-76. 33Fiala, A. (spring 2018). Anarchism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [E. N. Zalta ed.]. 34Nocella et al., 2015, p.7 as cited by Fiala, Anarchism.. 35 Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersections of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 140,pp. 139-167. Crenshaw, K. (1990). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review,43, 1241-1299. 36 Arruzza shows how within anarchism, the feminist movement was not always accepted as necessary because it was supposed to be inherent to the definition of anarchism struggling against all forms of domination. However, this is a way in which identity politics is actually important as we will see below. Arruzza, C. (2013). 11 primarily a politics aimed at overthrowing state-power, as is the aim of what Newman calls ‘classical anarchism’37, to addressing domination and power-relations as a more decentralised phenomenon. Michel Foucault described how this decentralised power functions. I will elaborate on this in chapter one. The aim of anarchists is to be free of domination and oppression. Foucault would only speak of “domination” when there is no possibility to act or change, when there is no dynamic in the power relations.38 In Nietzsche’s philosophy domination can be defined in multiple ways, but both Deleuze and Reginster agree that domination is seen as being natural to life. 39 In Deleuze’s interpretation we can speak of dominance when one force prevails over another to direct the relation they are in.40 In Reginster’s interpretation, domination is the consequence of overcoming resistance. 41 Thus, in Nietzsche, dominance is not seen as something that hinders development, whilst in Foucault’s definition it does. However, Nietzsche opposes the lack of dynamic in a similar way to Foucault: to be un-free is to be limited in one’s possibilities for acting.42 It is this lack of dynamic, lack of change and becoming that is what it means to be un-free. I will call this domination and oppression. As will be argued in chapter one, I think the neoliberal governmentality that is prevalent in current Western-European countries is oppressive and dominant. To be able to continue on this line of argument, I will now first consider what it means to be free. To be free, according to the above line of argument, is to be able to decide for yourself who and what you want to be, it is a form of self-realisation or autonomy.43 Freedom can be defined as follows: ‘a subject, or agent, is free from certain constraints, or preventing conditions, to do or become certain things.’44 In this definition, one could also be considered free within a neoliberal governmentality which stimulates one to pursue one’s goals. However, these goals can only be set within the boundaries of “normality”, which are, as we will see, quite limiting. What is necessary then, is another sense of freedom. As Pippin argues, Nietzsche uses a concept of ‘erreichte Freiheit’, achieved freedom, which is a ‘complete and hierarchical unity among states of one’s soul, memories, desires, aversions,

Of What is Anarcha-Feminism the Name? In: The Anarchist Turn [J. Blumenfeld, C. Bottici & S. Chritchley, eds.], pp.111-124. London: Pluto Press. 37 Newman, S. (2010). Postanarchism and power. Journal of Power, 3, 259-274. 38Foucault, Ethics: subjectivity and truth, p. 283 as quoted in Newman, Postanarchism and Power, 267. 39 Reginster gives multiple interpretations in chapter three of The Affirmation of Life. 40 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 86. 41 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 138-139. 42 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 66. 43 Carter, I. (2016). Positive and Negative Liberty. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer edition 2018). [E. N. Zalta, ed.]. 44 Carter, Positive and Negative Liberty. 12 and so forth.’45 I think an important addition is, however, that freedom is a practice.46 It is never fully achieved as a finished state.47 Freedom is therefore also tied up with agency, with what it means to be an individual or a subject. I will extensively consider this topic in chapter one and four, since what it means to be a ‘Subject’ differs quite significantly from what it means to be an ‘individual’. In doing so, I hope to show that ‘it requires that we surrender the conservative pleasures of familiarity, insularity, and routine for investment in a more open horizon of possibility and sustained willingness to risk identity, both collective and individual.’48 In other words, that freedom is a dynamic process as opposed to immobile domination. As I will argue, achieving this freedom cannot be brought about in isolation. As Bakunin wrote: ‘For the individual to be free means to be recognized, considered, and treated as such by another individual, and by all individuals that surround him.’49 So the way of organising in anarchism should reflect this. As Bottici writes, anarchists cannot isolate themselves from the rest of the world, neither individually nor collectively.50 In this lies the basis for a practice that is distinctly feminist in character, since it draws on conceptions of care for each other instead of individualised strength, on mutual aid instead of destroying state-power.51 All this brings me to my first question: why is the current way of living in need of change? I will answer this question in chapter one. For the purpose of this thesis, I have chosen to single out two anarchist practices to consider with this Nietzschean perspective: identity politics and accountability. Both are prevalent in anarchist practice and as topics of discussion. Both practices aim to change the way people currently live together in Western-Europe, whilst embodying in themselves an alternative mode of living. Identity politics is foremost a process that empowers people to work towards their freedom, do demand their place in society. 52 Spivak defined identity politics as strategic essentialism. That is to say: to organise within a group on the basis of shared experiences, politically or culturally, sexually or ethnically.53 This can, and often does, happen by organising around ‘safe spaces’, where people can formulate their ideas and

45 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,109. 46 Brown, States of Injury, 63. 47 Brown, States of Injury 23-27. 48 Brown, States of Injury 25. 49Bakunin quoted in Bottici, C. (2013). Black and Red: The Freedom of Equals. In: The Anarchist Turn, pp.9-34 [ J. Blumenfeld, C. Bottici & S. Chritchley, eds.]. London: Pluto Press, 15. 50Bottici Black and Red, 18-19. 51 Verter, M. C. (2013). Undoing patriarchy, subverting politics: anarchism as a practice of care. The Anarchist Turn, pp.101-110. [J. Blumenfeld, C. Bottici, & S. Critchley, eds.]. London: Pluto Press. 52 Crenshaw Mapping the Margins. 53Spivak, G. C. (1990). The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. [S. Harasym, ed.]. New York: Routledge, 45. 13 discuss those ideas with people who share their experiences on the subject.54 As Crenshaw states: ‘for all those groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development.’55 Organising within a safe space makes discussions about strategy, ideology and tactics easier because they are not obfuscated by racist or sexist comments, the role of people of colour, or of people with a disability in militant actions, nor by the repeated use of wrong pronouns.56 However, in current-day anarchist practice, identity politics can, inadvertently or otherwise, turn out to become ‘privilege politics’, thereby becoming counterproductive in the struggle for freedom, as I will show in chapter two and three. Important to note is that my critique of identity politics will be aimed mostly at the privilege politics identity politics can (and has) become because I do value the way identity politics can contribute to the struggle for freedom by pointing out the dominating and oppressive practices in daily life. Accountability processes are processes that take place when someone within a community has been harmed. Most often, these processes are put into practice in case of sexual assault, abuse or rape. But in principle they are there to ‘address the harm done directly without relying on the state’57 and as such can be extended to other areas of harm. I think accountability processes are an important tool, a promising alternative to state-justice, but a process has to be created that is able to deals with the complexities of social relations. I will argue in chapter two and three that, as of yet, this is not the case within anarchism.

54 Gelderloos, P. (2010), ‘Lines in the Sand’. 55 Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins, 1242. 56It takes up a lot of energy to continuously having to point people to the fact that they are mis-gendering you because not everyone identifies as “he” or “she” but prefer to be referred to as “they”, that not all people of colour are criminals, not all muslims are terrorists, and that both people of colour and women can decide for themselves what they can and cannot do. Because I do value the way in which identity politics helps to become more aware of the oppressions in daily life, I want to connect it to a practical implication for my thesis: the use of pronouns. I will refer to individuals and persons as “they” as to not assume that everyone identifies within one of the two binary gender-categories. I will also use this pronoun to refer to Subjects, as they are still people not only objects. 57CrimethInc. (w.y.). Accounting for Ourselves: Breaking the Impasse Around Assault and Abuse in Anarchist Scenes. 14

Chapter One: ‘People Not Profit’ As we have seen in the introduction, anarchism aims to change the way people now live together in Europe, but it is still unclear why one should want to change this. In other words, why is the current way of living together in need of change? This question is the one I take up in this chapter, while also touching on the question who or what the person is that wants to be free. Since anarchism wants to change all systems of oppression and domination, the focus of anarchist practice is, as we have seen, on power as a decentralised phenomenon. Michel Foucault analysed this power and the way it influences humans’ living together. That is why I will first turn to Foucault’s analysis of power and the development of neoliberal governmentality. To situate Foucault’s analysis in the current debate, I will draw on the works of David Graeber58 and Wendy Brown59.

1.1 Creating the Subject The first important point to note is that Foucault is influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy and incorporated elements of it into his own work. Like Nietzsche, Foucault is concerned to show that certain aspects of life are assumed to be quite stable, are in fact created by history. Nietzsche shows that morality – what is deemed to be “right” or “wrong” – is ‘a complex social institution that frames and shapes human subjects and human agency.’ 60 Foucault continues a genealogy of the subject, which he takes up from Nietzsche.61 The point both Nietzsche and Foucault make here is that there is no ‘unbiased subject’62 and no ‘universal form of the subject to be found everywhere’. 63 Subjectivity is produced by power and morality. For Nietzsche the creation of this “Subject” is done in a process of “active” ressentiment because it is ultimately created by a distinction (co-)created by philosophy between the experienced world, which is illusionary and a ‘true world’ that is the cause of what is done and experienced.64 Philosophers have been devoted to investigate and discover

58 Graeber, D. (2015). The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. New York: Melville House. 59 Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos. Brooklyn: Zone Books. 60 Saar, M. (2008). Understanding Genealogy: History, Power, and the Self. Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2, 295-314, 301. 61 Ansell-Pearson, K. (2015). Questions of the Subject in Nietzsche and Foucault: A Reading of Dawn. In: Nietzsche Today, vol. 5 Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity. [J. Constâncio, M. João Mayer Branco, & B. Ryan, eds.], pp.411-435. Berlin: De Gruyter. 62 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy, 71. 63 Rosenberg, A. & Milchman, A. (2018). Nietzsche and Foucault: Modalities of Appropriating the World for an Art of Living. In: Foucault and Nietzsche: A Critical Encounter. [A. Rosenberg & J. Westfall, eds.], pp. 147 – 192]. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 168. 64 See for instance Nietzsche, Human, All too Human; Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality; Nietzsche, Twilight of Idols. I will elaborate on why creating this distinction is ressentiment in chapter 3. 15 this “true world” – to approach Truth.65 Philosophers search for the Subject in the true world since it is thought that consciousness, intentions and free will – ‘what lies “behind” our basic commitments’66 – can be found there. The Subject is thereby posited as a causa sui, the origin of what is done in the world that can be separated from the acts.67 This distinction is made by creating a conscience as the cause for acting: their intentions, which are the cause of action; intentions, qua cause, can be located in consciousness.68 Foucault’s analysis helps us understand how this process of creating a Subject works by giving a ‘history of the microphysics of power’. 69 Power, according to Foucault, is productive, meaning that it both uses and creates knowledge to produce a Subject that can be then disciplined and controlled.70 The subject is both created as an object of knowledge and a knowing Subject that gathers knowledge on itself and others. This is done on two levels: the individual level and the collective, population level. At the level of the individual, knowledge is gathered by Subjects on themselves for the purpose of disciplinary techniques to make Subjects more useful.71 At the level of the population, knowledge is gathered by Subjects on the whole population (for instance statistic data), to regulate and control the population and to protect it from internal dangers.72 The power that is exerted on Subjects on this second level is what Foucault calls biopolitical power. 73 Power and knowledge are here inseparable because ‘power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in it, on the basis of, and thanks to that power.’ 74 The Subject created through these knowledge-gathering and power-exerting techniques, learns to tell the “truth” about themselves.75 This is what also happens in identity politics according to Brown: people tell the truth about themselves and posit this as a universal truth about people with that identity, laying claim to both the truth and to morality.76

65 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,14 in this search, truth and morality are knit together, since these same philosophers who look for Truth also search to ground morality in an objective truth: only those that are true can be good, and only what is true is worth pursuing in life. 66 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,43, 72. 67 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,68-70. 68 Nietzsche, TI, Four Great Errors, 3. 69 Ansell-Pearson, Questions of the Subject, 414. 70 Foucault, M., (1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction [translation: Robert Hurley, 1978]. New York: Pantheon Books, 135-150. 71 Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. [translation: Alan Sheridan, 1977]. New York: Vintage Books, 170. 72 Foucault, M., (2003). Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976. [M. Bertani and A. Fontana, eds.]. New York: Picador, 249. 73 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 144. 74 Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 24. 75 Brown, States of Injury, 42 76 Brown, States of Injury, 47. 16

Both disciplinary and biopolitical power create the Subject. Disciplinary power is exerted by techniques of surveying, creating a dossier, educating and training and regulating behaviour at the individual level.77 Biopolitical power adds to this by calculating population averages, deviations, predicting events and creating dividing lines between “normal” and “abnormal”.78 Together, these techniques shape a governmentality that aims to normalise the Subject, to make them conform to certain norms that are set by society: ‘the individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.’79 Nietzsche shows us that this creation of the Subject is not a necessary development but rather inspired by ressentiment, Foucault, on the other hand, shows how this Subject functions within our current society.

1.2 The Neoliberal Subject The various techniques of power together form an “art of governing”, a governmentality.80 Characteristically, governmentality is independent from the ideology that makes use of it: ‘the exercises of power consist in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome.’81 According to Foucault the governmentality that shapes one’s life is a neoliberal governmentality, and according to Wendy Brown and the analysis of Graeber this is still accurate. These analyses by Brown and Graeber are necessary since Foucault ‘did not anticipate the ways that the sciences of economics, business, and politics would be merged through rational choice, formal modelling, and above all, the language of administrative government.’82 The power techniques in this neoliberal governmentality not only aim at more obedience, but at making people and the population as a whole behave more “rational” – i.e. more economical – choice. 83 Because the social aspect of society in neoliberalism is completely regulated by “market” principles, even when enforced by state-actors, the principle of ‘equality in inequality’ is created.84 This equality in inequality means that people are equal in the risk that they can fall on harder times: there is inequality for everyone. The market is based on the principle of competition, in which the creation of social equality is

77 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136-137. 78 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 144; Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 249. 79 Foucault, M. (1988). Power/Knowledge. [C. Gordon, ed.]. New York: Penguin Random House, 74. 80 Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population – Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 [M. Senellart, F. Ewald, & A. Fontana; translation Graham Burchell, eds.]. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 97, 104. 81 Foucault, M., (1982). The Subject and Power. In: Critical Inquiry, 8, 777-795, 788-789. 82 Brown Undoing the Demos, 77. 83 Foucault, Subject and Power, 788. 84Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. [M. Sennelart, ed.]. New York: Palgrave Macillan, 167. 17 deemed “anti-economic”. Freedom is then seen as not having obstacles to prevent one from reaching one’s goal. Risks are privatised as much as possible and one becomes the entrepreneur of one’s own life, the Subject becomes a homo oeconomicus.85 A rational choice is thus one that generates as much profit as possible. 86 Brown adds: ‘Today, homo oeconomicus maintains aspect of that entrepreneurialism, but has been significantly reshaped as financialized human capital: its project is to self-invest in ways that enhance its value or to attract investors through constant attention to its actual or figurative credit rating, and to do this across every sphere of its existence.’87 The Subject is made completely responsible for their own situation and actions.88 While it is not bad that people are valued as having agency, the sense of freedom in neoliberal governmentality is lacking and the idea of equality in inequality is, as we will see, only theoretically interesting because of the way in which Subjects are created. As Graeber argues this equality in inequality principle will not hold in our society. In the bureaucratic world some people are more adept at ‘navigating the world of paperwork’ than others, for instance because their parents are richer and because of having had a better education to learn to understand this bureaucratic world.89 This system helps to keep those who are already faring better to keep doing so while not opening up the opportunity for those who are doing less well: one needs money to get an education, but this money first has to come from somewhere which can not only be done by just working harder. However, since this dynamic is not taken into account when determining whether one makes rational choices, this system can become increasingly oppressive. As soon as one does not follow the norm of making oneself into an entrepreneurial self, one does not ‘assess the world in a non-delusional fashion’90, in other words: one is crazy and needs treatment – normalised – because if everyone were to do this, it would threaten the neoliberal governmentality. The disciplinary and biopolitical techniques used on the neoliberal Subject are often forms of “soft power”, like legal rights, bureaucratic rules, privileges etc.91 But the techniques used can become increasingly oppressive when one seems resistant to change – this is often deemed a personal failing, since one is responsible for oneself, not taking into account the above described dynamic of equality in inequality. The normalising practices are

85 Foucault Birth of Biopolitics, 147, 226, 249. 86Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 135. 87Bown Undoing the Demos, 32-33. 88 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 120. 89Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 23. 90Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 38. 91 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 35. 18

‘felt most cruelly by the poor, who are constantly monitored by an intrusive army of moralistic box-tickers assessing their child-rearing skills, inspecting their food cabinets to see if they are really cohabiting with their partners, determining whether they have been trying hard enough to find a job, or whether their medical conditions are really sufficiently severe to disqualify them from physical labor.’92 These bureaucratic systems and normalising practices are always, according to Graeber, ‘backed up by the threat of force.’ 93 This does not necessarily mean an increase in physical violence, but can include taking away rights and privileges, forced treatment, or, ultimately, imprisonment. These practices of normalisation, which Foucault describes, fit in with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of ressentiment: it is an attempt at ‘a collectivity-building project that aims at disciplining bodies and selves and integrating them into a uniform whole’.94 This might seem counter-intuitive, since it would fit in nicely with Nietzschean ideas of ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ and the naturalness of the strong coming out on top. However, as Ansell-Pearson argues, it is precisely the homogenising consequence towards which biopolitical and disciplinary techniques aim that is ressentiment. We will see in chapter three exactly how this works, but it is for now enough to state that part of why the current way of living together is in need of change, is that it is based on ressentiment. The question is whether identity politics can change this way of living together based on a neoliberal governmentality. This question is pressing for two reasons. First, certain political identities, such as working-class, woman, black, queer, are depoliticised within this neoliberal framework, and identity politics is , broadly speaking, an attempt to (re-)politicise them. Second, the structural oppressions surrounding these identities are not taken into account when deciding if it was the natural working of the world that someone has fallen onto hardship. However, as we will see in chapter two, identity politics often focus on gaining rights, which is a way of gaining recognition within the neoliberal framework. As such, as Brown writes: political identity is ‘essentialized into private interest’. 95 This is because freedom within neoliberalism is seen as the existence of individual rights and the lack of obstacles to pursue goals, in combination with a Subject that is completely self-reliant and a causa sui. People’s hardship is individualised because the structural oppression is not taken into account.96 As such, the neoliberal Subject is ‘vulnerable to ressentiment’ according to

92Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 41. 93Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 32. 94Ure 2006, as cited by Ansell-Pearson, Questions of the Subject, 424. 95 Brown, States of Injury, 59. 96 Newman, Politics of Postanarchism, 11. 19

Brown.97 This goes for all neoliberal Subjects, since they fall back on the initial distinction between a “true world” and a “illusionary world”, but identity politics run an especially high risk because often a ‘sovereign and unified “I” that is disenfranchised by an exclusive “we”’ is created'.98 In doing so, people both tell the ‘hidden truth’ about their group identity and thereby lay claim on what is good: that which is opposite to oppression. But ‘the irony [is] that rights sought by a politically defined group are conferred upon depoliticized individuals; at the moment a particular “we” succeeds in obtaining rights, it loses its we-ness and dissolves into individuals’.99 I will elaborate on this depoliticised character of the neoliberal Subject more in chapter two where I will consider the way in which anarchist identity politics takes shape and whether it can escape this characteristic. This chapter started with the question why anarchists would want to change the current way of living together. I can answer to this question it is because living a neoliberal governmentality – which creates Subjects as entrepreneurs who are utterly responsible for their own well-being – is ultimately based on a morality of ressentiment. It puts profit over people. Everyone who does not conform to this ideal can be normalised under the threat of force to maintain the well-being of society as a whole. This neoliberal governmentality and its power techniques function on the assumption that the Subject is a causa sui with a free will, intentionality and responsibility. This, thereby, depoliticises their hardship as something that is their own responsibility. In turn, this limits the Subject’s freedom: their possibilities for acting are decided by the neoliberal governmentality along the lines of economical rationality. However, procuring rights might not be enough to liberate this Subject – i.e. to open up more possibilities for action – since rights define what it is to be a Subject, with which comes a set of norms and normalising practices. As such, Foucault’s analysis that is focused on the productive aspects of power falls short. According to Foucault one is still free within this neoliberal governmentality because there is opportunity for resistance. However, he underestimates, I think, how thoroughly the morality of ressentiment influences and limits the possibilities for acting. When the foundation of the resistance is still based on this ressentiment, on the same ideas of the Subject, rights and “Truth”, those attempts can easily be neutralised and incorporated within the neoliberal governmentality without providing actual freedom. It is thus necessary to evaluate whether anarchist practices are also based on

97 Brown, States of Injury, 67. 98 Brown, States of Injury, 61. 99 Brown, States of Injury, 98. 20 these ideas as to consider the question why anarchism does not seem to be a viable alternative for living together.

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Chapter Two: ‘Bigger Cages! Longer Chains!’ The situation that anarchism tries to change, the neoliberal governmentality described in chapter one, is based on what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, since it functions on the basis of a distinction between a “true world” and an “illusionary world”. Besides, neoliberal governmentality tries to fully conform people to a universalised morality of the economic. Brown suggests that people who organise their politics based on identity are even more susceptible to ressentiment. So in this chapter I will discuss identity politics and accountability as it is practiced in anarchist politics. As such it will form the basis for an answer to the question why these practices exemplify (following Nietzsche) ressentiment.

2.1 When Identity Politics Become Privilege Politics Identity politics is, as Spivak states, strategic essentialism. As such, it creates the, sometime very necessary, position of the “Other” as opposed to the Self to clarify what is going on in an oppressive power-relation. In many cases the self is then constructed as Other because they are on the receiving end of the relation. This is called ‘alterity’.100 An example of how this operates can be found in the work of Frantz Fanon, where he shows black people as radically other than white people in the context of colonialism.101 Alterity helps to show what is going on in these oppressive power relations: people are deemed as less valuable, as having fewer rights as humans based on their identity as “black”, “woman”, “queer” or all of the above. It can help to show that sometimes, people are not seen as people or even Subjects – however problematic that notion may be in itself – but as objects. Silvia Federici gives an example of this in her book Caliban and the Witch102, where she responds to Foucault’s claim that power is productive. She argues that power-relations only create Subjects who are acknowledged as such within governmentality. 103 For those who do not fall within this category, for instance women (as Federici argues) or black people (as K. Aaron argues), power-relations are more repressive than productive.104 This means that the power-relations are not dynamic, resulting in an absence of freedom. Aarons argues that this is still the case for black people in the United States; the slave-relation is still in place: ‘the slave-relation, Patterson argued, is rather defined by a threefold condition: a) general dishonourment (or

100 Appiah, K. A. (1991). Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial? Critical Inquiry, 17, 336-357, 354. 101 See The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. 102 Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. Brooklyn, NY, USA: Autonomedia. 103 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 15-16. 104 Aarons, K., (2016). No Selves to Abolish: Afropessimism, Anti-Politics and the End of the World. Retrieved from: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/k-aarons-no-selves-to-abolish-afropessimism-anti- politics-and-the-end-of-the-world. 22 social death), b) natural alienation (i.e. the systematic rupture of familial and genealogical continuities), c) gratuitous or limitless violence.’105 Therefore, it can be really important to organise politically on the basis of identity.

2.1.1 Essentialising Identity However, there are several problems with organising politically around identity in such a way. Crenshaw briefly highlights one: ‘it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences. […] ignoring differences within groups contributes to tension among groups’106 thereby making it harder to organise intersectionally, which is, as I argued in the introduction, important. This is part of seeing the self as a ‘unified “I”’, as something with an essential identity. Essentialism means there are certain characteristic that are a precondition of some identity.107 For instance, before one is a woman one must have a womb, ovaries, breasts. When one organises politically around identity, it is often the assumption that this identity can be generalised to groups of people, thereby smoothing over the differences between people who have one or several characteristics in common108: ‘the idea that there exists some detectible and objective core-quality of particular groups of people that is inherent, eternal, and unalterable.'109 In this way essentialism can become normalising: it pushes someone into a role that is associated with that identity and dressing, talking, and acting accordingly.110 The consequence of not conforming to these expectations can lead to being laughed at, stigmatised, or even excluded and denied a part of your identity. As such, creating an essential idea of what it is to be “gay”, “queer”, “woman”, and even “disabled” or “black” runs the risk of reproducing the same normalising power-practices that anarchist practice would oppose. Not only do these practices normalise certain individuals, however, it also reinforces the idea that structurally oppressed groups of people are different, “Other”, or victims. However necessary it may initially be to define yourself as the Other to gain recognition for your situation, to be seen as a person in the first place, one has to be careful to not completely identify with this identity as “victim”. Below I will argue that such an identity can become passivating. Examples of this happening are provided by multiple anarchist texts,

105 Aarons, No Selves to Abolish, 4. 106 Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins, 1242. 107 Gelderloos, Lines in the Sand, 8. 108 Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins; Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic. 109Jarach, L. (2004), Essentialism and the Problem of Identity Politics, 3. 110 Anonymous. (2012). Dangerous Foundations. 23 like Who is Oakland111, Ain’t no PC gonna fix it baby112, Against Innocence113, A Critique of Ally Politics114, and No Selves to Abolish115. Those show that agency is taken away because people are seen as victims. If one completely identifies as the victim of oppression, they would lose their ‘political significance of difference’ as soon as one stops being oppressed. One would lose an important part of their identity. The queer collective BASH BACK! even claims that identity politics is accordingly ‘rooted in an ideology of victimisation’116 I would argue that it is not a feature of identity politics per se but of what I will call ‘privilege politics’.

2.1.2 Claiming Rights Instead of Freedom Within the neoliberal framework where freedom is seen as having rights, political struggle around identity becomes what Aaron labels ‘privilege’ politics.117 I will refer to privilege politics for the rest of this discussion because it makes possible the important distinction between the sometimes necessary identity politics and its counterproductive expression in privilege politics. Within privilege politics, identity becomes “property” or “capital” which can be employed– within the boundaries of the neoliberal governmentality – to lobby for or demand rights.118 While this might initially help to gain the status of a Subject, it makes one dependent on the ‘benevolence’ of those in power. 119 Besides, it will not structurally change the radical exclusion of people deemed unworthy; ‘Rights that empower those in one social location or strata may disempower those in another.’120 An example of this is given by Arruzzi, when discussing the way in which second-wave feminism influenced anarchism.121 Due to the focus on the Subject, the Subject of the “woman” is created as opposed to the “man”, but at the same time excluding trans- and non-binary people from having the same rights.122 This is what Foucault calls Racism123: dividing up groups of people

111 Croatoan. (2012). Who is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co- Optation. Escalating Identity. 112 CrimethInc. (2014). Ain’t no PC gonna fix it baby. 113 Wang, J. (2012). Against Innocence – Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety. LIES: A Journal of Material Feminism, 1. 114 M. (2015). A Critique of Ally Politics. Exerpt from: Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism. Chico: AK Press. 115 Aarons, No Selves to Abolish. 116Eanelli, T. (2007-2011). Bash Back! Is Dead; Bash Back Forever!, 12. 117 Aaron, No Selves to Abolish, 3. 118 Heckert, J. (2002). Maintaining the Borders: identity & politics, 5. 119 Aaron, No Selves to Abolish, 3. 120 Brown, States of Injury, 98. 121 Arruzzi, Anarcha-Feminism, 119. 122 An extreme example of this that Arruzzi does not mention, is the case of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who argue that transwomen cannot participate in feminist struggle, since they do not have the 24 on the basis of the evaluation whether they are worth the investment. 124 Concretely, it concerns dilemmas such as: is it worth giving an alcoholic a new liver to keep them alive or are they not worth the investment? Another consequence of what the granting of rights can be is that some persons can ‘become “junior partners” of White civil society.’125 This means they can be incorporated or allied with the society that oppresses them as a group.126 The problem is that this acceptance by society happens on the basis of “innocence”: only when one is innocent can one be accepted; their oppression recognised as unfair. By the acceptance of some individuals their oppression is acknowledged as unfair due to their “innocence”, but the structural oppression of the group is not (necessarily) addressed. An example: the friendly leader of the group advocating non-violent protests or that neighbour next door that one knows well can be accepted, since one knows they are good people and their treatment is unfair. However, this is not mean that those rioting people who destroyed the car of the president are also treated unfairly, after all, they destroyed property so they are not innocent. This (unconscious) focus on innocence and rights takes the political out of the identity because ‘it may be that the withdrawal that rights offer, the unmarking or de-stigmatisation they promise, has as its cost the loss of a language to describe the character of domination, violation, or exploitation that configures such needs.’127 Heckert writes that identity, political identity, tries to provide an answer to the question who one is, but that the labels that are now used are only to relay ‘someone’s position in various hierarchies’.128 It is because of this that identity politics ‘fits in nicely with the dominant neoliberal ideology. Groups created around oppressed identities can lobby the state for civil rights’,129 but these rights function on the basis of neutrality and universality in which the identity is depoliticised.130 A Subject can have rights because they belong to a certain group that is granted those rights. However, as shown in chapter one, the neoliberal governmentality does not account for systematic oppression and the “Racism” inherent in this governmentality is thus still in place. What the granting of rights creates, then, is a Subject based on a political identity, setting norms and normalising the individual biological characteristics of women and therefore do not “really” experience womanhood and cannot know the oppression that comes with it. 123 It should be noted here that this form of Racism is not what we would call racism in our daily lives. Foucault generalises this phenomenon to all instances where a distinction is made between groups of people. 124 Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 254. 125 Aaron, No Selves to Abolish, 6. 126 Wang, Against Innocence, 4. 127 Brown, States of Injury, 126. 128 Heckert, Maintaining the Border, 5. 129 Heckert, Maintaining the Border, 5. 130 Brown, States of Injury, 98. 25

Subjects involved to the group-norms. The political is eliminated because one’s situation is again individualised and subordinated to what is economical.131 It is important to remember, according to Brown, what Foucault has taught us: ‘law produces the subjects it claims to protect or emancipate.’132 It is exactly because of this that anarchism requires a different notion subjectivity that is not based on the Subject with a free will and intentions, but centered around the claim that, as Pippin puts it: ‘the deed alone can show who one is, what one is actually committed to’.133

2.1.3 Identity for Ascribing Blame In privilege politics, identities are thus viewed as capital or property. Besides the problem of viewing identity as such, there is an additional problem with this practice for anarchist communities. Anarchists are highly aware of the oppression going on in society and are striving to not reproduce these oppressions in their practice. Within this context identity can be (and is) used as property in anarchist practice. Exactly those people who are the most oppressed in society, can claim the most oppressed identities and as such use them as a form of “currency”.134 People who are oppressed are often not listened to, not taken seriously or completely excluded from participating in the neoliberal society. Giving them a voice, then, often means initially demanding others stop talking and start listening. However, when this is translated to anarchist spaces where people are aware of these oppressions and sensitive to their critique, it can result in a reversal of society’s hierarchies instead of an abolition of those hierarchies: it can become a demand that those who are most oppressed be followed without question. 135 When someone does not follow the lead of the most oppressed person, the consequences can be ‘the moralising revenge of the powerless’.136 This happens for instance through practices of ‘public denunciation and/or disruption, criticism/self-criticism, purging/exclusion.’137 Thus, people can start feeling guilty for their lack of oppression, which is, as we will see in the next chapter, a consequence of ressentiment: it is ressentiment turned

131 Newman, Politics of Postanarchism, 11. 132 Brown, States of Injury, 131. 133 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,78. 134 This is not the best word for what is happening here. I am not suggesting they exchange oppressed identities to receive something else, but the more oppressed identities one has, the more ‘privilege’ they can receive in anarchist communities, as I will show. On the other hand, it reveals a weakness of anarchist practice, namely that it is often quite a white, male-dominated practice. I do not have the opportunity to discuss this here in depth, but this should definitely be given attention in changing the way anarchists organise. 135Crimethinc, Ain’t No PC, 3. 136 Brown, States of Injury, 67. 137 Dragonowl, L. (2015). Against Identity Politics: Spectres, Joylessness, and the contours of ressentiment, 3. 26 active.138 The focus on who is the most oppressed turns into the question who is morally superior.139 The response to this guilt can be to keep silent and passively follow someone’s lead. It can also be that someone becomes an active ‘ally’: ‘according to ally politics, the only way to undermine one’s own privilege is to give up one’s role as an individual agent, and follow the lead of those more or differently oppressed.’140 One would thus be seeking leadership, a rather un-anarchist approach to changing society. It is also a problematic approach, since it is often the case that one seeks out ‘the most visible “leaders” of a community whose lead to follow. This structurally reinforces hierarchical power’.141 Or the person who is chosen as leader can become an actual leader because of the authority that is heaped upon them.142 This can result in one giving up pursuing one’s own political ideals in favour of, for instance, more authoritarian politics because this happens to be the political standpoint of the person chosen to follow.143 It can also lead to the demand for the use or not-use of certain tactics in order to “protect” all the oppressed people within that category.144 This practice essentialises what certain people with a particular characteristic can or will do. For example, it lends credence to the assumptions that all people of colour are anti-racist, that all women are feminists, or that queer or disabled people cannot participate in a black block or other militant tactics.145 In the first two assumptions, identity becomes a moral category as well, since antiracism and feminism are generally seen as ‘good’ within anarchist action because it opposes certain oppressions. In the second assumption, people are again not listening to others; their agency is reduced because decisions are made for them on the basis of arbitrary characteristics; the differences within groups are smoothed over. The capabilities of oppressed people are denied them, their oppression affirmed, thereby ‘erasing the ongoing histories of Black [or queer or other identity categories] autonomous revolt and replacing it with a vision of struggle that

138Jarach, Essentialism, 3; Women’s Caucus of the Anarchist Federation. (2013). A Class Struggle Anarchist Analysis of Privilege Theory. Dysophia, 4, 12-18. 139 This raises the question of how to decide who is most oppressed. To give an example: is it the disabled white guy that people structurally deny agency because he is in a wheelchair, or the Indonesian man living in the Netherlands and discriminated against because of his appearance? 140Crimethinc. Ain’t No PC, 3. 141 M., Critique of Ally Politics, 6. 142 Croatoan, Who is Oakland, 22-23. 143 M, Critique of Ally Politics, 7. 144 Common Cause Ottawa. (2014). With Allies like these: reflections on privilege reductionism, 17; Croatoan, Who is Oakland, 27-31; Crimethinc, Ain’t No PC, 6-7; Gelderloos, Lines in Sand, 15; Walia, H. (2010), 10 points on the Black Bloc, youtube streamed interview, 00:23:52h.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6MxpsdXfrE. 145 Wang, Against Innocence, 19. I have seen one of the most effective and persistent blockades carried out by one person in a wheelchair; why would we want to deny them this opportunity on the basis of the generalisation that no disabled people want to participate in these actions. 27 looks more like a voluntary disavowal of privilege by white leftists and people-of-colour- allies [or other allies].’ 146 This exemplifiesbelief in the neoliberal Subject: identity and oppression are individualised to the extent that the political that addresses the structural oppression of a group is neutralised through belief in universal rights and an innocent Subject. As such, it reduces the number of possibilities for thoroughly changing how people live together. Besides, the structural oppression becomes secondary to the identity of ‘being oppressed’ and the struggle becomes one to gain rights within the neoliberal governmentality, not to get rid of the neoliberal governmentality. The victim-identity is thereby endorsed.

2.1.4 Using Safe Spaces for Escape Besides assessing how privilege politics can limit the freedom of people due to essentialist ideas on what a certain identity implies for one’s behaviour or capabilities, or for the freedom of the people who are less oppressed within the anarchist practices, I also want to pay attention to what privilege politics can mean for people on the outskirts of an anarchist movement. By outskirts of the anarchist movement I mean those who are considering, but not (yet), actively participating. Often, anarchist places are seen as “safe spaces”. As mentioned in the introduction this can help a great deal in initially forming ideas or temporarily withdrawing from action and conflict to recover and regain energy. But as Brown states: ‘our spaces, while requiring some definition and protection cannot be clean, sharply bounded, disembodied, or permanent.’147 However, they are often treated this way. People who are new to anarchism can find a decidedly unwelcome reception when they do not already know the right language and have the same knowledge of political topics. Wang describes how in current society ‘bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for Whites.’148 The same, however, often happens in anarchist, queer, women, or PoC spaces. People who make others ‘uncomfortable’ or unsafe are disposed of, for instance on the basis of them not being “queer enough” or “punk enough”.149 As Wang argues, criticising this can be difficult due to the referral to personal feelings: ‘when people use safe space language to call out people in activist spaces, the one wielding the language is framed as innocent, and may even amplify or

146 Aaron, No Selves to Abolish, 3. 147 Brown, States of Injury, 50. 148 Wang, Against Innocence, 9. 149 This happens for instance with people who look like most people do in society, not with their faces full of piercings or flashing haircuts. But it also happens when someone is not easily identifiable as ‘queer’ because one looks both lesbian and heterosexual. 28 politicise their presumed innocence.’ 150 This way they can ‘exert power without being questioned.’151 This is not to say one should not be able to ask people to leave when they are deliberately hurting others, but care should be taken not to stigmatise people who act in ignorance. I will give an example. Often, people who are new to anarchist movements and spaces do not know for instance that some people do not identify as man or woman, and like to be referred to as “they” instead of “her”, as I mentioned earlier. It can take time to learn this152 which can be understandably frustrating for a non-binary person. However, to send the new person away with the message to ‘educate themselves’ before returning, is not very helpful. That person would still need the right search-words to type into their browser and the results will to a large extent depend on the search history. For instance, a search about ‘people who are not men nor women’, can yield articles about gender dysphoria disorders instead of the intended articles on gender fluidity and pronouns, leaving the new person to think that all those queer people have mental disorders. This will not improve communication, whilst the new person did “educate themselves”. It was just not the right education. Even if one has the right articles that explain pronouns and gender fluidity, a lot of those texts are written in academic language which excludes people without a higher education. It is important that people learn about topics like gender, colonialism, capitalism etc., but people should not be sent away because they do not already know and therefore make others uncomfortable. People are not finished beings, everyone is still learning. And so, as Brown writes, anarchists (and others) have to learn ‘how to have public conversations with each other, arguing from a vision about the common (“what I want for us”) rather than from identity (“who I am”). 153 She argues, and I agree, that critically questioning certain standpoints can lead to feeling more responsible for the situation one is in; for one is always located in a history of oppression.154 One must to embrace their history in order to overcome ressentiment. It means anarchists have to leave their safe spaces, go out into the world where they will undoubtedly suffer and get into conflict with others.

150 Wang, Against Innocence, 17. 151 Wang, Against Innocence, 18. 152 Especially in Dutch where it is grammatically counterintuitive to use the plural “they” for one person, and it quickly seems to imply that someone has a multiple personality disorder. 153 Brown, States of Injury, 51. 154Rossdale, C. (2015). Dancing Ourselves to Death: The Subject of Emma Goldman’s Nietzschean Anarchism. Globalizations,12, 116-133, 128. 29

2.2. When Accountability Becomes the Justice System In the previous section I looked closely at what happens when identity politics become privilege politics. Now I will turn to a similar development in another important practice: accountability. Anarchists try to live in an alternative way, which means not relying on the state or the neoliberal justice system when someone has been harmed. The alternative for this, which is often put into practice in cases of sexual assault or rape, is called an accountability process which ‘address[ess] the harm done directly without relying on the state.’155 This is a process that could very well be extended to other situations in which people are hurt.

2.2.1 Restorative Justice Accountability processes are initially based on an idea of ‘restorative justice’.156 As Zehr writes, restorative justice can take on many, more or less, structured forms. There are accordingly multiple philosophical interpretations and practices of restorative justice as it relates to accountability processes. For the purpose of this thesis, I have used the Little Book of Restorative Justice, by Zehr and Gohar to give an indication of what the basic principles are. 157 According to this book, restorative justice is based on the idea that everyone is connected ‘in a web of relationships’.158 Still more basic is the idea that there is such a thing as a community that is tightly knit together. Importantly, a crime is seen as being done against a person and/or damaging the community instead as a violation of the law.159 Hurting someone is thus seen as a loss of trust. Therefore, community members play important roles in the justice process, as victims, wrongdoers, and mediators. An important part of the process is often dialogue or a facilitated meeting with all parties to decide upon everyone’s needs – also the needs of the “perpetrator” – because it is based on the assumption that everyone has certain needs to make the process work. Both should take responsibility for their actions and repay the harm that has been done. 160 The “perpretrator” should take responsibility, which is only possible when their participation in the process does not result in

155CrimethInc, Accounting for Ourselves, 3. 156Crimethinc, Accounting for Ourselves, 3. 157 Zehr, H. (2016). Preface. In: Reconstructing Restorative Justice Philosophy [Gravielides, T. & Artinopoulou, V., eds], pp.xvii-xix. New York: Routledge. In the same book, Mackay writes that it concerns restorative justice as both a sociological and ethical principle that functions within and alongside the legal justice system. So it is essentially linked to the state and the ‘pursuit of peace’ (Mackay, p.111). Problematic in this link to the justice system is that ‘the law does not generally provide the opportunity for the healing aspect’ (Mackay, p.115). 158Zehr, H. & Gohar, A. (2003). The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Intercourse: Good Books, 17. 159Zehr & Gohar, Little Book, 19. 160 Mackay argues that this repayment is often difficult, especially in the case of material harm such as with rape or assault. Besides which, restorative justice strives for reconciliation, which might not always be possible in such cases (Mackay, The Nexus, 114-115). 30 their complete exclusion from the community or denunciation of their person.161 I will add here what Mackay argues: restorative Justice often has to deal with moral injury and Honneth’s idea of recognition and moral obligation are therefore important to take into account. He states that ‘we develop self-confidence through recognizing and having recognized by other the individuality of our basic needs and desires. We develop self-respect when we acknowledge our obligations to others, and experience others fulfilling their obligations toward us. Third, we develop a sense of self-worth when we recognize our capacities and have them recognized by others.’162 In addition to the restorative justice theory, anarchist accountability processes, theoretically at least, consider the cycles of marginalisation and oppression when trying to resolve a conflict. This means that what was done is interpreted as being (partly) the result of patriarchal, capitalist, neoliberal, racist views that have been instilled by society.163 In what follows, I will describe and critique anarchist accountability processes in order to lay the foundations for an accountability process that can function as an alternative to state justice; one that does not rely on hierarchies and domination, but on care and mutual aid. An accountability process that is feminist in its practice.

2.2.2 Punishing the Guilty Accountability processes often include a combination of calling out the person that is seen as “perpetrator” and the “survivor” 164 seeking help in the community to issue and enforce a ‘list of demands for the perpetrator and requests regarding how they want others to interact with that person.’165 The perpetrator is excluded from conversation and their needs are not taken into account. This does not help someone take responsibility or help them to change their behaviour as to prevent them doing the same again and thus harming again. Instead, it punishes someone by taking revenge and justifies this by claiming the moral high- ground. As we will see in the next chapter, this practice of punishment and revenge is based on ressentiment and, more specifically, on what Nietzsche calls “bad conscience”. Instead of punishing someone as a way to teach them to not do this again and to find a way to deal with being harmed, the list of demands often takes the shape of ‘negotiating how they never have

161Zehr & Gohar, Little Book, 14-15. 162 Mackay, The Nexus, 120. 163Crimethinc, Accounting for Ourselves. 164 I put “perpetrator” and “survivor” in quotation marks as to indicate the vocabulary used is part of the moralising character of current accountability processes and as such needs to be changed. However, I do need words to indicate a distinction between those who does the harm and those who are harmed. Due to lack of a better word, I will therefore use perpetrator and survivor. 165CrimethInc. (2009). Thinking through Perpetrator Accountability. Rolling Thunder, 8. 31 to see each other again or share space’.166 I come back here to the point made earlier about safe spaces. This practice is held to the ideal Brown argues to be untenable: a space that is completely and permanently safe.

2.2.3 The Evil One The second point of critique I want to offer concerns the use of the vocabulary and its attendant morality. Making an absolute distinction between “perpetrator” and “survivor” preserves the state justice system, where there is a clear identity of a morally contemptible person who has violated the rights of the other, and the passive victim that should receive unquestionable support and compensation for the violated rights. This practice founded on rights and universalises, neutralises, and depoliticises what is going on.167 The justice system is based on the perceived “Truth” of the law, which does not consider the context of the situation. There can be no discussion: the law was broken, the perpetrator should be punished by being shamed, called-out, isolated, their social standing broken down, or all of the above.168 However, in social relations, it is hardly ever as simple: ‘people in relation to each other create healthy or unhealthy exchanges.’169 In this distinction between good and evil, it is the person that is punished, the person who is evil, instead of the act being wrong. This builds on the concept of guilt and the distinction between the Subject and the deed. It is grounded in ressentiment as we will see in the next chapter. The creation of this “evil” identity – and conversely the “good” identity that is derived from it – entails a feeling of power over someone else.170 As such, it once again creates identity as property and support as currency.171 It matters for one’s social standing if one is deemed good or evil: ‘if I was called out for abuse, I became a morally contemptible person. But if I were also a survivor, I suddenly deserved sympathy and support.’172 The label sticks with a person in a surrounding where almost everyone is acquainted. The same goes for everyone around the people involved in direct conflict, since support to the survivor should be unquestionably given. If this support is not unquestionably given, one might be labelled “rape apologist”, “sexist”, “racist”, “ableist” etc., which is likely to result in social death

166 Celeste, A. (2012). Safety is an Illusion. The broken teapot (Anonymous, ed.). 167 Brown, States of Injury, 97. 168 Lee, F. Excommunicate me from the Church of Social Justice. Setting Fire to the Church of Social Justice. 169 Celeste, Safety is an Illusion, 8. 170 Celeste, Safety is an Illusion; Anonymous, Questioning Rape. Setting Fire to the Church of Social Justice. 171 Anonymous. (2012). Foreword. In: The Broken Teapot (Anonymous, ed.), 3. 172 Anonymous, Questioning Rape, 5. 32 within the anarchist movement.173 In chapter four, I will argue that reflecting on the dynamic between people that creates an unhealthy, unsafe situation, does not mean the survivor is to blame for what has happened, nor that the perpetrator is not responsible. I will argue instead that what friendship is necessary, a friendship that can function as a critical relation between parties, and in which participants can work towards true accountability rather than seek revenge stemming from and uncritically accepted ressentiment.

2.2.4 The Victim This brings me to my last point on accountability, namely that the way anarchists now use accountability processes does not help the person who has been hurt to truly heal and overcome the situation.174 It makes “survivor” an important part of one’s identity because others continuously refer to one as such. In time, that identity can become such an important part of who one is, that one cannot get rid of it any more since one would lose an important part of oneself. This can vitiate one’s freedom by debilitating one’s action possibilities because it stems from ressentiment. As a survivor writes: ‘These identities make me the subject, the passive receiver of another’s violence or abuse.’175 They will have to rely on others, on the justice system, to solve the situation and are thereby confirmed in their powerlessness. The only option then is to call-out someone, make them feel guilty and demand they will not be in the same space anymore.176

To give an answer to the question why current anarchist practices are not suited to serve as an inspiration to an alternative way of living together, this is because current anarchist practice gives poor expression to identity politics and accountability processes. By taking as a starting-point the neoliberal Subject that tells the Truth, both practices create hierarchies and, in their own way, maintain the neoliberal governmentality and justice system based on rights by using practices of calling out, shaming and excluding those who are “less oppressed” or make one feel uncomfortable. As such these practices are distinctly un-feminist and un-anarchist, because it depends on who can put themselves forward and make the biggest wave, thereby creating (new) hierarchies and oppression. There is no room for care, mutual aid or intersectionality as solidarity beyond the borders of one’s own identity. They limit the freedom, qua possibilities for acting, of both those who are oppressed/survivors and

173 Lee, Excommunicate me . 174 Anonymous, Questioning Rape. 175 Anonymous, Questioning Rape. 176Celeste, Safety is an Illusion. 33 those who are privileged/perpetrators. In this way, these practices hinder more than promote the liberation from the neoliberal governmentality. In other words, these practices are asking for ‘longer chains and bigger cages’ instead of freedom. Before I move on to answer the question on what an anarchist practice should be based if it wants to change society, I will elaborate more on the points I have touched upon in this chapter. In particular, I will consider what this diagnosis of ressentiment means because I am of the opinion I can counter such a diagnosis only if I understand what it entails. 34

Chapter Three: ‘No One Is Free Until All Are Free’ In the previous chapter I touched upon some aspects of Nietzschean ressentiment recognisable in the practices of privilege politics and accountability processes in anarchist practice. But what is ressentiment? In interpreting this concept of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I will try to show in more detail what needs to be changed in these practices, which in turn provides the basis for how to change it. On the face of it, Nietzsche’s philosophy may seem a counterintuitive choice to try to change anarchist practice for the better, for he is quite explicit in his disdain concerning anarchism. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil he writes: ‘the anarchist dogs that now wander the alleyways of European culture’177 and in the Genealogy of Morality he writes: ‘this plant [ressentiment] now blooms most beautifully among anarchists and anti-Semites’.178 In other words, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, anarchists – and socialists, social-democrats and anti-Semites – are at least as bad as, or maybe worse, than the Christians and “Jewish priests” he reviles in most of his work.179 However, for all his disdain, Nietzsche shares some of the main critiques society and culture with anarchists (at least today). 180 According to Nietzsche, the State is built on ressentiment as is our justice system and representative democracy, as I will elaborate on below. Besides he also targets “commercial society” in Daybreak 174 because that ‘aims at disciplining bodies and selves and integrating them into a uniform whole’181 which is, as we have seen in chapter two characteristic of neoliberal governmentality. Anarchist practice is often still aimed at a critique of the state as the centre of power, which would need to be abolished before people can be free.182 Nietzsche considers the State to be good only for the protection of the “herd” because it protects individuals from one another. Although Nietzsche in the end thinks the State should be abolished, as do anarchists, he argues that the abolishment of the State should not be actively worked for.183 Both anarchists and Nietzsche,

177Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 202. 178Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 11. 179 It is however questionable to what extent Nietzsche knew what anarchist ideology and practice was. Shahin, in their book Nietzsche and Anarchy, refer to the work of Thomas Brobjer to argue that Nietzsche might not have known anything about anarchism besides what was written in the newspapers of his time. These might not have been positive because after the Paris Commune and the repression against working-class movements that followed, anarchists started to carry out bombings and “propaganda of the deed”. On the other hand, it might not be strange that Nietzsche lumped together socialists and anarchists, for in his time, anarchists often used the term socialism. This is, today, hardly thinkable anymore since for anarchists the term ‘socialism’ has become contaminated by the use of the term by social-democrats and state-socialists of the Soviet Union. 180 Ansell-Pearson, Questions of the Subject, 423-424; Call, Anarchy of Becoming, 49. 181Ure 2006, quoted by Ansell-Pearson, Questions of the Subject, 242-243. 182Newman (2010), Postanarchism and Power. 183Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 472. 35 however, agree that representative democracy is no real freedom because it evokes a feeling of being in control while at the same time giving up the power over your own lives to give it to some chosen few.184 Besides, with Foucault’s analysis of power in mind, it is important to not only focus on the state in trying to change society, but on all forms of oppression and thus the decentralised power-relations I have described in chapter one. Not everything will instantly be solved when the State is abolished. Working towards altering the ways people relate to each other is necessary, which in turn requires altering the foundation of those relations. Nietzsche diagnoses our morality, the foundations of how people relate to each other, with ressentiment. Since no one can escape the way society influences people, it is not surprising that Nietzsche is also right to diagnose anarchism with ressentiment. As Newman shows, this diagnosis is still correct today.185 However, I think that anarchist practice is pre- eminently suited to overcome ressentiment because of its shared critique of the State, the justice system and representative democracy. I will argue this in chapter four, but first I shall define ressentiment with recourse to the theories of Pippin, Staten, Deleuze and Reginster, I will elaborate on ressentiment in this chapter. I will link this to the current privilege politics and accountability as practiced in anarchism.

3.1 Ressentiment and Bad Conscience Nietzsche undertakes the most structural discussion of ressentiment in the Genealogy of Morality. Here he states that ressentiment is the ‘hate of powerlessness.’ 186 it is the impossibility of using or discharging the energy of one’s instincts, which in turn leads to frustration and bitterness.187As Deleuze puts it, it is a feeling of not being able to act on what happens around you.188 Importantly, it concerns a feeling of neither being powerful enough nor strong enough notwithstanding the actual strength or power someone has to act or overcome resistance.189 This feeling exists according to Deleuze because people connect what they experience in the present to a memory of earlier experiences and impressions.190 What people do, then, is respond to these impressions instead of the situation at hand. The

184Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 199. 185Newman, Politics of Ressentiment. 186Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, I 7. 187 Ridley, A. (1998). The Slave. In: Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the Genealogy, pp. 15-40. London: Cornell University Press, 8. 188Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 115. 189 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 254; In chapter four I will discuss the concept of strength in more detail. 190Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 112. 36 impossibility to forget and to embrace the past are the preconditions for ressentiment to come into existence. 191 In privilege politics and accountability there exists ‘an identity whose present past is one of insistently unredeemable injury’192 As such, the foundation is laid for ressentiment.. It is because of the link between not-forgetting and not being able to embrace the past, that there is a link between ressentiment and the construction of the Subject. A conscience is attributed to the Subject, which lays the foundation for being able to blame others, make them (or oneself) feel guilty and hold others responsible. This is only possible because the Subject is thought of as having a free will and intentions as I discussed in the introduction. I will return to the process of creating a Subject in section 3.2, I first want to elaborate more on the feeling of powerlessness. One can respond to the feeling of powerlessness in several ways193: affirmation, which is ‘saying yes to life in its strangest and hardest problems’194; by resignation or internalising suffering, which looks at suffering as something to be endured; by active ressentiment, where someone is blamed for the suffering of others. In this last case, the felt powerlessness is acted on in a double motion: turning it both inwards and outwards. In the last case Brown describes: ‘it [ressentiment] produces an affect (rage, righteousness) that overwhelms the hurt; it produces a culprit for the hurt; and it produces a site of revenge to displace the hurt (a place to inflict hurt as the sufferer has been hurt).’ 195 The “human-of-ressentiment”, due to their own feeling of powerlessness and (consequently) suffering, tries to seek justification for their suffering.196 This can go two ways.

3.1.1 Internalising Suffering When suffering is viewed as a necessary evil that must be endured – for instance a punishment for an original sin – and as a burden one should take upon oneself to show their strength.197 This internalising way of responding to feeling powerless relies on there being a Truth – like Heaven – that can only be reached through suffering. In this sense, the ressentiment is life-denying according to Nietzsche because it does not value the life one lives now as having intrinsic value.198 This is what Nietzsche also calls “nihilism”.199 It is in

191Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II On Redemption. 192Brown, States of Injury, 73. 193 Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 59-60. 194 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, What I owe to the ancients, 5. 195Brown, States of Injury, 68. 196Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, I 10. 197 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 15; Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, The Speeches of Zarathustra, On the Three Metamorphoses. 198 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, III 28. 199Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 34. 37 some kind of reason for suffering, which can be provided by an “ascetic ideal”; for instance the belief in God or a belief in Truth.200 Anarchism, in striving for a world ‘after the State’ or to a perfect safe space, can be seen as such an ascetic ideal and life-denying attitude.201 One has to suffer now, struggle against the powers that are, only to reach a state where those oppressions are no longer present. As such, working towards this situation is often viewed as something that should be taken very seriously, as a heavy burden to be borne. It is to this attitude that Emma Goldman is often quoted as having said: ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution’202 In both privilege politics and accountability people strive to create a pure safe space to live in, excluding those who may hurt one. Therefore, every word one utters is weighed by others and all behaviour is judged. When people do not live up to the standards, they are purged as to create a pure world where there is no suffering anymore.203 Suffering in this sense, is not even seen as a necessary evil that must be endured, but purely as an evil that must be eliminated as soon as possible. However, on a larger scale the struggles people go through are justified as working towards a life where that form of oppression will no longer exist. Yet this ideal is hardly possible when living together with others after all, ‘Sometimes, relationships just hurt’.204

3.1.2 Punishing and Bad Conscience When ressentiment becomes active, the felt powerlessness is experienced as suffering, as a passive state and something done to someone. One’s suffering, then, is blamed on someone else: that someone else is morally guilty or held responsible for the suffering of another.205 The result is the person who suffers wanting to take revenge,206 but as such this creates “bad conscience” and preserves an identity of victimhood: ‘Revenge as a “reaction”, a substitute for it and as a reproach to the present which embodies that history’.207 Because of

200Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, III. 201Newman, Politics of Ressentiment, 7. 202 Although there is no documentation of this exact quote, the meaning of it returns in her autobiography Living My Life where she responds to a fellow-anarchist who chastises her for dancing enthusiastically where everyone can see. 203 This is not to say that I think people should always be able to blurt out everything. “Politically correct” language is often about respecting people for who they are and learning how to do so, learning a new frame of reference to decide which comments are appropriate and which are not, because the old frame is no longer up-to-date. I am aware that my critique might sound like the critique given by right-wing spokespersons to the “left” as being too politically correct. The critique is then that one cannot even make a joke anymore. This is an exaggeration: identity politics and safe space language is not about not being able to make jokes or doing and saying things that are not perfect, but about respecting people’s existence. However, sometimes, as I am discussing in the case of privilege politics and accountability processes in anarchist practices, it can go too far. 204 Anonymous, Questioning Rape, 7. 205 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, III 15. 206Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 41. 207Brown, States of Injury, 73. 38 the feeling of powerlessness and the inability to react immediately on the present, the revenge of the human-of-ressentiment is acted out as a revaluation of values. It is a “spiritual” revenge, aimed at making the other feel less powerful and thereby making yourself feel more powerful.208 Revaluating changing the meaning of “good” and “bad”: instead of being based on one’s own power, what is good morally is founded on it being the opposite of what is “evil” namely that which hurts one.209 This revaluation means that suffering is regarded as evil, since suffering brings pain and conflict, and it should therefore be banned from life.210 People who feel powerless strive for peace, calm, contentment.211 So here, we again see the life-denying values of ressentiment in the striving for peace as the absence of conflict and suffering. The revaluation of values is the active, productive side of ressentiment. By creating new values, ressentiment produces a morality which is the basis of how people live together. Part of this morality is the creation of a Subject with a free will – maintained and reinforced by philosophy and science212 – which determines how people relate to each other. An even more complicated aspect of active ressentiment is that one might need it to be able to overcome oneself, to achieve greatness and become an “Übermensch” (I will return to this in sections 4.4 and 4.5).213 The active ressentiment is exemplified in privilege politics and accountability processes where several rigid identities are created, like The Evil and The Survivor, or The Oppressor and The Oppressed. On the basis of these identities, people are held responsible for what happens and consequently punished for what they are more than for what they do. The created identity becomes a form of property to use to punish others for what they have done to you or for what their identity symbolises. This is based on the Subject that is a causa sui, with a free will, intentions and responsibility. In assuming a free and responsible Subject, punishment becomes a settlement of a debt between a debtor and a creditor.214 This relation is

208Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 41. 209Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, I 10. 210 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 252. 211 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 117; Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 10. 212 Nietzsche argues that philosophy and science both strengthen the position of morality even though they argue against the existence of God. Both create a new belief: Truth. See for instance Beyond Good and Evil, 211 or the Genealogy of Morality III. Even more exemplary is statement 128 in book I part 3of Human, All Too Human: ‘What science promises. – Modern science has as its goal: as little pain as possible, as long life as possible – thus a kind of eternal bliss, though a very modest kind in comparison with the promises of the relitions.’ 213 Staten points out that Nietzsche’s attitude towards active ressentiment is ambivalent: sometimes he denounces it as low, sickly, weak and dangerous, whilst at other times, he seems to admire the will to power that is behind it. Staten writes: ‘Nietzsche’s language seems here to yield involuntarily to a kind of admiration for the phenomenon he is looking at, a phenomenon so dark and questionable that it out-Nietzsches Nietzsche’ (Staten Nietzsche’s Voice, 50). 214 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 4. 39

‘as old as the very conception of the “legal subject” and itself refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trade and traffic’.215 However, when the creditor is filled with ressentiment, the settling of the debt is more focused on a feeling of pleasure instead of a direct compensation in material goods for what was lost. A feeling of pleasure that comes from the ability to unrestrainedly exercise power over someone else: 216 ‘Through his “punishment” of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right of lords: finally he, too, for once attains the elevating feeling of being permitted to hold a being in contempt and maltreat it as something “beneath himself”.’217,218 These punishments, in privilege politics and accountability processes, take the shape of call-outs, silencing practices, exclusion, stigmatising etc., as we have seen in chapter two. It also can reverse certain hierarchies, by putting the most oppressed in the position of the leader. In virtue of a supposed essentialised identity these punishments give some people the “right” to take the lead. Thereby generalising some particular opinions, wishes, capabilities, and experiences to a whole group of people and speaking in their name. Nietzsche adds that with these punishments comes ‘bad conscience’. According to Nietzsche people actually enjoy the feeling of power while punishing someone because they can (finally) feel powerful, but at the same time feel guilty for this feeling of power and pleasure because it is in light of this (perceived) power that one is punished. Therefore, he calls this bad conscience. The perceived power of someone else, in comparison with someone’s own feeling of powerlessness, makes the powerful the Evil One. It is not the deed that is punished, but the person because as a Subject, one could also have done otherwise and be less powerful. Punishments, like shaming, silencing or excluding, are administered to compensate for the feeling of powerlessness. In doing so, the “powerless” themselves become more powerful than the “powerful”, thereby becoming the Evil One themselves. To cover up for this bad conscience, justifications are devised, functions for punishment: ‘Punishment as instilling fear of those who determine or execute the punishment’ or ‘punishment as

215 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 4. 216 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 5. 217 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 5. 218 It is here that revenge also touches upon the topic of cruelty. This idea is quite difficult to interpret in Nietzsche, because sometimes it seems he is advocating the actual infliction of pain, of being cruel, as good. As Staten writes: ‘This could just mean that there are two kinds of cruelty; the noble type that is an immediate release and the slave type that is an outlet for pent-up impulses. But Staten does not find this convincing and argues that this ambivalence is due to the different phases that can be seen in Nietzsche’s work, by this meaning Nietzsche’s own ambivalence towards what it means to be a ‘master’ or be ‘strong’. I will elaborate on this in chapter four and I will try to formulate some kind of answer, but Staten’s work shows that this ambivalence might not be something we can overcome in Nietzsche’s work. 40 elimination of a degenerating element’.219 The punishments are, notwithstanding the voiced justifications, not (only) administered to teach people they should clear space for those who are taught by neoliberal society to keep silent. The punishments are at least partly to increase one’s feeling of power. It is not accidental that call-out culture is often ‘a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit and how pure their politics are.’220 As such, privilege politics and accountability processes maintain the foundation of ressentiment. It is actually limiting for those who are deemed “more privileged” or “perpetrators”, reducing their possibilities for action. This might have some merit, except that these practices neither liberate the oppressed or survivors. In creating identities like The Evil one and The Victim, the feeling of powerlessness is reinforced.221 As such it limits the possibilities for acting of the oppressed as well since there is only room for acting within the boundaries of victimhood or otherness as detailed in chapter three. I would therefore be inclined to agree with the queer-collective BASH BACK! that these practices are rooted in victimisation. The only (limited) form of freedom made possible by these practices is having rights within a neoliberal governmentality. This brings me to the ressentiment in the justice system, the system which can create, bestow and enforce these rights.

3.2 Ressentiment in the Justice System I have argued in chapter two that privilege politics and accountability processes maintain the neoliberal justice system. Here I will elaborate on how this justice system is based on ressentiment as Nietzsche argues. It is in the punishment of those who are to blame for the suffering of others, that ressentiment is tied up with the justice system. The judicial system is based on the idea that there are Subjects that can be held accountable, Subjects that can promise, and have a ‘free will’. But it is not necessarily given that this is the case because as we have seen in chapter one these Subjects are created. In his genealogy, Nietzsche elaborates on how this Subject was created in morality. Pippin formulates this as follows: ‘the real genius of the slave revolt, according to Nietzsche, lies in its going beyond a simple inversion of value types and in the creation of a new way of thinking about human beings: the creation of a subject “behind” the actual deed, one who could have acted otherwise to express his strength.’222 In the Genealogy of Morality treatise II Nietzsche describes this process as

219Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 13. 220 Ahmad, A. A note on Call-Out Culture. Setting Fire to the Church of Social Justice. 221 Brown, States of Injury, 67 222Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,70. 41 having started in a “pre-historic” time 223 with the need to ‘breed an animal with the prerogative to promise […] That is precisely what constitutes the long history of the origins of responsibility.’224 This process is what Deleuze calls ‘species activity’: making and obeying laws, thereby both creating laws and being formed by laws.225 This process does not necessarily culminate into a morality of ressentiment as Ridley notes: the ressentiment is what develops because of people living together in a certain way, namely in a State.226 In living together, people always have to compromise with one another; this means a striving for peace: holding back on acting out of respect for another’s power, coming to an understanding between equals.227 This can only be the case when people are ‘roughly equal’, as Nietzsche says. This way of living together also implies that sometimes one must be able to remember and to make a promise. Memory, however, is a faculty of the mind that is opposite to the necessary forgetfulness of humans, according to Nietzsche.228 Making a promise involves saying that you will do something in the future, and to make a promise is thus to remember. By making a promise, furthermore, one becomes ‘answerable for his own future.’229 To be able to promise, one should be able to separate what must happen from what happens by accident, to be able to think in a causal manner, to anticipate the future, and to be sure what one’s goal is and what the means are to that goal and ‘in general to be able to recon, to calculate – for this, man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary.’230 One must know oneself; one must know what can be expected. It is not yet here that ressentiment comes into play, but when we move out of the “pre-historic”, two ‘gloomy things’ can happen – and have happened – according to Nietzsche. The first of those we have already seen above, which is ‘bad conscience’. But to have bad conscience, one must first have conscience to begin with.231 I think that what Nietzsche shows in section 3 of treatise II of the Genealogy of Morality is that having a conscience is not some inherent characteristic of humans. It was

223We must not think here of an actual “prehistoric” time with dinosaurs and such, but the conceptual idea of development of morality which started from a point in which there was no morality. This is not to say that such a state has necessarily existed at some point in time, but it does indicate how – conceptually – morality was created instead of part of the world as an inherent. 224Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 1-2. 225Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 134. 226Ridley, A. (1996). Nietzsche’s Conscience. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 11, pp. 1-12.; Nietzsche’s Voice, p.51. 227 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 8. 228Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 1. 229Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 1. 230Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 1. 231Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 3-4. 42 created to instil morality, to create a Subject that can promise and be held accountable. For it is necessary when living in a State that people follow certain commitments and make them their own: e.g. being able to promise to act in a certain way.232 However, with this conscience comes a danger because it makes you susceptible to guilt. Guilt is what makes it possible in the first place that punishment like shaming, silencing and excluding are effective. People with a conscience can reflect on themselves – as they would need to if they are to make promises.233 In anarchist practices this is exemplified in ally-politics described in section 2.1.3 and the need for unconditional support in accountability processes. Besides, according to Nietzsche, only if one can make promises can one is able to partake in ‘the advantages of society, – and truly! With the help of this kind of memory one finally came “to reason”!’234 To come to reason in this context, is (instrumental) rationality which in the neoliberal governmentality is to make economic choices. To belong to society, one must make rational choices – today rational is equated with economical – in order to profit from its advantages: security, stability, peace.235 If one does not conform, one is a threat to society and can be punished or excluded by having one’s rights removed or being banished. This is what happens as well in privilege politics based on rights. It follows the premise of people having and requiring rights to live together, granted them by neoliberal governmentality. But in aiming for those rights, people forget that rights can also be taken away again and used as a tool to make one conform to society’s norms. 236 Moreover, these rights describe what someone is – for instance, woman, citizen – and thereby prescribe what one should conform to if one wants to be included in these rights. In privilege politics it works as described in the text Dangerous Foundations discussed in section 2.1.1 on the normalising effects of gay identities.237 Conforming to society as a conscious (and rational) choice is also bound up with the idea of a free will and having a choice.238 Making the “right choice” supposes a Subject with a free will. This free will is, however, a form of self-deception in order to legitimise the feeling of powerlessness that people feel.239 Brown adds: ‘the language of privacy and cousin

232Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 3. 233 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 3. 234 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II 3. 235 Peace now changed from the definition it had in the “pre-historic” time, to an eternal peace, which is only reachable in a world-beyond and is thus life-denying. 236Brown, States of Injury, 125. 237 Anonymous, Dangerous Foundations, where they describe how within the gay-community the norms on how to act are so strict that if you do not conform to certain categories of ‘gay’ you do not fit in. 238Brown, States of Injury, 123. 239 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,71. 43

“choice”, are used to mask state coercion as private desire’.240 What happens is that people convince themselves that it was their own choice to suffer, they suffer with reason, or they give up their freedom consciously to enjoy the advantages of the state. But this implies that people actually have need of such stability and eternal peace. While it is hard to imagine people arguing that they have chosen to be oppressed, discriminated against or raped, thinking within this framework that offers the opportunity to legitimise the struggle for rights instead of change of the governmentality. As we have seen, this can lead to ally-politics and reversed hierarchies that do not so much get rid of the oppression and domination that is struggled against, but change it to another form. All this shows that the State, as a source of peacefulness plays an important role in ressentiment.

3.3 Ressentiment as the ‘peacefulness’ of the State Ressentiment is an inability to embrace what was, and to affirm life as will to power. 241 As explained in the introduction, the will to power can have an affirming or negating quality according to Deleuze. When the will to power has a negating quality, it has an affinity with reactive forces focused on life-denying values: conserving what is, preventing change, creating stability and peace.242 In this relation, the will to power is the will to nothingness.243 This is important because it indicates that reactive forces are not passive; they still strive for something – namely nothingness.244 They strive for nothingness because they cannot accept the absence of permanent peace, stability, nor can they accept the existence of suffering, conflict, and harm. In the case of privilege politics anarchists try to create spaces where this eternal peace can be reached. This search for peace and stability is ressentiment since it is at the same time both life-denying and a denial of the will to power because it strives for a life-beyond, a permanent and pure place without oppression or harm. Even when this permanence is not (yet) reached, at least a safe space can provide the same conditional and temporary peace of the State by normalising practices. As seen in the discussion of consciousness, neoliberal governmentality and the State rely on rights and rational choice to ensure the well-being and safety of the whole population. To ensure this disciplining techniques and biopolitical control are needed which Nietzsche describes as ‘a collective drive toward timidity masquerading behind an intellectual front: this drive desires … that life be rid of all the dangers it once held and that each and every person

240 Brown, States of Injury, 123. 241 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II On Redemption. 242Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 100. 243Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 97. 244Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 67, 171. 44 should help toward this end with all one’s might: therefore only actions aimed at the common security and at society’s sense of security may be accorded the rating “good”.’245 Justice in the context of the State (or safe space) becomes a means to the goal of the eradication of conflict: it mediates in a conflict situation as to extinguish struggle that is the result of conflict. 246 Therefore, the state ‘is a prudent institution for the protection of individuals against one another.’247 Privilege politics and accountability processes that aim at such states of certainty, and permanent peace, are thus in this sense not only reproducing the justice system, but also the State and the techniques of a neoliberal governmentality. As such, this might be considered =a reason for why anarchist practice does not seem to be an attractive alternative to our current way of living together, since it is based on the same ressentiment that is the foundation for the neoliberal governmentality. Thereby it does not offer an alternative but rather a reproduction of the same structures albeit different.

For anarchist practice, all this means that both the search people undertake for a better life is based in ressentiment, and that anarchist practices do not formulate an alternative, since its practices are also based on ressentiment. Most of people’s certainties in life are disappearing, such as belief in God, Truth, Sciene, the Nation-State, and the Market. To prevent themselves from being caught up in a death-wish, people try working towards some new goal as the solution, as a new certainty. For instance, trying to create an ethno-state by expelling all “foreigners”, or trying to create a completely free market by privatising everything, or by trying to create a pure safe-space by expelling everyone who does not conform to its norms.248 According to Nietzsche, this pursuit of certainty is because the will ‘always needs a goal, - it would rather will nothingness than not will.’249 As such it is what Nietzsche calls “nihilism”. Nihilism is the striving for eternal peace, stability and security.250 It is the denial of life because it basically assumes that this life, with all its imperfections, is not good enough. If life is, as Nietzsche argues according to Deleuze, Reginster and Staten, eternal becoming, this idea could not be grasped by the human-of-ressentiment they would be overwhelmed by the feeling of powerlessness. There would be neither certainty to fall back on, nor hope of

245Nietzsche, Daybreak, 174 quoted in Ansell-Pearson, Questions of the Subject, 422. 246Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality II 11. 247Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 235. 248All these examples are of course extreme situations which are not often this starkly pursued. It helps, however, to show the craving that people have to create certainties and permanence, something to hold on to. 249Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, III 1. 250 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 22. 45 life without suffering or conflict to look forward to. It would also mean that ‘trump cards such as “morality” or “truth”’251 are meaningless because their authority is derived from the distinction between the illusionary world and the true world. Both Deleuze and Reginster formulate two forms of nihilism. In the first account, according to Deleuze, people would doubt the meaning of life because the higher values demand this.252 Achieving eternal peace or security is only possible in a world beyond. So if one keeps to those values, one would come to realise that this world is fundamentally inhospitable to the realisation of one’s values.253 This is what Reginster calls “despair”. Life itself loses its meaning and one strives for the world-beyond, which is nothingness. It is therefore that ‘“nihilism” means the negation as the quality of the will to power’254 overlaps with the negating quality of the will to power. This is because the highest values are the valuation of suffering in the name of some higher goal or the devaluation of suffering as such. As Pippin puts it: ‘the interpretation of suffering provided by “morality” […] actually succeeded for a while in creating the conditions of commitment, sacrifice, and dedication, but it extracted far too high a price. […] and led us into nihilism.’255 This is manifested in the striving for a pure safe space within privilege politics and accountability processes. People despair because this world seems not to be able to have a place for such spaces. In the second sense, Deleuze defines nihilism as the moment where ‘higher values are reacted against, their existence denied, they are refused all validity – this is no longer the devaluation of life in the name of higher values but rather the devaluation of higher values themselves.’256 This is what Reginster calls “disorientation”: our values seem to be wrong, or maybe there are no objective values to begin with in which to root our commitments.257 According to Deleuze, this is the first step on the road to “passive nihilism”: not willing anymore, instead of willing the end or nothingness. 258 I have not discerned this will to nothingness in the practices I described.

All in all, Nietzsche’s diagnosis of ressentiment as the foundation of anarchist practice seems quite accurate. Throughout this chapter it has become clearer in which way the practices of

251Brown, States of Injury, 48. 252Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 147. 253Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 28. 254Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 147. 255Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,62. 256Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 148. 257Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 28. 258Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 149. 46 privilege politics and accountability processes are founded on ressentiment. A distinction can be made between the internalising ressentiment, the resignation, which claims to accept suffering as something that must be endured to come to a better life where it will be eliminated, and active ressentiment which ascribes blame, guilt and which acts out revenge. In doing so, both privilege politics and accountability processes rely on a concept of the unified Subject with a free will, recreating both the neoliberal justice system and the need for a State that ensures their rights. In this Subject the development of consciousness creates the possibility for punishment by call-out, shaming, and exclusion. What is especially characteristic of ressentiment here is the “bad conscience” behind the punishment: claiming a legitimate function of punishment based on the identification of “good” and “evil” and having to teach someone what is good, while at the same time actually enjoying a feeling of increased power in the act of revenge. In doing so, anarchists limit both the possibilities of action for themselves and others. Instead of trying to create a world where everyone is free, no one is free. A new foundation for anarchist practice is thus necessary based on the affirmation of life and revaluing suffering. For this a new concept of what an individual is, instead of a Subject, is required whilst maintaining some form of responsibility. I will argue that for this, an anarchist community is needed which is based on friendship. This is what I will explore in chapter four.

47

Chapter Four: ‘Love Is Its Own Protection’ In the previous chapters I have argued that anarchists want to radically change the neoliberal governmentality that is prevalent in Western-European countries. I have also argued that two of the practices used for this purpose – identity politics and accountability – are expressed poorly in privilege politics and accountability processes. Instead of liberating the foundation of ressentiment is maintained. That leaves us with the question how Nietzschean philosophy can help to arrive at a solution to these problems. In this chapter I will try to formulate an alternative that is, hopefully, better suited for the task of providing an attractive alternative way of living together than anarchist practice based on privilege politics and accountability processes does. This practice would have to be able to create an alternative way of living together without reproducing the State or neoliberal governmentality. This is necessary because the neoliberal governmentality limits one’s freedom and normalises, conforms one to a “commercial society”. In doing so, I will try to formulate concrete practices based on this new foundation. However, this last challenge might be difficult due to the nature of the change that is required if one wishes to overcome ressentiment: an affirmative ‘stance toward life’.259 This change can only come about through a complete revaluation of values that are now prevalent. The life-affirming attitude as opposed to the life-denying values of ressentiment is to value life as eternal becoming. This would mean, primarily, a revaluation of suffering and thus of Mitleid and happiness. It would also mean a new concept of who one is, an individual instead of a Subject, and a new way to organise the community based on friendship as to ensure responsibility. I will elaborate on these ideas below, but first I will look into what it means to affirm life.

4.1 Affirmation: Life as Becoming Ressentiment is founded, as we saw, on a distinction between the illusory and the true with the creation of a Subject as a consequence. Pippin writes that ‘the one image Nietzsche most wants to free us from [is] – the powerful picture of a subject separable from and in effect “commanding” his or her deeds, a distinct causal force responsible for actions occurring and commitments undertaken.’260 To overcome ressentiment one needs to let go of the idea of a unified Subject that is the foundation of privilege politics and accountability processes in anarchist practice. To affirm life, one must value this life, in its own finite, imperfect perfectness instead of striving for eternal peace in a safe space of world-after-the-

259Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy, 12. 260Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy, 46-47. 48 revolution. Affirming is to enjoy how things are, were and will be, while enjoy the finiteness of life and life-events. As Deleuze puts it, to affirm life is to be able to play, that is to say to affirm all outcomes of the dice toss as being what one wants without aiming for a certain outcome. In doing so, it cannot be considered a failure when a certain outcome is reached.261 Seeing a certain outcome as failure, gives rise to ressentiment, since apparently one was not powerful enough to do what one intended. This is why a new understanding of the individual is crucial, not as Subject with intentions “behind” the act, but as an individual that is “in” the deed. For this, having a more complex notion of what constitutes a “successful” act is unavoidable. According to Pippin: ‘we should understand successful action as a continuous and temporally extended everywhere mutable translation or expression of inner into outer, but not as an isolated and separated determinate inner struggling for expression in imperfect material.’ 262 One must be able to see oneself ‘in the deed (sometimes the surprising, unexpected deed) as actually performed, see it as an expression of me (in a sense not restricted to my singular intention) but also such that what I understand is being attempted and realised is also what others understand.’263 So seeing oneself in the deed means affirming beforehand that a deed can be appropriated by others as well and it could turn out differently than how one thought it would. The point is that by affirming one does not want life to be different than they turn out to be.264 This does not mean however, that there is no responsibility anymore, that one can just do everything because those deeds are seen as ‘merely expressing their inherited drives’.265 Pippin argues that some kind of ‘holding ourselves and others to account’266 would still be possible in a narrower concept: ‘did the agent do it, bring it about? Did he know what he was doing? Was he coerced? If the answers are yes, yes, and no, he was responsible.’267 Besides, in Nietzsche’s concept of friendship, as we will see, it is essential that people are receptive to their actions being criticised so as to become a ‘“sovereign individual” (GM, II 2). As such, individuality is understood as an always fragile, unstable, threatened achievement instead of an original state.’268

261Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 25-34. 262Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy, 78. 263Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy, 79. 264Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 179. 265 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,59. 266 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,59. 267 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,80. 268 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,61. 49

To see life as permanent becoming, as a continuation of ever finite events and relations of force that shift and come into being forming our lives269 which continues to go on with endless amounts of variation, is also to affirm that at the end of human live, there is death.270 For anarchist practice, this would mean that instead of blaming someone for acting in a certain way and punishing them on the basis of a generalised idea of what is “good” and “evil”, a system of responsibility and empowerment that is not closed off should be devised. A system that can be criticised, revaluated, and recreated to adapt to the context of a situation. I will elaborate on this more when discussing the revaluation of Mitleid and building a community based on friendship. First, however, I will investigate what permanent becoming is and how the dice toss fits into it all.

4.1.1 The Eternal Recurrence Nietzsche arrives at the conclusion that one should affirm life through the concept or thought experiment of the ‘eternal recurrence’. Nietzsche states in Ecce Homo that the eternal recurrence is ‘the highest possible formula of affirmation’. 271 The thought of the eternal recurrence, centres around section 341 of book IV in the Gay Science.

The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to

269Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 226. 270Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 222-223. 271Nietzsche, Ecce Homo III Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1. 50

life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?272

Of course, the last reaction would imply true affirmation. But what does this mean? The idea of the eternal recurrence can be interpreted in multiple ways.273 Deleuze and Reginster both put forth a conception of what the eternal recurrence means which I will now discuss. Deleuze describes the eternal recurrence as a selective principle that choses what will return, which is according to Deleuze, only everything that is active and affirmative.274 For Deleuze, the demon in the Gay Science that announces the eternal recurrence, states that one will forever be in a process of becoming. Life is defined as playing, as tossing the dice that will determine which relations come into being. The question the demon askes, then, is whether one can accept and embrace life as not being in one’s complete control. That is why, according Deleuze both a double affirmation275 and a double negation is required.276 The first affirmation is that one affirms life as eternal becoming, as having no “goal” or “world- beyond” to strive for; a goal of permanence, certainty and eternal peace. Life should be seen as always changing and being based on chance and difference. 277 In this sense the first affirmation is aimed at countering the distinction between the true and illusionary world and the essentialised identities that become possible because of it. It also counters the idea that there can be a pure safe space to live in. The first affirmation is thus only possible if there is at the same time a negation, namely the negation of “Subject”, “the True”, “the Real”, which are ‘avatars of nihilism.’278 If these ideas are not negated, affirmation becomes saying “yes” to everything and affirmation would only be the acceptance of suffering, of enduring suffering, thus the resigning ressentiment described in chapter three.279 Amor fati, to “love your fate” would then become that one must endure one’s fate instead of loving it.280 So this first affirmation is the destruction of all the old, known values of ressentiment, a revaluation as to relate reactive forces to the negating quality of the will to power as to arrive at active ressentiment.

272Nietzsche, Gay Science, IV 341. 273In section II of Chapter 5 in The Affirmation of Life (pp.205-219) Reginster describes and refutes several interpretations of the eternal recurrence, which shows how multi-interpretable this idea is. 274Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, preface xvii. 275Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 180-186. 276Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 171-180. 277Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 188. 278Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 184. 279Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 177-178. 280Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 182. 51

The second affirmation is the affirmation of affirmation, the affirmation of the idea that life is necessarily eternal becoming.281 It is here, Deleuze writes, that ‘becoming has being’ since becoming is now the object of the affirmation as well as the principle of becoming (affirmation). For this to be possible, however, a second negation is required as well, one in which the will to nothingness ‘breaks its allegiance with reactive forces.’282 Otherwise, the creation of new values would not be possible and affirmation cannot be affirmed. This breaking of the allegiance means that the negating quality of the will to power loses its primary quality in the will to power; this leaves room for the affirmative quality of the will to power to become the primary quality. Without Zarathustra who first dismantles all old values and starts people on the path to revaluation, the person who can create new values, the “Übermensch”, would not be possible.283 A becoming-active, instead of the becoming- reactive of ressentiment, is paramount to creating new values and go beyond one’s current limits. Instead of continuing on the path of Morality as the foundation of their practice, anarchists need to move beyond good and evil. This does not mean there will be no values at all, as Pippin notes, but that the values one has are considered neither universal nor eternal Truths.284 Privilege politics and accountability processes in anarchist practice are not on this new path, instead they have created a new Morality, one that has reversed the hierarchies, but is still considered universal. What Nietzsche has warned us for, has happened: ‘whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.’285 The creation of radical new values is called for, and I think Emma Goldman points in the right direction when she says: ‘“Beyond good and evil” means beyond prosecution, beyond judging, beyond killing etc. Beyond Good and Evil opens before our eyes a vista the background of which is individual assertion combined with the understanding of all others who are unlike ourselves, who are different. [...] The vision “beyond good and evil” points to the right to oneself, to one’s personality. Such possibilities do not exclude pain over the chaos of life, but they do exclude the puritanic righteousness that sits in judgement on all others except oneself.’286 Instead of dictating certain rules of conduct, going beyond good and evil by way of affirmation, aims to take away the need for judging, prosecuting and excluding by being founded a responsibility of empowerment and friendship instead of rights and the Subject.

281Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 189. 282Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 174, 179. 283Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 174. 284Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,51. 285Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 146. 286 Goldman, E. (1915). Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure, 1. 52

The double affirmation is necessary, since only when one affirms life as eternal becoming, one can stop striving for a telos, for eternal peace and rest. The double affirmation is also necessary for the eternal recurrence to be a bearable idea because otherwise, everything would return exactly the same, forever. This would lead us to what Deleuze calls “passive nihilism” in which case one would not be able to overcome oneself but just would silently disappear. By affirming life the eternal recurrence becomes a bearable thought because life is seen as eternal becoming and change, it is not that everything one does is predetermined because the toss of the dice yield different outcomes every time, thereby leading one to a new deed. As such the eternal recurrence is a selective principle according to Deleuze: only becoming can return, only that which is affirmative and sees life as eternal becoming can bear the thought of the eternal recurrence, others would fade away. Reginster’s interpretation of the eternal recurrence takes place on a practical level, on which he also considers the eternal recurrence to be a selective principle. He quotes Nietzsche as writing that the eternal recurrence is ‘a doctrine powerful enough to work as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world-weary’.287 Reginster distinguishes interpretations of the eternal recurrence on two levels before moving to his own interpretation. First he distinguishes the theoretical and practical implications of the eternal recurrence. In the theoretical version, the eternal recurrence ‘helps to bring out, a particular property of the life to be affirmed.’288 So if life will recur one should keep this in mind in what one chooses to do. The recurrence of life is a property of life and one should be able to welcome this, choose what one does as to be able to wish life will recur forever. If life does not have this property, however, one would not need to affirm the choices one makes, nor pay attention making choices. In the practical version, on the other hand, the eternal recurrence ‘tells us something about what sort of practical stance or attitude affirmation is.’289 So to wish life recurs eternally is to adopt a certain attitude towards life, namely affirmation. In section 4.1 we have seen what this attitude entails: life as permanent becoming.

287Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 218. Reginster quotes here from the “book” The Will to Power, this should not be considered a book. In his notes from 1884, Nietzsche writes: ‘Es bedarf einer Lehre, stark genug, um züchtend zu wirken: stärkend für die Starken, lähmend und zerbrechend für die Weltmüden.’ (Nietzsche, KSA band 10, 1884 25[211]) The note in question is not as clearly related to the eternal recurrence, e.g. Nietzsche does not make this link himself, however, I think it is quite possible it concerns the eternal recurrence. The note is on how striving for equality is unnatural because there is a natural order of rank in the world which we should somehow restore. The means to restoring the natural order of rank in the world, could very well be the eternal recurrence. 288Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 202. 289Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 203. 53

The second distinction Reginster makes is between the affirmation of life as a formal ideal or a substantive ideal. Considering the affirmation of life to be a formal ideal means that one should be able to affirm one’s life if one has no regrets, if ‘in light of the values I happen to have, that life has proved good enough to make the prospect of its eternal recurrence desirable.’290 When the affirmation of life is considered to be a substantive ideal wishing the eternal recurrence of life ‘requires that I comply with specific values or a specific range of values.’291 These values must be affirmative, as to make the thought of the eternal recurrence a bearable thought in the first place because it would otherwise indicate the exact return of what has happened in one’s life without change or variation. Affirmation thus includes a revaluation of for instance suffering, since life as eternal becoming cannot exist without suffering, conflict, imperfection. So in the formal ideal it does not matter which values one holds to, while in the substantive ideal one would require affirmative values.292 Reginster himself opts for interpreting the eternal recurrence as a practical-substantive idea. The wish for the eternal recurrence is thus ‘meant to express how perfect, how fully satisfying that moment is. It would make no sense to wish for the eternal repetition of a moment that is not fully satisfying, or leaves something to be desired. The crucial difference [with Christian eternity], as I noted earlier, is that in wishing for the eternal recurrence of that moment, I acknowledge that its perfection is impermanent.’ 293 The Christian eternity in Heaven, resembles a pure safe space. In both cases one strives for eternal peace, for everything staying the same, for happiness as contentment. Therefore, the values that are affirmed in ressentiment are the condemnation of suffering and the praising of Mitleid. What is necessary, then, is a revaluation of values in favour of becoming. Values affirm Zarathustra’s statement that ‘pain is also a joy’. 294 Pain is also a joy because all actions, feelings and experiences are connected in a whole. As Staten writes: ‘In one sense, Zarathustra’s affirmation here seems to be the most open and capacious in Nietzsche’s work because it accomplishes the full inclusion of the negative […] it is primarily the negative to which joy says yes.’295 This calls for a psychology of the tragic, a Dionysian outlook on

290Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 204. 291Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 204. 292I think that Reginster makes an unnecessary distinction between the theoretical-formal and practical- substantive, since the practical role of the eternal recurrence which tells us what the practical attitude of affirmation is, already requires a specific set of affirmative values. 293Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 225. 294Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV The Sleepwalker Song, 10. 295Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 181 [first emphasis is mine]. 54 life.296 In the Dionysian, tragic, outlook on life, pain is sanctified: ‘the “woes of a woman in labour sanctify all pain in general, - all becoming, all growth, everything that guarantees the future involves pain. There has to be an eternal “agony of the woman in labour” so that there can be an eternal joy of creation, so that the will to life can eternally affirm itself.’297

4.2 The Revaluation of Suffering The first step towards the joyful, towards affirmation of life, is thus revaluating suffering. In the ressentiment of privilege politics and accountability processes, suffering considered something to be abolished.298 As we have seen in Schopenhauer’s account of the will to live, suffering should be eliminated from life because it prevents us to be happy, since happiness is ‘a contentment that cannot again be disturbed.’ 299 To will, is always to be unhappy then because there is some desire that is not yet satisfied. To eliminate suffering is, in the end, to eliminate willing and as such to stop wanting to live. The way in which this life-denying valuation of suffering takes shape in anarchist practice in the striving for a safe space in which there is no conflict and where one can be comfortable, which can only be the case if everyone who makes us feel uncomfortable is eliminated. As such, pain and conflict are avoided, albeit temporarily since it is quite difficult to completely lock oneself off from the world around, besides all social relations are potentially painful. Creating a safe space and living within that safe space does not structurally change unequal distribution of suffering. When a safe space becomes the goal instead of the means of change, as seems to be the case in privilege politics and accountability processes, the only option is to turn away from the world or to disempower others as to make oneself feel powerful enough. Nietzsche urges to affirm suffering as something one needs, as an inescapable part of life.300 Suffering is thus seen as intrinsically belonging to life and gets a higher meaning: suffering is indispensable as to create a balance within ‘the entire economy of my soul’, which consists of both fortune and misfortune. 301 This balance, this harmony within an individual is necessary to be free in a radically different way than what it is to be free within a neoliberal governmentality: ‘“erreichte freiheit [achieved freedom]”, a complete and

296Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 37; Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 243-250; Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 110-120; 147-167. 297Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, What I Owe to the Ancients, 4. 298 Note the difference between identity politics which aims to change the unequal distribution of suffering, and privilege politics which, like anarchist accountability processes, aims at the complete abolition of suffering in trying to create pure safe spaces. 299 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I 65 as cited in Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 108. 300Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 225; Gay Science, 338. 301Nietzsche, Gay Science, 338. 55 hierarchical unity among states of one’s soul, memories, desires, aversions, and so forth.’302 This freedom is the freedom that is reached when one is able to affirm life, to see oneself as being “in” the deed instead of behind it. The suffering one goes through, then, is necessary to create or maintain that balance. But another person often cannot completely understand this. Therefore, people have the tendency to lighten someone’s burden by showing Mitleid. But as Nietzsche states, this ‘strips the suffering of what is truly personal: our “benefactors” diminish our worth and our will more than our enemies do.’ 303 Mitleid, then, does the opposite of what it intends to do: instead of making one feel better, it disempowers them because they require others to overcome the obstacles in their lives.304 As Staten states: suffering is necessary because joy needs pain and suffering. Ultimately all valuations are immoral and need each other.305 To be able to love, one must be able to hate; to be able to experience joy one must be able to feel pain. ‘We must affirm the whole, the suffering- causing part as well.’306 According to Reginster’s reading of Nietzsche, suffering is extrinsically good, since it helps one to strive to overcome resistance: to create is to suffer meaningfully.307 Resistance is required as to feel one’s power has increased, to become “great”.308 This has to do with what Reginster thinks is strength for Nietzsche. Reginster ties up the ability to affirm life with being “strong”. Reginster states that Nietzsche distinguishes ‘feeling power and being powerful […] Nietzsche, however, never denies that the feeling of power is a necessary component of happiness, only that such a feeling is not a necessary component of it. Happiness is feeling powerful when one really is powerful.’309 I disagree with Reginster that greatness is only possible when one is strong and not only feels strong. It implies a ‘nostalgic naturalism’ where some are stronger than others and such is the way of life. 310 It is a problematic point in Nietzsche’s elitism that Reginster struggles with here because Nietzsche does not and cannot qualify what he thinks is “great”, as much as he cannot define what the content of the new values should be because he would then be creating a new Morality, a new universal to which most of his philosophy is opposed. Reginster’s own idea of the will to power as overcoming resistance gives the solution to this problem and rids us of the necessity

302Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,109. 303Nietzsche, Gay Science, 338. 304Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 225. 305Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 105, 141. 306Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 105. 307Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 242. 308Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 195. 309Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 197. 310Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 105. 56 of some objective universal standard. He defines weakness and strength primarily as the capability to overcome more or less resistance.311 Reginster argues that the strength of the person cannot be relative to their capabilities because otherwise one could not achieve “greatness”, only “valuable achievements” can be considered the result of strength.312 I think, however, that it can very well be a valuable, great achievement if someone in a wheelchair do something as trivial as going out the door because they are overcoming high resistance, and this can also be argued on the basis of Reginster’s own interpretation. What is important is that, first, one is able to overcome high resistance, and second, that any successful achievement demonstrates that the agent had the strength to overcome resistance. This is still in accordance with Nietzsche’s phrasing in Ecce Homo that ‘the strength of those who attack can be measured in a way by the opposition they require’313 on the basis of which Reginster argues that only great achievements show the strength of the person achieving it. And my claim is even stronger, I think, because of what Reginster says Nietzsche thinks about “intrinsic resistance” and “extrinsic resistance”, namely that extrinsic resistance is of more value in the decision whether some achievement is “great”, or rather, whether someone is “a great individual”.314 Intrinsic resistance is the resistance that someone experiences while doing a task, reaching the goal one has in mind and the resistance that comes with it, regardless of one’s specific circumstances. Extrinsic resistance is the resistance that one is confronted with when pursuing a task, resistance that has to be overcome if one wants to reach this goal but that is not necessarily the same resistance that everyone reaching this goal has to overcome. Extrinsic resistance are also obstacles that are ‘neither essential nor pertinent’ to reach the goal. For example: you want to go outside. The obstacle that is intrinsic to reaching this goal is to open the door, it is both pertinent and essential to reaching your goal. Another pertinent, but nonessential obstacle is that you cannot walk. So it is not an obstacle that everyone who wants to go outside has to face, but it is for you. So you need to use a wheelchair or some other prosthetic tool to be able to go outside. Then last, some people have to also overcome the obstacle that their financial situation does not allow them to easily buy such an aid. According to Reginster – who explains these concepts with the example of Beethoven – the mere ability to open the door and walk out, is not what makes someone strong, however, having to show certain qualities of character to overcome the extrinsic

311Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 178-179. 312Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 181. 313 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, I 7. 314Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 179-180. 57 obstacles does.315 This example might seem trivial, but it is essential to make this point because Nietzsche often talks about strength the physiological terms, implying that physical strength is required to be considered strong or to be “great”. However, strength does not only have to be physiological: it is a combination of physiological and psychological strength.316 I would argue, then, that in the case of being in a wheelchair and having to open the door, especially in combination with the extrinsic resistance of having to scrape together enough money, going out the door is actually an achievement of great strength because of the resistance that is overcome. Suffering or pain that accompanies the resistance is thus an important component of feeling powerful, strong. Revaluation means, as Deleuze writes, to consider pain and suffering to be ‘a stimulant to life’.317 In ressentiment, suffering and pain are considered evils that must be endured and ultimately expelled from life because it is ‘evil, hateful, deserving of annihilation, as a defect of existence’.318 Mitleid is therefore seen as good because it lightens the suffering. But in doing so, it separates one from what one can do. In accountability processes, one is separated from what one can do through the identification of the one who is hurt as survivor and thereby making them dependent on the benevolence of others for dealing with the hurt. In privilege politics, in the same happens in ally-politics where the ‘most oppressed’ is given some kind of absolute authority to decide what must be done, thereby reversing the hierarchies of current society, and relying on the benevolence of the allies for giving this power over others. People should feel empowered, independently from what they are given by others because this would reproduce the identity of the Other, the victim. One needs to ‘join with our powers’, so to say: feeling empowered in what one can do. It is thus to see strength as being available to everyone, though Nietzsche stays ambivalent about this.319 Strength is not just some inborn quality that only a “noble race” might have, as Reginster shows, people can develop strength when given the chance. Developing strength means to “overcome ourselves”, for which we need the help of others; true compassion and friendship. This can be accomplished through a feminist practice centred on care instead of aggressive revenge and outcry.

315Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 180. 316Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 23. 317Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 130. 318Nietzsche, Gay Science, 338; Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 185-186. 319Staten points to this ambivalence in his chapter Power and Pleasure where he shows that Nietzsche struggles to define his ideas on power and strength throughout is oeuvre. Where in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche ‘glorified an expansive, even cosmic, receptivity to the being of others and Promethean self- expenditure on their behalf’, in later works he turns to the glorification of cruelty and egoism. (Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 86-104). 58

Revaluating suffering means in the first place to consider, as pain and pleasure, suffering and joy as bound together. 320 Staten paraphrases Nietzsche: ‘Pleasure and displeasure are really “false opposites”; pleasure in the deepest sense includes displeasure because the feeling of power actually “constitutes the essence of pleasure” (WP 699; cf. 658, 695, 696).’321 This can mean, as we have seen in chapter three, that the increased feeling of power coincides with causing suffering or cruelty. But this is not necessarily so, since ‘the increase is greater for those who are less powerful than those they make suffer, and lower, or perhaps even non-existent, in those who already are (or feel) more powerful’.322 What is more important, when ones values the personal experience and power of people around them, is that one does not decrease their suffering as to give them the opportunity to feel increased power, increased strength. This is why a revaluation of Mitleid in addition to the revaluation of suffering is imperative.

4.3 The Revaluation of Mitleid ‘They want to help and have no thought that there is a personal necessity of misfortune; that terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as necessary for me and you as their opposites; indeed, to express myself mystically, that the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell.’323 This implies another kind of acting empathically, a way that empowers instead of disempowers. What does this mean? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we find the following passage: ‘‘But if you have a suffering friend, then be a resting place to his suffering, yet at the same time a hard bed, a camp bed: thus you will be most useful to him.’ 324 This is compassion that supports people in carrying the burden of suffering, but not taking the load from them. There can be genuine compassion, ‘insofar as it is driven by a concern to benefit the other.’325 Compassion can also be a response to seeing missed opportunities in others, the lack of suffering as it were, someone who does not take the opportunities that life offers because they want to lead a comfortable life. But when leading a comfortable life, one can never be truly happy, joyful.326 In the anarchist practices I have criticised, what happens is exactly the taking of the burden away by ensuring that, for instance, one does not have to deal

320Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 104. 321Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 89. 322Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 142. 323Nietzsche, Gay Science, 338. 324 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II On the Pitying, 69. 325Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 187. 326Nietzsche, Gay Science, 338. 59 with difficult situations by expelling the person causing the discomfort, to negotiate how people do not have to see each other again when they are in conflict. Transforming, revaluating suffering, is thus very much connected to another definition of what it means to be “happy”. The difference between the contentment that is created by pure safe spaces, closed off from others, is that it is a passive feeling of being at peace, while joy is the active, energetic state in which one revels in their situation. What it means to be truly happy, is to be joyful according to Nietzsche. Only through the “psychology of the tragic” can this joy be experienced.

4.4 The Psychology of the Tragic, Dionysus I can be quite short on what the psychology of the tragic is according to Deleuze. He states that ‘the tragic = the joyful’.327 To be joyful, as Deleuze puts it, is to be creative because ‘willing = creating and will = joy’.328 To be creative is then to be an active force, to affirm life, happiness is an activity: discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life’.329 To be able to be joyful, to affirm life, however, chance and becoming have to be affirmed.330 True affirmation of life is Dionysian: ‘dance affirms becoming and the being of becoming; laughter, roars of laughter, affirm multiplicity and the unity of multiplicity; play affirms chance and the necessity of chance’.331 It is not until there is a becoming-active, that both affirms life and affirms the affirmation of life that one can truly be joyful, truly affirm suffering. As to truly affirm life, suffering must be enjoyed. Reginster adds that the tragic wisdom, the Dionysian in affirmation, is that knowing that at some point the resistance that one tries to overcome will be too great, that one will fail and die. One cannot escape one’s mortality so one must embrace it, including the suffering in it.332 Being joyful in the Dionysian sense, then, means thinking of happiness as an activity instead of a state.333 ‘Creation – that is the great redemption from all suffering, and life’s becoming light. But in order for the creator to be, suffering is needed and much transformation.’334 According to Reginster, the ‘pains of childbirth’ are exactly the sufferings that are affirmed in a ‘truly creative individual’.335 Only the individual who ‘loves himself

327 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 37. 328Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 84. 329Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 101. 330Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 190. 331 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 194. 332 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 248-250. 333 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 247. 334 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra II On the Blessed Isles. 335 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 243. 60 most’, who ‘overflows with an urge to create’, who seeks to suffer meaningfully – that is, to create. Creativity is often linked to confrontation, whether it be with the outside world or with oneself. As Wendy Brown writes, one should to be able to ‘have public conversations with each other, arguing from a vision about the common (“what I want for us”) rather than from identity (“who I am”).336 Creativity can be expressed in several ways, but what is important according to Reginster’s interpretation is that one values creativity: one needs to value the creative act more than the outcome of creativity.337 The outcome is always an end while the creative individual values becoming, the future, so the creative individual must be able to leave their creations behind and to do so with love.338 Only if one loves what is behind, one truly affirms life as becoming and is liberated.339 However, wherever new values are created, they are shaped by the history of the individual creating them. Whatever one does, whenever new values are created, it cannot be independent from the background against which values came into being. This is also not necessary, since one cannot exist without that which is bad. One has to go through it to overcome it, as Nietzsche says: one has to go through man to overcome him.340 ‘Human being is something that must be overcome. There are manifold ways and means of overcoming: you see to it! But only a jester thinks: “human being can also be leaped over.”’ I propose to interpret this sentence as the need one has of “man” and of ressentiment before overcoming ressentiment, before one can become the “Übermensch”. The Übermensch is the only one, according to Nietzsche, who can create new values, who truly affirms life, who is joyful. Since I have already argued that everyone can develop the strength to achieve greatness, the aim is then to become the Übermensch. The Übermensch is the one that truly affirms life as becoming, eternally recreating themselves, revelling in their situation. This is especially important because when ressentiment is not overcome, it can become nihilism, or worse, passive nihilism. A new revaluation is quintessential for an attitude towards life that affirms the becoming, the impermanence and the need to forever keep revaluating our values. However hard one struggles, some form of oppression will be (re)created, but as long as it is not an absolute, closed system that cannot be criticised, it can be criticised and revalued.

336 Brown, States of Injury, 51. 337 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 243. 338 Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 245-246. 339 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II On Redemption. 340 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra On old and New Tablets, 3, 4. 61

This is the bridge to the last concept I want to discuss here, namely friendship. I have already briefly touched upon friendship when discussing compassion, but I think here lies an important part of how anarchists can be inspired by Nietzsche in their practice, without becoming pure individualists. According to Reginster, ‘the individual must overcome or manage the ever greater psychological tensions his pursuit of ever greater challenges will inevitably generate.’341 This is something, I think, which can be done together. Especially since having compassion is possible so as long as it promotes others to strive beyond their boundaries.

4.5 Communities of Friends In friendship, the practical implication of revaluating suffering is combined with the idea of an individual and of life as eternal becoming. Friends, for Nietzsche, are those people who one can both laugh and dance with, and those who challenge one the most.342 As we see in for instance Zarathustra, a good friendship ‘causes one to stir’ 343 and who ‘changes himself’ [sich wandelt].344 As described above, conflict is an important part of growth for people.345 Just as compassion is only acceptable so long as both parties benefit from it, friendship is only good as long as both friends become stronger through the friendship.346 Friends are thus not completely an end-in-themselves: they lead one to becoming an Übermensch.347 In other words, what is required is both a friend who is capable of criticising, loving life as eternal becoming. In the case of accountability processes, thus, anarchists need to move beyond the unconditional support for the ‘survivor’ and stop assuming their undoubted rightness. In social relations, people together create situations that cause harm and there is not one absolute good side.348 Reginster states that valuing creativity implies a revaluation of suffering. 349 To become the joyful, to affirm life, one should value the creative act: the activity of creating instead of the end-product. This means affirming the process of becoming whilst at the same time valuing the impermanence of this process, this is the tragic. When something is created,

341Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 193. 342Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, On the friend; Beyond Good and Evil, From High Mountains. 343 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I On marriage and child. 344 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, From High Mountains; the translation in English only says ‘those who change’ without the addition of the himself. However I would lean towards the addition of the himself, as the Dutch translation also does because of the sich that is affixed to wandelt. 345 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 297. 346 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 297; Human, All Too Human, 317. 347 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I On the neighbor; Daybreak, V 552. 348With the exception of rape, murder, slavery etc. However important, these are extreme situations to which the solutions will completely different than in most cases of being hurt. 349Reginster, Affirmation of Life, 242. 62 becoming stops, the activity comes to an end, and so it needs to be left behind so another activity can be started. As Nietzsche says in Zarathustra: ‘You higher men here, haven’t all of you – failed? Be good of cheer, what does it matter! How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!’ 350 One needs to find lightness in life, a lightness that allows one to laugh and dance.351 And so, love is fundamental: loving oneself, loving life, and loving pain. The trick is to love enough, which is a fine line since loving – like friendship and compassion – involves others and thus risking ressentiment and losing one’s individuality to the herd.352 A balanceshould be reached between being around people and being alone. Throughout Nietzsche’s work, “the desert’” is a recurring theme which is sometimes described as being of great people, while sometimes it is described as dangerous.353 One needs a little bit of desert now and then, to clear one’s mind and gain perspective; a hard and temporary resting place – such as a safe space where criticism is essential.354 As is now clearer, pure individuality is not the necessary consequence of Nietzschean anarchism. Collective support is especially important since loving enough to be able to find a lightness in life is only possible through friendship: ‘Here and there on earth there is probably a kind of continuation of love in which this greedy desire of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship.’355

4.6 To Empower ‘Let us rather raise ourselves that much higher. Let us give our own example ever more brilliant colours!’356 To answer the question that started this chapter, how Nietzschean philosophy inspires an anarchist practice that can realise an alternative way of living together, the answer is thatNietzsche provides the solution for the ressentiment he diagnoses: affirmation. Affirmation means to have a certain attitude towards life, an attitude in which the thought of eternal recurrence becomes bearable because life is seen as eternal becoming instead of working towards some end state in which there is permanent peace. By affirming life as

350 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV On the Higher Man, 15. 351 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV On the Higher Man, 15-20. 352 Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 154; In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche is sometimes very positive about loving, while at other times, loving is described as a risk for Zarathustra, the risk that because of his loving, Zarathustra is not able to achieve greatness, for example in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III The Wanderer. 353 Examples can be found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III The Wanderer; Beyond Good and Evil, 270, 271; Genealogy of Morality, III, 8. 354 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 273; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, On the Pitying. 355 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 14. 356 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 321. 63 becoming, life is affirmed in its finiteness and variability. The dice can show different pips in many combinations, but whatever the outcome, whatever the outcome of the activity, the individual is in the activity: it is their activity. This affirmation thus requires viewing one not as Subject, as we are inclined to do in neoliberalism, but as a “sovereign individual”. In the sovereign individual it is not a certain identity characteristic that defines who one is – arguably identity labels only show what one is and what their rank are in the hierarchies of society – but it is their deeds that show who they are. The agency and responsibility of these individuals is not to be found in their free will, their conscience or intentions, but in their knowingly and unforced actions. If, for instance, someone is hurt by the activity of another, this would not call for ascribing blame, guilt and the administrating of punishment and acting out revenge, but criticism to teach someone. This is only possible when individuals are perceived as becoming, and thereby always open to criticism and recreation. As such, one would want to learn because of the accompanied sadness of not being who one thought one were.357 For anarchist practice this would mean building a community of friends (or multiple communities of friends) that allow for this kind of responsibility and accountability. Accountability can be practiced without it being a public trial because of the felt responsibility for actions and the critical support from friends on both sides of the conflict. This helps all those involved to increase their feeling of power by overcoming resistance, by proving to oneself and others that one is strong enough to act and overcome high resistance. This affirmative stance towards life helps both survivor/oppressed and perpetrator/oppressor to become more free because their possibilities for acting are increased and they have a feeling of power over their lives. If for some reason, someone still feels the urge to hurt others to feel powerful, support should be given to help this person to love, love themselves, their lives, and others. Accountability still happens, but in a radically different way. A way that no longer reinforces the idea of punishments and rights, that depends on the justice system to define guilt and distribute punishment as to conform everyone to society’s norms, as is the case in the neoliberal governmentality. It helps people to see that they do not need permanent peace, certainty or security in life as promised by the State, but that they need compassion instead if Mitleid and support as temporary resting-place and a hard bed instead of unconditional expressions of support. This is more evident of course in cases where there is an acute conflict and less in the case of systematic discrimination that identity politics tries to counter. But I think that the

357 Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy,83. 64 same applies here. For those, PoC, women, queer, trans-, or less-able people, who in current society are devalued as individuals, a community that both supports and sends one out into the world is desirable. A community that helps to strengthen oneself to overcome the resistance one encounters, instead having to lock oneself in a safe space with strict norms to conform to as to be able to bear life. This community has to support one as to make one feel powerful enough that one does not need to discriminate, judge, or exclude others. By functioning on criticism and responsibility one can learn whenever one does discriminate out of feeling powerless. People should to start living together instead of existing together. Since to live is to suffer, to laugh, to feel pain, and to dance, all at the same time it requires strength through support. I think this component of care is what makes this Nietzschean anarchism distinctly “feminist” or at least anti-macho, more than the current practice of accountability and privilege politics. The latter still depend on who can step forward, who has the loudest voice and who is the most popular. It neglects the necessity of real compassion and care: love for oneself and others is the protection against pain. Especially because a practice based on affirmation as I have outlined, treats individuals as individuals instead of homogenous groups that are “right or wrong”, “left or right”, “good or bad”, I think it can offer an attractive and functional alternative to the current ways of living in neoliberal governmentality that urge so many people to despair. Direct action, as Graeber describes it, shows the possibility of creating new ways of living together in this life, right now.358 For instance, setting up hospitals for undocumented and poor people (for example in Exarchia, Greece), support for queer- and trans people (for instance in Amsterdam and London), mental health support groups (for instance Spoons in Utrecht), and all kinds of collectives to earn some money while doing what one loves and is good at. There is plenty people can do while working together, but many still need to experience the feeling of being powerful enough to act without permission from the State. In Revolution in Reverse and Direct Action, David Graeber elaborates on this topic. What is necessary for these examples to become more widespread is that anarchists themselves are open to criticism and pain, to leave the safe spaces they have created and to act on what people have in common, because ‘Our moral beliefs did not fall from heaven and neither are they credentials we can flash like a badge to establish our moral probity.’359 This is what anarchists need to learn from Nietzsche.

358 Graeber, D. (2011). Revolution in Reverse. Chico: AK Press. 359 Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 78. 65

Conclusion The question with which I started my thesis was how Nietzsche’s philosophy can inspire anarchists towards a practice that can function as an alternative to the current neoliberal way of living together. I thought this question important given the rise in right-wing, conservative ideologies and conspiracy theories throughout Europe. Not even two decades ago, many people turned to anarchist practices in trying to change this neoliberal governmentality, but that appeal seems to have withered away. However, I think anarchism is the only viable solution to the problems of precarity that so many are facing today, because the State – even if it is a democratic or socialist State – still reproduces oppression and domination. In my thesis I have explored a solution to this problem by looking into the diagnosis of ressentiment and the consequent cure Nietzsche proposes in his philosophy. I have first investigated the question why the society we live is in need of change, after which I have explored in what way anarchist practices of identity politics and accountability fall short of offering a viable alternative. Last, I looked into the question on what foundation an anarchist practice should be based as to overcome the Nietzschean diagnosis of ressentiment. To answer the first question why the way we live in is in need of change, I have analysed how to understand the current predicament. According to Foucault, Brown and Graeber we live in a society that is governed by a neoliberal ideology. Within this governmentality Subjects are created as entrepreneurs who are deemed to be completely responsible for their own situation. Subjects are created by the knowledge that is gathered by and on them. This knowledge is then used to discipline Subjects and control society in general. These power techniques function on the assumption that the Subject has a free will, intentionality and, because of their free will, responsibility. Because this Subject is utterly responsible for their own situation, it depoliticises the way in which people are systematically dominated and oppressed – criticism about someone’s oppression is deflected by talk of ‘equality in inequality’ and putting responsibility on the person not making “rational”, i.e. economical, choices. Everyone who does not conform to this ideal is normalised under threat of force to maintain the security of society as a whole. Even though this equality in inequality does not at all function as the ideal neoliberal theory would have us believe. Ultimately it limits everyone’s freedom: possibilities for acting are shaped by the neoliberal governmentality and thus by what is considered economical. Procuring rights is not be enough to liberate this Subject, to make them free in a sense that is not limited to freedom in the neoliberal governmentality, since it supposes a unified “I” which it opposes to a heterogeneous “we”. As such, the neoliberal Subject is vulnerable to ressentiment: feeling 66 powerless and trying to regain power by taking (spiritual) revenge.360 It is therefore that anarchism opposes this current way of living together, a way of living together that puts profit over people. However, when considering two important practices within anarchism to challenge this neoliberal way of living together, I have come to the conclusion that Nietzsche’s accusation that anarchist practice is based on ressentiment is quite right. While answering my second question – why current anarchist practices do not inspire an alternative way of living together – I discovered that current anarchist practice deformed identity politics and accountability processes in accordance with neoliberal governmentality. This is not to say that all identity politics or accountability should be thrown overboard, because in its basic principles identity politics is very important for starting the liberation of those people who are not even considered Subjects by neoliberal governmentality. Besides, it is important that people should be responsible for what they do. But in current anarchist practice, identity politics has turned into what I call privilege politics that, like anarchist accountability processes, function mostly to act out revenge and punish people. This is because privilege politics and accountability processes maintain the idea of the Subject as truth-telling, responsible and unified “I”. As such, the effort to change how people live together, maintains a neoliberal governmentality that is based on rights and the idea that one is justified to punish someone when they are deemed “evil” by way of shaming and excluding. As such these practices are distinctly un-feminist and un-anarchist: it relies on people wanting to aggressively put themselves and their Truth forward as to take revenge. Thereby it creates (new) hierarchies and oppression. It claims space by reducing the space of others so that there is no room for care, mutual aid or intersectionality as solidarity beyond the borders of one’s own identity. This limits the freedom, qua possibilities for acting, of both those who are oppressed/survivors and those who are privileged/perpetrators. In this way, these practices hinder more than promote the liberation from the neoliberal governmentality. These practices rely mostly on lobbying for more rights within the neoliberal governmentality, and would thereby only change be that we could live in bigger cages and on longer chains. The practices are still founded on ressentiment. Ressentiment is the ‘triumph of the weak as weak’, which means that some justification is sought for the suffering that people go through, either in a higher purpose or in ascribing guilt and blame on others. In doing so, the identity of the oppressed or the survivor

360 Brown, States of Injury, 67. 67 is recreated as morally superior and thereby bestowed the right to take revenge on those who they blame for their suffering by calling them out, silencing them, shaming them, stigmatising them or even excluding them from participation. This neoliberal governmentality is based on what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, and since anarchist practices are based in the neoliberal governmentality, they are also founded on ressentiment. The same normalising practices are reproduced in the creation of an identity and safe space where everyone should conform to the norms or be excluded. As such, it is because of the foundation of ressentiment and neoliberal governmentality that it is unsurprising that anarchist practice is no attractive alternative. Especially given how these practices are used when it concerns people on the outskirts of the anarchist movement who are also expected to instantaneously conform to the norms that apply and to have instinctive knowledge of history, the workings of capitalism, correct use of pronouns, the history of colonialism, patriarchy, sexism and racism. A new foundation is thus required for anarchist practices if they are to be an actual alternative to the current neoliberal way of living together. To answer the last question, on which foundation an anarchist practice should be built to overcome ressentiment, I have answered that it should be built on Nietzschean affirmation of life. This affirmation of life challenges the assumption of the Subject as a unified “I” with distinguishable characteristics and a free will. Instead it offers to view people as sovereign individuals who can be held accountable for what they do, not on the basis of universalised norms and rights but on the basis of them as becoming and as such making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. The individual is seen as forever moving and becoming, and thus always susceptible to criticism and change. Instead of relying on morality claims about the Subject, this new politics relies on communities of friends or groups of friends that work together to create a free but responsible living together. It recognises the need of support for everyone, even if one is racist or has hurt someone. It is a practice that aims to empower people and care for people instead of blaming and taking revenge. This solution is at the same time the biggest problem. This political practice assumes that the majority of people participating feels empathy or at least feels responsible. I do think that this is the case for most people. However, it leaves open the question how to deal with people who do neither feel responsible for their actions nor empathise with others, and as such cannot learn and change themselves. Probably it will end in the exclusion of this person from the community, as they are a threat to everyone and are refusing to see others as their equals and compromise as is necessary for living together, but this needs to be further thought out. 68

The affirmation of life requires a revaluation of suffering as necessary in the process of becoming instead as an evil that should be eradicated. It also requires a revaluation of Mitleid or “pity” as honest for as long as it urges one to overcome the resistance encountered only offering a temporary resting place, instead of eliminating the burden by creating a space of permanent safety and peace. This last revaluation requires the existence of a community of friends that criticise and support each other to become creative, active and strong in order to be free. These revaluations will be hard to execute, exactly because everyone is shaped by the neoliberal governmentality that one grew up in. The overcoming of oneself will be difficult and will probably take a long time. More problematic, even, is that before anarchist practice can be founded upon this affirmation, at least one group of people should start practicing it: every individual in the group should recognise the ressentiment in the current practices and together work to build this new foundation. Otherwise, I can have these new values, but if no one around me also does, my actions may well lead to me being excluded. It is hard to imagine how this will take shape, especially since there is no such community in the Dutch anarchist environment. Sure, there is a group of people that shares – at least to some extend – political opinions and who work together in organising actions or campaigns, but to say that there is a community of friends would be a stretch.

This project has shed some light on why anarchist practice is not attractive as an alternative way of living together. It has given an explanation – though hardly the only explanation – for why it so often seems that, instead of functioning as an alternative way of living together, the anarchist movement is consumed by infighting and the reproduction of the neoliberal governmentality anarchists fight to change. The project has also given some ideas on how to fundamentally change the anarchist practices as to create a more attractive alternative, as well as for people who do not consider themselves to be “left”. However, it is a difficult process that will no doubt take long before it is actualised – if that will ever happen – and would also need more elaboration on topics like accountability and direct action as to make Nietzschean anarchism more practical. Maybe Honneth’s work on restorative justice might be of help here. For instance, by investigating how this would relate to the transitional phase in which anarchists would struggle against the status quo to change migration policies, discriminating policies at job-interviews, forced psychiatric treatment etc. And then, more thought should be given to subjects like providing mental health care, non-discriminatory health care or education. On the latter topic Paolo Freire has done interesting and influential work, but more work is necessary to come to a practice that fits with this new framework of affirming life. 69

However much work still needs to be done, this new perspective provides hope by showing there might be an alternative to the prevalent neoliberal governmentality with all its precarity. To answer the question how Nietzschean philosophy can inspire anarchist practice to become an alternative to neoliberal society, I would say that it does so by offering a radically different outlook on what is wrong and on how people can regard one another. Maybe it will take long, maybe it will never take root, but the least we can do is to toss the dice and see what combination pips come up.

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