Nietzsche's Revolution: Décadence, Politics, And

Nietzsche’s Revolution

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Nietzsche’s Revolution

Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality

C. Heike Schotten

First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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For my parents, Peter and Bernice Schotten,

who taught me to love

and

For my intellectual parents, Michael and Catherine Zuckert,

who taught me to read

Man vergilt einem Lehrer schlecht, wenn man immer nur der Schüler bleibt. [One repays a teacher poorly if one ever remains only a pupil.]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra I:22(3) “On the Gift-Giving Virtue”

[O]ften I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. The Gay Science Preface §2

What is best in us we do not know—we cannot know. Beyond Good and Evil §249

Contents

Acknowledgments ix A Note on Citations xi Introduction 1 1 Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 11 I Revolution 2 Diagnosis: Décadence 41 3 Treatment: Revolution 67 II Conservation 4 Diagnosis: Emasculation 91 5 Treatment: Redemption 127 III Contradiction 6 Queering Revolution 171 Notes 207 Bibliography 259 Index 269

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Acknowledgments

Many people have helped bring this book to completion. Michael and Catherine Zuckert read multiple drafts when it was still in the dissertation phase, and continually pushed me to account for all the parts of Nietzsche that I at that time preferred to leave out. Michael, in particular, has been my teacher, advisor, mentor, and nurturer for almost fifteen years, and I am profoundly grateful for his guidance and support—both academic and otherwise—without which I cannot imagine my intellectual development. Dan Conway provided unconditional long-distance support both during the dissertation process and since, and his scholarship continually nourishes me and stimulates my thinking anew. His influence on my own work is obvious, and perhaps most apparent in those places where I fail to acknowledge it explicitly. Anonymous reviewers rightly compelled me to sharpen the book’s argument, in particular, the reviewer who pushed me to think through the role of prognosis in my account of Nietzsche’s doctoring. Chapter 3 is much stronger than it would have otherwise been due to Eric Jonas’s careful reading and thoughtful criticisms. I am also grateful for his valuable work in constructing the book’s index. The University of Massachusetts Boston has been a rich and meaningful place to complete my work on this project. As the only public university in Boston, UMass’s commitment to affordable, accessible higher education for working-class students has taught me the real meaning of education and the important obligations of liberatory pedagogy and research. My colleagues in the Political Science department have been warm, affable, engaging, and supportive. Their enthusiasm for political theory in general, and my own teaching and research in particular, makes UMass feel like home. I have also benefited from the comradery, friendship, and intellectual collegiality of particular faculty both within and outside my own department: Jalal Alamgir, Matt Brown, Reyes Coll- Tellechea, Doreen Drury, Leila Farsakh, Larry Kaye, Erin O’Brien, Pra- tima Prasad, and Rachel Rubin. Finally, I have been lucky enough to have developed intensely meaningful and rewarding relationships with a handful of students whose love of learning, care for politics, and seemingly infinite thirst for yet another book to read and think about made teaching at UMass Boston fulfilling beyond anything I could have ever expected: Reem Abou-Samra, Eric Jonas, Alex Kulenovic, Paul Rehm, Jarrod Sha- nahan, and Lindsey Souza. x Acknowledgments

I survived the writing process as successfully as I did due to the intelligence, care, insight, and wit of Sarah Dunbar, without whom I would not be who and where I am today. Dunya Alwan offered nuanced, critical, and sustaining love from both near and far away, and taught me as often through the example of her life as through the content of her words the meaning of doing right by other people. Leila Farsakh consistently reminds me of the meaning of unconditional love. I have learned from Avinash Veeraraghavan’s power of vision, and am moved by his ability to see me in ways no one else does. And I am grateful for the friendship of Arjun Jayadev, the sweetest man in the world, who always knows just what to say when I need him to say it, and so agreeably and comprehensively answers my endless questions about economics. It should go without saying that all remaining inadequacies—in the text or otherwise—are the responsibility of the author. I am lucky to have had such good companionship during this project, and do not for one minute take for granted the exquisite beauty of each of these precious intimacies, which have been intellectual and extra-intellectual and sometimes both at the same time.

A Note on Citations

All references to Nietzsche’s works are indicated in the text by the following abbreviations (translator and edition information for both Eng- lish and German versions may be found in the bibliography). For On the Genealogy of Morals, Roman numerals indicate essay number; Arabic numerals indicate aphorism number. For Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Roman numerals indicate part of the text (First, Second, Third, or Fourth), Ara- bic numerals indicate the section of that part, and Arabic numerals in parentheses indicate the aphorism number of that section, where necessary [e.g., IV:13(2)]. I have also included the title of the section for con- textual and interpretive purposes. For all other works, Arabic numerals refer to aphorism number. The letter “P” indicates that work’s preface. I have sometimes included the German text alongside the English citation for the reader’s own reference but have retained all English translations intact unless otherwise indicated. All quotations also retain Nietzsche’s original emphasis unless otherwise indicated. Regarding gender, I retain translators’ usage of the words “man” and “mankind” to render Mensch and Menschen. Not only would this have been standard meaning and usage in Nietzsche’s day, but as analysis in later chapters will make clear, I also believe this is to whom Nietzsche is specifically referring, rendering gender neutrality both a false equity and an interpretive disservice. When discussing issues unrelated to Nietzsche’s views specifically, I myself will rely on gender-neutral pluralities such as “humanity” or “humankind,” and alternate between male and female singular pronouns as necessary. BT The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music DS David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer HL On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life

SE Schopenhauer as Educator WB Richard Wager in Bayreuth HH Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits D Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality GS The Gay Science: la gaya scienza Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None BGE Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future xii A Note on Citations

GM On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic CW The Case of Wagner TI Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer A The Antichrist(ian) EH Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is NCW Nietzsche Contra Wagner Subdivisions of Twilight of the Idols are indicated by the following abbreviations: “Maxims” “Maxims and Arrows” “Socrates” “The Problem of Socrates” “Philosophy” “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” “Fable” “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” “Anti-Nature” “Morality as Anti-Nature” “Errors” “The Four Great Errors” “‘Improvers’” “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind” “Germans” “What the Germans Lack” “Skirmishes” “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” “Ancients” “What I Owe to the Ancients” Where Nietzsche discusses his own texts by chapter in Ecce Homo, I have retained the above textual abbreviations to indicate these chapters (e.g., EH “BT” §1). The four larger subdivisions are indicated by the following abbreviations: “Wise” “Why I am so Wise” “Clever” “Why I am so Clever” “Books” “Why I Write Such Good Books” “Destiny” “Why I am a Destiny”

Introduction

For the task of a revaluation of all values more capacities may have been needed than have ever dwelt together in a single individual—above all, even contrary capacities that had to be kept from disturbing, destroying one another. Ecce Homo “Why I am So Clever” §9

The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition. Twilight of the Idols “Morality as Anti-Nature” §3

It is by now a commonplace that Nietzsche’s philosophy is characterized by contradiction, a deceptively simple observation aptly summed up by the title of Wolfgang Müller-Lauter’s study, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of his Philosophy.1 Müller-Lauter con- cisely indicates here both that Nietzsche is a philosopher of contradiction— a thinker who praises contradiction and welcomes adversity, opposition, and struggle—and yet also that Nietzsche’s thought is plagued by contradiction, inconsistency, and paradox. It is my contention that this dual set of conditions reveals not only Nietzsche’s most basic philosophical consistency (whatever this word can mean in the face of his attack upon it) but also his most important teaching. Nietzsche’s readers are, as a whole, very concerned about his contradictions. Philosophers worry about Nietzsche’s famed problem of self- reference, often considered a foundational contradiction at the heart of his philosophy. How can this self-professed advocate of “perspectivism” claim that his own philosophical viewpoint is “true”? If every philosophical viewpoint is “only” a perspective, then is this also true of perspectivism itself? And, if so, then how can we take perspectivism seriously as a coherent epistemological theory? As John Richardson has asked, “What kind of truth can it be if it is (just) perspectival?”2 Indeed, is Nietzsche even speaking intelligibly—can we even understand his words—if he makes no claim to any kind of truth whatsoever? Thus far, Anglo-American philosophers have chosen one of two tactics in responding to the problem of self-reference in Nietzsche’s epistemology: attack and abandon, or revive and rescue. Practitioners of the first approach conclude that Nietzsche is hopelessly mired in self-contradiction, his critique of truth merely demonstrating the inescapability of truth claims. Practitioners of the second tactic attempt to rescue Nietzsche by 2 Nietzsche’s Revolution drawing a distinction, arguing either that he does not make truth claims at all,3 or that the truth claims he does make are of a different character than the truth he criticizes.4 A graceful and thorough response, the latter is no different from the former insofar as both answers depend on the presumed priority of the principle of noncontradiction. Because consistency is essential to philosophical rigor, concluding Nietzsche contradicts himself puts his very eminence as a philosopher into question,5 and suggests he is unworthy of scholarly attention.6 Political theorists are also concerned about Nietzsche’s contradictions. While the epistemological problem does not escape their attention, political theorists are more concerned with Nietzsche’s political loyalties, which are not simply unfashionable in their reckless elitism and juvenile adoration of brute strength, but also seem inconsistent with his philosophical critiques of essentialism, teleology, and sovereign subjectivity. Similarly, feminist theorists (those who bother with Nietzsche at all, that is) remain divided regarding the relative usefulness of Nietzsche’s critiques of identity, objectivity, and truth for feminist ends, given not only Nietz- sche’s notorious critiques of gender equality, but also the multiple bilious remarks he reserves for his various tirades against Woman, women, and the Eternal-Feminine. While philosophers have come to one of two basic conclusions regarding the status of Nietzsche’s self-referential paradox, political theorists have constructed a more elaborate series of defenses in their attempts to resolve the seeming contradictions between Nietzsche’s philosophical arguments and his political positions. Some, of course, simply conclude the dispute is irresolvable, arguing that Nietzsche’s politics and his philosophy are at irreconcilable odds (with the latter often emerging as far superior to the former).7 Others, primarily those on the Left, have attempted to save Nietzsche from disrepute by focusing less on what he said than on what can be done with what he said, appropriating Nietzsche’s critiques of truth and championing of the agon for projects of (sometimes “radical”) democracy.8 Similarly (although decisively different in both strategy and purpose), the philosophical project of deconstruction has both traced its

roots to Nietzsche and used deconstructive techniques of interpretation to exonerate him of political wrongdoing. These thinkers, in effect, use Nietzsche’s “philosophy” to overcome his “politics,” often specifically to acquit him of the charge of misogyny.9 Finally, feminist theorists have used Nietzschean critiques of subjectivity, identity, and truth to develop a less normative, more open-ended feminist coalition,10 a more substantial feminist epistemology,11 or to reign in worrisome strains of identity politics ascendant in feminist theory.12 Now, the very suggestion that Nietz- sche’s philosophy must be “appropriated” (and not simply “followed”) for progressive political projects clearly suggests it is not immediately ame- nable to such usage. Many political theorists have insisted on precisely Introduction 3 this—that Nietzsche’s explicit political claims trump all. Citing his adoration of aristocracy and slavery and stressing his signature contempt for the “herd” of humanity, these commentators deny that Nietzsche’s thought could be legitimately used to bolster any liberatory project whatsoever, much less offer a framework for radical democracy.13 Similarly, some feminists reject Nietzsche as useless or irrelevant to feminism, yet another mouthpiece for the misogyny of the Western philosophical tradition.14 Each of these intellectual disputes actually represents an advance. After all, it is only within the past fifty years or so that Nietzsche has been admitted into consideration by the English-speaking world as a legitimate philosopher in his own right; Nietzsche’s accepted status as a political philosopher is even more recent.15 But what is remarkable is the surprising way in which the opposing sides of these disputes overlap: all too often the literature on Nietzsche associates his truth-pronouncements with conservative politics, while his descriptions of interpretation, perspectivism, and subjectivity become linked to an incipient leftism. Because Nietzsche’s declarations regarding, for example, the necessity of slavery16 or the desirability of aristocracy17 are spoken in declarative and seemingly unequivocal language, it is suggested that overlooking them is foolishly to appropriate Nietzsche’s philosophy for a politics it cannot coherently sustain. By contrast, commentators on the Left stress Nietzsche’s critique of the very notion of truth, suggesting that if this critique is applied to Nietzsche’s own assertions, then all of his inegalitarian views become subject to the same delegitimating critique he applies to the entire Western tradition. Yet this surprising alignment is lamentable: Nietzsche’s truth- telling is not “simply” conservative any more than it is “simply” political, just as his critique or deconstruction of truth is neither “simply” progressive any more than it is “simply” philosophical. Indeed, Nietzsche’s assertions of truth, especially as regards life, the body, and will to power, are quite radical. Later, I will argue that these assertions are the foundational planks of Nietzsche’s revolutionary program to transform the modern age, a project so complex in its rhetorical and political strategies that one would be hard-pressed to deny its “philosophical” credentials. Simi-

larly, Nietzsche’s critiques of truth are in no way necessarily progressive. As Wendy Brown has pointed out with specific reference to genealogy (although her point holds for deconstruction as well), there is no necessity that any particular textual practice entails any specific political allegianc- es.18 Indeed, as Nietzsche himself clearly demonstrates in the first essay of the Genealogy, one can certainly engage in genealogical inquiry without necessarily being committed to a progressive political agenda. Finally, of course, there is itself a politics to interpretive strategies. Methods of reading simply cannot be relegated to the “merely” or solely philosophical— they are in fact entirely political insofar as they govern the very parameters of intelligibility itself. After all, the protocols that govern one’s reading of 4 Nietzsche’s Revolution a text necessarily affect what one finds there. And what is more political than the struggle to determine who or what exists—to determine who or what counts as intelligible at all?19 However, all of this simply returns us to the epistemological question raised at the outset by the philosophers, marking it as perhaps the central problem in Nietzsche’s thought, for the problem of Nietzsche’s political loyalties is subsidiary to the question of the epistemological status of his views to begin with. After all, if there is no truth, then how can Nietzsche proclaim one, even if it is only his own? Political theorists have struggled with the question of whether to privilege Nietzsche’s political assertions, which appear explicitly antidemocratic, racist, and misogynist, over his philosophical views, which some believe hold radical or liberatory potential. But for philosophers, the very possibility that Nietzsche’s philosophical views could hold anything at all is in dispute, for they seem trapped in a maze of irresolvable epistemological contradiction. This question must be broached directly, since using Nietzsche’s views on interpretation to undermine his political assessments merely presumes—perhaps illegitimately—that we can privilege Nietzsche’s perspectivism over his politics, that we can count on his insistence on multiplicity and interpretation to trump his likewise insistence on an order of rank and dismissal of pity. It is here, I think, that we find a more significant overlap in the way philosophers and political theorists have approached Nietzsche’s texts: each set of readers has desired to resolve these difficulties into a single, more or less definitive account of Nietzsche’s thought as a whole. The hope seems to be that we might finally settle the question of whether Nietzsche is, in the case of the problem of self-reference, mired in hopeless self-contradiction or cleverly surpassing the limits of language through his redeployment of the word “truth.” In political theory, we believe we might finally settle the question of whether Nietzsche is “really” a radical democrat or an aristocrat, a feminist or a woman-hater. More significant than the substance of these disputes, in my view, is the anxiety they veil: Nietzsche’s readers are troubled by the broader problem of contradiction itself. The difficulty is not precisely who Nietzsche is or what Nietzsche

says, but what to do with argumentative assertions and political view- points, which, when attributed to the same author, are irreconcilable. In Nietzsche’s Revolution, I suggest that none of these paradoxes can be resolved once and for all. They cannot be resolved in their particularity because they cannot be resolved in Nietzsche’s thought more generally because the very essence of that thought is contradiction. This means that both sets of scholars, in both disciplines, on both “sides” of these disputes, are right. They are right because Nietzsche’s philosophy simply consists of two divergent sets of philosophical and political positions that cannot be resolved into a coherent reading wherein one side is definitively privileged over the other.20 Nietzsche is both a proclaimer of truth as well as its Introduction 5 deconstructor, both a potential progressive and an aristocratic conservative, both a woman-hater and a (perhaps unwitting) feminist forebear. Indeed, I simply do not think that any textual evidence exists that could conclusively decide in favor of one side or the other in these disputes. And, really, is this surprising? If Nietzsche himself praises contradiction and multiplicity, if he rejects the possibility of resolution or unity or wholeness or any kind of Hegelian sublation of constitutive oppositions, should we really be surprised that his own thought is characterized by such irreconcilability? Shouldn’t we rather be surprised at our own desire to make Nietzsche less complicated, less difficult, less paradoxical? What is at stake in showing that Nietzsche is “really” one thing or another? And can this demonstration be squared with Nietzsche’s own dismissal of reconciliation, with the philosopher who declares even the best friendship to be an enmity?21 Of course, this assertion is itself a claim regarding who or what Nietz- sche “really” is; such interpretive assertions are inescapable. But they are, perhaps, possible to undermine or dodge in order to undo them from the inside. This is in part what I am attempting to do by saying, in an eminently Nietzschean spirit, that the essence of Nietzsche’s thought is contradiction. After all, if what Nietzsche “really” is is contradictory then this is simultaneously a truth that is also not a truth. As an essence, contradiction cannot capture Nietzsche’s thought without undermining it(self); it is a “that”ness that is also, and necessarily, a “not-that”ness. My aim, then, is not to resolve Nietzsche’s thought into a coherent or unified whole, but rather to acknowledge and affirm its both/and status without domesticat- ing or neutralizing either side of it. In Nietzsche’s Revolution, therefore, I intervene into each of the debates about Nietzsche’s paradoxes—in philosophy, political theory, and feminism—but without maintaining the disciplinary divisions between them intact. This is because commentators in all three fields are similarly invested in finding a noncontradictory truth of Nietzsche’s thought, but also because I think any such separation of field or domain would be an artificial one: in my view, Nietzsche’s claims regarding politics and

inequality are essentially bound up with his philosophical commitments regarding truth, an intersection he demonstrates specifically through the vehicle of gender throughout his writings despite commentators’ refusal to pay this intersection sufficient attention. This refusal stems in part from the view, widespread in U.S. academia and especially prominent in political science, that politics or the political is that domain of thought and praxis concerned primarily with the state, its machinations, and associated institutions. Political theory, then, as a “normative” undertaking, would concern the study of possible legitimizations of the state, perhaps also the state’s origin and foundations (when these aren’t presumed to be the same thing), and inquiry into the relative justness of the state’s 6 Nietzsche’s Revolution institutional workings.22 While it is true that the state is a prominent locus of power, to presume that the study of power can be exhausted through study of the state alone is simply to beg the question by presum- ing the state as power’s only domain, missing a more satisfying and robust delineation of the political as what is specifically concerned with power per se and the state only residually, only insofar as it is as an important site and redeployment of power.23 Adherence to a state-centric model of politics and political theory actually prevents us from noticing the ways in which power circulates in multiple domains, saturates and informs relationships beyond those between sovereigns and subjects, and operates according to logics beyond the juridical. It is of course on this basis that much feminist theory has claimed gender to be a political relation, and Foucault has claimed mental illness, sexuality, and even truth itself as legitimate objects of political inquiry.24 The political, then, might be better understood as that framework or point of view that renders politics apparent—the political is the perspective that sees social life as the very site or domain of the workings of power. It is on this basis that I would argue Nietzsche’s philosophy is essentially political, for, as is well-known, Nietzsche claims much of our human life to be infused with power in a deeply constitutive way—from subjectivity to morality to knowledge itself, basic facets of our human life and being are in fact the effects of power or the by-products of domination.25 In Foucaultian terms, we might say that Nietzsche understands power to be productive at least as much as it is prohibitive, and to operate in as multifarious and dispersed and uncircumscribable a manner as life itself. Viewed in this way, we can in fact see the ways in which Nietzsche’s own philosophy of truth and power is the intellectual forebear of the Foucaultian view of philosophy as “the politics of truth”26 or the history of succeeding regimes of “power-knowledge.”27 Delimiting political theory to the study of the state’s legitimacy and justice, then, unnecessarily constricts its purview by overprivileging the state and rendering any other permutation of power irrelevant to political inquiry. By this measure, of course, Nietzsche is surely no political thinker; but, then, by this account, very little about human life is political and power is

largely absent from the world. This is a view to which Nietzsche himself surely did not subscribe and that, if accurate, seems utterly to decimate the content of his philosophical thought, which, considered as centrally concerned with power as I take him to be, is in fact primarily, if not essentially, political.28 Nietzsche’s political views, then, and especially insofar as they involve women, gender, or sexuality, have been excluded from both philosophy’s and political theory’s consideration because they could not possibly, by definition, be relevant for understanding his philosophical project. In my view, this has impoverished our understanding not simply of Nietz- sche’s politics, but also of his philosophical views, insofar as they, too, Introduction 7 are suffused with gendered and bodily imagery, metaphor, and meaning. Indeed, we must seriously consider; if, as I have argued, the question of truth is the central stumbling block that seems continually to mire Nietzsche in contradiction, and truth is, as Nietzsche so often supposes, a woman, then how could severing his (gender) politics from his philosophy constitute anything but a radical dismemberment of his thought? In Nietzscehe’s Revolution, then, I consider the philosophical and political contradictions disputed amongst Nietzsche’s commentators within one framework, characterized as a single struggle that I see as the more comprehensive tension within Nietzsche’s philosophy: the conflict between his revolutionary desire to radically overhaul the modern age and his nostalgic longing for a romanticized “golden era” in which everything—in particular, bodies and moralities—remained within its proper place. So, on the one hand, in his revolutionary posture, Nietzsche advocates nothing less than a complete overhaul of the entirety of Western civilization— what he calls its “form of life”—which he diagnoses as having been in decline ever since its ancient Greek beginnings, in the last throes of déca- dence now, and inching ever-slowly toward its nihilistic demise. Yet at the same time, Nietzsche consistently glorifies past ages and heroic figures, expressing contempt for the weakness, laziness, and effeminacy of his contemporaries who have lost all powerful instincts in their emasculated seekings after truth, equality, and virtue. Indeed, Nietzsche often laments the decay of older, traditional moralities, which he finds more honest, more noble, and just plain healthier for the human race. Nietzsche’s frequent, often immoderate revelry in such nostalgia is proof positive that his revolutionary project was not one he himself could ultimately follow through with. Dismayed by the current condition of humanity, yet terrified of the forces his own revaluation might unleash, he frequently retreats into a longing for an order of rank that has decayed and is no longer operative, conflating health with masculinity and entreating modern man to “Become hard!” and give birth to himself in the only properly self-sufficient display of self-overcoming. In his most excessive moments, Nietzsche even explicitly longs for a redeemer to save humanity from

its own decay (which he metaphorizes as castration), an übermenschlich figure whose creative activity will justify all the horror and misbegotten ugliness of humanity’s failures, making them bearable from at least a cos- mic or suprahistorical perspective. Nietzsche’s embarrassing indulgence in a quintessentially Christian longing for redemption demonstrates both the aptness of his diagnosis of modernity and his incapacity to facilitate its revolutionary overthrow. The real paradox in Nietzsche, then, is not that between his declarations and critique of truth or even that between his epistemology and his politics, but rather the contradiction between his deep, revolutionary longing for a total overcoming that he himself is unable to stomach, much 8 Nietzsche’s Revolution less bring about. For Nietzsche’s reticence regarding revolution occurs precisely at the moment in which his diagnosis of modernity becomes gendered—it is only when décadence is characterized as castration that Nietzsche becomes truly unable to face this sickness, much less prescribe a therapeutic regimen or undertake its revolutionary overthrow. Nietzsche was thus unable to embrace the contradictions that he himself argues are constitutive of life, nor could he recommend the necessarily hybrid forms that must emerge from his revolutionary attempt to transform modernity. Frightened by the “unnatural” bodies his own revolution might make possible, he defensively calls for a return to a naturalized gender hierarchy to save a décadent modernity from nihilism and death. Nietzsche therefore largely refuses to take up the political challenge his own critique of truth invites, leaving it to others to take up his revolutionary project and carry out that which he could only authorize, but not himself undertake. Importantly, Nietzsche’s inability here is not emblematic of philosophical or political inconsistency, but rather can be seen as an illustration of the impossibility of purity, a performance of anti-idealism that is his larger teaching. Nietzsche’s conflicting desires for both radical revolution and retrogressive return cut both ways: first, and perhaps most obviously, he is deeply critical of the Christian idealism and morality that have convulsed the modern age and are threatening its nihilistic demise. His demand that it be overthrown in a revaluation of all hitherto existing values is quite clearly a position and program of revolution. Yet Nietz- sche’s honesty in relating his own inability to bring about—or even simply accept—the consequences of his own revolutionary demand also presents us with a deep critique of revolution, traditionally understood, as a definitive break with the old and the inauguration of the radically new. Indeed, Nietzsche makes painfully clear the ways in which revolutionary desire can also be a longing for purity. It can become an escapism into an idealism of the future, just as conservatism can become an escapism into the idealism of the past. Nietzsche’s own failed revolution shows the tragedy of this impossible will to truth, the very sickness he is seeking to root out of the Western psyche. It is thus no accident that in attempting to destroy

it, he performs for us its very destructive power. This is but one more proof of the need for total revolution, and one more performance of the impossibility that Nietzsche could bring it about.29 After an introductory chapter detailing Nietzsche’s understanding of some important terms for this study—the body, health, and will to power—in Chapters 2 and 3, I explore the affirmative or “progressive” side of this duality, detailing Nietzsche’s withering diagnosis of modernity as suffering from décadence, and revealing what I believe to be the exciting and radical promise of his revitalizing, revolutionary rhetoric of will to power. In the second half of the book—Chapters 4 and 5—I explore the reactionary and conservative elements of Nietzsche’s thought, which, in Introduction 9 my view, prevent him from redeeming the promise of this revolutionary rhetoric. Both of these views are interpreted through the prism of Nietz- sche’s view of the body, more often specifically through the vehicle of gender and sexuality (I consider the role of race in this framework explicitly in Chapters 2 and 4). In the final chapter, I take up the question of where we go from here. If Nietzsche’s thought and politics are characterized by irreconcilable contradiction, what do we do? There are two questions at stake here: (1) how are we to understand Nietzsche? and (2) how are we to approach our own political world? This is where my own sympathies emerge most clearly. Casting my lot with the revolutionary Nietzsche explicitly, I attempt to develop the consequences of this line of his thinking to what I believe to be its twenty-first-century post-structuralist conclusions. Contradicting my own methodological proscriptions, I mine the Nietzschean corpus for reasons to privilege the revolutionary Nietzsche over the conservative one, uncovering evidence that he knew of the impending demise of gender coherence his own critique of truth authorizes and invites, and even endorsed (albeit tacitly) the arrival of this postmodern future. I then unabashedly appropriate Nietzsche for my own projects and attempt to theorize a revolutionary commitment that is harmonious with post-structuralist critique. This is a revolutionary politics sundered from recourse to either hypostasized origins or redemptive, teleological futures. It is my halting and nascent attempt to think through revolution post-Marx, indeed post-revolution itself, an attempt to realize the paradoxical possibility of a revolutionary desire that is, and remains, committed only to the décadent present. This is, I want to suggest, a Left Nietzschean project that Nietzsche would endorse had Nietzsche been a Left Nietzschean, an unlikely possibility that we nevertheless cannot conclusively rule out. Thus I actually have two agendas in this text—to argue that the essence of Nietzsche’s thought is contradiction and to argue that Nietzsche himself authorizes contemporary queer politics. Now, this is likely a project Nietzsche himself would almost surely have rejected and even found contemptible. But it is certainly a project he authorizes, and I, for one, think that taking up Nietzsche’s challenge is the necessary political task for revolutionaries and anyone else concerned about the post-Nietzschean, postrevolutionary world we live in. Nietzsche had no illusions about the difficulty of this task; indeed, he made all too clear that it was one he himself was unable to undertake. But in the wake of nihilism, there simply is no other choice. As I hope to show, in Nietzsche’s view, our only options are revolution or death. I think he wanted us to choose the former. 10 Nietzsche’s Revolution A Note on Method

In this book, I reference only Nietzsche’s published writings, leaving The Will to Power and the rest of his notebooks aside.30 There is, of course, a diversity of approaches and appeals to the Nachlass for interpretive justification. A standard compromise is to rely first and foremost on the published writings, appealing to the Nachlass only when it supports something already evident in the published works, or else can extricate the interpreter from a tight spot by filling in a gap that nevertheless seems consistent with assertions in the published writings.31 Others rely mostly on the published works, but refer to the notes for a conceptual clarity (regarding epistemological claims, for example, or important doctrines) believed to be absent from Nietzsche’s finished texts.32 By contrast, Alex- ander Nehamas makes no distinction between Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings, arguing that as “an author, a public figure,” all of Nietzsche’s “writings are relevant to his interpretation.”33 And Heidegger, of course, relies only on the Nachlass, specifically only on the fragments collected in The Will to Power, which he believes contain Nietzsche’s real philosophical views.34 Pierre Klossowski’s famous interpretation of eternal recurrence also relies virtually exclusively on citations culled from the Nachlass.35 While I think Nehamas is right that “there can be no single answer to the question of priority,”36 I nevertheless also agree with Clark that “the published writings provide much more of a context for specific passages,”37 a context that the fragments in The Will to Power—and the other notebooks—obviously lack. This context is important not for the reason Clark suggests, because “many more checks on the accuracy of interpretation” are available, but rather because Nietzsche is a master styl- ist, a writer whose rhetoric belies any clear demarcation between form and content. I think it is necessary to take seriously the mode in which Nietz- sche presents his philosophy and to read it as being equally as important as what he “says.” Thus a collection of unfinished and unpolished writings, some of which were assembled into the “pastiche non-book”38 The Will to Power by a manipulative sister and clumsy editors, and published under

a title and within an organizational structure not explicitly sanctioned by Nietzsche, does not present itself as an obvious exemplar of Nietzschean philosophizing.39 And, while compelling in its own right, the rest of the Nachlass only raises the same sorts of methodological questions for a reading of Nietzsche that emphasizes, as mine does, the crucial importance of his rhetorical presentation. It is because of these difficulties that I restrict myself solely to the consideration of Nietzsche’s published writings for the interpretation offered here. C HAPTER 1

Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power

Some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I:8 “On the Tree on the Mountainside”

The Body

In Plato’s REPUBLIC, that foundational text of Western political theory, the discussion that takes place between Socrates and his interlocutors centers around their attempt to answer the ethical question “why be just?” To answer this question, Socrates suggests that they build a “city in speech,” a project that is premised upon a now famous presumption that has come to be called the analogy between city and soul:

“It looks to me as though the investigation we are undertaking is no ordi- nary thing, but one for a man who sees sharply. Since we’re not clever men,” I said, “in my opinion we should make this kind of investigation of it: if someone had, for example, ordered men who don’t see very sharply to read little letters from afar and then someone had the thought that the same letters are somewhere also, but bigger and in a bigger place, I suppose it would look like a godsend to be able to consider the little ones after having read these first, if, of course, they do happen to be the same.” “Most certainly,” said Adeimantus. “But, Socrates, what do you notice in the investigation of the just that’s like this?” “I’ll tell you,” I said. “There is, as we say, justice of one man; and there

is, surely, justice of a whole city too?” “Certainly,” he said. “Is a city bigger than one man?” “Yes, it is bigger”; he said. “So then, perhaps there would be more justice in the bigger and it would be easier to observe closely. If you want, first we’ll investigate what justice is like in the cities. Then, we’ll also go on to consider it in individuals, considering the likeness of the bigger in the idea of the littler?”1 12 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Adeimantus agrees to this proposition, entreating Socrates not to do anything else but follow this precise discursive course. As Socrates notes, this method will be successful only “if, of course,” the big and small letters “do happen to be the same.” By mutual agreement that they are, in fact, analogous, the discussion of politics that proceeds throughout the rest of the Republic can be understood as depending upon this performatively enacted homology between polis and psychē, collectivity and individual. Establishing this relationship is necessary at least in part because justice is easier to observe in the city—it is “bigger”—than the individual. Socrates seems to be suggesting here that the soul cannot be known or approached directly, but rather must be understood by means of an analogy—the correspondence of which is uncertain—to a more familiar, larger, collective body. Early on in the construction of this city in speech, Socrates muses that it would be best if “when one of us wounds a finger, presumably the entire community—that community tying the body together with the soul in a single arrangement under the ruler within it—is aware of the fact, and all of it is in pain as a whole along with the afflicted part; and it is in this sense we say that this human being has a pain in his finger.”2 Here Socrates makes clear that underlying the analogy between polis and psychē are actually two unificatory desires—one for a unification of individual bodies with the collectivity and another for a unification of body with soul. The result, if such a thing were possible, would be one gigantic body politic, ruled by reason and organized harmoniously, so fused in thought and perception that when one member (or extremity) of the body is wounded, that pain is felt throughout the entirety, as an injury to all. This longing to unite citizen and state, body and soul in an analogous—if not identical—relationship is a founding desire of not only the discussion in the Republic but also a dominant strand of Western political theory. The frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan is only the most obvious representation of the body politic trope in political theory, which recurs repeatedly: Spinoza’s conceptualization of “the whole of Nature as one individual,”3 Rousseau’s desire to force citizens to be free, the early Marx’s

lamentation of alienation in labor and the erosion of our species-being under liberal capitalism, Freud’s reworking of the Platonic tri-partite psychē and seamless projection of its dynamics onto social, political, and religious life, and even the critiques of liberalism by offered by modern- day communitarians witness the desire of Western political theorists to merge polis and psychē into a single body with a unified, reigning order.4 Presumably, Socrates is aware of the impossibility of the fulfillment of such a desire. Such fulfillment is impossible because, for among other reasons, the human body remains the site of irreducible experiential particularity. As Hannah Arendt notes, the body is that about human life that is the most private, the least sharable.5 Socrates indicates this himself by Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 13 noting that the “privacy” (idiōsis) of pleasure and pain dissolves the unity of the city.6 But in dreaming of a community in which all feel pain with and as one another, Socrates knowingly advances an argument for utter uniformity that even individual bodies lack. Certainly we do not experience pain throughout our entire bodies whenever we stub a toe, for example, or feel nauseous. Moreover, individual people’s experiences of similar stimuli vary, as do their relative pain thresholds, rendering empathic com- miseration with fellow citizens an effortful act, a condition far from the unconscious and subterranean workings of the body, which register experiences of pleasure and pain to us without our being aware of the mechanisms by which they do so. Indeed, were Socrates’ desires to be fulfilled, bodies that are not injured would nevertheless experience pain; and, prerequisite to such a condition, the internal structure and order of those bodies—what he calls their “souls”—would likewise also be identical. The impossibility of this well-ordered, harmonious, utterly homogeneous city in speech that the interlocutors of the Republic together construct was thus already determined by its founding assumption—namely, that the site of utmost privacy, particularity, and incommunicability might be made sharable, generalizable, communicable, public.7 It is legitimate to conclude, then, that this fundamental desire of West- ern political theory to unite body and soul, collectivity and individual, is premised upon an explicitly performative agreement that its participant interlocutors know full well is impossible. Put another way, one could say that a constitutive desire of Western political theory is rooted in an impossible idealism that deliberately and knowingly excludes the body from its speculations. Although the recognition that it is easier to spot justice in the city than in the individual might suggest the impossibility of ever knowing the soul, and potentially and fundamentally undermines its importance for political life altogether, instead the Socratic project insists upon a unification of individual with collectivity and body with soul in order to eliminate the body and its cumbersome, divisive particularities altogether. For in the Socratic schema, without the hindrance of the body, what remains is the soul’s unmediated communing with absolute knowl-

edge, its desired and most desirable condition. We might even say that without the body, all that is left is a soul, rather than the soul or souls, since no soul has a different experience or understanding of knowledge, which remains ever and universally the same. The city in speech in the Republic, then, is an attempt to create on earth what can only exist in the realm of the Ideas—the disembodied, solely real, and universally true experience of knowing. That this experience is so divorced from earthly, bodily existence renders it beyond or outside humanness. That it is so divorced from the multiple and particular existences of bodies and social life renders it ultimately beyond—indeed, in active opposition to—politics, Socrates’ deferral of the body is thus a resounding rejection of politics. 14 Nietzsche’s Revolution

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche claims that “our body is but a social structure composed of many souls,”8 and much has been made of the similarities between Nietzsche’s political view of subjectivity and Socrates’ metropolitan model of the soul.9 Yet whereas Socrates longs to unify all members of the community into a single, functioning body, organized along the model of an individual soul, Nietzsche instead insists on the irreducible multiplicity of even an individual body, such that one “soul,” no matter how multifaceted, is inadequate to explain or account for the body’s complexities. Each individual is herself a collectivity—every body is a body politic, composed of a manifold of “individual” souls. Although Nietzsche rejects the Platonist implications of the analogy between individual and collectivity, he maintains the structural aspect of this view intact, such that, as Deleuze puts it: “Every relationship of forces constitutes a body—whether it is chemical, biological, social, or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship.”10 And if the “soul” is rather understood as one of these forces—as a drive or, better, a multiplicity of drives battling amongst themselves for dominance, then what Nietzsche is suggesting is that the body is always the result of some particular, contingent, and ever-shifting struggle for power amongst these “souls.” As he notes in a single-sentence aphorism: “The will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, affects.”11 While even this formulation may not seem very far from the Socratic model, nevertheless, a crucial aspect of Socrates’ account is missing, whether it is the rational or reasoning part of the soul of the Republic or the charioteer who commandeers the light and dark horses in the Phaedrus. In either case, the Socratic insistence on rational or conscious control of the affects and desires is eliminated from Nietzsche’s account. Instead, for Nietzsche, the body is primarily an effect of these drives’ struggle for power, a conflict in which “we” play little to no part. Denying the existence of the will itself as a cause of bodily motion, Nietzsche observes it is rather the outcome of the struggle of affects that we call willing: “‘Freedom of the will’—that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising

volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order.”12 To claim one has willed an action ignores the way in which such an action is actually a fait accompli with which one only retrospectively (and inaccurately) identifies: “What happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth; namely, the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. In all willing it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as already said, of a social structure composed of many ‘souls.’”13 Nietzsche, however, is not content merely to dispense with the will and logos. Just as Socrates’ ultimate aim is to do away with the body, Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 15

Nietzsche’s overall goal is to eliminate the soul. Sometimes he denies this. In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, he claims his real target is merely “the soul atomism,” a view of the body taught by Plato and Christianity in which the soul is considered as “indestructible, eternal, indivisible,” existing “as a monad, as an atomon.”14 This perception and prioritization of the soul are, for Nietzsche, both wrong and destructive, for “soul is only a word for something about the body.”15 Presaging Freud’s statement that “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego,”16 Nietzsche declares the soul to be an intellectualization of that which is both fundamental and unknowable—bodily drives or instincts. Nietzsche’s psychology, then— his logos of the psychē—is first and foremost an account of the body. As he notes in the Genealogy, “I consider even ‘psychological pain’ to be not a fact but only an interpretation—a causal interpretation—of facts that have hitherto defied exact formulation . . . When someone cannot get over a ‘psychological pain,’ that is not the fault of his ‘psyche’ but, to speak crudely, more probably even that of his belly (speaking crudely, to repeat, which does not mean that I want to be heard crudely or understood crudely).”17 Nietzsche thus proposes alternative notions of the soul, “such conceptions as ‘mortal soul,’ and ‘soul as subjective multiplicity,’ and ‘soul as social structure of the drives and affects.’”18 Of course, taken separately, any one of these “soul hypotheses” amounts to a radical redefinition of the soul of Plato or Christianity; taken together, they constitute a frontal attack on the traditional notion of soul itself. Like Socrates, Nietzsche, too, wishes to elide the ultimate “difference” between an individual and a collective body. Nietzsche also mimics Socrates in method, producing this elision through the deployment of a “soul hypothesis.” Yet radically different political implications follow from the very opposed ways in which Nietzsche conceives the body politic. His desire to multiply the parts or “souls” of the body is an emphasis on the infinite variation that bodies are capable of manifesting, and is thus an active resistance to the homogenizing, collectivizing impulses of the Socratic model in the Republic. Nietzsche’s emphases on the importance of unconscious motivations and instincts only further complicates the possibility of knowing or ordering the multitude of forces that come together in any body, resisting the importance and necessity of order that Socrates so emphasizes. And the corporealization of any and all psychic occurrences means that there is nothing about any passion, drive, affect, thought, or idea that does not have its origin or explanation in some physiological or bodily process. That this is the conclusion of Nietzsche’s musings on the “soul hypothesis” of Christianity indirectly confirms what he had originally denied he was proposing when he conspiratorially suggested that “between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of ‘the soul’ at the same time, and thus to renounce one of the most ancient 16 Nietzsche’s Revolution and venerable hypotheses.”19 This is, in fact, precisely what Nietzsche is suggesting: “The body is inspired; let us keep the ‘soul’ out of it—.”20 In the same book in which Nietzsche defines the body as a social structure of many souls, he also defines psychology—the study of the soul—as the “morphology and doctrine of the development of the will to power.”21 Here Nietzsche explicitly replaces the soul with will to power, and argues that to know about will to power, the psychologist must study two things: (1) its morphology (its shape or form) and (2) the doctrine of its development (its growth). We can therefore account for will to power only symptomatically, by studying its morphē—the ways it looks, acts, sounds, smells, feels. This morphē is what allows us to study will to power at all, and I think it is what Nietzsche means by the body—the body is nothing more or less than will to power’s sensible form(s). But morphē does not thereby become an abiding or unchanging material essence—it is a symptom or, rather, a collection of symptoms, a multitude of signs by which we attempt to decipher the otherwise inscrutable and subterranean workings of will to power: “The form is fluid, but the ‘meaning’ is even more so.”22 As the drives and their struggles, their shifting alliances and temporary victories each unfold, so, too, does the body itself change, grow, and decay. The body, on this view, is neither simply material nor metaphorical—as Nietzsche often notes, moralities and cultures too are “forms of life,” just like the human body. Indeed, what makes a body a body is a coincidence of drives and affects that lend it an intelligible form; clearly, this collision can constitute bodies other than material ones. And, as we will see below, it is in part the ceaseless struggle of its drives that produces a body’s health.23

Health

These differences between the Socratic and Nietzschean views of body and soul have significant consequences for the ways in which each understands what it means to be healthy. For Socrates, health is the same thing as justice: the just individual, like the just city, has all its parts in order, is

governed by reason, and maintains an appropriate separation between the various parts so that each can function efficiently and well. Like justice, health is understood as appropriate organization and order. Yet for Nietz- sche, the body is, instead, a coincidence of instincts engaged in struggle for domination. Indeed, not only does Nietzsche argue that there is no such ideal order, claiming that there is “no health as such,” only “innumerable healths,”24 but he also describes his own “multiplicity of inward states” as essential for his own virtuosity of style, which he immodestly asserts is unparalleled in the history of the German language.25 In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche praises as the first of “our” virtues “multiplicity and the art of disguises,” arguing that “if we should have virtues we shall Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 17 presumably have only virtues which have learned to get along best with our most secret and cordial inclinations, with our most ardent needs. Well, then, let us look for them in our labyrinths—where, as is well known, all sorts of things lose themselves, all sorts of things are lost for good. And is there anything more beautiful than looking for one’s own virtues?”26 This underground labyrinth wherein even good things get lost “for good” does not seem to be particularly well ordered. What could get “lost” like this in the city in speech of the Republic? Moreover, Nietzsche praises the only possible “greatness” of man as being his “range and multiplicity . . . his wholeness in manifoldness,”27 and claims that the “price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition.”28 It is therefore not obvious that order is the desirable condition, especially if it is Nietzsche’s own internal chaos that he claims accounts for both his superior nature and the beauty of his writing. As he writes in The Gay Science: “Parable.—Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound. Whoever looks into himself as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.”29 Platonist Nietzsche interpreters have, by and large, insisted on the importance of order for the exceptional or truly healthy Nietzschean individual, in particular, the importance of his having an orderly soul. It is claimed that such order is only temporary, more or less quickly replaced by a different drive that strives for its own dominance (as all drives, by definition, do). Yet the unflagging insistence on order nevertheless seems more indebted to Plato than to Nietzsche.30 In what is now a very famous argument, Alexander Nehamas has argued for the necessity of internal order, based almost entirely on an aphorism in The Gay Science wherein Nietzsche declares that the “one thing” that is “needful” is to “‘give style’ to one’s character.”31 According to Nehamas, this order requires “controlled multiplicity and resolved conflict” of the body’s internal affectual strife.32 Although Nehamas tries to define the process of giving style to one’s character as not static, as consisting in being, “we might say, becoming,”33 he nevertheless cannot eliminate from this definition the requirement that

the admirable Nietzschean subject “desire to appropriate and to organize as my own all that I have done, or at least that I know I have done, into a coherent whole.”34 While this Platonic psychic order need not endure—it may be discernible only at a particular moment—this concession nevertheless raises the question of what, then, exactly constitutes “order” and how it is to be distinguished from disorder. Nehamas summons Nietzsche’s praise of “brief habits” in section 295 of The Gay Science as support for a happy medium of temporary order; and indeed, in this aphorism, Nietzsche takes a remarkably moderate position, arguing for a kind of mean between “enduring” and nonexistent habits. Yet if every (re)configuration of drives and affects 18 Nietzsche’s Revolution in the body is temporary, contingent, and subject to violent overthrow at any time, to what extent can we call any of these arrangements an “order” at all? “Order” implies stability—what makes an order an order at all is that it endures over time. But at what point does the perpetual regime change of the Nietzschean body politic cease to be orderly and become disorderly? Does any arrangement of the “soul” at all, as long as it is viewed or theorized as frozen in some kind of photographic moment, constitute an “ordering” of that soul?35 Perhaps distracted by their interest in psychic order, Platonist Nietz- sche scholars remain unsurprisingly silent about the body. Nehamas’s important study is exemplary in this regard—he mentions the body only offhandedly, in two otherwise unrelated passages. In one, he inexplicably claims that “the needs and goals of the body are usually not in conflict with one another” because “it is organized coherently,”36 thereby assuming what, in Nietzsche especially, needs to be proven. In the other, Nehamas argues that “the human body is simply the unification of . . . low-level activities . . . an elementary unity upon which we can base more complicated organizations of activities, sometimes even activities that are in conflict with one another.”37 Thus, he argues that for Nietzsche, the body is “the common ground” of “thoughts, desires, and actions.”38 Nehamas explicitly claims what others perhaps hope they can silently assume: that the body is a harmonious or stable “ground” from which we can understand “thoughts, desires, and actions” to emanate. As an unproblematic site of “elementary unity,” the body is presented as the concrete field underfoot upon which warring drives and affects tread when they march into battle. Yet this Socratic (and Christian) view of the independence and separability of body and “soul” engages in a bizarre dualism that is utterly foreign to Nietzsche. The body is not the battle- ground of this affective strife: it is this affective strife—for Nietzsche, the body is any discernible coincidence of instincts engaged in struggle for domination. To sift out “the body” from this strife, as if it were a neutral party or stable substratum, in order to preserve it from the dangers of contradiction or multiplicity is to take refuge in a coherence, structure,

and intelligibility that Nietzsche does not believe the body presents. The Platonizing of Nietzsche’s texts on this issue has obscured the very radical implications of Nietzsche’s decidedly disorderly view of both corporeality and health. That radicalness consists in Nietzsche’s belief that bodily multiplicity need not be definitively ordered or structured if an organism is to be healthy or capable of growth. For Nietzsche, health consists of having an unconscious yet affirmative disposition toward one’s own status as a living organism, embracing the perpetual flux of becoming without anger, resentment, hostility, or fear. “Health” has meaning for him not as an ideal, however idiosyncratic or individually tailored one wants to make it,39 but rather as a process of emergence from a contrasting Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 19 condition of sickness.40 Far from insisting on an appropriate or abiding structure of internal order and domination, Nietzsche describes bodily division and internal conflict as disorders to be faced, even encouraged, for they constitute the only source of growth and potential self-overcoming: “sickness is instructive, we have no doubt of that, even more instructive than health.”41 Indeed, the very existence of something like “soul” is itself, for Nietzsche, the product or result of bodily conflict: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ‘soul.’”42 A rigid ordering of these instincts would not constitute health but rather stagnation, dissolution, and decay. For Nietzsche, the “healthy” body politic of the Republic is in fact a body racked with disease. Its existence is not only an impossibility in practical terms—it is also a frightening and contemptible domestication of the body and its potentialities. It both denies and yet perpetually reenacts the constitutive conflict that marks the human animal as “ensouled” to begin with, fore- closing the possibility of health even as it stigmatizes and punishes sickness. In denying and censuring this internecine conflict, the possibility of the growth of the body politic is foreclosed. As Nietzsche would say, the community of the Republic is a society utterly hostile to life—it is a body that wills its own collective death.

Will to Power

Despite its impossibility, this age-old analogy between city and soul, between the body politic and the bodies of individual citizens, continues to captivate. This fascination endures not simply as a function of its identificatory impossibility (and therefore as a tragic attraction to an impossible ideal), but also because this city-soul relationship is not simply an incredible idea. For the body is not only the site of irreducible particularity—it is also the site of what is most familiar to us, mundane, and generalizable. This is a prominent reason why the interlocutors of the Republic can agree to the analogy at all: although experiences are always

to some extent incommunicable, we nevertheless generalize about them all the time, and they are readily understandable to sympathetic others. A friend sharing the pain of embarrassment, the end of a relationship, a headache, or sore muscles does not strand us in alienated confusion over the utter unfamiliarity of such an experience; so, too, with the pleasures associated with a good meal, a satisfying workout, a meaningful friendship, or great sex. The very possibility of such generalities at all reveals the body to be the site of the most predictable and therefore the most constant and reliable facets of human life—desire and fullness, excitation and exhaustion, emptiness and satiety. The ever necessary activities of life’s reproduction—eating, sleeping, and excretion—can be generalized 20 Nietzsche’s Revolution without fail; their constancy provides both a comfort and a burden in even the most unpredictable of circumstances. Bodies are thus interchangeable in some sense—in their very corporeality. Yet this commonality is not, as Socrates would have it, the order or structuring of the “soul,” but rather, as Nietzsche argues, the shared experience of life, of being ensnared in the process of becoming. This is what renders the analogy between individual and collectivity both feasible and forceful. For Nietzsche, a body cannot be definitively circumscribed as “individual” since it is an effect of a contingent and ever-shifting struggle of forces and affects, and is always best understood as (in the process of) living or dying, ascending or descending. What is generalizable about bodies is, for painful lack of a better expression, their “quality of life.” As Spinoza notes, “all bodies agree in certain respects.”43 For Spinoza, this agreement consists in extension, motion, and rest; similarly for Nietzsche, bodies agree insofar as they are living—that is, insofar as they undergo processes of growth and decay. Indeed, the Hobbesian and Spinozist con- ceptualizations of life as perpetual motion are perhaps only further qualified by Nietzsche in the particular terms of growth and decay, ascent and decline, which we might specify in Spinozist terms as expansive or con- strictive motion. The living, healthy body is engaged in expansive movement, while the decaying, dying body is in the process of contacting and withering. Nietzsche uses the term “will to power” to refer to this bodily commonality—this is the way he talks about, describes, and attempts to explain life and living things. Understanding exactly what Nietzsche means by will to power is thus crucial to understanding his view of the body and health. Before articulating precisely what will to power “is,” however, it is important to say what will to power is not, which requires that we first dispel certain prominent rumors, misnomers, and casual misunderstand- ings of this somewhat notorious term of art in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For starters, will to power is not any kind of voluntarist conceptualization of human beings’ innate self-interest or desire for domination. It is not, in fact, a desire at all, nor is it meant to capture the inherently cruel or fero-

cious character of “natural” human beings outside the confines of society or law. Nor, on the other hand, is will to power a term used to indicate the fundamental character of the universe or to demarcate the metaphysical essence of all things. The germ of each of these views continues to infect the field of Nietzsche interpretation more generally, unwittingly circum- scribing the content and possibilities of Nietzsche’s thought. Yet Nietzsche does not actually use will to power in either of these ways. To clarify the differences, then, I first offer a brief comparison of Nietzsche with Hob- bes, the major spokesperson for the first view, on the issue of what each might mean by a “will to power.” I then take up the second proposition that will to power is a metaphysical principle that sums up the essence of Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 21 the world, showing the methodological difficulties and interpretive leaps and assumptions required to sustain such a view.

Will to Power: The Hobbesian Interpretation

For Hobbes, willing is a “voluntary motion,” meaning that it is an action that proceeds from a desire or an aversion. It is, in fact, “the last Appetite in Deliberating”44—it is the desire or aversion upon which we settle after a chain of alternating desires and aversions, hopes and fears. The outcome of this “deliberation,” the action settled upon, is willing. Although Hob- bes concedes that the beginning of voluntary motions actually originates internally (calling this interior motion “endeavour”45), without an object, voluntary motion lacks direction, and would therefore be imperceptible. If human beings are to interact with the world at all for Hobbes, endeavor must take an object, producing the outward signs of desire—namely, voluntary motion. Motion toward an object is called “appetite”; motion away from an object is “aversion.” Possessing a will to power, then, for Hobbes, would mean a voluntary motion toward—that is, an appetite or desire for—power. Hobbes defines power as someone’s “present means, to obtain some future apparent Good.”46 There are two kinds of power for Hobbes— natural (or original) and instrumental: “Naturall Power, is the eminence of the faculties of Body, or Mind: as extraordinary Strength, Forme, Pru- dence, Arts, Eloquence, Liberality, Nobility. Instrumentall are those Pow- ers, which acquired by these, or by fortune, are means and Instruments to acquire more: as Riches, Reputation, Friends, and the secret working of God, which men call Good Luck.”47 Power, for Hobbes, is a capacity—it is the ability to get what you want, to “obtain” that which seems “good” to you. Some people have a bit of it naturally because they are strong or beautiful, wise or well-spoken. But power can also be acquired or supple- mented, by producing yourself as someone whom others either fear and/ or love. Power is not explicitly defined as an end in itself for Hobbes—it is rather a means by which we can acquire the objects of our desires and avoid

the objects of our aversions. Indeed, Hobbes characterizes life itself as this very succession of desires and aversions, pleasures and pains: “Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.”48 This means, however, that power must be an end in some sense—it is the ever-present goal, that which we must always strive to possess, for it is what enables us to attain the objects of our desire. Power, for Hobbes, is what enables us to live. It is perhaps because of power’s preservative function that Hobbes notes that “the object of man’s desire, is not to enjoy once onely, and for an instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desire.”49 The content of happiness is thus “a continuall progresse of the desire, 22 Nietzsche’s Revolution from one object to another,”50 rendering power indispensable for its attainment (indeed, the very possibility of willing at all presumes at least a residual amount of power, enough at least for me to think it plausible that I could attain the object(s) of my desire in the first place). Thus does Hobbes “put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.”51 Attaining happiness is a perpetual struggle, both against the world and against others. You will either join with me to achieve the objects of my desire (that is, you will supplement my power) or you will stand in the way of my achieving my desires (you will diminish my power). For Hob- bes, when it comes to power, the rule is: (1) the more of it, the better, and (2) more for me means less for you and everyone else. Power always comes at someone else’s expense. There is actually a way in which it seems that Hobbes just did not think of using an expression like will to power, despite the fact that it so obviously captures what he wanted to convey. Yet Nietzsche’s notion of will to power could not be further from this Hobbesian reading for three reasons. First, the will to power in no way aims at pleasure, happiness, or securing the objects of desire. Indeed, the will to power is not an appetitive drive at all, and is better thought of along a kind of hydraulic model of pressure release than a teleological model of object-directed activity: “Every animal—therefore la bête philosophe, too—instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power; every animal abhors, just as instinctively and with a subtlety of discernment that is ‘higher than all reason,’ every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could obstruct this path to the optimum (I am not speaking of its path to happiness, but its path to power, to action, to the most powerful activity, and in most cases actually its path to unhappiness).”52 At its most basic level, will to power is a drive toward release, toward expenditure of energy. It is perhaps a revised version of Hobbes’s “endeavour,” but an endeavor that needs no outside object to spur it to action. Outside objects and persons can channel will to power in certain directions, restrict its outward flow,

or even turn it against itself. But will to power does not require an object to get going, become visible, or drive the body to interact with itself or the outside world. Because it is not an appetitive drive, it neither strives toward something nor is extinguished (however temporarily) through satisfaction. Second, unlike Hobbesian desire and aversion, Nietzschean will to power is, by and large, an unconscious drive. When Nietzsche tells us that psychology consists of the morphology and development of will to power, he does so in the context of complaining about all hitherto existing psychology, which “has not dared to descend into the depths.” If we venture into this subterraneality with Nietzsche, we must read “in what has been Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 23 written so far a symptom of what has so far been kept silent.”53 Nietzsche’s new psychology of will to power demands analyses of people, cultures, and events that are symptomatic diagnoses of unspoken undercurrents of drives or instincts, for will to power does not announce itself the way Hobbesian desires and aversions do. “We have to relearn here, as one has had to relearn about heredity and what is ‘innate.’ As the act of birth deserves no consideration in the whole process and procedure of heredity, so ‘being conscious’ is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.”54 The surface is only an indicator for what lies below: “Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every world also a mask.”55 Although there is no necessity that the voluntary motions Hobbes calls desire and aversion are conscious, willing certainly must be since it is the outcome of a process of deliberation. According to Hobbes, deliberation occurs “in the mind of man” and involves the consideration of consequences that “come successively into our thoughts,”56 thus producing either fear or hope of attaining our end(s). Yet while it may occur “in the mind” (terminological translation becomes difficult here), will to power certainly does not come “into our thoughts.” It is an unconscious process that emerges as visible only in the outward form of other pursuits—truth, philosophy, happiness, pain, and so on. The objects of one’s pursuits are not the reasons for the hunt—“purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function”57—but rather the retroactive justification of actions already undertaken. Finally, unlike Hobbes’s restless striving for power after power, “which ceaseth only in death,” Nietzschean will to power—which also ceaseth only in death—does not come at anyone else’s expense. The will to power neither aims at power, as we already established (for it does not aim at all, it merely releases, discharges), nor does it aim at power over others. Nietz- schean will to power can be understood, somehow, to “aim” at power only if we carefully specify the meaning of power, which is better understood not as an instrumental capacity to achieve external goods but rather as growth, self-expansion, and expenditure of energy.58 Will to power thus always produces a kind of development or change: it is perpetual inducement of self-transformation. At most, if will to power can be said to seek power “over” anyone, it seeks power over itself since its expenditure produces continual self-transformation, perhaps even producing self-overcoming. But will to power is not best understood as a claim about the basic brutishness of self-seeking individuals who are engaged in a perpetual war of all against all.59 24 Nietzsche’s Revolution Will to Power: The Kitchen Sink Hypothesis

Almost as seductive as the Hobbesian interpretation of will to power is the belief that Nietzsche thinks everything is will to power. Indeed, if will to power is one of Nietzsche’s most captivating phrases, the book in which it plays the largest role, Beyond Good and Evil, is filled with provocative assertions about it such as “life itself is will to power”60 and even the “essence” of the “world” is will to power.61 The grandiosity of these claims, combined with the fascination will to power compels and its placement in one of Nietzsche’s most exciting texts, has perhaps led to the seizing upon these statements as the definitive declarations of Nietzsche’s “doctrine” of will to power. Regardless, it has become almost reflexive to claim that, for Nietzsche, “everything” “is” will to power, whether that “everything” be understood as “the world” or as a metaphysical characterization of what beings “are.” The most famous of these interpretations is that offered by Heidegger, who argues that will to power to constitutes the “Being of beings” for Nietzsche, a resolutely metaphysical viewpoint that participates in the Western tradition’s perpetual deferral and displacement of the question Being itself.62 Heidegger’s interpretation of will to power is based largely—indeed, almost exclusively—on the unpublished notes assembled in that epony- mous text “on” will to power, an interpretive method I reject (see the “Note on Method” in the Introduction). That my interpretation of will to power differs, then, is no surprise; it is in fact much more difficult to elicit a metaphysical view of will to power from the published writings than it is from the Nachlass, where such an interpretation is practically a forgone conclusion.63 In general, I find there is no warrant for defending any sort of metaphysical interpretation of will to power as an expression of the basic character of the world or being(s) if we rely solely on the evidence found in Nietzsche’s published work. I find this is especially so given his virulent opposition to singular or stable notions of the ego, soul, or self, his endless critiques of the trappings of grammar that seduce us into unjustifiable metaphysical beliefs regarding being, and his constant complaints regarding philosophers’ blindness to this linguistic reification. Language is in fact the vehicle of being—because of it, we are deceived into believing that being is “real.” Certainly, using language at all in order to capture or name “becoming” (as Nietzsche does with, say, “will to power”) participates in the same reificatory practice, but it is surely too quick a conclusion to suggest that he therefore endorses such reification simply because he uses language in order to communicate about becoming. Moreover, the philosophic content of Nietzsche’s discussions of will to power show an active resistance to any attempt to stabilize or define will to power as either an ontological or metaphysical principle.64 The most “metaphysical” claim Nietzsche makes about will to power—a claim that occurs only twice in all of Nietzsche’s published works—is that the Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 25

“world” “is” essentially will to power, a claim that I will short-handedly refer to as the “kitchen sink hypothesis.” Although Nietzsche does assert versions of this thesis—twice—it is nevertheless difficult to attribute it to him unproblematically. For starters, of course, to argue that Nietz- sche thinks the world simply is will to power contradicts his own warnings against the possibility of characterizing “the world” at all, much less his arguments regarding the impossibility of legitimately assimilating the multitude of different things and experiences into unities or events. Understanding what exactly Nietzsche might mean by this claim, then, entails close examination of not only its content, but also its context and rhetoric, if we are to avoid falling into oversimplifying conclusions, a methodological point often refused by Nietzsche’s commentators.65 Both instances of the kitchen sink hypothesis occur in Beyond Good and Evil, the highpoint of Nietzsche’s published references to will to power. The first instance resides in the oft-quoted section 36. Conclud- ing with the provocative statement, “The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else,” section 36 is often enlisted as proof of the fact that Nietzsche unquestioningly believed in the kitchen sink hypothesis.66 Yet right away, we notice that Nietzsche has placed will to power in quotation marks, rendering any straightforward attribution of the kitchen sink hypothesis to Nietzsche immediately problematic. Although we may not yet know why, it is clear that Nietzsche is deliberately distancing himself from his own “doctrine” of will to power here.67 As an “experimental” aphorism, commentators are right to note the tentative, even speculative, character of Nietzsche’s proposed hypothesis in this section. Yet we need to look even more closely. For here Nietz- sche demonstrates, using the tools of modern philosophical and scientific investigation, just how “reasonable” the kitchen sink hypothesis might be. I cite section 36 at great length:

Suppose nothing else were “given” as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other “reality” besides the reality of our drives—for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to make the experiment and to ask the question whether this “given” would not be sufficient for also understanding

on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or “material”) world? I mean, not as a deception, as “mere appearance,” an “idea” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer) but as holding the same rank of reality as our affect . . . In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands it [emphasis added]. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a single one has been pushed to its utmost limit (to the point of nonsense, if I may say so)—that is a moral of method which one may not shirk today [emphasis added]—it 26 Nietzsche’s Revolution

follows “from its definition,” as a mathematician would say. The question is in the end whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do—and at bottom our faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself—then we have to make the experiment of positing the causality of the will hypothetically as the only one. “Will,”of course, can affect only “will”—and not “matter” (not “nerves,” for example). In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever “effects” are recognized—and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as a force is active in them, will force, effects of will. Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will—namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it; suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment—it is one problem—then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power. The world viewed from the inside, the world defined and determined according to its “intelligible character”—it would be “will to power” and nothing else.—

In this aphorism, Nietzsche brilliantly turns the method of modern science against itself, proving that its own self-definition not only demands consideration of the kitchen sink hypothesis but in fact culminates in proving it to be correct. Nietzsche’s own perspectival approach to truth is therefore validated not only as more “scientific” but also as more “moral,” insofar as consideration of every possible explanation—including the possibility that there is no explanation and that the world consists of the immoral will to power—is more constitutive of Nietzschean perspectivism than modern science and philosophy, which close off notions of “will,” “cause,” and “matter” from critical scrutiny. There is a similar operation at work later in Beyond Good and Evil in section 186 where Nietzsche again equates the world with will to power, this time minus the quotation marks. Unsurprisingly, this passage is intimately related to the will to power experiment in section 36 because it,

too, deals with the problem of methodology and the rational justification of knowledge. The opening gambit in the section entitled “The Natu- ral History of Morals,” Nietzsche here complains that philosophers, one and all, have hitherto believed themselves to have discovered “a rational foundation for morality,” yet have always accepted “morality itself” as “‘given.’” We already know from section 36 that such a method is at odds with the requirements of modern science. We know, too, that, as an exacting free spirit himself, Nietzsche will have no truck with philosophers uninterested in interrogating everything about morality and not simply its rational foundation. He therefore, in this aphorism, insinuates will to power into his exposition of morality as both the dominant alternative Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 27 to philosophers’ explanations and the antagonistic rhetoric by which he highlights their staggering blind spot:

Listen, for example, with what almost venerable innocence Schopenhauer still described his task, and then draw your conclusions about the scientific standing of a “science” whose ultimate masters still talk like children and little old women: “The principle,” he says (p. 136 of Grundprobleme der Moral), “the fundamental proposition on whose contents all moral philosophers are really agreed—neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, juva [Hurt no one; rather, help all as much as you can]—that is really the proposition for which all moralists endeavor to find the rational foundation . . . the real basis of ethics for which one has been looking for thousands of years as for the philosopher’s stone.” The difficulty of providing a rational foundation for the principle cited may indeed be great—as is well known, Schopenhauer did not succeed either—and whoever has once felt deeply how insipidly false and sentimental this principle is in a world whose essence is will to power, may allow himself to be reminded that Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really—played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute—the laede nimenim morality—what? is that really—a pessimist?

Here, instead of out-sciencing the scientists, Nietzsche demonstrates that he can out-pessimist the pessimist, that greatest pessimist of them all, Arthur Schopenhauer, the man from whom Nietzsche learned pessimism and, apparently, from whom he also learned how to be more consistently pessimistic, such that he here upstages his own teacher.68 In either case, however, Nietzsche takes the given presuppositions of knowledge and deploys them against themselves in service to his own hypothesis. This has the double effect of revealing the ways in which modernity’s knowledge disciplines fail within their own terms but, if deployed consistently, ultimately lead to the undoing of the very knowledge that they claim to produce.

In both sections 186 and 36, Nietzsche points out that if one is in the business of rationally justifying knowledge (moral or otherwise), one must at least entertain the hypothesis that the world’s essence is will to power as one candidate among many. Those concerned with the rational justification of the particular view of the world they espouse must, indeed, very actively make such a suspicion one of their primary concerns. If they are forced to do so, they must recognize that the hypothesis that will— much less “will to power,” as Nietzsche has it—may very well be the cause of everything “wherever ‘effects’ are recognized.”69 Nietzsche claims that accepting this thesis—or at least its plausibility—is demanded by the “moral of method.” Thus, the immoralist becomes, through investigation 28 Nietzsche’s Revolution of his immoral supposition, more conscientious than his free-spirited colleagues. Yet that “morality of method” should, by its own definition, also encompass a questioning of the very terms of the hypothesis itself—for example, “will” (much less causality, the very attempt to “explain” the world, etc.). As he says of his own book, Daybreak, “in this book faith in morality is withdrawn—but why? Out of morality!”70 What Nietzsche is doing in these aphorisms is employing the modern morality of method to prove both that the kitchen sink hypothesis is rationally defensible and that it is ultimately absurd, for it—just like the modern science Nietzsche is critiquing—supposes things like the unity of the will as an efficient cause. In other words, Nietzsche knows quite well that his own hypothesis is subject to the same charges he levels at other philosophical and scientific views. Indeed, he notes that his own suggestion, that everywhere “‘effects’” are recognized the will to power is at work, turns on the belief in causality: “The question is in the end whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will.” The next sentence begins “if we do” and, on the basis of this very big “if,” Nietzsche’s experiment with will to power concludes by proving the kitchen sink hypothesis to be correct. Yet if we have been paying attention to everything else Nietzsche has ever said, we know, of course, that he does not buy into the causality of the will. Indeed, the very thesis he advances in section 36 is dismissed in the Genealogy as an unnecessary doubling of activity that posits a nonexistent agent: “A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect—more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a ‘subject,’ can it appear otherwise.”71 We further know that Nietzsche does not believe in the causality of the will because “at bottom,” belief in the causality of the will “is nothing less than our faith in causality itself.” And causality is explicitly listed by Nietzsche as one of the four great errors in Twilight of the Idols: “We created the world on this basis as a world of causes, a world

of will, a world of spirits. The most ancient and enduring psychology was at work here and did not do anything else: all that happened was considered a doing, all doing the effect of a will; the world became to it a multiplicity of doers; a doer (a ‘subject’) was slipped under all that happened. It was out of himself that man projected his three ‘inner facts’—that in which he believed most firmly, the will, the spirit, the ego.”72 Nietzsche has a number of critiques of causality, both philosophical—it is a fiction, an error of logic, the result of trappings of grammar—and medical—the desire for causality is a symptom of illness, a sign of weakness and slavish- ness, an oversimplification that helps us to live in an otherwise frightening and unpredictable world. But there is no real question that Nietzsche Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 29 explicitly denies the feasibility, logic, and rational basis for causality, especially causality of the will.73 Nietzsche’s disbelief in causality means that he cannot subscribe to the kitchen sink hypothesis, at least as it is presented in section 36. Instead, Nietzsche here performs for us the paradox of modern knowledge production through his demonstration of the tenuous position any scholar must hold: he both believes the will to power is at work wherever effects are recognized and believes that such a belief is impossible. By including himself amongst his modernist colleagues (“we free, very free spirits”74), Nietzsche acknowledges both his debt to and his implication within this knowledge production of modern philosophy. He thus anticipates the critique of his own philosophy as nihilistic—section 36 is in fact one of Nietzsche’s best pre-Genealogy formulations of the trajectory of modern nihilism. Nietzsche performs a similar, pithier demonstration of the difficulties involved in observation and explanation in section 22 of Beyond Good and Evil. This time, instead of clothing himself in the garb of the free spirit, Nietzsche asks our forgiveness for being “an old philologist who cannot desist from the malice of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation.” As a philologist, then, Nietzsche criticizes physicists’ views of nature as conforming to law and argues that a different interpretation yields a view of nature that is indeed predictable, but “not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.” This would be, in other words, a nature utterly permeated by “‘will to power.’” Here Nietz- sche offers a different interpretation of nature, one based on will to power, and simultaneously distances himself from this reading by placing will to power, once again, in quotation marks. He then steps back one more time, concluding the aphorism with the remark, “Granted this too is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to raise this objection?— well, so much the better. —” Here Nietzsche explicitly admits what he implicitly demonstrates in section 36—that his own critique can be turned against him. His view

of nature as a place that is utterly permeated by “‘will to power’” is also a perspectival view, just like the physicists’: “It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.”75 Yet Nietzsche is less interested in being right about nature than in shifting the emphasis from being right about it to offering a good interpretation of it. For no hypothesis about “the world” will be right. How could it? To be right about the world, one would have to have seen all of it, from everywhere and all at once. But what we know of “the world” is only what we are able to see of it, and “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing.’”76 The rubble of discarded, disproved, or unprovable 30 Nietzsche’s Revolution hypotheses about “the world” are such because they are interpretations of the world, advanced from particular perspectives. That Nietzsche’s own pet interpretation of nature as a place constituted by will to power is “simply” an interpretation is thus no objection to the kitchen sink hypothesis, for the fact that it is only one view among many is precisely Nietzsche’s point: “But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather has the world become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.”77 The physicists’ interpretation of nature as mechanistic, as governed by natural laws, is not objectionable to Nietzsche because it is wrong but because, as he remarks in The Gay Science, it is “stupid,” meaning that it is an interpretation that is “one of the poorest in meaning . . . an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world.”78 Nietz- sche’s experiments with will to power thus demonstrate that not only is more than one interpretation of nature possible, defensible, and even required, according to science’s own self-definition, but also that the interpretations that science offers are boring and stupid. We could do so much better! We could, for example, invest in a different hypothesis, one more fruitful and rich in meaning—the will to power, perhaps? “Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity.”79 Taken together, sections 36 and 186—the only places in Nietzsche’s published works where he asserts in any form that the world is will to power—highlight the fundamentally paradoxical nature of the grandiose claims Nietzsche frequently makes. The first point is that Nietzsche probably, in some sense, thought they were true. Yet it is also quite clearly the case that Nietzsche understands such formulations as “the essence of the world is will to power” to be undeniably and problematically metaphysical (although he might instead use the term idealist). The assumptions of this formulation are unjustifiable—it reifies the world of becoming into unchanging being or essence and it excludes the admittance of any other perspectives into the interpretive arena: “Even if we were mad enough to

consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist.”80 Second, because the equation of world with will to power occurs only twice in Nietzsche’s published texts, and because of the deliberate use of irony, sarcasm, and scare quotes by which Nietzsche distances himself from his assertions,81 it seems clear that the kitchen sink hypothesis cannot be fairly or unproblematically attributed to Nietzsche as a candidate for what he “really,” or simply, thinks. It seems more likely to me that Nietzsche’s use of the “world” in these sections is a notable occurrence of Nietzschean hyperbole, a deliberate rhetorical device used to accomplish certain ends (an argument to which I will return in Chapter 3). The only Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 31 other basis for concluding Nietzsche’s belief in the kitchen sink hypothesis relates to commentators’ adoration of section 1067 (1885) of The Will to Power, which concludes with the declaration, “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” The concluding aphorism in a collection of unpublished notes, this section is certainly an intoxicating bit of writing but its privileging in Nietzsche scholarship is simply unwarranted. Taking up almost an entire page, scholars nevertheless simply quote its first sentence—“And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me?”—together with its last, eliminating the bulk of this two-page aphorism with a mere ellipsis. The questionable status of “the world” here, flanked, once again, by Nietzschean scare quotes, is ignored, as is the opacity of the text that is eliminated from direct citation. This deleted text includes such claims about “‘the world’” as its being “a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income”; “enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary”; “a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many”; and something that is perpetually “blessing itself as that which must return eternally.” To unquestioningly agree with Nietzsche’s conclusion in this note that “will to power” does or can subsume all of these obscure things, and then unproblematically conclude that, for Nietzsche, the world simply “is” will to power involves gargantuan interpretive leaps that demand a justification otherwise lacking in scholars’ appeals to this text. The beauty of this aphorism must not allow us to overlook its otherwise troubling lack of clarity. Nor can we conveniently ignore the obvious fact that such claims were never replicated anywhere in Nietzsche’s published writings. The desire to attribute to Nietzsche the view that the world is will to power is an easy temptation, but one which is borne out not by careful interpretation but rather by shortsighted interpretive methods. “My patient friends . . . learn to read me well!”82

Will to Power: Life as Inequality

By contrast with the readings of will to power offered by either the Hob- besianinterpretation or the kitchen sink hypothesis, it is my suggestion that will to power is Nietzsche’s way of talking about, defining, explaining, and describing life and living things. Unlike Nietzsche’s quite rare equation of will to power with “world,” Nietzsche almost invariably relates will to power with life throughout his texts. The definitive places in which Nietzsche specifically equates life with will to power occur twice in Beyond Good and Evil,83 once in the Gay Science84 and once in the Genealogy of Morals.85 In Zarathustra, Nietzsche calls will to power “the unexhausted procreative will of life,”86 and in The Case of Wagner, he calls will to power the “principle of life.”87 32 Nietzsche’s Revolution

What becomes clear from examining these aphorisms is, first, that will to power is the fundamental instinct of living things; and, second, that living things are determined not by their drive to preserve themselves or seek out pleasure but rather by their drive toward growth or expansion. This is stated quite plainly in Book V of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche notes that “the really fundamental instinct of life . . . aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self- preservation.” Thus, he concludes: “The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power—in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life.”88 This section parallels, almost exactly, the two aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche associates will to power with life. In section 259, Nietzsche uses an almost identical locution to relate them: “‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.” And in section 13, the most direct (albeit brief) statement in Nietzsche’s published writings of what the will to power “is,” Nietzsche similarly takes up the critique of self-preservation as he did in The Gay Science and contrasts it with the will to power, a drive toward expansion and growth. In both books, Nietzsche identifies Spinoza (or “Spinozistic dogma”) as being responsible for this faulty version of teleological thinking: “Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength— life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results. In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles—one of which is the instinct of self- preservation (we owe it to Spinoza’s inconsistency).” Will to power, in other words, is the very definition of a living thing. Its presence is the decisive mark or sign of life in a body: “Where I found the living, there I found will to power.”89 We know, first, that “life itself” is will to power, and that the will to power is the “will of life.” We know, second, that the will to power is not a teleological drive and thus is a principle that is different from self-preservation. As Zarathustra notes:

“Life sacrifices itself—for power . . . only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but—thus I teach you—will to power.”90 This point is confirmed very late in Nietzsche’s productive career in Antichrist(ian), section 6, where he writes that “life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for power.” As we might expect, then, the absence of will to power is a sign of weakness in a body—decay, degeneration, or disease: “Where the will to power is lacking there is decline.” After defining life as whatever instinctually strives after power, Nietzsche again notes, later on in the Antichrist(ian), that Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 33

“wherever the will to power declines in any form, there is invariably also a physiological retrogression, décadence.”91 Will to power is thus neither an appetitive nor a teleological drive but rather an organic principle of life that strives toward expansion and growth. Life, for Nietzsche, is either ascending or descending—it is either growing, expanding, and surpassing itself or it is breaking down and decomposing. It is either being driven primarily by will to power or by decadence and decay. Will to power’s constant striving and self-overcoming defines health for Nietzsche, and any body that does not restrict this expenditure and expansion manifests its drive to health. “All that is good is instinct—and hence easy, necessary, free.”92 When Nietzsche says that the will to power strives to surpass itself, that life is a perpetual process of overcoming itself, a goalless expansion and self-supercession, this is another way of his saying that the body instinctively and unwittingly produces its own health. But just like will to power itself, health is neither a condition, nor a goal, nor an end-state, nor a telos, but rather a never ending process of becoming, wherein the future is impossible to determine or predict.93 As indicated previously, health is also not in any way an ordered or orderly bodily condition. Consonant with Nietzsche’s understanding of life as becoming, health is rather a process, a constant battle and engagement with sickness and disorder. In other words, for Nietzsche, health is identical with convalescence—it requires sickness, by definition, as its very foundation. In the book most explicitly devoted to convalescence, Nietzsche says that health is born of sickness: “In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.”94 Foreshadowing a theme to be discussed in much greater detail later, we see here that health offers the possibility of a kind of self-birthing, which is at the same time a

self-overcoming, which is, like all life processes, never complete. As Nietz- sche says of the “great health,” it is something that “one does not merely have but also acquires continually, and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up.”95 Hence, there can be no clear distinction between health and sickness; rather, the only question is that of the overall upward or downward trajectory of life. Nietzsche’s major distinction regarding life, the (only) means by which he (can) calibrate(s) its health, is whether it is ascending or descending. Nietzsche’s diagnostic contrast between active and reactive is the primary way in which he distinguishes between ascending and descending life.96 For Nietzsche, reactivity is a premier symptom of weakness of the 34 Nietzsche’s Revolution will, modernity’s particular manifestation of décadence or disease (more on this in the next chapter). By contrast, ascending life determines its activity without reference to internal limitations or outside forces: “As for the famous ‘struggle for existence,’ . . . it occurs, but as an exception; the total appearance of life is not the extremity, not starvation, but rather riches, profusion, even absurd squandering—and where there is struggle, it is a struggle for power.”97 This is not to say that outside forces or an organism’s own limitations do not affect its growth, merely that they are not part of an active organism’s (unconscious) consideration. For Nietz- sche, only life that is in decline measures itself on the yardstick of self- preservation. Strong, ascending life is oblivious to such concerns—heroic types and ages are, like life itself, squanderers:

I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and his catastrophe: for his virtue’s sake he wants to live on and to live no longer. I love him who does not want to have too many virtues. One virtue is more virtue than two, because it is more of a noose on which his catastrophe may hang. I love him whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and returns none: for he always gives away and does not want to preserve himself.98

The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily a squanderer: that he squanders himself, that is his greatness.99

Ages must be measured by their positive strength—and then that lavishly squandering and fatal age of the Renaissance appears as the last great age; and we moderns, with our anxious self-solicitude and neighbor-love, with our virtues of work, modesty, legality, and scientism—accumulating, economic, machinelike—appear as a weak age.100

Squandering is in fact the performative proof of psycho-physiological health: the “superfluity of formative, curative, molding and restorative forces” is “precisely the sign of great health.”101 As I will show in the next chapter, it is a characteristic of organic nature that human beings have lost with the acquisition of consciousness, and the reinforcement of that consciousness through the antinatural lying of morality. There is no way of “proving” or confirming that an organism is healthy except via observation of its “prodigal and indif- ferent magnificence which is outrageous but noble.”102 This is why Zarathus- tra praises the tightrope walker in Zarathustra’s Prologue: “You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands.”103 And it is why Nietzsche so lavishly praises rogues like Napoleon and Cesare Borgia. These figures exemplify a kind of health that Nietzsche believes modernity otherwise lacks. Nietzsche knows they are healthy because he sees their squandering—they sacrifice all without viewing it as a sacrifice; they are oblivious to the vast expenditure of energy and resources that follows in their wake Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 35 and sustains their activities. As he says of “geniuses” like Napoleon, “the instinct of self-preservation is suspended, as it were; the overpowering pressure of outflowing forces forbids him any such care or caution. One calls this ‘self-sacrifice’; one praises his ‘heroism,’ his indifference to his own well-being . . . He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself—and this is a calamitous involuntary fatality, no less than a river’s flooding the land.”104 This mention of Napoleon and Borgia alerts us to the potentially unsavory implications of will to power that I have thus far ignored. For although Nietzsche consistently defines will to power as some sort of basic life principle, perhaps unobjectionable in itself, he nevertheless manages to define life itself in all sorts of unpleasant ways. This seems to trouble both the distinction between Hobbes and Nietzsche that I have asserted, as well as problematize the until-now largely inoffensive reading of will to power I have been advancing. For example, in one of the most frequently invoked passages from Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: “Here we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the matter, resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation—but why should one always use those words in which a slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages?”105 If the essence of life is will to power, and yet the essence of life is also all of these heinous and nasty things, then it seems will to power too must be “injury,” “overpowering” of the weaker, “exploitation,” etc. I think Nietzsche is up to a number of things with this sort of rhetoric. The first is simply a straightforward philosophical claim: life is essentially a series of hierarchical negotiations and relationships of domination and submission. Nietzsche is candidly dismissive of the possibility of any sort of equality between or amongst living things, seeing inequality as constitutive of bodies, whether “individual” or collective. The foundation of logic, for example, is “to treat as equal what is merely similar,” an assumption that Nietzsche believes is never tenable, “for nothing is really equal.”106

For Nietzsche, any assemblage of living things manifests a diverse array of strengths and weaknesses, each a particular channeling or coincidence of will to power. And if nature were composed of bodies undifferentiated in composition, size, shape, strength, or ability, it would be dead. There would be neither growth nor decay—only a stagnant deadlock of power, a stasis where nothing ever ascended or declined. After all, if not only living things, but the assortment of drives that made them up, were equal, none could triumph and no living would actually get done. If food were a force equal to one’s stomach acids, nothing would ever get digested (hence the “dyspeptic,” or someone who “cannot ‘have done’ with anything,”107 an oft-encountered figure in modernity). If drives were never able to harness 36 Nietzsche’s Revolution or recruit one another to serve their own purposes, human beings could never “will” anything at all: mixed feelings, indecision, unconscious resistance, habituation, and even outright hostility would strand us in our places, incapable of any motion whatsoever. Yet these drives overcome and are overcome all the time by various other affects, which carry us through to all sorts of behavior—and this, whether we are aware of these processes or not. Viewed from a political or moral perspective that values equality, the ways in which these various forces “treat” one another looks an awful lot like domination and submission. Yet if equality were the highest value for the affects that drive living bodies, if “every will must consider every other will its equal,” life would be governed by “a principle hostile to life,”108 leading inevitably to degeneration and death: “Everywhere people are now raving, even under scientific disguises, about coming conditions of society in which the ‘exploitative aspect’ will be removed—which sounds to me as if they promised to invent a way of life that would dispense with all organic functions. ‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.”109 Viewed in this manner, when Nietzsche says “inequality,” he is really talking about difference or differentiation, although that differentiation is never one in which hierarchy is absent. Indeed, Nietzschean differentiation never means something like benign pluralism or any egalitarian notion of enriching multiplicity or multicultural variety.110 Nietzsche refuses to embrace this secular, democratic political “value” in part because he recognizes the degree to which this “equality” is ultimately a project of leveling hierarchy through a vision of “sameness.”111 Instead, he agrees with Spinoza that insofar as bodies are to affect one another, they must be different from one another. In Nietzsche’s language, inequality is essential to life—“Whatever lives, obeys. And this is the second point: he who cannot obey is himself commanded. That is the nature of the living.”112 This constant striving for mastery and domination is what Spinoza calls “harmony” between and among bodies. For Nietzsche, this harmony is

hierarchical difference and it is the enabling condition of life. This necessary inequality is true both of bodies in the aggregate as well as within a “single” body. Any event, any formation of life, any set of bodily characteristics, is apparent to us not by accident or because it is “natural” or because it is God’s will or because it was fated to be such, but rather because some power(s) or other has triumphed over another set of competing or disparate powers. For Nietzsche, life’s basic functions are not the passive or reactive afterthoughts of a system striving to maintain equilibrium; rather, life is a constant battle of wills in which some triumph over others and assimilate the defeated to their own enterprise. This is true of us and our own bodies as well as the interactions Some Terms: The Body, Health, Will to Power 37 between and among (human and nonhuman) bodies, animal and plant life (the extension of roots into the ground, for example, in search of water), natural occurrences like the weather (the rising and setting of the sun, the crash of waves on the shore, the approach of a hurricane), and even chemical reactions: “Is it virtuous when a cell transforms itself into a function of a stronger cell? It has no alternative. And is it evil when the stronger cell assimilates the weaker? It has no alternative; it follows necessity, for it strives for superabundant substitutes and wants to regenerate itself.”113 It thus makes sense that the possibility of a politics that would overwrite difference by rendering all “equal in law” would have struck Nietzsche as “hostile to life.” For what else are differences if not, at least in part, inequalities? By framing bodily differences in terms of equality, or whitewashing them into “legal” equality, we have (im)moralized differentiation, thereby threatening the only possibility for life and health. In valuing equality over inequality, we have suggested that sameness and uniformity are of greater importance than difference and diversity, producing that animal of whom Nietzsche never tires of complaining—the herd animal of modernity who, as we will see, wills his own death in a profound perversion of all healthy instincts. But one thing, at least, is clear: for Nietzsche, valuing sameness or equality is equivalent to valuing death over life, sickness over health, decay over growth. Nietzsche’s philosophy of the body is thus indisputably a philosophy of life. However, in refusing the animating desire of Western political theory for bodily unity at both the individual and collective levels, Nietz- sche suggests that the only thing bodies share is their irretrievable particularity, which can neither be definitively accounted for nor discursively discounted in the name of equality, community, or political solidarity. His reformulation of the Socratic-Christian “soul hypothesis” into will to power shows that the only thing that is common to bodies is difference itself. And while we are not stranded in a sea of isolated alienation from all others, nevertheless, we can no longer daydream of the possibility of deep political unity with them in the pursuit of the good life or the practice of freedom.

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P ART I

Revolution

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C HAPTER 2

Diagnosis: Décadence

Every table of values, every “thou shalt” known to history or ethnology, requires first a physiological investigation and interpretation, rather than a psychological one; and every one of them needs a critique on the part of medical science. On the Genealogy of Morals I:17 Note

While the contested term “modernity” has neither an obvious ref- erent nor established boundaries, for Nietzsche, this term functions as a cultural designation, indicating a time and place—in this case, the West, and the major portion of its historical existence—in which human beings exhibit particularly weakened and diseased practices of life. Nietzsche writes perpetually about this modernity, taking aim at its weaknesses, its hubris, and, in particular, its décadence. Positioning himself as its culture doctor,1 Nietzsche diagnoses the modern age as suffering from the strange condition of self-loathing: modernity is inhabited by the grotesque paradox of living beings who loathe themselves as living. As he rather hyper- bolically puts it in the On the Genealogy of Morals: “Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant, and offensive creatures filled with a profound disgust at themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain—which is probably their only pleasure.”2 For Nietzsche, the masochistic logic of this asceticism—ordered by what he calls “the ascetic ideal”—is the logic of modernity. Its nihilism epitomizes the various moralities and method- ologies that govern its intellectual and ethical life: Platonism, Christianity, Kantianism, scientific method, aesthetics, modern education, et cetera.

This asceticism is nihilistic above all because of its longing for security, for protection from the perpetual flux of the life of the body. Its residuals—its “ideals”—take many forms: the soul, the ego or subject, the afterworldly, redemption, God’s grace, truth, nature. Each of these ideals is an attempt to isolate a realm of existence untouched by contingency, becoming, or change. And idealism of this sort is, in Nietzsche’s view, nihilism—it is an escapist drive toward death: “We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all 42 Nietzsche’s Revolution appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself—all this means—let us dare to grasp it—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life.”3 Denigrating life’s constitutive aspects of “appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing,” and “longing,” the ascetic ideal dismisses them as both inessential and loathsome. Within its terms, life as life is both mendacious and revolting. The logic of the ascetic ideal is the logic of eternal sleep, of safety and security only in death. In Nietzsche’s troubled and troubling view, modern human beings are thus a species of living dead, walking incarnations of the suicidal tendency. Nietzsche argues that this displacement of the value of life is the symptom of illness. Nihilism, in other words, indicates that modernity is suffering from a larger, underlying condition, which Nietzsche calls déca- dence.4 Our contraction of this illness, as explained in the second essay of the Genealogy, has produced a sickened, humanized body, burdened by consciousness and “soul,” and thrown headlong into the abyss of nihilism and decline. For nonconscious beings, life is simply lived—it is neither denigrated nor affirmed. Yet modern human beings have lost this capacity. Life has become, for us, an object of scrutiny, its meaning or importance a source of anxious bewilderment. That we are anguished regarding life’s purposeless suffering and meaningless flux bespeaks for Nietzsche a species of creatures in decline, a species that has fallen away from a healthier mode of living. Although Nietzsche admits that life cannot, in fact, be justified,5 in modernity this fact has become a cruel and bitter fate. Life’s illegitimacy is the anguish of modernity, which would rather, as Nietzsche notes in the Genealogy, “will nothingness than not will.”6 Nietzsche’s entire philosophy can be read as a profound reflection upon and struggle with this diagnostic observation. As we will see in the following chapter, it is the source of his revolutionary desire and the impetus for his attempt at therapeutic transformation of modernity. In this chapter, I seek only to substantiate the first part of the argument: that Nietzsche sees modernity as infected with the dread disease of décadence. I trace the development of Nietzsche’s thinking about décadence—its meaning, etiology, and prognosis as well as the method—olfaction—by which

Nietzsche diagnoses this fateful condition. By posing as the doctor of a décadent modernity, Nietzsche enacts or performs precisely what I argued he “thinks” about the body in Chapter 1: it is both material and metaphorical, both individual and collective. Its health is always implicated in, and emerging from, sickness and its overall life is best understood as either ascending or descending. This corporeal framework, and, in particular, Nietzsche’s refusal to distinguish between the body of modernity and an individual body, provides the basis for his radical revolutionary claim, to be discussed more fully in the next chapter, that the body itself—or Diagnosis: Décadence 43 the process of what he calls “incorporation”—is the only test or “proof” of truth.

Weakness of the Will

Nietzsche’s consideration of both the failings of modernity and the possibility of its radical transformation begins from early on; its formulation as a problem of culture begins in Nietzsche’s four Untimely Meditations. Pre- occupied with the ways in which modern European culture is lacking and determined to instigate the construction of a new culture out of which exemplary types can emerge, Nietzsche sets down a preliminary diagnosis of the problem he spends the bulk of his later writings trying to nail down with more precision: “modern man suffers from a weakened personality.”7 This essentially means that “we are without culture, more, we are ruined for living.”8 We catch glimpses of Nietzsche’s more existentialist moments in these early writings, as he laments the fragmented condition of modern man, whose existence is inauthentically split between an “inner” and an “outer,” and characterized by a rejection of nature. We are incapable anymore of “right and simple seeing and hearing, for happily seizing what is nearest and most natural to us.” All of these disorders, these inabilities of modern man to live “rightly” and “simply,” Nietzsche claims, are symptomatic of his primary illness, weakness of the personality, from which we suffer because we “do not yet possess even the basis of a culture, because we are not even convinced we have genuine life in us.” Nietzsche is concerned that the lack of Bildung has produced creatures unable to live, for they are unable to recognize themselves as living:

Fragmented and in pieces, dissociated almost mechanically into an inner and an outer, sown with concepts as with dragon’s teeth, bringing forth conceptual dragons, suffering from the malady of words and mistrusting any feeling of our own which has not yet been stamped with words: being such an unliving and yet uncannily active concept- and word-factory, perhaps I still have the right to say of my self cogito, ergo sum, but not vivo, ergo

cogito. Empty “being” is granted me, but not full and green “life”; the feeling that tells me I exist warrants to me only that I am a thinking creature, 9 not that I am a living one, not that I am an animal but at most a cogital.

Already sensing that life was to be at the center of his concerns with the disorders of modernity, Nietzsche sees the cause of this weakness of personality, this lack of culture, in a disorder within the modern psyche. Tak- ing up his role as culture doctor early on, Nietzsche writes that modern man exists within a tenuous historical context, a status that results in “oscillation between Christianity and antiquity, between an imitated or 44 Nietzsche’s Revolution hypocritical Christianity of morals and an equally despondent and timid revival of antiquity . . . the desire for a firm footing somewhere, the impotence of his knowledge that reels back and forth between the good and the better, all this engenders a restlessness, a disorder in the modern soul which condemns it to a joyless unfruitfulness.”10 These diagnoses are vague, the causal linkages between them unclear. At times, it seems as though modern man’s particular location in history is the cause of his psychic disorders, which have thereby produced an animal unfit for living. At other times, Nietzsche seems to think that it is modern man’s unfitness for living that has produced a crisis of historical location, turning the body’s instincts against each other. At yet others, it seems as though the restlessness of the modern psyche has made itself ill, rendering itself unfit for living, thus causing modern man to cast about in the annals of history in search of a morality or culture by which to orient himself and his era. Although Nietzsche drops the existentialist trope of the inauthentic fragmentation of the self, this theme of dissolution and disintegration persists through to the last of his writings. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche’s next sustained examination of modernity and its disorders, Nietzsche revises his thesis of weakness of the personality to that of weakness of the will—modernity, and Europe in particular, suffers from weakness or paralysis of the will:

Paralysis of the will: where today does one not find this cripple sitting? And often in such finery! How seductive the finery looks! This disease enjoys the most beautiful pomp- and lie-costumes; and most of what today displays itself in the showcases, for example, as “objectivity,” “being scientific,” “l’art pour l’art,” “pure knowledge, free of will,” is merely dressed-up skepticism and paralysis of the will: for this diagnosis of the European sickness I vouch.11

Today the taste of the time and the virtue of the time weakens and thins down the will; nothing is as timely as weakness of the will.12

The cause of this illness, Nietzsche says, is an irregularity in breeding: the will becomes weakened “when races or classes that have long been separated are crossed suddenly and decisively.” The result is a kind of “nervous exhaustion and sickliness”13 in what Nietzsche calls the “hybrid European —all in all, a tolerably ugly plebeian.”14 This enervating hybridization has wrought deep physiological upheaval in the individuals of modernity who, Nietzsche claims, “have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest.” Such a condition is the very hallmark of modern life—internal disorder and chaos distinctively mark “human beings of late cultures and refracted Diagnosis: Décadence 45 lights,” who, because of their diversity of inheritance, “will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war they are should come to an end.”15 This indiscriminate “mixing” (Vermischung) of races and classes has had, on Nietzsche’s account, both a homogenizing and a weakening effect. Jumbling up all different kinds of people together in one pot produces a motley society, a collectivity of individuals who know best how to conform and adapt to one another, rather than differentiate themselves: “Thus an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man is gradually coming up, a type that possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as its typical distinction.”16 More- over, such Vermischung constitutes a blindness to distinctions in vitality, combining different forms of ascending and descending life haphazardly without regard for the outcome of their unions. The resulting conglomeration of foreign internal forces means that our instincts are not able to compel us any longer, even in any particular direction: “‘I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,’ sighs modern man.”17 Say what you will about the ascetic ideal—call it nihilism, call it antinatural, call it despicable calumny—nevertheless, “it is and remains a will!”18 Moder- nity, by contrast, is an era of exhaustion, reactivity, mere subsistence; it suffers from a listless, aimless, unbearably sluggish decay. The “orgy of feeling” of the ascetic priest has been secularized into the scientific will to truth, our dishonest lying has become “inveterate innocence in moralistic mendaciousness”:19

One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.20

The decrease in instincts which are hostile and arouse mistrust—and that

is all our ‘progress’ amounts to—represents but one of the consequences attending the general decrease in vitality: it requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to make so conditional and late an existence prevail.21

Ages must be measured by their positive strength—and then that lavishly squandering and fatal age of the Renaissance appears as the last great age; and we moderns, with our anxious self-solicitude and neighbor-love, with our virtues of work, modestly, legality, and scientism—accumulating, economic, machinelike—appear as a weak age. Our virtues are conditional on, are provoked by, our weaknesses.22 46 Nietzsche’s Revolution

And, to reiterate: all of this exhaustion is due to the “tremendous physiological process” taking place in Europe: “Europeans are becoming more similar to each other; they become more and more detached from the conditions under which races originate . . . they become increasingly independent of any determinate milieu that would like to inscribe itself for centuries in body and soul with the same demands.”23 Weakness of the will, however, is a species of which corruption is the genus. In both Beyond Good and Evil and, earlier, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche uses “corruption” (Corruption, Verfall, Verderb) as a term indicating the general stage of decline in the life cycle. Weakness of the will, then, the diagnosis of modern man’s particular affliction, is one of many possible forms this corruption might have taken, since “corruption (Cor- ruption) is something totally different depending on the organism in which it appears.”24 Although corruption is how Nietzsche talks about the decline of life more generally, in these two books, he does not describe it with any particular antipathy, content to watch people and cultures rise and fall with the disinterested interest of a medical observer: “Corruption [Corruption] is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people.”25 In these texts, Nietzsche refuses the conservatism of those who foretell the dissolution of all happiness and morality as a result of a decaying culture:

When “morals decay” [die Sitten verfallen] those men emerge whom one calls tyrants: they are the precursors and as it were the precocious harbingers of individuals. Only a little while later this fruit of fruits hangs yellow and mellow from the tree of a people—and the tree existed only for the sake of these fruits . . . In his age the individual is usually ripest and culture therefore in its highest and most fruitful stage . . . The times of corruption [Corruption] are those when the apples fall from the tree: I mean the individuals, for they carry the seeds of the future and are the authors of the spiritual colonization and origin of new states and communities.26

Eventually, however, a day arrives when conditions become more fortunate

and the tremendous tension decreases; perhaps there are no longer any enemies among one’s neighbors, and the means of life, even for the enjoy- ment of life, are superabundant. At one stroke the bond and constraint of the old discipline are torn: it no longer seems necessary, a condition of existence—if it persisted it would only be a form of luxury, an archaizing taste . . . At these turning points of history we behold beside one another, and often mutually involved and entangled, a splendid, manifold, jungle- like growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the competi- tion to grow, and a tremendous ruin and self-ruination . . . decay [Verfall], corruption [Verderb], and the highest desires gruesomely entangled; the genius of the race overflowing from all cornucopias of good and bad; a Diagnosis: Décadence 47

calamitous simultaneity of spring and fall, full of new charms and veils that characterize young, still unexhausted, still unwearied corruption.27

As an observer of the life and death of peoples and cultures, Nietzsche neither celebrates nor laments their downfall: “we ‘conserve’ nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods”; yet “we are not by any means ‘liberal’; we do not work for ‘progress.’”28 Death is not retrogressive on this account of corruption anymore than life is progressive. Nietzsche retains his particular diagnosis of modernity as suffering from weakness of the will to the end of his productive career;29 however, the physiological condition that comes to occupy his attention most is the underlying condition that produces it: corruption, or, as he later terms it in the 1888 writings, décadence: “I understand corruption [Verdorben- heit], as you will guess, in the sense of décadence: it is my contention that all the values in which mankind now sums up its supreme desiderata are décadence-values [décadence-Werthe].”30 After detailing its etiology in the Genealogy, décadence becomes the foregrounded problem of Nietzsche’s medical philosophy, taking center stage in the 1888 works.31 Nietzsche mysteriously forgoes the German Dekadenz in this diagnosis, instead relying specifically on the homologous French word décadence. As with ressentiment, Nietzsche’s deliberate usage of the French suggests that décadence is a term of art within his philosophy, possessed of a specific meaning that requires particular interpretive attention. We cannot take it for granted that décadence simply means decadence, just as ressentiment is not simply another word for resentment.32 What is décadence, then? As argued in the previous chapter, will to power is the definition of a living thing—its presence is the decisive mark or sign of life in a body. As a principle that differs from self-preservation, will to power directs itself not toward a particular state or condition (like “preservation” or satiation) but toward growth. This point is confirmed very late in Nietzsche’s productive career in section 6 of the Antichrist(ian), where he writes: “Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for power.” As we might expect, then, the absence of will to power is a sign of weakness in a body—decay, degeneration, or disease: “Where the will to power is lacking there is decline [Niedergang].” After defining life as whatever instinctually strives after power, Nietzsche again notes, later in the Antichrist(ian): “Wherever the will to power declines [niedergeht] in any form, there is invariably also a physiological retrogression, décadence.”33 It seems, then, that décadence is simply the organic movement of life that runs contrary to the process of growth. This makes initial and intuitive sense. Just think of anything that decays—a compost pile, for instance. Nietzsche would then be saying that modern humanity is like a gigantic heap of backyard organic waste, a pile that creaks and moans under the weight of its own decay. Motley, reactive, exhausted, used up, no longer good for anything purposeful, 48 Nietzsche’s Revolution modern humanity’s usefulness lies only in what will be produced after it has finished this process of decomposition—in the richness of the soil, perhaps, which may contain the seeds of the “individuals” hinted at in the passages from The Gay Science previously cited. Just as will to power is the definition of a living thing, then, so, too, does décadence seem to be the definition of that which is dying. Yet décadence is not just any decay. After all, decay is an essential part of life. From excretion and the shedding of dead skin to the daily depletion of energy that must be regularly replenished with food and sleep, “corruption” cannot be separated from life’s vital functions. Why, then, is Nietzsche so concerned about décadence? Unlike “corruption,” which is natural and healthy and essential to life, décadence indicates a decay that has exceeded its healthy functions and contaminated the entire organism such that it has become that body’s defining principle. The organism is thus no longer defined by life but death. Nietzsche’s terminological transition away from the value-free “corruption” and toward a primary reliance on the judgment-laden décadence as the subject of his musings is coextensive with his transformation from disinterested observer of life and death into disturbed diagnostician of modernity’s degeneration. In diagnosing the modern age as suffering from rot, Nietzsche is indicating that one of its constitutive drives has gotten out of control and is threatening to convulse the body of modernity and choke it to death. That is why décadence is a diagnosis with a terminal prognosis. The reactivity of decomposing matter—its subjection to its own internal dissolution as its driving force—is an exhaustion that inevitably culminates in its own extinction.34

Etiology: “Race-mixing”

As already noted, Nietzsche offers the unsavory explanation of Vermisc- hung—the indiscriminate mixing of different “races” or “classes” together—as the cause of this terminal modern malaise. If we recall Nietzsche’s emphasis on differentiation as a condition of life, it makes sense that he

might claim indifference to, or disruption of, differentiation as a cause of death, especially if it resulted in homogeneity or “equality.” Yet there is no necessity that this differentiation be marked by race or class, or translated into what often seem like proto-eugenicist claims. Why does Nietzsche take up the category of race here, and what are we to make of his dispar- agement of “race-mixing” specifically? Like his contemporaries, Nietzsche is concerned with the violation of boundaries more generally—between strong and weak, healthy and sick, male and female—and this late nineteenth-century anxiety was often translated into concerns regarding racial “contamination” and miscege- nation.35 Nietzsche’s claim that “race-mixing” overlooks the necessary Diagnosis: Décadence 49 differences and inequalities between and amongst living things obviously exemplifies this anxiety, and also takes up the evolutionary and social Darwinist discourses ascendant in his day, of which he was an avid reader.36 Combined with his diagnosis of décadence, then, a racist and pro- to-eugenicist view seems to emerge from the tacitly causal relationship Nietzsche establishes between the boundary violation of “race-mixing” and the decline of European culture and vitality overall. This relationship thus also raises the question of whether Nietzsche’s prized categories of strength and weakness, ascending and descending life, health and sickness, are surrogates for racial categorizations. To what degree are Nietz- sche’s biological metaphors a cover for a more insidious, racialized view of European development?37 To what degree are Nietzsche’s biological categories fixed or unalterable predestinations?38 Is décadence better understood as Europe’s failure to institute racial hygiene? To answer all of these questions in their complexity, we must first investigate what Nietzsche actually says about race (Rasse) and “race-mixing.” Although we do find quite a lot of verbiage about race, nevertheless his usage of the term is patently unclear, and he speaks relatively little about the phenomenon of race-“mixing” per se.39 For example, he never offers any definitional framework for what might constitute race (relying alternately on nationality, ancestry, language, or “spirit” to distinguish “racial” groups), nor does he adequately specify consistent referents for his racial categorizations (e.g., who counts as a “strong” race or a “weak” one). Most of the time, Nietzsche uses race interchangeably with class (Stand), arguing, in the Genealogy, for example, that “classes always also express differences of origin and race,”40 and asserting, in Beyond Good and Evil, that “our Europe of today” is “the arena of an absurdly sudden attempt at a radical mixture of classes, and hence races.”41 We notice, however, that even in these two passages there is confusion—in the first, Nietz- sche says classes always express racial differences (making race, in some sense, “first”), whereas in the second, Nietzsche says the opposite—that racial differences are necessarily expressions of class (thereby making class “first”). Elsewhere, Nietzsche simply equates the two, lamenting the sud- 42 den and decisive crossing of “races or classes.” And then, in other places, Nietzsche labels what we would today call “nations” or national groups as races—as, for example, when he refers to the British as an “unphilosophi- cal race,”43 claims the Jews as “beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe,”44 or ponders that uniquely Ger- man question “Was ist Deutsch?” and speculates about the characteristics of the German “race.”45 But, then again, he even refers to Europeans as a whole as a “race”46 and, in one passage, contrasts northern and southern Europeans in terms of “barbarian” and “Latin” races.47 Nietzsche’s interest in race and his flexible usage of the term clearly reflect the proliferation of racialist and social Darwinist discourses in late 50 Nietzsche’s Revolution nineteenth-century Europe, and the varied deployment of race in these discourses themselves. As Anne McClintock notes, “the term ‘race’ was used in shifting and unstable ways, sometimes as synonymous with ‘species,’ sometimes with ‘culture,’ sometimes with ‘nation,’ sometimes to denote biological ethnicity or sub-groups within national groupings: the English ‘race’ compared, say, with the ‘Irish’ race.”48 This flexibility is clearly on display in Nietzsche’s writings, and we cannot fail to attribute an at best ethno- or Euro-centric perspective to this type of analysis. Yet what also becomes clear from an investigation of these discussions is that Nietz- sche also clearly opposes essential premises of the racialized nationalism and social Darwinism of his day, thereby resisting a number of otherwise tempting interpretations of his philosophy of décadence as an essentially racist or racialized diagnosis. First and foremost, Nietzsche rejects the pro- gressivist reading of human history adopted by social Darwinist writers such as Herbert Spencer or Ernst Haeckel (and implicitly endorsed by Darwin himself).49 As we have seen, Nietzsche’s assessment of the West is that it is characterized by retrogression—décadence and decline. Far from the “fittest” having survived through a process of natural selection, it is in fact the weak and the conniving who survive through an elaborate process of lying re-named and propagated as “morality”:

Anti-Darwin. As for the famous “struggle for existence,” so far it seems to me to be asserted rather than proved . . . Assuming, however, that there is such a struggle for existence—and, indeed, it occurs—its result is unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin’s school desires, and of what one might perhaps desire with them—namely, in favor of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority— and they are also more intelligent. Darwin forgot the spirit (that is Eng- lish!); the weak have more spirit.50

In some sense, then, Nietzsche opposes Darwin by alluding to Jesus and arguing that the meek will indeed inherit the earth. The difference, of course, is that, in Nietzsche’s view, the weak do not deserve this inheritance; rather, they will triumph over the strong because they have more “spirit,” by which he means “care, patience, cunning, simulation, great self-control, and everything that is mimicry (the latter includes a great deal of so-called ‘virtue’).” At a minimum, then, Nietzsche opposes a social Darwinist view of the necessary triumph of the superior race through natural selection or the survival of the fittest (which presumes we would be able to determine what exactly he means by “race,” anyway), and insofar as he is writing during the age of European empire, it seems at least possible that it is the Europeans themselves who are the weaklings he may be referring to, those who conquer their betters through cunning, dissimulation, and “virtue.” Indeed, Nietzsche notes, “the mediocre alone Diagnosis: Décadence 51 have a chance of continuing their type and propagating—they are the men of the future, the only survivors.”51 Of course, Nietzsche was not alone in attributing a declension narrative to social Darwinism—fin-de-siècle Europe was crowded with a host of thinkers, writers, and theorists of décadence prognosticating the demise of European culture.52 These critics, however, argued that the dissolution of Europe was either the result of “the epidemics of ‘social pathologies’ such as alcoholism, sexual perversion, crime, insanity, prostitution and anarchism,”53 the radical upheavals in economic and social life wrought by industrialization,54 or the infiltration of the Jews into Europe, who were viewed “as a dangerous internal enemy which insidiously threatened the very life-force of Christian society” and were equated “with moral corruption, physical deformity and disease.”55 Now, certainly, even a declension narrative of social Darwinism can be read through a racialist lens. After all, Nietzsche’s association of race-mixing with Europe’s decline may very well mean that the “barbarian” or “darker” races are those meeklings whose inheritance of the earth will be brought about through their infiltration of Europe and their dilution of its Aryan strength. But I think Nietzsche is not arguing this either because, by contrast with any of the explanations offered by Nietzsche’s social Darwinist contemporaries to account for European decline (whether progressive or retrogressive), the overwhelming culprit Nietzsche holds responsible for the infection of modernity is Christianity, “the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected.”56 Unlike his contemporaries, who saw the European way of life as under siege by either external forces (in the form of inassimilable Jews or intermarriage with uncivilized natives) or by radically new and foreign internal developments (like disease, sexual license, or the industrial revolution), Nietzsche instead sees all of these difficulties as themselves symptomatic of the larger, underlying décadence caused by Christianity. Indeed, Christianity may simply be another word for décadence: “I negate a type of morality that has become prevalent and predominant as morality itself—the morality of décadence or, more con- cretely, Christian morality.”57 Christianity’s hostility to life has caused a

radical inversion of the natural order, creating a form of life that detests life as life. Neither external nor internal to European culture, Christianity is rather essential to and constitutive of European culture. Décadence, then, considered as a disease and a wholly physiological phenomenon, is best understood neither as a malignant growth, like the crime and industrialization believed to be eating away like a cancer at the health of Europe’s cities,58 nor as an allergic reaction, wherein something benign yet foreign to the body is perceived by it to be harmful, as with the presence of Jewish populations on the continent or colonized populations abroad. Rather, décadence is Europe’s fatal autoimmune disease. The illness of Christian- ity has rendered modern Europe unable to recognize its own constituent 52 Nietzsche’s Revolution parts, thereby triggering an immunity reaction against the very elements of its life itself—the body, its flux, and infinite variation:

Behind this [Christian] mode of thought and valuation . . . I never failed to sense a hostility to life—a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life. Hatred of “the world,” condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for “the sabbath of sabbaths”—all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a “will to decline”—at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life.59

When seriousness is deflected from the self-preservation and the enhancement of the strength of the body—that is, of life—when anemia is construed as an ideal, and contempt for the body as “salvation of the soul”—what else is this if not a recipe for décadence?60

Décadence is a uniquely European disease because its toxicity is particular to a uniquely European form of life, a Christian form of life, which has created a condition wherein “the majority of mortals” are now “physiologically deformed and deranged.”61 This deformity is intrinsic: it is an “expression of the physiological contradiction—of being modern.”62 This physiology of decay explains the otherwise unnerving biological deter- minism in Nietzsche’s texts—as we recall, the prognosis for modernity was terminal because the very definition of décadence entails death: it is a decay that has exceeded its healthy boundaries and convulsed the entire organism. Far from being caused by external threats or “inferior” “races,” however, Europe has brought this calamity upon itself, and there is no redemptive possibility available to save it from its physiological fate:

Suppose we could contemplate the oddly painful and equally crude and subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking and aloof eyes of an Epicurean god, I think our amazement and laughter would never end: doesn’t it seem that a single will dominated Europe for eighteen centuries—to turn man into a sublime miscarriage? Anyone, however, who approached this almost deliberate degeneration and atrophy of man represented by the Christian European (Pascal, for example), feeling the opposite kind of desire, not in an Epicurean spirit but rather with some divine hammer in his hand, would surely have to cry out in wrath, in pity, Diagnosis: Décadence 53

in horror: “O you dolts, you presumptuous, pitying dolts, what have you done! Was that work for your hands? How have you bungled and botched my beautiful stone! What presumption!” I meant to say: Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of arro- gance yet. Men, not high and hard enough to have any right to try to form man as artists; men, not strong and farsighted enough to let the foreground law of thousandfold failure and ruin prevail, though it cost them sublime self-conquest; men, not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, chasm of rank, between man and man—such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe, with their “equal before God,” until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre has been bred, the European of today.63

The necessarily fatal prognosis for décadence becomes increasingly pronounced over time in Nietzsche’s writings, culminating in a veritable orgy of décadence doom-saying in his final work, The Case of Wagner. There, for example, Nietzsche notes dryly: “Things are bad generally. Decay [Verfall] is universal. The sickness goes deep.”64 Or, as he sighs in Twilight of the Idols, “Nothing avails: one must go forward—step by step further into déca- dence (—that is my definition of modern ‘progress’ . . . ). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration [Entartung], gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.”65 In addition to this singular etiology of décadence, Nietzsche also breaks significantly with his contemporaries’ views of race and degeneration in another way by avoiding a biologically essentialist account of race, an otherwise indispensable tenet of any racialist explanation of European déca- dence.66 While essentialist passages can certainly be found in Nietzsche (the clearest of these being BGE §264 and GM I:5), much more frequently, he tends to define politico-cultural groupings in terms of shared social and historical experiences, particularly in terms of the shared experience of the imposition of power. For example, in one instance, he defines a people (Volk) as “human beings” who “have long lived together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, needs, and work)”; “what results from this is people who ‘understand one another’—a people.”67 The Volk, in

other words, is a group that is developed and achieved over time; it is neither inscribed in nature nor rooted in the constitution of bodies. In other places, Nietzsche argues that races—in particular, “inferior” or “lower” races—are at least in part constituted both as races and as inferior through the effects of power. So in the Genealogy, Nietzsche argues that language is instituted by the masters—“the origin of language itself [is] an expression of power on the part of rulers”—and that “it is the noble races that have left behind them the concept ‘barbarian’ wherever they have gone.”68 Similarly, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes, “Let us admit to ourselves, without trying to be considerate, how every higher culture on earth so far has begun. Human beings whose nature was still 54 Nietzsche’s Revolution natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races, perhaps traders or cattle-raisers, or upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption. In the beginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste.”69 In this passage, Nietzsche confounds the typical meaning of “civilized” and “barbarian,” equating the conquerors with both nobility and barbarity. And while Nietzsche’s discussions of these pillaging races are disturbing in their explicit documentation of founding violence, nevertheless, his substantive claims are uncontroversial: the production of more typically considered “barbarous” races or peoples, as many have persuasively demonstrated, is a primary strategy of invading colonizers who seek to justify their aggression and claim to rule.70 Similarly, the production and reification of the languages of nonliterate cultures into written tongues is a typical artifact of missionaries who seek, quite literally, to spread the Word. Although any collectivity of human beings, once delineated as a group and observed to exist over time, can be designated as a “biological” category insofar as it reproduces itself, the very act of defining the group as a group plays just as crucial a role in determining its “biological” or “natural” essence. In other words, Nietzsche seems to acknowledge the degree to which even “biologically” based categories are constructed and produced by historically and politically momentous events.71 Moreover, while “race-mixing” may cause any number of difficulties for modern social life in Nietzsche’s view, he nevertheless also attributes the possibility of new forms of greatness to this amalgamation, even suggesting that such Vermischung may lead to modernity’s ultimate salvation. We have seen this already in the aphorisms about corruption quoted previously, in which Nietzsche describes corrupt cultures as “carry[ing] the seeds of the future” in the form of “individuals” who shall be the “authors of the spiritual colonization and origin of new states and communities.”72 In the climatic description of corruption offered in Beyond Good and Evil, wherein declining cultures are metaphorized as humid and overgrown

jungles “rich in marvels and monstrosities,” Nietzsche again remarks, offhandedly, that these are the ages in which “the ‘individual’” appears, noting that “the genius of the race” is here “overflowing from all cornucopias of good and bad.”73 Even in Beyond Good and Evil, the text wherein Nietzsche’s concerns with “race” and “race-mixing” are most insistent, Nietzsche celebrates the collapse of distinct cultures or races, arguing that the terrifying tragedy of “race-mixing” also holds the potential to save modernity from its impending disaster: “The very same new conditions that will on the average lead to the leveling and mediocritization of man—to a useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose herd animal—are likely in the highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of Diagnosis: Décadence 55 the most dangerous and attractive quality.”74 In an aphorism that begins by asserting that ages of indiscriminate “race-mixing” are weak ages that seek to anesthetize their internal conflict, Nietzsche similarly notes that it is precisely in such “late cultures” that “those magical, incomprehensible, and unfathomable ones arise, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and seduction, whose most beautiful expression is found in Alcibia- des and Caesar.” Nietzsche argues that these types “appear in precisely the same ages when that weaker type with its desire for rest comes to the fore; both types belong together and owe their origin to the same causes.”75 Nietzsche thus appears to be saying that Alcibiades and Caesar are mixed-breeds. He even claims himself as a by-product of “race-mixing,” suggesting that this mixed-ness is the basis for his rejection of the racialized nationalism of the German republic, saying, “We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent” to “feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false among the people of the ‘historical sense.’”76 Here Nietzsche rejects not simply the notion that races are fixed or intransigent biological essences, claiming the Germans (and by extension himself) as racially “mixed,” but he also consequently (and contemptuously) dismisses the racialized nationalism and anti-Semitism of German identity. Referring to himself as a “good European,”77 the Nietzsche who admits that “we do not love humanity” nevertheless also asserts that he is not nearly “German” enough “to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine.” Exam- ples of such ridiculous quarantine include not simply “the anti-French stupidity” or the “anti-Polish stupidity” but also the “anti-Jewish.”78 Sometimes, Nietzsche indulges in a strange and flamboyant fantasy of an overarching continental unification, a conglomerate creation that would entail quite a bit of Vermischung. Voiced only in The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil and subsequently abandoned, Nietzsche some-

times declares it would be best if Europe were to develop a small but all- powerful caste of superior types who would rule the continent and unite it into what perhaps might be called a race but that we would, today, more likely call a people or nation.79 This longing clarifies Nietzsche’s consistent romanticization of Napoleon80 and elucidates what he means by “great politics” (grosse Politik),81 which Peter Bergman explains as the “then fashionable conviction of the primacy of foreign policy, of a higher form of politics specifically addressing European and world power con- flicts in contradistinction to a presumably lesser form of politics dealing with internal matters.”82 Nietzsche classes German nationalism as kleine Politik, as the desire for “the eternalization of the European system of a 56 Nietzsche’s Revolution lot of petty states [Kleinstaaterei].”83 He calls national separatism itself an “insanity,” its policies “of necessity only . . . entr’acte policies.” They overlook the fact “that Europe wants to become one.”84 But this short-lived fantastical project of continental confederation not only lacks imperialist ambitions (necessary as it is only for Europe and Europeans’ own insular self-overcoming), but also cannot be accomplished through any eugenicist program given Nietzsche’s already-voiced skepticism regarding the ability to definitively circumscribe biological characteristics or groups. Indeed, it is not clear that this caste has any clear racial demarcations whatsoever, nor that it could be “bred” by taking racial categories into consideration (though other forms of “spiritual” breeding may be possible). Nietzsche’s disavowal of biological race and the racialized nationalism of his day make it difficult to argue that “race-mixing” could be the cause of anything, much less the downfall of European modernity. Unlike Christianity, which (in all its resentful and egalitarian variants) Nietzsche holds unequivocally responsible for décadence, race-mixing instead seems to be both cause and effect of the doctrine of equality, an intermediate step between it and Christianity tout court, thus rendering race-mixing alternately a manifestation and an accelerator of the process of decay. While Nietzsche is no friend of causality, this ambiguity nevertheless requires clarification; otherwise, “race-mixing” is not merely a symptom of déca- dence but the disease itself. Is Nietzsche suggesting that “race-mixing” itself is just another form of Christian slave morality? If yes, is it more or less responsible for Europe’s degeneracy than, for example, democracy is? Putting on our social scientist hats for a moment, we can chart the causal unclarity as follows: Figure 2.1 shows race-mixing as the effect of equality, while Figure 2.2 shows race-mixing as the cause of equality. Figure 2.3 offers the possibility that equality and race-mixing are co-extensive causal variables. Now, if “race-mixing” gets off the ground only as a product of the equalizing effects of slave morality, as indicated in Figure 2.1, it is difficult to sort out which is the proper cause of the physiological exhaustion that is supposedly produced—is the cause “race-mixing,” or the cause of

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2 Diagnosis: Décadence 57

Figure 2.3

“race-mixing” itself, Christianity/Christian morality? That is, does Figure 2.1 or 2.3 more adequately capture the succession of causations? And if it is Figure 2.3, what are the relative proportions of each variable? Are egalitarian doctrines equally responsible (as would be fitting) for Euro- pean exhaustion or for only a small part? But, if the pattern of causality does in fact fit Figure 2.1, to what extent is race-mixing the “real” cause of European exhaustion more so than Christianity, without which the whole game would never have gotten started?85 This confusion is clarified if we consider a fourth possibility:

Figure 2.4

Despite the prominence of race and “race-mixing” in Beyond Good and Evil, its resonance with the social Darwinism so prevalent in late nineteenth-century discourses, and its temptingly teleological foretelling of the rise of Nazi fascism, I nevertheless think it is more textually accurate to understand “race-mixing” as one more manifestation of the generalized egalitarianism—a by-product of Christian morality—that is threatening to kill off European civilization. While I make no excuses for the multiple racist remarks to be found in Nietzsche’s texts,86 have little doubt of his investment (conscious or otherwise) in the ideology of Aryan/white superiority,87 and find it entirely plausible that his “anti-Christianism” is in fact premised upon anti-Semitism,88 nevertheless, I do not think that Nietzsche’s remarks on race or “race-mixing” can be credibly construed as offering his conclusive—or even partial—explanation for modernity’s development of décadence. It seems clear that Christianity is the prime culprit responsible for modernity’s infection and the primary target at which Nietzsche takes lifelong aim—whether as doctor, philosopher, or revolutionary strategist. Nietzsche does often long for the process of modernity’s 58 Nietzsche’s Revolution decay to be sped up, lamenting that “we are weary of man”89 and observing that “all-too-many live, and all-too-long they hang on their branches. Would that a storm came to shake all this worm-eaten rot from the tree!”90 But this otherwise repellent rhetoric of the sacrifice of untold many to the few great figures of a particular culture or era,91 when understood according to his model of organic decomposition, suggests no necessity that such a demand culminate in fascistic regimes composed of master races eager to hasten the process along. Indeed, once décadence has set in, there is no real possibility that death will be averted, and thus no need for any outside interference. Certainly, Nietzsche’s rhetoric can be appropriated for fascist projects, but this neither renders them intrinsic to Nietzsche’s thought nor explicitly advocated there.92 And while Nietzsche discusses both race and nationalism in all of his writings, the specific language of racialization and his concerns with “race-mixing” are discussed only in Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy, then subsequently disappear and are absent for all practical purposes from the 1888 works.93 It is also important to keep in mind that the symptoms that led Nietzsche to the diagnosis of décadence are multiple, including not simply “race-mixing,” but also “the advent of democracy, international courts in place of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and whatever other symptoms of declining [absinkenden] life there are.”94 Insofar as “race-mixing” does bother Nietzsche, then, it does so for the same reasons democracy, law courts, women’s equality, and pity bother him—they demand a flat- tening of difference, an obscuring of bodily differentials: “The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice.”95 Of course, it is this, and a bit more than this, that troubles him about Christianity and Christian doctrines, so it is to this more fundamental etiology of décadence that I wish to turn.

Etiology: Christianity

Nietzsche’s theory of the instincts is the foundation underlying his cri-

tique of décadence: “To have to fight the instincts—that is the formula of décadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.”96 Because our instincts are in chaos, we can no longer will anything with a unified (albeit unconscious) authority—we are no longer commanded in any particular direction. Our modus operandi is primarily reaction, self-preservation, and conservation of vital energies so as to perpetuate our own meager existence. This reactivity exemplifies weakness of the will, modernity’s particular manifestation of décadence: “Every mistake in every sense is the effect of the degeneration of instinct [Instinkt-Entartung], of the disintegration [disgregation] of the will: one could almost define what is bad in this way. All that is good is instinct—and hence easy, necessary, Diagnosis: Décadence 59 free.”97 Our instinctual chaos was brought into being by Christianity and made poisonous by being made permanent—Christianity inverted the instincts of life, devaluing the body and this world, making morality, God, the soul, and the beyond into the source and substance of the meaning of all existence. Thus, when Nietzsche diagnoses modernity as being décadent, he is arguing that its instincts have been so thrown into chaos that they no longer drive it toward life and expenditure but rather toward death and extinction:

Instinctively to choose what is harmful for oneself, to feel attracted by “disinterested” motives, that is virtually the formula of décadence. “Not to seek one’s own advantage”—that is merely the moral fig leaf for quite a different, namely, a physiological, state of affairs: “I no longer know how to find my own advantage.” Disgregation of the instincts!98

For that one does not resist him [Wagner], this itself is a sign of décadence. The instincts are weakened. What one ought to shun is found attractive. One puts to one’s lips what drives one yet faster into the abyss.99

Nietzsche offers a speculative, quasi-anthropological account of our contraction of this illness as a result of Christianity’s scrambling of our instincts in On the Genealogy of Morals. According to the narrative offered there, modern humanity suffers from décadence because its animal nature has been fundamentally corrupted. We humans have been uniquely invested with consciousness, a development Nietzsche argues is the result of “an ineluctable disaster”100—the moment when man “found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and peace.”101 Consciousness emerges as a by-product of social relations, which require that the “old instincts” of animal life “seek new and, as it were, subterranean gratifi- cations.” Forbidden from outward expression, “hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction” were “turned against the possessors of such instincts”; the most “wild” and “free” instincts were prohibited from being vented outwardly. Yet they do “not suddenly cease . . . to make their usual demands!” Having nowhere beyond the body to go, drives can only discharge themselves internally, producing the malignant growth of consciousness: “The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited.” Before this disturbing and radical new development, human consciousness was essentially no different from animal consciousness. It was, in other words, ahistorical—consciousness was consciousness only of an abiding present. It is with the inculcation of memory that Nietzsche locates the beginning of our fall from animality, our turning away from that condition of constant forgetting that he characterizes as “a form of 60 Nietzsche’s Revolution robust health.”102 The development of the distinctive mark of the human, then, is the development of the distinctly sickened and corrupted animal, “for man is more sick, uncertain, changeable, indeterminable than any other animal, there is no doubt of that—he is the sick animal.”103 In Nietzsche’s terms, “human” is synonymous with “sickness,” “animal” with “healthy.” The human animal is thus both sick and no longer an animal insofar as its “apparatus of repression” has been “damaged and ceases to function properly”—or, in other words, insofar as it is no longer capable of the process of “active,” if unconscious, forgetting. For there can be “no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present,” or, taken together, no health, “without forgetfulness.”104 Continuing his vague historical narrative, Nietzsche charts the transformation of animal consciousness into what he calls the “bad conscience” of the responsible subject, and further from the bad conscience into the sinfulness of the guilty soul. Each of these developments is a further perversion of our original, healthy condition; each is, therefore, a further development of the sickness that afflicts the human animal. While each of these transformations is significant in its own right, Nietzsche devotes most of his attention to the production of the moralized, guilty subject of Christianity. Before Christianity, Nietzsche argues that human social relations were premised on the “oldest and most primitive personal relationship”105—that between creditor and debtor. “The idea” was “that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit.”106 Wrongdoings were errors; punish- ments were exacted on the wrongdoer’s body through the infliction of pain. The contrasting “idea, now so obvious, apparently so natural, even unavoidable,” that “‘the criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted differently,’” is in fact “an extremely late and subtle form of human judgment and inference.”107 “Indeed, during the greater part of the past the judges and punishers themselves were not at all conscious of dealing with a ‘guilty person.’ But with an instigator of harm, with an irresponsible piece of fate.”108 The transformation of error into sin, of responsibility into guilt, comes with the “advent of the Christian

God”—“the maximum god attained so far.” Hereafter, breaches in one’s responsibilities consequently summon “the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.”109 Failures to remember or to keep one’s promises are no longer simply failures in memory but rather faults or sins for which one is guiltily accountable. These misdeeds can no longer be recompensed by an injury of the body—a debtor must suffer psychically for his defaults: “Punishment is supposed to possess the value of awakening the feeling of guilt in the guilty person.”110 Punishment alone thus becomes insufficient for compensating a wrongdoing, for it is no longer simply the body that is implicated in one’s misdeeds. With Christianity develops the “soul,” that new locus of ethics Diagnosis: Décadence 61 and responsibility, good and evil, suffering and joy. It is the soul that must grieve for its transgressions; one must feel bad, regret, repent if they are to be redeemed. The wrongdoer herself thus becomes the judge of her own deeds and the administrator of their punishment, for there is, quite obviously, no social mechanism to ensure that such undergoing takes place. The sinner herself becomes the only one able to determine whether she has suffered “enough.” Nietzsche has another name for this moralization of historical consciousness: he calls it the slave revolt in morality. This development is, for Nietzsche, the very beginning of the process of human decay.111 In locating the responsibility for misdeeds in the individual doer, Nietzsche argues that (Christian) morality fallaciously produces what we now see as the foundation of any ethics or social order—the autonomous subject. “For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so.”112 Christianity, in other words, refuses to treat the conscious human animal as a historical development. Before this moralization of guilt, punishment for one’s mistakes “descended” “like a piece of fate”—the wrongdoer “suffered no ‘inward pain’ other than that induced by the sudden appearance of something unforeseen, a dreadful natural event, a plunging, crushing rock that one cannot fight.”113 In Christianity, by contrast, punishment is deserved, because wrongdoing is the product of willful disobedience of God (or, as in morality more generally, of social norms, rules, customs, laws, obligations, etc.). Christian morality thus displaces the human animal entirely from the body and declares its soul, its sickness, to be what is most important about it. Modernity’s death drive, then, has become ascendant due to centuries of Christian discipline and breeding; the result is an animal for whom hostility to life has become its first instinct.114 The essentially healthy instincts of the unconscious, unpersonified, and therefore unaccountable animal have been eroded and replaced by a set of instincts that run coun-

ter to the basic dynamics of organic life as Nietzsche understands it—a set of instincts that attempts to harness and punish activity and force, while valorizing complacency and weakness. Indeed, Christianity has so corrupted our instincts that we understand “‘perfection’” in terms of “a pale, sickly, idiotic-enthusiastic character, so-called ‘holiness,’” that “fights health as a kind of enemy, devil, temptation! which fancies that one can carry around a ‘perfect soul’ in a cadaver of a body.”115 In Nietzsche’s medical terminology, Christianity has sickened humanity for so long that we have become able to digest what is harmful to us. Hence, Nietzsche’s diagnosis of décadence: our instincts no longer compel us in the right direction; our will to power has become attenuated; we are animals who 62 Nietzsche’s Revolution deliberately seek out our own suffering and death. Christianity has, at its best, made us into masochists: “Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out.”116 At its worst, it has made us suicidal, for “with the ‘beyond’ one kills life.”117

Diagnostic Method: Olfaction

How does Nietzsche detect our contraction of this illness? How is he so keenly able to determine the insidious and sickly quality of such seemingly benign things as equality, women’s rights, democracy, and international law—things that continue to receive widespread accolades around the world? What exactly is it about these developments that indicates an underlying disease to Nietzsche? Of this there is no doubt: “Bad air! Bad air!” The smell “of some ill- constituted thing,” “some ill-constituted soul!”118 For Nietzsche, the telling sign of decomposition is ultimately the same in people as it is in any other organism—stinkiness—and Christianity is no exception on this front: “With morality it is easiest to lead mankind by the nose!”119 Decom- position is both Nietzsche’s diagnosis of, and the primary metaphor he uses to explain, the effects of lying on the human condition. And Christian morality is nothing else if not one gigantic lie. That is why the factory where morals are produced smells bad: “Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are manufactured—it seems to me it stinks of so many lies.”120 Recoiling from the stench of Christian morality, Nietzsche begs us “to open the windows a little”121 and warns that “one should not go to church if one wants to breathe pure air.”122 The stink of morality betrays “the sickening fumes of inner corruption [Verderbniss] and the inner rot of disease!”123 Nietzsche’s revulsion at the smell of décadence is rivaled only by his abundant self-congratulation for having been such a superb diagnostician as to have sniffed it out. In his own view, Nietzsche is extraordinary both in his powers of olfactory perception—he declares that his “genius” resides “in his nostrils”124—and for being the first philosopher to

notice, praise, and employ the nose itself as a critical philosophical tool, an organ “of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude” but that is nevertheless “the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal.”125 With his powerful nose, Nietzsche smells out nasty, rotting deception wherever it may lurk: “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.”126 Indeed, diagnosis comes naturally to Nietzsche, and his ability to sense the approach of illness and decay is instinctual:

May I still venture to sketch one final trait of my nature that causes me no little difficulties in my contacts with other men? My instinct for cleanliness Diagnosis: Décadence 63

is characterized by a perfectly uncanny sensitivity so that the proximity or—what am I saying?—the inmost parts, the “entrails” of every soul are physiologically perceived by me—smelled. This sensitivity furnishes me with psychological antennae with which I feel and get a hold of every secret: the abundant hidden dirt at the bottom of many a character—perhaps the result of bad blood, but glossed over by education—enters my consciousness almost at the first contact. If my observation has not deceived me, such characters who offend my sense of cleanliness also sense from their side the reserve of my disgust—and this does not make them smell any better.127

Here, as elsewhere, Nietzsche presents himself as the one who knows. In this case, because of his superior olfactory capacities he is the doctor who can distinguish between health and sickness, and thus, by implication, the physiologist who knows what ultimately benefits or harms an organism: “I have a subtler sense of smell for the signs of ascent and decline than any other human being before me; I am the teacher par excellence for this—I know both, I am both.”128 It is important to note that in order for this claim to be credible, Nietz- sche himself must be healthy. The sickness with which Nietzsche diagnoses modernity is instinctual upheaval, and, as décadents, moderns are naturally driven to seek their own suffering, sickness, and decline. They are thus wholly unreliable sources for determining what is best for their bodies. The sick person’s instincts are in a state of dissolution—she cannot regard her own sense for what would benefit herself as reliable and thus cannot have an accurate understanding of what “really” constitutes health. In Nietzsche’s schema, only the healthy can recognize health—the sick, by definition, do not know what health is because their very illness reproduces itself by causing its sufferers to seek out what is harmful to them. This is a prominent reason why Nietzsche presents himself in his autobiography (and elsewhere) as the perfect picture of robust health. Although he begins by noting he is both—“at the same time a décadent and a beginning,” nevertheless, throughout the rest of this autobiographical self-characterization, he insists that “it is my privilege to have the subtlest sensitivity for all signs of healthy instincts. There is no pathological trait in me.”129 Nietzsche’s assertions of his own health rely on the claim that he has always had the right response to illness—unlike the décadent, Nietzsche is able to fall ill without succumbing to its worst consequences—complete and total dissolution:

Even in periods of severe sickness I never became pathological; in vain would one seek for a trait of fanaticism in my character.130

Apart from the fact that I am a décadent, I am also the opposite. My proof for this is, among other things, that I have always instinctively chosen the right means against wretched states; while the décadent typically chooses means that are disadvantageous for him.131 64 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Nietzsche’s body, in other words, is supremely healthy. It has been subject to decay (a normal life process, as we recall) but has not been driven to complete and total disintegration. Rather, these brushes with déca- dence have only reconstituted his energies and made his body stronger—a sure sign of superabundance. This is why Nietzsche not only adores the condition of convalescence but never hesitates to tell us about his recov- eries from various illnesses. Far from suggesting that Nietzsche himself might have been a weak or sickly fellow, this perpetual recuperation is rather presented as proof of his enduring health, evidence of the constitutive strength that allows him to overcome sickness time and time again. “As summa summarum, I was healthy; as an angle, as a specialty, I was décadent.”132 Convalescence is the best testimony of Nietzsche’s health because it displays both his ability to surmount disease and his diagnostic credentials, for it means he has firsthand knowledge of illness:

You see that I do not want to take leave ungratefully form that time of severe sickness whose profits I have not yet exhausted even today. I am very conscious of the advantages that my fickle health gives me over all robust squares.133

Freedom from ressentiment, enlightenment about ressentiment—who knows how much I am ultimately indebted, in this respect also, to my protracted sickness! This problem is far from simple: one must have experienced it from strength as well as from weakness.134

The energy to choose absolute solitude and leave the life to which I had become accustomed; the insistence on not allowing myself any longer to be cared for, waited on, and doctored—that betrayed an absolute instinctive certainty about what was needed above all at that time. I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again: the condition for this—every physiologist would admit that—is that one be healthy at bottom.135

Nietzsche knows more because he has experienced more. Because he is the only décadent who is also the opposite of a décadent, he is also the only one capable of detecting the contours of health and sickness. Thus the “philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of that word”136 for whom Nietzsche calls in The Gay Science is the role Nietzsche adopts in Ecce Homo, presenting himself as the only possible diagnostician whose pronouncements can instigate the world-historical revaluation of all values: “And in all seriousness: nobody before me knew the right way, the way up; it is only beginning with me that there are hopes again, tasks, ways that can be prescribed for culture—I am he who brings these glad tidings.—And thus I am also a destiny—.”137 Nietzsche thus engages not simply in diagnosis but also treatment of our otherwise terminal illness. As the only one capable of determining, once and for all, who is truly Diagnosis: Décadence 65 healthy and who sick, Nietzsche offers his own prescription for modernity: a world-historical revaluation of all values, an uprooting of the poisonous plant of Christianity in the hopes of detoxifying the soil from which a new form of life might grow. Nietzsche adopts a twofold strategy for bringing this transformation about: first, he wages a warfare of good old- fashioned revolutionary reversal. “If you want a quick idea how before me everything stood on its head, begin with [Twilight of the Idols]. What is called idol on the title page is simply what has been called truth so far.”138 Christian morality has turned life against itself and produced this antinature as instinct. Nietzsche thus proposes to set things right side up again, overturning the unhealthy reversal of Christianity and renaturing the antinatural: “I reduce a principle to a formula. Every naturalism in morality—that is, every healthy morality—is dominated by an instinct of life . . . Anti-natural morality—that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preached—turns, conversely, against the instincts of life.”139 Nietzsche thus stands opposed to décadence by calling it lies and representing his own view of life, the body, and health as truth. “Indeed, this is my insight: the teachers, the leaders of humanity, theolo- gians all of them, were also, all of them, décadents: hence the revaluation of all values into hostility to life, hence morality.”140 “But what if the reverse were true?”141 The second step in the process of revaluation demands a displacement of the very yardstick by which values are measured—a displacement of the regime of God-truth-nature altogether. The engine that drives Nietz- sche’s revaluation on both levels is, appropriately enough, his innovation of will to power. Consideration of will to power and its role in fueling Nietzsche’s revolution is thus the subject of the following chapter.

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C HAPTER 3

Treatment: Revolution

What must first be proved is worth little. Twilight of the Idols “The Problem of Socrates” §5

Before me, it was not known what could be done with the German language—what could be done with language in general. Ecce Homo “Why I Write Such Good Books” §4

The greatest events and thoughts—but the greatest thoughts are the greatest events—are comprehended last: the generations that are contemporaneous with them do not experience such events—they live right past them. What happens is a little like what happens in the realm of stars. The light of the remotest stars comes last to men; and until it has arrived man denies that there are—stars there. Beyond Good and Evil §285

It is among the best-kept secrets about Nietzsche that his philosophy offers a sustained reflection on the nature, importance, and potential of revolutionary political strategy. Infused with revolutionary rhetoric, Nietzsche’s philosophy seeks to bring about nothing less than a total transformation of the ways, modes, and forms of life present within what he calls “modernity,” a radical overhaul of life as the West has heretofore known it. In this chapter, I show the radical way in which Nietzsche attempts to treat modernity’s ailing condition—via a complex, strategic, performative rhetoric of will to power. Although it is controversial to suggest that Nietzsche offers any treatment for modernity at all, I maintain not only that there are resources for recovery within Nietzsche’s texts but that Nietzsche himself specifically recommends them.1 These resources are rhetorical, and Nietzsche’s platform is that of the revolutionary who seeks to transform an entire historical, sociocultural order, reconfiguring the very nature of the human in the process. His “longing for total revolution” in this sense locates him squarely within the radical tradition of Western political thought, marking him as a clear successor to Rousseau and Marx. In attempting to bring about a fundamental change in the ways in which truth and morality were considered, Nietzsche attempts 68 Nietzsche’s Revolution nothing less than a revolution in the forms of life that modernity has hitherto produced.2 While Nietzsche employs a multitude of rhetorical tactics to bring about the change he desires—masks, parables, rudeness, jokes, accusa- tion, logic, poetry, confession, myth-making, expressions of contempt, excessive praise, blasphemy, dialogues with invisible interlocutors—it is his aggressive rhetoric of will to power that is the main weapon in his revolutionary arsenal. Just as will to power is the propulsive principle of all living organisms, so, too, is Nietzsche’s assertion of will to power the rhetorical engine that drives his revolutionary project.3 Nietzsche typically deploys this weapon via direct, frontal confrontation: if modernity is sick with décadence and weakness of the will, Nietzsche will counteract this difficulty with an unequivocal, contrariwise assertion of will to power, a reinterpretation of life that will heal modernity through its successful hegemonic articulation. All of Nietzsche’s “positive” assertions—all those Christianity-negating statements regarding the body, health, and will to power—function in this way, as confrontational attempts to lay down a new law of rejuvenating health for modernity. Indeed, for Nietzsche the true philosopher is not a discoverer of reality but a dictator of it—a lawgiver.4 Nietzsche’s doctoring of modernity is thus also an eminently political activity. As an attempt to overturn our received wisdom in morality, religion, philosophy, and law, Nietzsche’s doctoring is undertaken as a political legislating. And his lawgiving is equivalent to the physician’s art of healing, for Nietzsche’s revolution is, effectively, the treatment that will inaugurate a new regime of health and life for modernity itself. Now it might seem odd to claim that Nietzsche attempts a treatment of modernity, especially given what I have outlined as his terminal prognosis for it. It is here where the political Nietzsche comes to the fore, becoming the (potentially tragic) revolutionary figure who seeks to avert the apocalyptic disaster he himself portends. Or, if we want to extend the medical reading, we can see Nietzsche as the doctor who proposes radical, even experimental, means as the only possible hope of treating the otherwise irremediable condition of his patient. Regardless, these two activities

come to be indistinguishably united in Nietzsche’s philosophizing, which is as totalizing as both his diagnosis and prognosis for the fate of the modern age. The décadence of modernity and Nietzsche’s philosophical activity are absolute conditions at irreconcilable odds with one another, and whether we name the latter a medical treatment or a political transformation in either case it is utterly, urgently, desperately needed.5 This gives us some hint that Nietzsche’s philosophical activity is unlike anything we are used to. We have seen already that Nietzsche is unconventional in his theorization of modernity as a body and its deficiencies as illnesses that he, posing as its culture doctor, diagnoses and that I am arguing here he also attempts to treat.6 With the transmutation of this doctorly activity Treatment: Revolution 69 into an act of legislation we become aware of an additional, explicitly political aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophical activity. But the important tension at work in Nietzsche’s remedial activity in the face of his own, terminal prognosis for the modern age reveals the essential component of philosophy for Nietzsche—its absolutist, totalizing gesture. Philosophy is not merely healing or legislating or even some unspecified Nietzschean synthesis of the two—it is rather a necessarily unconditional proclama- tory activity that aspires to successfully hegemonic articulation. While Nietzsche’s unequivocal, declarative philosophy—and the urgency of its successful treatment or legislation—may seem particular only to the historical set of conditions he believes existed in late nineteenth-century Europe, Nietzsche nevertheless generalizes this understanding as the definition of philosophical activity. The totalizing character of philosophy is mandated by the formidableness of its creative task; only its successfully hegemonic achievement could render that philosophy “true.” What this means, in my view, is that, for Nietzsche, a true philosopher is a successful revolutionary. Real philosophers are the fashioners of the world.7 Because Nietzsche’s central philosophical claim is offered as a lawlike assertion rather than an argumentative claim, Nietzsche rarely “explains” or argues for it.8 Just like the equality and reactivity it seeks to replace, will to power is a first principle, a basic assertion about the character of life and living organisms. No amount of argumentation can sufficiently “prove” or justify it—one either accepts it or one does not. Indeed, we might say that Nietzsche’s rhetorical assertion of will to power is “performative” in this sense, although by this I do not mean to reference the now-famous performative of speech-act theory. Rather, Nietzsche’s philosophy of will to power is performative insofar as he writes as that which he writes about, meaning that his philosophy embodies or demonstrates the very dynamic of will to power he seeks to “teach” us. His assertions “about” will to power are also assertions of will to power—Nietzsche’s “philosophical” attempt to locate truth in the body, to make incorporation the measure of any doctrine’s truth, is brought about by producing a philosophy that does or enacts precisely this relocation.9 What Nietzsche demonstrates here

is that first philosophy, so called, is not metaphysics but politics. By refusing to appease the reader’s will to truth by “justifying” (impossibly) will to power, Nietzsche reveals the performative character of all statements of first principle, thereby highlighting the inherently political character of all philosophy and philosophical systems.10 However, this reading clearly does not exhaust the multiplicity of Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategies, insofar as Nietzsche also proclaims his laws via statements other than the solely declarative and in voices other than simply the imperative. Because Nietzsche’s laws both address and are addressed to the physiological—because they seek to affect the body and effectively change it—they operate at more intrusive and complex levels 70 Nietzsche’s Revolution of subtlety than mere proclamation (although they surely operate here as well). One example of this type of rhetorical strategy is his frequent and familiar engagement in a seductive rhetoric of elitism or esotericism, which he deploys as a means of enticing those who believe themselves superior to become a member of his exclusive club of philosophers of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. For example: “What a philosopher is, that is hard to learn because it cannot be taught: one must ‘know’ it, from experience—or one should have the pride not to know it.”11 All of Nietzsche’s bombastic rhetoric dramatizing his longing and despair regarding the (im)possible arrival of those mysterious “philosophers of the future” goes here. For the (even) less subtle, Nietzsche additionally offers a deliberate and pedantic object lesson in his diagnostic and philosophical credentials in Ecce Homo, and, finally, at the very deepest levels of subtlety, attempts to retool the actual physiology of modern readers through a metaphorics of the body that he hopes will render his readers more similar to himself by inducing bodily experiences that are more like his own. Regardless of the tactic taken, however, what is crucial to note is that Nietzsche does not simply engage in a declarative, lawlike rhetoric of will to power, but also actively seeks to produce the effectivity of those laws through an elaborate series of rhetorical ploys aimed at reconfiguring the body itself. Were such a felicitous transformation to occur—if Nietz- sche’s declarations did indeed become the laws of our lives—they would cease being commands and become mere descriptions, thereby signaling the victory of Nietzsche’s revolution, the truth of his philosophy, and the therapeutic success of his prescription for modernity. Nietzsche’s method of philosophizing, then—indeed, his very mode of using language—is explicitly political. It is surely not “the speech act of a rational truth-seeker conveying truths to other such seekers.”12 Rather, it is an attempt to radically shift the entire horizon and meaning of truth as it has so far been lived in modernity, through that philosophy’s mere articulation. The boundaries of that modernity’s horizon (which are still ours in some significant sense) consist in the separation of mind from body, idea from matter, and language from essence. They are built on the foundation of the value of truth over falsity and sustained by the principle of noncontradiction. Nietzsche’s embodied discourse is an attempt to shatter these boundaries and destroy this foundation to create a new world, a world where “soul is only a word for something about the body”13 and truth and contradiction are coextensive. Nietzsche’s philosophy, in other words, is a project of revolution. As I hope to show in this chapter, this renders his philosophy—by definition—political, his words essentially deeds, and his teachings necessarily revolutionary. The essence of all of them is will to power. Treatment: Revolution 71 Changing the World

It is important to emphasize Nietzsche’s revolutionary aspect, for his political theory is typically either forgotten or dismissed, his investment in radical transformation often rejected outright. This stems from the larger conviction that Nietzsche is essentially “anti-political,”14 lacks a political theory altogether,15 or is only interested in highly individual- ized projects of self-creation.16 Thus, if Nietzsche is invested in radical transformation, the character of that change is apolitical—it is instead ethical,17 cultural,18 philosophical,19 ontological,20 or simply mythologi- cal insofar as it would not entail actual political transformation for “real” people “on the ground.”21 By contrast, I understand Nietzsche’s philosophy to be overtly political in a positive or constructive sense, not simply a critical or deconstructive one, for as Nietzsche himself claims, “critics are instruments of the philosopher and for that very reason, being instruments, a long ways from being philosophers themselves.”22 Nietzsche’s philosophy is, in fact, revolutionary in its insistent demand that Christian- ity be overthrown, the only possible measure Nietzsche believes capable of saving modernity from the scourge of décadence, and a dire, but necessary, means of transforming human beings themselves from the wretched and miserable creatures they have become into new, better, healthier forms of life.23 Nietzsche is this revolutionary figure because he is the first to have revealed to the world the full magnitude of Christian depravity: “What defines me, what sets me apart from the whole rest of humanity is that I uncovered Christian morality.”24 And this unveiling is a terrible and overpowering event: “The uncovering of Christian morality is an event without parallel, a real catastrophe.”25 Thus, Nietzsche says of himself, “I am no man, I am dynamite,”26 referring to the Antichrist(ian) as “the shatter- ing lightning bolt of the Revaluation that will make the earth convulse.”27 Nietzsche believes his explosive revelations will either utterly break us—“let whoever comprehends what has here been destroyed see whether anything is left in his hands”28—or induce widescale crisis of its own accord, for Nietzsche envisions that the terrible confrontation between Christian morality—“the lies of millennia”—and his own immoralism—“truth”— will produce “upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The concept of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded—all of them are based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth. It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics [grosse Politik].”29 As with other revolutionaries before him, Nietzsche acknowledges that such necessary destruction will be violent and terrible, but insists it must be endured if the much more objectionable and intol- erable oppression of Christianity is to be overthrown. Only this radical an upheaval holds the promise of any real future: “And time is reckoned 72 Nietzsche’s Revolution from the dies nefastus with which this calamity began—after the first day of Christianity! Why not rather after its last day? After today?”30 Although Nietzsche admits this renders him “by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.”31 And Nietzsche himself has no doubts about his status as an incendiary revolutionary figure—whether it be as the “first immoralist,”32 the “bringer of glad tidings like no one before” him,33 a “man of calamity,”34 or, perhaps most unequivocally, the Antichrist himself.35 Nietzsche calls the “revaluation of values” his “destiny of a task,”36 and declares himself to be a “destiny” in Ecce Homo, prophesying that his name will one day be associated with “a crisis without equal on earth . . . a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far.”37 Indeed, there can be little doubt about the revolutionary current in Nietzsche’s writing, a rhetoric that becomes impossible to ignore in his final works.38 When his tirade against the repulsive and sickening aspects of décadence climaxes near the end of Ecce Homo, we can almost feel how unbearable Christian modernity is for him, and it is difficult not to cry out in anguished solidarity with Nietzsche in his agonized invocation of Voltaire as he torturedly exclaims, “Ecrasez l’infâme!”39 In a no-less rhetorical, but nominally more juridical, censure of Christianity near the end of the Antichrist(ian), Nietzsche puts Christianity on trial in a righteous performance worthy of Law and Order’s Jack McCoy: “I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions. It has had the will to the last corruption that is even possible.” And Nietzsche, the merciless judge, renders his verdict: “I condemn Christianity . . . The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its corruption; it has turned every value into an un-value, every truth into a lie, every integrity into a vileness of the soul.”40 In this closing condemnation, Nietzsche not only proposes that we make today the first day without Christian- ity (as already cited)—entreating our cooperation in nothing less than revolution now!—but also suggests that we begin time anew on this day, inaugurating a revolutionary calendar that will mark time from this post-

Christian beginning. Nietzsche’s historicization of the ills of Christianity makes clear that things could be otherwise; his persuasive detailing of its loathsomeness commits us (so he hopes) to its overthrow. That these are Nietzsche’s investments is clear even before the explicitly revolutionary turn in 1888. For example, in the Genealogy, Nietzsche writes:

All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man; and whoever can still bear to hear (but today one no longer has ears for this!) how in this night of torment and absurdity there has resounded the cry of love, the cry of the most nostalgic rapture, Treatment: Revolution 73

of redemption through love, will turn away, seized by invincible horror.— There is so much in man that is hideous!—Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!41

We modern men are the heirs of the conscience-vivisection and self-torture of millennia: this is what we have practiced longest, it is our distinctive art perhaps, and in any case our subtlety in which we have acquired a refined taste. Man has all too long had an “evil eye” for his natural inclinations, so that they have finally become inseparable from his “bad conscience.” An attempt at the reverse would in itself be possible—but who is strong enough for it?—that is, to wed the bad conscience to all the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which runs coun- ter to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short all ideals hither to, which are one and all hostile to life and ideals that slander the world. To whom should one turn today with such hopes and demands?42

For two millennia now we have been condemned to the sight of this new type of invalid, “the sinner”—shall it always be so? 43

I know of hardly anything else that has had so destructive an effect upon the health and racial strength of Europeans as this ideal; one may without any exaggeration call it the true calamity in the history of European health.44

The Genealogy is explicitly subtitled by Nietzsche as a polemic. He thus makes clear that he is deliberately amping up his rhetoric in service of his argumentative goals. That this rhetoric only becomes increasingly evoca- tive, accusatory, and revolutionary with the passage of time reveals both that the distinction between polemics and philosophy is, for Nietzsche, at best, an increasingly muddy one (if indeed it is coherent at all), and also that he becomes more and more deeply committed to the overthrow of Christian- ity, the scourge that has so mutilated and deformed our animal existence.45 Nietzsche’s response to this all-encompassing crisis is to philosophize, albeit in the peculiar way in which he understands this activity. For Nietz-

sche, true philosophy is not the arcane activity of deskbound academics intent on proving the existence of God or wondering what it is like to be a bat: “the concept ‘philosopher’ is not restricted to the philosopher who writes books—or makes books of his philosophy.”46 Rather, Nietz- sche’s philosopher is “a terrible explosive, endangering everything,”47 and remember, he is no mere mortal himself but dynamite. For Nietzsche, philosophizing is the vehicle for the expression of the most powerful drive within us, a drive that is powerful precisely insofar as it is world-encompassing in its interpretation, insofar as it cannot but view and present the world from its own, totalizing perspective. For example, Nietzsche speaks of the drives as philosophizing: “anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see to what extent they may have been at play just here as inspiring 74 Nietzsche’s Revolution spirits (or demons or kobolds) will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time—and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive wants to be master—and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit.”48 A perspective becomes philosophical, then, when it presents itself as the only way of viewing the world, the perspective that can account for and subsume all other perspectives within its all-powerful purview. To philosophize is to seek mastery by representing oneself as what there is, as all there is, as the only thing that truly is. True philosophy is thus tyrannical domination—it can accept no other approach as valid, can broach no contradictions or dissensions within its ranks. This mode of self-legitimation, Nietzsche tells us, is “an ancient, eternal story” that plays itself out “as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the ‘creation of the world,’ to the causa prima.”49 True philosophy, in other words, is masterful interpretation—it is an interpretation that both seeks to dominate and successfully does so. This interpretive creativity and mastery distinguishes true philosophers from those more humble figures like Kant and Hegel, whom Nietzsche names mere “philosophical laborers”:

Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or political (moral) thought or art, some great data of valuations—that is, former positings of values, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called “truths.” . . . Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!” They first determine the Whither and For What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is a creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth 50 is—will to power.

For philosopher-legislators of this sort, Nietzsche says, their will to truth is their will to power. Their will to truth is not, in other words, a hyper- rational exercise in self-denial for the sake of objective knowledge, but rather an unconscious, nonteleological principle of life that aims only at expenditure and growth. Determined and produced by the drives and issuing in creation, this will to truth is divested from dogmatism, for it no longer aims at certainty—truth, the “in-itself,” nature, God, et cetera— but rather to expend and squander its vital energies in a nonteleological process of growth and creation. Undoubtedly, this will to truth seeks Treatment: Revolution 75 rulership—this “creating,” Nietzsche says, is also a “legislation.” But its domination is not purchased through any legitimation other than its own power—it has no reason or purpose other than itself and its own expansive, squandering activity. In true philosophers, then, truth and power are inseparable—this healthy amalgam means that true philosophy is life itself. This is one part of what Nietzsche means when he says that all philosophy is autobiography (insofar as philosophical activity consists of the drives seeking mastery), and it suggests that, in his view, true philosophy is revolutionary: if it does not succeed in remaking the world, it simply is not philosophy. In offering philosophical interpretation, revaluers are revolutionaries—by changing the interpretation of the world, they change the world itself: “it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities to create in the long run new ‘things.’”51 Interpretation is in fact the most masterful expression of power, since “what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are.”52 Interpreting the world is changing it on this view because change is always “only” change in interpretation: “That mountain there! That cloud there! What is ‘real’ in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can!”53 To presume interpretation is a change in things themselves, in the world itself, presumes there is an in-itself or essence that stands beneath or behind the interpretation being offered, a view that Nietzsche rejects again and again. Even if there in fact existed this mythical “in-itself,” it still “has to be interpreted: in itself it just stands there, stupid to all eternity, like every ‘thing in-itself.’”54 True philosophy is thus eminently political and any attempt to rule requires philosophy, since “all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation.”55 This “masterly task and masterfulness of philosophy”56 is precisely what Nietzsche sets out to do with his interpretation of life as will to power. For example: “by prescribing ‘love of the neighbor,’ the ascetic priest prescribes fundamentally an excitement of the strongest, most life-affirming drive, even if in the most cautious doses—namely of the will to power.”57 Here, will to power is indirectly described as the “strongest, most life-affirming drive.” This claim is not

argued for as such, nor explained or even elaborated upon. It is simply taken for granted as self-evidently true, referred to only indirectly and taken as indisputably factual. More conspicuous, of course, are the types of declarations about will to power like the following: “‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.”58 Such declarative statements offer neither justificatory premises nor necessary consequences, but this is because they are not offered as arguments. They are instead offered as laws. They are Nietzsche’s commandments, his “Thus it shall be!” Exploitation simply is an essential characteristic of life. It simply 76 Nietzsche’s Revolution is the case that one day the earth will split open as a result of a radical confrontation of opposing world views. Nietzsche neither offers proof for such claims nor indicates any awareness that such confirmation is lacking or even necessary.59 However, Nietzsche’s lack of logical or evidentiary proof for his claims regarding will to power does not mean he fails to successfully demonstrate their force. Rather, Nietzsche proves the validity of will to power as life’s first principle by enacting its meaning—his assertion of the thesis is itself an instance of the thesis. In other words, Nietzsche’s many “arguments” for will to power are in fact assertions of will to power. As we will see, this is both the only way one can make an argument at all and the most persuasive proof that Nietzsche’s “argument” has force.

Performing Will to Power

As argued in Chapter 1, for Nietzsche the essence of life is not simply will to power but, as a consequence, inequality—differentiation proved essential to life. Yet modernity is characterized by a veritable love affair with equality, which Nietzsche sees as a reflection of its physiologically weakened and deteriorated condition. This decline has come to infect all of modernity—not only its politics (in the form of “equal rights”) but also its knowledge disciplines—its Wissenschaften.60 Indeed, according to “the now prevalent instinct and taste,” investigators would “rather be reconciled even to the absolute fortuitousness, even the mechanistic senselessness of all events than to the theory that in all events a will to power is operating.” This resistance to will to power is a result of that “democratic idiosyncrasy which opposes everything that dominates and wants to dominate,” a prejudice that has invaded even the most “objective sciences” and indeed “all physiology and theory of life.”61 Modern historical study, too (Nietzsche often singles out Darwinism62), has posited the essence of life as “adaptation,” thereby “rob[bing] it of a fundamental concept, that of activity.” In attempting to erase the presence of any sort of domination in nature, modern scholarship in general has reduced life

to a reactive principle of inertia that can respond only to external stimuli, and this, because it must do so—because it cannot not react. “Thus the essence of life, its will to power, is ignored: one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions, although ‘adaptation’ follows only after this; the dominant role of the highest functionaries within the organism itself in which the will to life appears active and form-giving is denied.”63 Here Nietzsche quarrels not simply with the substantive claim about reactivity, but also with the methodology of modern science that has embedded that substantive claim into its operating assumptions. Nietzsche is in fact quite concerned about proper methodology, a frequent concern Treatment: Revolution 77 that arises almost exclusively in his discussions of will to power.64 For example, in both The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche’s elaborations of will to power critique Spinoza for foolishly forgetting that “method, which must be essentially economy of principles” demands the extirpation of dispensable presuppositions—in this case, the goal of self- preservation.65 In his elaborate hypothetical “experiment” with will to power as the explanatory principle of the workings of all organic nature, Nietzsche repeatedly emphasizes the “moral of method” that demands precisely this experiment and consideration.66 And in the sections we have just been reading from aphorism II:12 of the Genealogy, Nietzsche introduces a distinction between origin and purpose, which he calls a “major point of historical method”—a distinction he believes is premised on the notion of life as governed or driven by will to power. This aphorism itself is Nietzsche’s only published discussion of genealogical method, which he claims to be the first to have gotten right. As he emphasizes near the end of his career, “the methods, one must say it ten times, are what is essential, also what is most difficult, also what is for the longest time opposed by habits and laziness.”67 The difference between Nietzsche’s view of life and that of modern science, then, is that his underscores the irrationality and arbitrariness of the activity of life-interpretation itself, a characteristic that renders will to power a therapeutic treatment in an age weakened and debilitated by its dogmatic commitment to truth. Nietzsche shows us the arbitrariness of life-interpretation by enacting it, by reinterpreting the physicists’ and Darwinists’ views of life through his own lens, from his own perspective. But this performance also confirms his own claims regarding true philosophy: Nietzsche’s ability to redescribe life as will to power reveals that whatever description of life is the “true” one gets decided not on the basis of the intrinsic or empirically observable character of life itself—impossible to determine anyway and ultimately a nihilistic enterprise—but rather on the basis of which interpretation is stronger and succeeds in “becoming master” through incorporation. For argumentation is never simply argumentation but the application of a will to power—the imposition of

an interpretation onto an already existing interpretation, not onto a blank slate or inert bit of matter (an “in-itself”) docilely awaiting a name. It is a “forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else” belongs to “the essence of interpreting.”68 Significantly, this political view of truth rebounds back onto Nietz- sche’s own life-interpretation, strengthening it and heightening its appeal despite its explicit rejection of rational justification. For will to power is a first principle, which, like all first principles, instates itself as the long lost beginning and calls itself the origin and source of truth. Yet it is a first principle that, through Nietzsche’s very assertion of it, performs this precise operation, revealing its self-installation as originary and thereby 78 Nietzsche’s Revolution undercutting its entitlement to be there. Nietzsche’s performance of will to power thus displays what it “argues” is true—will to power is an interpretation that, like all interpretations, is an imposition of meaning that has no real justification. It is, in this sense, the movement of life itself, and thus the most compelling evidence that Nietzsche is in fact correct in asserting that, for example, “life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.”69 This is true, Nietzsche thinks, not simply for organic or bodily processes but also for the uniquely human process of the acquisition of knowledge: “whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.”70 Nietzsche is thus not really making an argumentative claim for the validity of will to power as a definition of life; rather, he is showing it is true by showing us that argumentation is never sufficient to “prove” meaning or validity, in particular when it comes to first principles. After all, how else might we choose between modernity’s view of life and Nietzsche’s? What is there to recommend the view of life as active versus the view of life as reactive? The answer is irresolvable, making any decision about it arbitrary. Admit- tedly, Nietzsche does offer health as the reason for choosing activity over reactivity, will to power over weakness of the will. Yet this simply becomes tautological once we realize it is parasitic on an unjustifiable definition of life as essentially active, superabundant, and squandering. By defining life as will to power, Nietzsche is looking to refound the very methodology of modern Wissenschaft (political scientists, take note!). He is replacing a basic principle of physiology—that of self-preservation— with self-expenditure. If will to power is the governing drive of an active life, then claiming that life is essentially will to power means determining life from the outset as essentially active, not reactive. On the one hand, this

is a straightforward battle of first principles that can never definitively be settled—either bodies are constituted by a kind of natural equality, or they are not; either living is a primarily adaptive activity, or it is not. As I have argued, I think Nietzsche’s performance of will to power underscores the impossibility of ever proving its truth, a double-edged performance that in fact heightens its persuasive power. But the vehemence with which Nietzsche asserts his own first principle betrays that there is something more at stake here than mere argumentative victory. In fact, this battle for first principles is a political and therapeutic warfare for the very future of the modern age. Nietzsche’s repeated entreaties to steel oneself against sentimentalism or weak-kneed moralizing in the face of the hard facts of Treatment: Revolution 79 life as will to power are the equivalent of a doctor entreating a patient to take her medicine despite its vile taste and nasty side effects in the hopes that it will nevertheless make her better. Although doctrines like equality, socialism, Darwinism, and democracy are the products of an already sickened form of life, it is possible that a replacement of life principles might reinvigorate those few who still possess the potential to attempt an active life or begin to build a future that could produce these types. Nietz- sche’s attempt to instate will to power as the physiological first principle of life—be it in history, biology, politics, or philosophy—is his attempt to treat modernity’s ailing and weakened condition, a political project of total social, cultural, and political transformation that we can call by its more familiar shorthand appellation, revolution. Nietzsche’s aggressive rhetoric of will to power demonstrates that the last thing modernity needs is more “philosophy,” traditionally understood. As he says regarding Socrates, for example, argumentation is a last resort on the part of the weak and the dying: “One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means.” A choice made of desperation, it is disastrously ineffective: “Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons.”71 Nietz- sche’s innovation of will to power and his performative refusal to justify it in any familiar way demonstrates that other, more effective weapons are possible, even in a décadent age. Modernity does not need to be reasoned with—it requires mastery, treatment, command, therapy. After all, “one does not refute a sickness.”72 If Christianity is, as Nietzsche insists, a disease, then neither logic nor argumentation are the proper tactics for overcoming it, and our belief that rationality and reasons will save us is just one more symptom of that illness that, if left untreated, will only make us sicker. Will to power, in Nietzsche’s performative political and medical deployment, is the only possible antidote to the toxic illness threatening to decimate the modern age.

Rewriting the Body

The major obstacle impeding Nietzsche’s revolutionary success is, in his view, his firm belief that his books are unintelligible. They are such because he is a man of the future and a person with singular experiences that, given the limitations of both his contemporaries and language itself, can only remain incommunicable or else be tragically misunderstood by his temporally benighted public. Indeed, Nietzsche’s (self-) ostracism from any shared system or structure of intelligibility—a frequent point of pride for him—poses serious obstacles to his own rhetorical and strategic success. If Nietzsche is a doctor, his services are not in demand; if he is 80 Nietzsche’s Revolution a lawgiver, he is a sovereign with no subjects. He complains about this situation repeatedly:

I am often asked why, after all, I write in German: nowhere am I read worse than in the fatherland.73

I should prefer to be understood in this matter—as in many others.— But . . . not a word I write is understood any more. Even the Kreuzzeitung testifies to that, not to speak of the Literarische Zentralblatt.—I have given the Germans the most profound books they have—reason enough for the Germans not to understand a single word.74

Ten years—and nobody in Germany has felt bound in conscience to defend my name against the absurd silence under which it lies buried.75

In his own view, Nietzsche is a man of the future, a European “of the day after tomorrow,” a “first-born of the twentieth century,”76 a fact he thinks explains why he is so misunderstood. Indeed, Nietzsche presents his books—especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra—as unintelligible insofar as he is five steps beyond modernity, separated from the herd by an unbridgeable temporal and experiential divide. Speaking of himself, he writes: “Imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events that lie altogether beyond the possibility of any frequent or even rare experience—that it is the first language for a new series of experiences. In that case, simply nothing will be heard, but there will be the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, nothing is there.” Nietzsche claims that “this is, in the end, my average experience and, if you will, the originality of my experience.”77 Nietzsche’s untimeliness is thus, by definition, his incom- prehensibility, for the distance between himself and his age is so vast that he is unable to successfully communicate himself and his experiences to it, even when addressing it directly. This conundrum begins the Gay Sci- ence: “This book may need more than one preface, and in the end there would still remain room for doubt whether anyone who had never lived

through similar experiences could be brought closer to the experience of this book by means of prefaces.”78 Nietzsche’s provisional solution to this quandary is to present his philosophical opacity as a virtue. Indeed, Nietzsche’s self-laudatory descriptions of his very difficult and mysterious texts are a hallmark of his writing:

It is hard to be understood, especially when one thinks and lives gāngāstrotagati among men who think and live differently—namely, kūrmagati, or at best “the way frogs walk,” mandūkagati (I obviously do everything to be “hard to understand” myself!)—and one should be cor- dially grateful for the good will to some subtlety of interpretation.79 Treatment: Revolution 81

What does it matter if I remain right. I am too much right. And he who laughs best today will also laugh last.80

This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is even living yet. Maybe they will be the readers who understand my Zarathus- tra: how could I mistake myself for one of those for whom there are ears even now? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.81

The obvious interpretation of these statements as a defense mechanism in the face of poor book sales and little to no reputation amongst his contemporaries is, I think, only a first reading. For Nietzsche’s presentation of his works as a form of elite knowledge available only to very few is yet another of his revolutionary strategies—an attempt to create the readers he seeks by enticing them with the possibility of exclusive initiation into a new form of life. As Nietzsche says of Beyond Good and Evil: “From this moment forward all my writings are fish hooks: perhaps I know how to fish as well as anyone?”82 This is how he will make good on his claim that he will be born posthumously—only future others can create the context that will make his claims ring true. Nietzsche’s self-definition as one who will be born only after his death is, then, a kind of revolutionary promise that he cannot redeem by himself, one that can only be fulfilled by his future readers. And the stakes of his successful communication are quite high: should his promise of posthumous birth come true, it means that Nietzsche will be read with understanding, and thus have become victorious.83 Elitist seduction is insufficient for producing revolutionary triumph, however, for, by definition, it can only initiate the very few, and even these may be unreliable (“If nothing was caught, I am not to blame. There were no fish”84). It is too risky to stake all on a handful of future acolytes—Nietzsche needs not simply future leaders but future followers. Thus, he also adopts a broader-based strategy of narrowing the gap between himself and his contemporaries by attempting to produce the polity of subjects who will (be able to) obey his laws, rendering them no longer laws but rather adequate and unremarkable descriptions of a now healthier form of life. One way he does this is via an over-the-top performance of self-revelation in his explicit work of autobiography, Ecce Homo, tellingly subtitled How One Becomes What One Is. As he explains in the first aphorism of the preface to this work: “Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am. Really, one should know it, for I have not left myself ‘without testimony.’ But the disproportion between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me.”85 Although Nietzsche had already established that all philosophy 82 Nietzsche’s Revolution is autobiography,86 his unequivocal presentation of Ecce Homo explicitly as an autobiographical text is necessary because his readers had failed to understand the full impact of that claim in Beyond Good and Evil or its corollary that “in the philosopher, conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal.”87 There is a way, then, that we can understand everything Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo to be a repetition and clarification of everything he has said before, only this time for the specific benefit of inattentive, lazy, dogmatic, childish, and otherwise deficient readers. And this self-revelation is necessary, Nietzsche says, in order to prepare humanity for his demand, the greatest demand ever made of it, his “task of preparing a moment of the highest self-examination for humanity.”88 Thus Nietzsche resignedly concludes, “under these circumstances I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom—namely, to say: Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.” Ecce Homo is an attempt to make clear, especially to the deficient modern reader without whom Nietzsche’s revolution cannot come into being, precisely “who Nietz- sche is.” As he says, such clarification should not be necessary, for he has already proffered plenty of “testimony.” But such evidence has not been understood as the autobiographical relic it is, and the revolution cannot succeed unless we have satisfactorily grasped who Nietzsche is. And who is Nietzsche, exactly? Well, he is a wise, clever man who writes very good books, for starters—facts that were otherwise lost on his contemporaries. Ecce Homo in fact offers a structured lesson in these virtues—Nietzsche’s wisdom (in issues of health and sickness, for example, and décadence in particular), his cleverness (especially for being such a strict materialist), and his style (i.e., his magnificent writerly virtuosity). Although Nietzsche’s pompous chapter titles—“Why I am so Wise,” “Why I am so Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books”—have been disparaged or dismissed as signs of impending insanity,89 I see no reason why they cannot be read as straightforwardly serious—as Nietzsche’s attempt to point out, in pedantic and unmistakable language such as a teacher might use with a small child, just exactly what his readers have failed to understand. In this vein, Nietzsche also offers a brief primer of instruction on all of his previous texts, each of which receives individual 90

discussion after the enumeration of his three virtues. Most significantly, Nietzsche’s autobiographical lesson concludes with the chapter/teaching/ self-declaration, “Why I am a Destiny,” the clearest explanation of just how Nietzsche really will become what he is. Here Nietzsche declares of himself (and many of these quotations will sound familiar):

One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of Treatment: Revolution 83

conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.91

I contradict as has never been contradicted before and am nevertheless the opposite of a No-saying spirit. I am a bringer of glad tidings like no one before me, I know tasks of such elevation that any notion of them has been lacking so far; only beginning with me are there hopes again.92

For all that, I am necessarily also the man of calamity.93

I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.94

The uncovering of Christian morality is an event without parallel, a real catastrophe. He that is enlightened about that, is a force majeure, a destiny—he breaks the history of mankind in two. One lives before him, or one lives after him.95

Nietzsche’s status as a destiny is his performative promise that he will become what he is, one day, when the revolution for which he so longs arrives. Only then will the fullness of who Nietzsche is be both manifested and realized. Nietzsche is claiming, in other words, that he himself constitutes revolution. Ecce Homo can be read as Nietzsche’s step-by- step explanation of this fact to his otherwise dense contemporaries, an explanation necessitated solely by their own deficiencies, and an explanation that will render his revolutionary project transparent and therefore realizable. This act of guiding the reader through his life and works to its revolutionary conclusion, then, is not simply an instructive activity but also a productive one—it is Nietzsche’s attempt to produce the kinds of readings and readers necessary in order to bring about the transformation he seeks. By telling readers what they should look for or have already found in his books, Nietzsche is attempting to redeem the guarantee contained in his repeated promise that he will be born posthumously. That modernity needs such instruction at all, of course, is only further proof of Nietzsche’s

diagnosis of its failings. And although this strategy presents any number of strategic difficulties, the only alternative to it is silence: not writing, or, what is the same thing, unintelligibility. Although he frets that his texts will never be understood, that “I live on my own credit; it is perhaps a mere prejudice that I live,”96 the performative force of his writings and the stack of texts it generated provide the very evidence of his desire to communicate himself and his implicit belief that it is not only possible but might even be successful. After all, is it not the case that Nietzsche’s books are 84 Nietzsche’s Revolution intelligible, to some extent, to some readers, at least some of the time? For that matter, why go to the effort of cultivating a masterful rhetorical style, if it is destined to fall on deaf ears? Why, in the end, attempt to instigate a world-historical revolution, if no one will ever understand your words? The fact that Nietzsche did not choose silence—either by not writing or by locating himself too far beyond the boundaries of intelligibility— suggests he is very much invested in the success of his revolution and that he is modernity’s physician in not simply a diagnostic sense. Although Nietzsche sighs that modern readers have not yet heard or even seen him, nevertheless, he flamboyantly declares in the Antichrist(ian): “My voice reaches even the hard of hearing”97; “I have letters to make even the blind see.”98 One might be skeptical of Nietzsche’s project here—how could a stack of incomprehensible philosophical texts (which are self-described as such) possibly have such a profound effect, not simply on us as readers but on something as grandiose as “modernity”? Even Nietzsche himself seems doubtful, conceding that “nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows”99 and lamenting the impossibility of being understood by impoverished modern readers. Yet Nietzsche clearly is invested in being understood, otherwise he could not be so wounded by his general misrecognition. Moreover, his textual appeals are neither always so explicit nor so straightforward. They are certainly not aimed solely at the reader’s conscious understanding, nor is our experience of these texts necessarily transparent to us as readers. This is why taking note of Nietzsche’s rhetoric is so important, since rhetoric operates to persuade, through speech, in ways that typically exceed or lie outside the domain of the solely rational. In this regard, Nietzsche employs an even subtler tactic in attempting to render us receptive to his treatment of will to power: bodily metaphors. As others have demonstrated, Nietz- sche prominently employs the indirect precision of metaphor to show the metaphorical character of all language.100 But Nietzsche employs bodily metaphors in particular in order to highlight his elision of the distinction between language and corporeality altogether, a distinction being directly 101 targeted in his resolutely antidualist “theory” of will to power. This is a rhetorical strategy that is by no means straightforwardly rational and seeks neither to persuade the reader at a conscious level nor primarily operates there. Rather, the use of bodily metaphors, and Nietzsche’s multiple lin- guistically sensuous appeals to the body, are strategies that seek to seduce the reader—wittingly or not—to a Nietzschean way of “thinking,” while simultaneously altering her horizons of understanding of (what constitutes) philosophy in the process. Thus, reading and understanding are simultaneously practices of (bodily) transformation—thus, Nietzsche’s rhetoric operates at a physiopsychic level that it simultaneously attempts to open and cultivate in its readers. Treatment: Revolution 85

We might go so far as to say that Nietzsche’s philosophy reveals its character as—and functions similarly to—a physical encounter. After all, the reason Nietzsche offers for why one cannot get more out of books than one already knows is because “what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear.”102 Part of his aim, then, is to bridge this experiential gap through the experience of his texts in order to render them more intelligible and thereby bring about the revolution they can only claim to predict. Nietzsche’s writing is thus littered with sensuous ploys and seductions, appealing continually to embodiment by evoking the senses, since “the more abstract the truth is that you would teach, the more you have to seduce the senses to it.”103 Significantly, Nietzsche solicits not simply the primary senses employed when reading a book—namely, vision (the vehicle of perspectivism)104 and touch (for example, having “fingers” for nuances105)—but above all taste, smell, and hearing, the senses that seem more remotely related to “intellectual” activity:

A new danger has gradually appeared in addition, deriving from the manifold attempts that have been made to adapt Schopenhauer to this feeble age or even to employ him as an exotic and stimulating spice, as it were a kind of metaphysical pepper.106

All of them [moralities] speak unconditionally, take themselves for unconditional, all of them flavored with more than one grain of salt and tolerable only—at times even seductive—when they begin to smell over-spiced and dangerous, especially of the “other world.”107

Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices—you made me sneeze and laugh—and now?108

[The Birth of Tragedy] smells offensively Hegelian, and the cadaverous per- fume of Schopenhauer sticks only to a few formulas.109

With this book my campaign against morality begins. Not that it smells in the least of powder: you will smell far different and much lovelier scents in it, assuming your nostrils have some sensitivity.110

Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us “absent-minded”: we cannot give our hearts to it—not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: “what really was that which just struck?” so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, “what really was that which we have just experienced?” and moreover: “who are we really?” 86 Nietzsche’s Revolution

and, afterward as aforesaid, count the twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our being—and alas! miscount them.111

With regard to our problem, which may on good grounds be called a quiet problem and one which fastidiously directs itself to few ears.112

Another mode of convalescence—under certain circumstances even more to my liking—is sounding out idols . . . For once to pose questions here with a hammer, and, perhaps, to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound which speaks of bloated entrails—what a delight for one who has ears even behind his ears, for me, an old psychologist and pied piper before whom just that which would remain silent must become outspoken.113

Nietzsche’s use of bodily metaphors is both an appeal to our senses—a lure—and the beginning of a process of transformation of our very experience of sensation itself—a preparatory treatment. Nietzsche is attempting nothing less than to seduce us to the view of the world he relays in his writings by appealing to our senses in ways that resonate with his own experience of the world. This reliance on corporeality is an enticement he hopes will ease the path of our understanding, but also begin the process of making us more available to experience his experiences. Insofar as his texts are “understood” by us, then, they have thereby widened the scope of how and what we (can) “know.” And this occurs regardless of whether or not we have explicitly accepted Nietzsche’s “ideas” or given them permission to infiltrate our consciousness to begin with. Getting to “know” Nietzsche in this way is, he thinks, a transformative experience. This is based on a twofold self-evaluation: first, as argued in the previous chapter, Nietzsche sees himself as possessed of a body that is healthy beyond measure. Although this significantly contradicts what we know of Nietzsche’s life, which was largely spent bedridden and dominated by headaches, nausea, spells of blindness, and “fits,” nevertheless, Nietzsche still insists on his larger condition of overall health:

All pathological disturbances of the intellect, even that half-numb state that follows fever, have remained entirely foreign to me to this day; and I had to do research to find out about their nature and frequency. My blood moves slowly. Nobody has ever discovered any fever in me. A physician who treated me for some time as if my nerves were sick finally said: “It’s not your nerves, it is rather that I am nervous.” There is altogether no sign of any local degeneration; no organically conditioned stomach complaint, however profound the weakness of my gastric system may be as a consequence of overall exhaustion. My eye trouble, too, though at times dangerously close to blindness, is only a consequence and not a cause: with every increase in vitality my ability to see has also increased again.114 Treatment: Revolution 87

Although Nietzsche concedes that longstanding intestinal and eye problems may bespeak a “periodicity of a kind of décadence,” nevertheless, this episodic succumbing to decay is neither definitive nor fatal, since “there is no pathological trait in me; even in periods of severe sickness I never became pathological.”115 As noted in the previous chapter, Nietzsche’s body is the superabundant organism that is able to endure decay without being drawn inevitably toward death, that undergoes convalescence as its only practice of health: “Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant.”116 Acquaintance with Nietzsche’s physiological particularity, then, offers an experience of health that is otherwise unknown to inhabitants of modernity, one that might save them from their downward spiral insofar as they begin successfully to incorporate his experiences for themselves. In addition to the profound experience of bodily health he has to offer us, Nietzsche also offers us an experience of “the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man.”117 As he says, “I have some notion of my privileges as a writer; in a few instances I have been told, too, how getting used to my writings ‘spoils’ one’s taste. One simply can no longer endure other books, least of all philosophical works.”118 Although previously he had insisted that no one can get more out of books than he already knows, here Nietzsche clearly concedes the possibility that one’s “taste” can be transformed through a reckoning with his writing—a reckoning that ruins one’s appetite for other philosophical prose. The possibility of this transformation is further widened in Nietz- sche’s discussion of style, wherein he claims that “Good is any style that really communicates an inward state, that makes no mistake about the signs, the tempo of the signs, the gestures.” “Here,” Nietzsche says, “my instinct is infallible.”119 As we have seen, communication is dependent upon a shared system of signification or set of experiences, without which Nietzsche and his readers remain stranded in confused isolation from one another. So if a reader is really to understand Nietzsche’s style, the inward states he seeks to communicate, the reader must be “similarly conditioned” to Nietzsche,120 “related to me in the height of his aspirations.”121

Thus, if Nietzsche’s style successfully communicates his inward states to his readers, it must also be able to condition them to such an extent that they reach his same aspirational height, thereby glimpsing him in all his inward glory. And what, in particular, characterizes Nietzsche’s inward state, that which his style communicates? As Nietzsche says of himself (using his favorite royal we): “we ourselves, we free spirits, are nothing less than a ‘revaluation of all values,’ an incarnate [leibhafte] declaration of war and triumph over all the ancient conceptions of ‘true’ and ‘untrue.’”122 To familiarize oneself with Nietzsche’s inward states, then, with his physical particularity, is to know him as the fundamentally revolutionary being that he is. For Nietzsche is revolution “incarnate”—he is the very embodiment 88 Nietzsche’s Revolution of the revaluation of values: “Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part of humanity, become flesh and genius in me.”123 This revaluation will succeed to the extent that his instinct really does proves infallible, successfully communicat- ing his inward states to us and thereby transforming us in the process. In an uncanny redeployment of the Socratic desire to unify all citizens into a single body politic in order to secure the reign of justice forever, Nietzsche instead proposes that all members of modernity become him in order to bring about the violent and total overthrow of everything existing. This may be the only way philosophy in Nietzsche’s sense is possible: rather than the singular body politic of the Republic, where all are one soul, we have Nietzsche’s body politic of revolution, wherein all become one body, namely his. This total physiological transformation into the superabundantly healthy organism of Nietzsche’s body would institute the total revolutionary overthrow of illness and inaugurate a new regime of health and plenitude in the modern age.

P ART II

Conservation

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C HAPTER 4

Diagnosis: Emasculation

Humanity! Has there ever been a more hideous old woman among all old women—(unless it were “truth”: a question for philosophers)? The Gay Science §377

Philosophy reduced to “a theory of knowledge” in fact no more than a timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence—a philosophy that never gets beyond the threshold and takes pains to deny itself the right to enter— that is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony, something inspiring pity. How could such a philosophy—dominate! Beyond Good and Evil §204

Thus far, I have attempted to make a cogent case for Nietzsche’s philosophy of (the life of) the body, arguing that his corporeal rhetoric of will to power is crucial to understanding a philosophy that treats modernity as itself a body, diagnoses its disorders and malfunctions as diseases, and offers solutions to those dysfunctions in the form of a revolutionary therapeutic treatment. Indeed, on my telling thus far, Nietzsche is the unabashed philosopher and advocate of the body. He offers physiological analyses of even seemingly nonphysiological phenomena, like religion— which he suggests may have developed as an interpretation of epilepsy1— and skepticism, which he claims is caused by a nervous disorder.2 He understands all intellectual processes to be matters of physiology and appropriates digestion as the primary explanatory metaphor for psychic functioning. More generally, Nietzsche locates the origins of philosophy and science (Wissenschaften) in the “entrails,” and declares without a hint 3 of irony that “all prejudices come from the intestines.” Of Socrates, that exemplar of idealist philosophy, Nietzsche muses that his rationalism may be the result of rickets, his daimon an “auditory hallucination.”4 Despite this veritable celebration of embodiment, however, Nietzsche is not entirely without inhibition when it comes to the body. He is, in fact, especially squeamish about decaying bodies, and in particular with regard to the putrid smells they emit: “What is it that I especially find unendurable? That I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air! The approach of some ill-constituted thing; that I have to smell the entrails of some ill-constituted soul!”5 In another, seemingly unrelated display of disgust, Nietzsche similarly disdains the particularities of 92 Nietzsche’s Revolution female physiology: “When we love a woman, we easily conceive a hatred for nature on account of all the repulsive natural functions to which every woman is subject.”6 What this particular combination of distaste, this “mixture of pudendum and horrendum”7 reveals, is that despite engaging in an affirmative rhetoric of the body to combat modernity’s rampant bodily (self-)loathing, this doctor of the modern age nevertheless could not stand to be confronted with major aspects of its corporeality. What explains this seemingly inconsistent physiological anxiety? At one level, we might understand or even share Nietzsche’s disdain for décadence, since we all, at one time or another, have had the unpleasant experience of taking out a particularly rancid bag of trash or emptying a long overdue compost bucket. Yet, as we have seen, Nietzsche the physiologist insists that decay is merely a fact of life. Nietzsche the philosopher explains that sickness and decline are necessary for health and ascension, indeed their enabling conditions, and Nietzsche the artist-poet declares that everything about this world and bodily existence is worthy of—indeed requires— affirmation. What, then, explains Nietzsche’s instinctual and hyperbolic revulsion at décadence, a revulsion so intense that it frequently causes him to moan that “nausea at man is my danger”?8 At one level, we can read Nietzsche’s reflexive disgust with décadence as consistent with what has thus far been claimed regarding his revolutionary project and rhetorical strategies. That is, Nietzsche’s revulsion can be understood as an expression of his condemnation of décadence, perhaps the only condemnation possible within his explicitly perspectivist framework. Nietzsche’s anguish is thus one more performative reiteration of his claim that décadence is a disease. Yet I think this is an incomplete reading, for Nietzsche’s horror at décadence does not exhaust his bodily loathing insofar as he also expresses clear reticence regarding femininity or the female body itself. These two apprehensions are in fact surprisingly and intimately related, for Nietzsche understands the décadence of modernity to be not merely a disease but a bodily injury, and a very specific sort of bodily injury at that—a castration. As we have seen, for Nietzsche, any attempt to deny the differentiation of strength and weakness is a denial of life; this confusion is both cause and effect of instinctual disorder and exhaustion. This is what slave morality is—the condemnation of strength and the refusal to accept its differentiation from weakness. Significantly, however, the gender distinction itself corresponds to the difference between strength and weakness: “the aggressive pathos belongs just as necessarily to strength as vengefulness and rancor belong to weakness. Woman, for example, is vengeful: that is due to her weakness, as much as is her sus- ceptibility to the distress of others.”9 Moreover, Nietzsche typically links feminism with ressentiment—he condemns the notion of women’s equality to men, or women’s liberation movements themselves, as variants of Diagnosis: Emasculation 93 slave morality. They are part and parcel of the broader movement toward democracy and equal rights already afoot in Europe, all of which bespeak the continent’s décadence: “A predominance of mandarins always means something is wrong; so do the advent of democracy, international courts in place of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and whatever other symptoms of declining [absinkenden] life there are.”10 While it is much easier to pick on Nietzsche for his antifeminism than his fetishization of power, especially as the latter is both more central to his philosophy and potentially more ambiguous, it is nevertheless a mistake to leave Nietzsche’s remarks on women and the feminine aside, whether because they are unimportant, unenlightened, or simply uninteresting.11 It is a mistake because Nietzsche’s understanding of health and strength is gendered—for Nietzsche, health is masculinity incarnate.12 Insofar as Nietzsche understands modern décadence as an emasculation, a frightening elision and erosion of natural, gendered categories that leads to the dissipation of male virility, vitality, and dominance, this makes his views regarding gender and sexual difference crucial to a complete understanding of his philosophical critique of modernity. Indeed, they do not simply inform his diagnosis of modern décadence—they define it. The surprising obstinacy Nietzsche displays with regard to the loathsomeness of décadence and femininity is the flipside of the revolutionary Nietz- sche who sees becoming—and thus bodily change and transformation—as the necessary condition of all life. Indeed, while Nietzsche is content to acknowledge the constitutive inequality of bodies in his frequent critiques of slave morality, nevertheless, his hatred of modern effeminacy causes him to slip unjustifiably into a kind of essentialism of this “condition,” a move he otherwise condemns not only in logic and philosophy but also with regard to his own view of life as will to power. This essentialism is most pronounced when articulated in gendered language—when Nietz- sche describes modernity as effeminate or castrated, or attacks women’s equality as décadent or hostile to life.13 Because the distinction between strength and weakness is interchangeable with the distinction between male and female, Nietzsche sees the weakened masculinity of the modern age as the meaning of its sickness, an emasculation from which “we” can never recover. In Nietzsche’s view, modern décadence erodes the natural strength, health, and virility of nonconscious human animals, animals who are thereby revealed as always already male in Nietzsche’s conceptualization. And this attack on the (male) body of modernity is an injury it cannot overcome, for in these essentialist moments, health is synonymous with the phallus and once one has lost it, it is gone for good: “In a lizard a lost finger is replaced again; not so in man.”14 Gender equality, then, constitutes a direct and dire threat to the future of European humanity. For how can a body that has been so horribly mutilated be made whole again? 94 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Although Nietzsche’s revitalizing treatment of will to power seemed to present the possibility of fundamentally undercutting the will to truth, offering radical new possibilities for the embodiment of health, Nietzsche himself is unable to realize these possibilities in the face of the radical reconfiguration of bodies it suggests. For not only would Nietzsche’s own redeployment of “life” suggest that the weak or sick might become able to approach the kind of health he valorizes (a possibility he nowhere fully accepts), it would also synonymously demand the affirmation of a future built, at least in part, on the foundation of an emasculated manhood. This radical reconfiguration of gendered roles and bodies was too frightening for Nietzsche to accept, much less affirm. By declaring some bodies to be strong and others weak, some male and others female, Nietzsche sets up a schema in which health entails a set of bodily prerequisites for its attainment. Despite his attempt to make the body the measure of truth, then, Nietzsche nevertheless sees certain bodies as the truth—he sets up a specific, male mode of embodiment as the ideal of health to which other bodies cannot live up. This investment in masculinity is not simply a macho self-congratulation (although it is this); it is also Nietzsche’s specific investment in European male domination. As Nancy Leys Stepan makes clear, under- standings of racial and sexual difference in the late nineteenth century were effectively interchangeable, such that “lower races represented the ‘female’ type of the human species, and females the ‘lower race’ of gender.”15 This means that Nietzsche’s fear of the erosion of sexual difference can also be read as a fear of racial contamination, insofar as European women were perceived as analogous to male members of subordinate races. Nietzsche’s discussions of woman, women, and the “Eternal-Feminine,” then, are clearly discussions of specifically European woman, women, and the Eter- nal-European-Feminine, a function of his resolutely Eurocentric analysis of the phenomenon of décadence. Investigating the precise meaning and determination of Nietzsche’s gendered categories, then, will reveal a view of manhood that entails domination of European women (and, insofar as they are “like” European women, “lower races”) as part of its definition. It

will display his conservative nostalgia for a patriarchal social order slowly being dissolved by the slave moralities of Christianity, democracy, socialism, and feminism, a social order he portrays as “natural” on the basis of his essentialist view of men’s and women’s bodies and his traditional view of their respective roles. It will explain his bizarre idealism of masculinity and femininity wherein the latter is figured as truth and the former as her virile warrior/conqueror. Exploiting this sexual metaphor to its fullest, Nietzsche condemns the will to truth as self-annihilation, a metaphor whose effectiveness turns on a demonization of both the female body and sexual desire for women that are as undeniable as they are central to Nietzsche’s thought. Diagnosis: Emasculation 95

This is not a popular interpretation of Nietzsche’s remarks on women, gender, and sexual difference.16 Yet I offer it not out of an investment in righteously condemning Nietzsche, nor do I think admitting the fact of his misogyny renders him a philosopher unworthy of serious study. Rather, it is important for two reasons, which I hope to persuasively demonstrate in this chapter. First, they centrally define Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modernity as décadent, the disease that is his central concern and the target of his revolutionary project. To ignore them, or to otherwise complicate or deny their essentially misogynist character, would thus be to miss a crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity. Second, they are important as symptoms by which we can attempt to decipher the deeper corporeality of Nietzsche himself. Following Nietzsche’s own interpretive method, I suggest that Nietzsche’s views of gender and modern emasculation constitute an autobiographical confession of his own fear and anxiety regarding women. They reveal that Nietzsche, too, just like the anonymous “scholars” he criticizes, desires to “possess” women, whom he simultaneously seeks and yet fears, and with whom he believes intercourse will lead only to nihilism and death. It is Nietzsche himself who insists on male domination as the only response to the terrifying specter of women exposed or in control. Indeed, in figuring “modernity” as masculine, “truth” as feminine, and “intercourse” or equality as “castration,” can we be so sure that Nietzsche is really talking about anyone other than himself?17 We cannot forget that Nietzsche is a member of modernity, too. In fact, “modernity” may be better understood (in every respect, whether conservative or progressive) as a projection and elaboration of Nietzsche’s own most particular bodily anxieties. What this autobiographical interpretation of Nietzsche’s views of women, gender, and sexual difference reveals is thus the secondary subject of this chapter, following the primary aim of demonstrating the gendered character of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modernity.

“Opposite Values”

In general, Nietzsche categorizes bodies according to three basic, dichotomous determinations, all of which are more or less substitutable for one another—bodies are either strong or weak, healthy or sick, ascending or descending. Any attempt to ignore, attenuate, or amalgamate these categorical distinctions, Nietzsche argues, belies a fundamental ignorance regarding the basic prerequisites of life. To make strong bodies weak or healthy bodies sick is to impoverish the species, to undermine its capacity for expansion and growth. This Vermischung, as we saw in Chapter 2, is the primary operation of Christianity and of slave morality more generally: the confusion of the givens of life—the resentful subjectification of 96 Nietzsche’s Revolution strength and valorization of weakness—is what causes décadence, leading to the body’s dissolution and eventual death. Now it is sometimes considered to be a rather clumsy reading to take Nietzsche at his word regarding these categorical binarisms. In the words of one judicious commentator:

What has been called a dualism in Nietzsche’s work appears contrary to his disavowal of absolute opposites and transcendent categories. It is, in fact, better labeled a pluralism. The hard and fast dichotomies of decadence and growth, strength and weakness, noble and plebeian, good and bad, are heuristic devices that allow one to talk about a virtual infinity of ranks, orders, and spiritual regimes. Just as there are no actual antipodes of good and evil, but only differences of degree, so too are the categories of decadence and growth but a shorthand to describe a myriad of divergent states of the soul. Any attempt to venture into this plethora of ambiguities is bound to place a premium on nuance.18

This critic rightly reminds us of Nietzsche’s assertion that “the art of nuance” is “the best thing we gain from life”19 and warns us to be careful readers of this very nuanced writer. As Nietzsche himself sighs, “alas, I am a nuance.”20 Nevertheless, this moderate and compelling reading of Nietzsche raises a number of critical questions. First, the qualification that there are no actual antipodes of, say, décadence and growth, but rather only degrees of difference, does not thereby mean Nietzsche is uncommitted to such antipodes. After all, degrees of difference become legible only on a continuum that must be anchored by norms of décadence and growth at either end. Moreover, any comparison, no matter how fleeting, relies on some standard or scale of valuation, no matter how relative—this is a difficulty even Nietzsche cannot escape. Second, if Nietzsche’s binaries are not binaries at all, but rather “pluralities,” abbreviations of virtual infinities of varying ranks and kinds, then why does he use such abbreviations to begin with? What are we to make, for example, of Nietzsche’s blatant declaration that “what alone should be resisted is that falseness, that deceitfulness of instinct which refuses to experience these opposites [master and slave morality] as opposites”?21 Does Nietzsche present things in dichotomous terms merely as a pedagogical device, banking on our ability to see nuance in the reality of which these binaries are (only?) the model? Or are we rather supposed to overlook Nietzsche’s dichotomous designations as another instance of Nietzschean hyperbole, a purely metaphorical excess? If they are rhetorical immoderacy, are they “simply” strategic, one more over-the-top performance by which Nietzsche seeks to induce revolution? Or are they thus to be disregarded as insignificant or not philosophically “serious”? If, on the other hand, we decide not to ignore, dismiss, or moderate Nietzsche’s rhetoric, and instead take him Diagnosis: Emasculation 97 at his word in these binary deployments, then another more Nietzschean set of questions arises: what form of life is revealed by Nietzsche’s deployment of binary categories? Do they bespeak a philosopher in decline, a philosopher committed to reinstating some kind of order, a veiled will to truth? Might these binarisms, perhaps, bespeak the ressentiment of a man who never himself attained the “great health” for which he so longed and hoped? Might they even be an indication of Nietzsche’s own décadence? Of course, any attempt to take Nietzsche’s binarisms at face value must contend with his explicit interrogation and condemnation of the belief in “opposite values” in section 2 of Beyond Good and Evil, the passage most frequently invoked to support the interpretive claim that Nietzsche is in no way committed to the binarisms in which he nevertheless so often traffics. If we look more closely at this passage, however, we see that his insistence upon hierarchical binary classifications is not refuted by his critique of “opposite values” but rather confirmed there. In this passage, Nietzsche is attacking a view he ascribes to “the metaphysicians,” an anonymous bunch that he ventriloquizes in the following manner:

“How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? Or the will to truth out of the will to deception? Or selfless deeds out of selfishness? Or the pure and sunlike gaze of the sage out of lust? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, indeed worse; the things of the highest value must have another, peculiar origin—they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, paltry world, from this turmoil of delusion and lust. Rather from the lap of Being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the “thing-in-itself”—there must be their basis, and nowhere else.”22

In Nietzsche’s view, what motivates the kinds of questions these “metaphysicians” ask is no mere inquiry into knowledge but rather a need that good and evil be definitively separated from one another. If good and evil should prove to have the same origin, then ultimately distinguishing between them may be impossible and judgment must be forever suspended. Uncomfortable with this potential coimplication of good and evil, these metaphysicians seek an otherworldly realm of unconditionality, wherein the good can be said to have originated. Nietzsche declares this demand and this recourse to be the underpinning of any and every metaphysical view. Both in this passage and elsewhere, his objections to it are diagnostic in character:

For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and sec- ondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use. 98 Nietzsche’s Revolution

For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!

Although Nietzsche couches these objections as hypotheses, framing them with multiple “maybes,” we recognize them as basic to Nietzsche’s perspective and exemplary of his critique of truth in modern philosophy. Nietzsche suggests not only that dishonesty, selfishness, and unrestrained desire may be more valuable than their glorified and idealized opposites, but also that they may in fact be the same thing as their opposites. Truth and lies, selflessness and selfishness, self-denial and lust, may be “in essence” identical. The insistence on separating them out and valorizing the “good” half of these oppositions over the other betrays a “provisional perspective”—a “frog perspective.” It betrays, in other words, a view from below. In the case of the metaphysicians, their choosing to privilege good over evil, selflessness over selfishness, and restraint over desire is symptomatic of their declining life and strength, their lowness in stature, energy, and vitality. It is their retreat from life to an illusory “beyond,” where change, becoming, and death do not exist—a place where the good, the true, and the just dwell in unperturbed bliss. This retreat from the world is a judgment and condemnation of life, Nietzsche thinks, and “for a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life is thus an objection to him, a question-mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom.”23 Belief in opposite values, then, is significant less as a philosophical “argument” than as a confession, a betrayal of a personal investment, an autobiographical declaration that may be read as such only if one understands the text symptomologically, a method Nietzsche himself introduces and recommends to us in many places. Returning to the particular case of Nietzsche, then, we might say that while it is clearly the case that he doubts the credibility of “opposite values,” and even offers up the tools 24 for a surprising and delightful deconstruction of them, this nevertheless does not prevent him from frequently indulging in precisely such oppositional valuations himself. Our task, then, is neither to validate nor to dismiss Nietzsche’s binarisms—which are, I think, indisputably there— but rather to understand them symptomologically, to read them as indi- cations of Nietzsche’s relative health and quality of life. Nietzsche himself invites us to do as much. And, quite frankly, Nietzsche just loves asserting oppositional valuations. He characterizes not only bodies but also the very terms of his own philosophy in this way. In the Epilogue to The Case of Wagner, for example, Nietzsche presents the distinction between ascending (i.e., Diagnosis: Emasculation 99 healthy) and descending (i.e., décadent) life as a mutually exclusive binarism: “Either [an age] has the virtues of ascending life: then it will resist from the profoundest depths the virtues of declining [niedergehenden] life. Or the age itself represents declining [niedergehendes] life: then it also requires the virtues of decline [Niedergangs-Tugenden], then it hates everything that justifies itself solely out of abundance, out of the overflowing riches of strength.” Immediately following, he suggests that the distinction between master and slave morality is similarly oppositional:

In the narrower sphere of so-called moral values one cannot find a greater contrast than that between a master morality and the morality of Christian value concepts: the latter developed on soil that was morbid through and through (the Gospels present us with precisely the same physiological types that Dostoevsky’s novels describe), master morality (“Roman,” “pagan,” “classical,” “Renaissance”) is, conversely, the sign language of what has turned out well, of ascending life, of the will to power as the principle of life. Master morality affirms as instinctively as Christian morality negates (“God,” “beyond,” “self-denial”—all of them negations).

Near the end of this section, Nietzsche concludes that “one looks in vain for more valuable, more necessary opposites.” There are also Nietzsche’s frequent (if various) characterizations of the movement of world history in oppositional terms as a confrontation between two warring and hostile forces. In his self-described “polemic” On the Genealogy of Morals, for example, Nietzsche describes the slave revolt in morality as the struggle of “‘Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome’:—there has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle, this question, this deadly contradiction.”25 Later in this same text, Nietzsche argues that the ascetic ideal forces “the complete, the genuine antagonism” of “Plato versus Homer,” “there [i.e., Plato] the sincerest advocate of the ‘beyond,’ the great slanderer of life; here [i.e., Homer] the instinctive deifier, the golden nature.”26 This struggle morphs into Nietz- sche’s revolutionary proclamations regarding the impending demise of

the modern age in Ecce Homo, wherein he describes the challenge his immoralism presents to centuries of Christian and slave morality. As he says there, “I was the first to see the real opposition: the degenerating [entartenden] instinct that turns against life with subterranean vengefulness (Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of Plato, and all of idealism as typical forms) versus a formula for the highest affirmation, born of fullness, of overfullness, a Yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence.”27 Or, as he puts it in his pithiest articulation: “Have I been understood?—Dionysus versus the Crucified—.”28 100 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Now, I argued in Part I of this book that Nietzsche is committed to the instigation of a world-historical revaluation of all values, a revolution that demands a privileging of the body and its vicissitudes as its first moment or step. It is thus possible that Nietzsche’s essentialist dichoto- mizations serve a strategic purpose on par with the way in which I have argued he deploys will to power—as an attempt to renature the antinatural and reverse the process of Christian décadence. Indeed, if Nietzsche is the revolutionary I have claimed him to be, he is unlikely to deploy tentative or qualified judgments regarding the possible value of morality for life as effective agents of change. Therefore, it should be unsurprising that Nietzsche’s rhetorical hyperbole about bodies often lacks subtlety, or that in waging war against décadence, he apocalyptically declares it to infect everything and everyone in the modern age. All of his oppositional statements quoted thus far may be read, then, as consistent with his larger revolutionary project. Moreover, Nietzsche does sound a few cautionary notes regarding the intractability of his otherwise strict binary determinations of bodies. He says, for example, that “it should be kept in mind that ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ are relative concepts,”29 and argues that ascending and descending life, even life and death, are coimplicated: “What is life?—Life—that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life—that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak—and not only about us. Life—that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient? Con- stantly being a murderer?”30 Belying his seemingly resolute determination that living bodies are only either ascending or descending, Nietzsche also offhandedly remarks in the Genealogy that active and reactive are both variants of reactivity; there, he says of ressentiment that it is denied “the true [real, actual; eigentliche] reaction, that of deeds.”31 Similarly, Nietz- sche says that master and slave morality can “occur directly alongside each other—even in the same human being, within a single soul.”32 In these places, Nietzsche illustrates his claim from BGE, section 2 that opposites may in fact be identical to one another or possessed of a single essence.

Yet these few, significant, nuanced remarks about the coimplication of various opposites do not overwrite the fact that Nietzsche also, simultaneously and undeniably, simply and repeatedly, just plain insists that bodies are only ever healthy or sick, strong or weak, with correspondingly different and appropriate instincts, since “in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.”33 He is insistent on this point because, for Nietz- sche, strength and health are gendered—to say that a body is weak or sick is the same thing as saying it is soft, female, feminized, or castrated. It is precisely at and because of this convergence that Nietzsche’s view of bodies becomes irretrievably essentialist.34 Nietzsche views modernity as an effeminate age, one that has been “improved” or domesticated to the Diagnosis: Emasculation 101 extent that its culture has been emasculated. Modernity’s “civilizing” forces constitute the criminalization and ruin of all healthy/male instincts:

The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick. He lacks the wilderness, a somehow freer and more dangerous environment and form of existence . . . His virtues are ostracized by society; the most vivid drives with which he is endowed soon grow together with the depressing affects—with suspicion, fear, and dishonor. Yet this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration [Entartung] . . . It is society, our tame, mediocre, emasculated [verschnittene; my emphasis] society, in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the adventures of the sea necessarily degenerates [entartet] into a criminal.35

The decrease in instincts which are hostile and arouse mistrust—and that is all our ‘progress’ amounts to—represents but one of the consequences attending the general decrease in vitality: it requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to make so conditional and late an existence prevail. Hence each helps the other; hence everyone is to a certain extent sick, and everyone is a nurse for the sick. And that is called “virtue.” Among men who still knew life differently—fuller, more squandering, more overflowing—it would have been called by another name: “cowardice” perhaps, “wretchedness,” “old ladies’ morality.”36

What is womanish [Was von Weibsart ist], what derives from the servile, and especially the mob hodgepodge: that would become master of all human destiny. O nausea! Nausea! Nausea!37

The forces of Western civilization, of Christianity and democracy and equality, are all equivalent in the sense that all conspire to emasculate the strong man who would be healthy. Nietzsche calls Christianity a religion of castratism [Castratismus].38 And of course, “the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement,”39 rendering it just as menacing. Reflecting on the Europeans of his day, Nietzsche confesses how ill at ease he feels among them, how “homeless” he is in modernity as one “who refuse[s] to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated [verschneiden lassen].”40 Comparing those exemplars of healthy humanity, Goethe and Napoleon, with the rest of their contemporaries in Germany, Nietzsche remarks that these two are the only real men of Europe:

But if we want to really feel what a distinction such fear of the “man” in the German spirit confers—a spirit through which Europe was after all awakened from her “dogmatic slumber”—we have to remember the former conception which was replaced by this one: it was not so long ago that a masculinized woman [vermännlichtes weib] could dare with unbridled 102 Nietzsche’s Revolution

presumption to commend the Germans to the sympathy of Europe as being gentle, goodhearted, weak-willed, and poetic dolts. At long last we ought to understand deeply enough Napoleon’s surprise when he came to see Goethe: it shows what people had associated with the “German spirit” for centuries. “Voilà un homme!”—that meant: “But this is a man! And I had merely expected a German.”41

Those rare and significant moments wherein Nietzsche qualifies his otherwise resolute determinations regarding ascending and descending life (or growth and décadence, master and slave, active and reactive, strong and weak) nevertheless do not prevent him from engaging in an overall essentialism of these determinations such that, relative or not, they become inescapable bodily predestinations. Even when Nietzsche is not explicitly trafficking in an essentialism of strength and weakness (as, for example, when he declares “the weakness of the weak” to be “their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality”42), his rhetoric often relies on the possibility and necessity of distinguishing between them, in particular when these distinctions are specified as hardness and softness, male and female, masculine and feminine. Most famously, of course, Nietzsche demands that the healthy and the sick be separated from one another, so as not to infect or feminize the healthy: “That the sick should not make the healthy sick—and this is what such an emasculation [or feminization; Verweichlichung] would involve—should surely be our supreme concern on earth; but this requires above all that the healthy should be segregated from the sick, guarded even from the sight of the sick, that they may not confound themselves with the sick.”43 While Nietzsche admits that such invective “sounds harsh,” he nevertheless demands why he should bother to “stroke the effeminate [verweichlichten] ears of our modern weaklings?”44 Truth is hard, and “if there will one day be a poster- ity with a more severe, harder [härteren], healthier taste,” then it will resist the “innermost feminism [Femininismus] that likes to call itself ‘idealism’ and at any rate believes it is idealism.”45 It is true that, in many places, Nietzsche is able to think health or strength in nonessentialist terms, as possibilities that are ever in the process of development, accumulation, and overcoming by all bodies. Demonstrating this was the task of Part I of this book; it is Nietzsche’s revolutionary promise. Yet insofar as sickness and weakness are linked, for Nietzsche, with softness, femininity, and castration, they become aspects of the body that are impervious to change. And while his essentialist rhetoric of strength and weakness can indeed be read as serving the strategic purpose of reversing the décadent values of a sickly age, nevertheless, the gendered nature of this reversal introduces an element of corporeality that Nietzsche is unable to displace or overturn. Nietzsche’s rhetorical engagement with hard and soft, male and female, masculine and feminine, in other words, simply lacks the subversive character of his Diagnosis: Emasculation 103 performative rhetoric of will to power, wherein the reversals it asserted were themselves overcome via a destabilization of their own evaluative foundation. In decrying of the feminization of modernity and modern men, Nietzsche does not undercut the very standard of masculinity itself as the privileged indicator of value. Manliness (in the peculiar way in which Nietzsche understands it) thus becomes Nietzsche’s standard of health, an unchanging and impossible ideal lodged at the center of his revolutionary project.

Décadence, Gendered

Manliness, then, is what this reactive Nietzsche thinks is lacking in our “plebeian” age, an age in which everything is mixed up and “motley,” in which the demand for equal rights dominates—an age that discourages all order of rank or pathos of distance. All that is different, superior, and higher becomes attenuated, mixed, and diluted by what is small and weak: “The strength to withstand tension, the width of the tensions between extremes, becomes ever smaller today; finally, the extremes themselves become blurred to the point of similarity.”46 This weakness and confusion produces not heroic, masculine types like Napoleon, but rather types such as “the scientific average man” who “always rather resembles an old maid: like her he is not conversant with the two most valuable functions of man.”47 It produces disturbing and motley people who are not one thing or another—figures like Sainte-Beuve and George Sand, the former of whom possesses “nothing of virility, full of petty wrath against all vile spirits . . . a female [Weibsperson] at bottom, with a female’s lust for revenge [Weibs-Rachsucht] and a female’s sensuality [Weibs-Sinnlichkeit] . . . plebeian in the lowest instincts.”48 Of George Sand, Nietzsche writes: “I cannot stand this motley wallpaper style any more than the mob aspiration for generous feelings. The worst feature, to be sure, is the female’s coquetry with male attributes, with the manners of naughty boys.”49 Sand and Sainte-Beuve typify the failure to behave in accordance with their respec- tively gendered bodies and instincts; most appalling about them is that

they resist clearly gendered determination. Sainte-Beuve is thus “a female [Weibsperson] at bottom”; Sand not only adopts a male name but adopts “male attributes” [Männlichkeiten] and “manners.”50 As we have seen, Nietzsche has similar anxieties regarding the mixing of different races. Ultimately, however, he finds “race” to be too fluid or ambiguous a biological category, since its Vermischung led to the production of both mediocre and superior types. By contrast, Nietzsche sees sexual difference as irreducibly definitive of bodies, and, unlike his grudging acknowledgement of the benefits of racial integration, Nietzsche simply does not think it is in the interests of the species for men and women to become “mixed” or in any way “like” one another. To argue that women 104 Nietzsche’s Revolution should possess the same kind of strength as men, or that men should be “improved” to become more like women, is to commit a fundamental error regarding the very constitution and character of life itself: “I should have to add what ‘improved’ signifies to me—the same thing as ‘tamed,’ ‘weakened,’ ‘discouraged,’ ‘made refined,’ ‘made effete’ [or soft; verzärtlicht], ‘emasculated’ [entmannt] (thus almost the same thing as harmed).”51 This concern with gender mixing and Nietzsche’s essentialist intractability on the subject—in distinct contrast with his physiological flexibility with regard to race—makes clear that Nietzsche worries about race and “race-mixing” through the vehicle of gender. Gender thus becomes not only the primary site of his concerns regarding racial contamination, but also the intrinsic measure by which he assesses the manliness (and thus “health”) of the West, specifically in contrast with a romanticized and mythologized “East” variously symbolized by China, India, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam. Indeed, the word that Kaufmann translates as “emasculated” is the adjective verschnitten, which certainly can mean castrated but primarily means diluted, as in the case of mixing wines together, leading to their adulteration. This double meaning is essential to Nietzsche’s usage, for it is this gendered attenuation with which he is most concerned—the mixing of gendered bodies, roles, and capacities that are, and ought to remain, distinct from one another. As we will see, when genders become too similar to one another, European women cease having children. They become verunglückt—unlucky, unfortunate, a kind of catastrophe—or missrathen—poorly turned out, malformed, ill-developed. In either case, what Nietzsche really means by this is “childless”—gender mixing threatens to dilute the womanliness of women by rendering them not-mothers.52 But Nietzsche’s concern that European women become strong mothers who give birth to strong children cannot be divorced from predominant European anxieties at the time regarding racial purity and the perpetuation of empire, especially insofar as he sees European women’s refusal of motherhood as potentially causing the downfall of Western civilization as a whole.53

When it comes to men, by contrast, gender mixing causes their literal Verschnittenung—the “dilution” of their masculine specificity is quite specifically their emasculation. Sometimes Nietzsche is less dramatic, claiming that the intermingling of otherwise gender-specific qualities and capacities (or of strong and weak, healthy and sick) constitutes a softening, a feminization of the strong and healthy, a making tender of this presumably otherwise hard and unyielding male. The word Nietzsche uses in these cases is either verweichlich or verzärtlich—men become soft from a previous condition of having been hard. But it is nevertheless essential that this distinction—between hard and soft, or male and female, healthy and sick—be preserved, and these words function in opposition to Diagnosis: Emasculation 105 vermännlich, as in Nietzsche’s hope that Europe will become more “virile” [Vermännlichung].54 Seizing on the bourgeois norms of proper, healthy, masculine and feminine identity ascendant in his day, Nietzsche incorporates these gender ideals into his own philosophical project of critiquing modern nihilism, the ominous endpoint of décadence’s trajectory.55 And for Nietzsche, these ideals are perpetually negotiated through his mythol- ogizing view of Eastern men and masculinities.56 For example, he says of European anarchists that their “involuntary plunge into gloom and unmanly tenderness [Verzärtlichung]” is a “spell” under which “Europe seems threatened by a new Buddhism.”57 Nietzsche in fact qualifies Euro- pean nihilism as a form of Buddhism, admiring, by contrast, the hierarchy of Hinduism and the masculinity of Islam and lamenting the dissolution of European manhood in relation to these superiorly masculine ways of life. Nietzsche’s general usage of the terms “modernity” and “humanity,” then, do not function as unmarked categories, and when he talks about modern men, he is in all cases using that term with its literal European ref- erent in mind and not as a stand-in for a gender-neutral “humanity.” Oth- erwise, how could he use emasculation synonymously with décadence?58 The sometimes neutrality of Nietzsche’s terminology is belied by this usage as well as by the many times he bemoans décadence specifically as a failure of manliness [Männlichkeit]:

Almost everywhere in Europe today we find a pathological sensitivity and receptivity to pain; also a repulsive incontinence in lamentation, an increase in tenderness that would use religion and philosophical bric-a-brac to deck itself out as something higher—there is a veritable cult of suffering. The unmanliness [Unmännlichkeit] of what is baptized as “pity” in the circles of such enthusiasts is, I should think, what always meets the eye first.59

The “religion of pity” to which one would like to convert us—oh, we know the hysterical little males and females well enough who today need precisely this religion as a veil and make-up.60

There is little of man [Mannes] here; therefore their women [Weiber] strive to be mannish [vermännlichen]. For only he who is man enough [Mannes genug] will release the woman in woman [Weibe das Weib].61

The many décadent developments Nietzsche bemoans in modernity, in other words, are actually failures of manliness. This becomes apparent in his discussions of women and gender because with the introduction of the problem of “woman,” we see that she actually has her own separate, specific form of décadence, as befits her different body and set of instincts. In other words, décadence and weakness of the will signify differently, depending on the gender of the body in question: 106 Nietzsche’s Revolution

To be sure, there are enough imbecilic friends and corrupters of woman [Frauen-Freunde und Weibs-Verderber] among the scholarly asses of the male sex [Eseln männlichen] who advise woman to defeminize [entweibli- chen] herself in this way and to imitate all the stupidities with which “man” [Mann] in Europe, European “manliness” [“Mannhaftigkeit”] is sick: they would like to reduce woman [das Weib] to the level of “general education,” probably even of reading the newspapers and talking about politics. Here and there they [Man] even want to turn women [Frauen] into free- thinkers and scribblers—as if a woman [ein Weib] without piety would not seem utterly obnoxious and ridiculous to a profound and godless man [Mann] . . . Altogether one wants to make her more “cultivated” and, as is said, make the weaker sex strong through culture—as if history did not teach us as impressively as possible that making men [Menschen] “cultivated” and making them weak—weakening, splintering, and sicklying over the force of the will—have always kept pace, and that the most powerful and influential women [Frauen] of the world (most recently Napoleon’s mother) owed their power and ascendancy over men to the force of their will—and not to schoolmasters!62

The “cultivation” (Cultivirung) Nietzsche bemoans here makes both men and women weak in will, and thus is recognizable as the by-product of décadence. However, in the case of men, “cultivation” weakens them by making them into herd animals—specified in this case as newspaper readers and political participants. In the case of European women, by contrast, “cultivation” poses two distinct (yet effectively synonymous) dangers: first, it threatens to make them more similar to these ridiculous and mediocre men, whom Nietzsche clearly finds to be unmanly and contemptible. But second, it distracts them from their sole important task and contribution to culture—bearing strong children. While modern morality may weaken or feminize men, it poses a double threat to women, first by rendering them more “manly” (in the shallow and ridiculous way in which modern men can be said to be men at all), and second, by defeminizing them, rendering them not-women insofar as it renders them not-mothers. Modern décadence thus wreaks two different gender monstrosities: feminized men

and sexless women. Nietzsche is opposed to European women’s “equality” with men because, as we saw, he finds modern European men themselves to be contemptible. But Nietzsche also finds such equality problematic because it distracts women from their essential physiological difference from men and thus from their instinctual fulfillment of their cultural role—being strong mothers who bear strong children. Because Nietzsche thinks specific feminine instincts correspond with and follow from a specifiably female body, this means that if one’s body is capable of giving birth, for one not to do so—to pursue paths other than childbearing—is “abortive” [verunglückten],63 “an almost masculine [maskulinische] stupidity,”64 Diagnosis: Emasculation 107 a denial (and ultimately, decay) of the instincts appropriate to the type of body she has:

Everything about woman [Weibe] is a riddle, and everything about woman [Weibe] has one solution: that is pregnancy. Man [Der Mann] is for woman [das Weib] a means: the end is always the child.65

[M]an and woman [Mann und Weib]: the one fit for war, the other fit to give birth.66

Has my answer been heard to the question how one cures a woman [ein Weib]—“redeems” her? One [Man] gives her a child. Woman [das Weib] needs children, a man [der Mann] is for her always only a means: thus spoke Zarathustra.67

Nietzsche here articulates a familiar refrain of certain conservatives: because female bodies possess the capacity for giving birth, there is also an instinctual feminine compulsion to have children and, correspondingly, to care for and raise them. Feminism, then, has led European women away from this natural childbearing role and toward participation in social and political life, a defeminization that bespeaks a frightening ignorance of the requirements of culture:

Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman [das Weib] now aspires to the economic and legal self- reliance of a clerk: “woman as clerk” [das Weib als Commis] is inscribed on the gate to the modern society that is taking shape now. As she thus takes possession of new rights, aspires to become “master” [Herr] and writes the “progress” of woman [Weibes] upon her standards and banners, the opposite development is taking place with terrible clarity: woman is retrogressing [das Weib geht zurück].68

Almost everywhere one ruins her nerves with the most pathological and dangerous kind of music (our most recent German music) and makes her

more hysterical by the day and more incapable of her first and last profession—to give birth to strong children.69

The intrinsically gendered character of Nietzsche’s otherwise unmarked diagnosis of décadence is made even plainer in his discussions of ‘feminism,’ a term he uses quite narrowly to indicate the multitude of late nineteenth- century social and political developments that gave upper-class European women increasing opportunities for participation in otherwise traditionally male activities like reading, writing, education, and politics.70 These very concrete changes are clearly a target of Nietzsche’s ire, for whom this kind of feminism is one more instance of slave morality—he speculates 108 Nietzsche’s Revolution that European feminists are actually women consumed by resentment of the “woman who is turned out well [wohlgerathenes Weib].”71 As he says, “woman, the more she is a woman [Das Weib, je mehr Weib es ist], resists rights in general hand and foot.”72 Feminism is thus both the symptom and the cause of the décadence of the European female’s instincts, a blurring of the natural boundaries differentiating bodies, instincts, and their corresponding social structures:

“Emancipation of women [Emancipation des Weibes]”—that is the instinctive hatred of the abortive [or failed or poorly turned out] woman [des mis- srathenen Weibes], who is incapable of giving birth, against the woman who is turned out well [das wohlgerathene]—the fight against the “man” [Mann] is always a mere means, pretext, tactic. By raising themselves higher, as “woman in herself [Weib an sich],” as the “higher woman [höheres Weib],” as a female “idealist” [“Idealistin” von Weib], they want to lower the level of the general rank of woman [Weibes]; and there is no surer means for that than higher education, slacks, and political voting-cattle rights. At bottom, the emancipated are anarchists in the world of the “eternally feminine [Ewig-Weiblichen],” the underprivileged whose most fundamental instinct is revenge.73

This modern “weakening and dulling of the most feminine instincts [aller- weiblichsten Instinkte]”74 threatens to erode the seemingly indestructible system of roles by which European men and women not only interact with one another successfully, but also maintain and reproduce successful cultural structures. Thus it is not hyperbole for Nietzsche to suggest that this gendered instinctual tumult threatens the very existence of Western civilization.75 While feminism, egalitarianism, and democratic enlightenment have distracted European women from their proper role as child-bearers, these modern moralities have similarly dissuaded European men from assuming their respective and properly masculine roles. Nietzsche sees the modern age as “enthusiastic, idealistic, feminine [Feminischen], hermaphroditic [Hermaphroditischen],” unable to resist “the softhearted [weichmüthige] 76 and effeminate [verzärtelte] taste of a democratic century.” Thus while European women must return to their appropriate role and realm as mothers if modernity is to be saved, European men, too, require a program of remasculinization, a virilization that will return them to their proper places as men. Such a program is essential, since “the degree and kind of a man’s sexuality [Geschlechtlichkeit eines Menschen] reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.”77 What, precisely, constitutes manliness for Nietzsche? It is certainly the whole host of characteristics already discussed under the supposedly gender-neutral rubric of “health”—activity (as opposed to reactivity), ascension, unconscious self-approbation, the squandering of a superabundance Diagnosis: Emasculation 109 of vital energies—or, in Nietzsche’s words, “health, well-constitutedness, strength, pride, and the sense of power.”78 And, certainly, these elements are not forsaken in Nietzsche’s recommendations to European men; they are merely specified in more clearly gendered terms. So in an aphorism already quoted from the section “What is Noble” of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche distinguishes between two kinds of pity: a manly kind and an unmanly kind. The latter is the predominant kind in Europe and consists in a contemptible reticence toward pain and suffering (Nietzsche calls it a “repulsive incontinence in lamentation,” among other things). The former kind of pity, however, is not a defect. And while Nietzsche leaves this admirable type of pity unspecified (explicitly naming only the widespread, European pity as an “unmanliness” [Unmännlichkeit]), it is nevertheless clear from his description that admirable pity is manly pity, possessed only by real men:

A man [Ein Mann] who says, “I like this, I take this for my own and want to protect it and defend it against anybody”; a man who is able to manage something, to carry out a resolution, to remain faithful to a thought, to hold a woman [ein Weib], to punish and prostrate one who presumed too much; a man who has his wrath and his sword and to whom the weak, the suffering, the hard pressed, and the animals, too, like to come and belong by nature, in short a man who is by nature a master [kurz ein Mann, der von Natur Herr ist]—when such a man has pity, well, this pity has value.79

This real man is a “master,” which means (among other things) that he can “hold” [festhalten], “punish” [strafen], and “prostrate” [or throw down; niederwerfen] a woman; that he has anger [Zorn] and a “sword” [Schwert] at his disposal; and that he is one to whom the weak and the suffering are inexplicably drawn and to whom they naturally belong. None of these constituents is inessential to Nietzsche’s definition of manhood, which also relies on a brute fact of embodiment: just as the female body is distinguished as such because of its capacity to give birth, so, too, is the male body specified by its possession of a penis. This is

why the master has a sword—as Nietzsche reminds us all too often, a real man/artist/creator/master is hard. Indeed, the entreaty to “become hard” pervades Nietzsche’s texts,80 and whether it is his sword, his hammer, his whip, or his stick, Nietzsche is never at a loss for metaphorical penis surrogates to indicate male potency and domination. Simultaneously sexual and violent, the fusion of maleness with power in these phallic symbols draws the weak and helpless to him (as Nietzsche explains, good and bad women want a stick81), and is so apparent that even other men can recognize it (as the magician admits to Zarathustra, “you are hard, wise Zara- thustra,” “your stick forces” the “truth out of me”82). No wonder, then, that “softening” and castration are the threats décadence so terrifyingly poses. 110 Nietzsche’s Revolution

However, it is not just any penis that is essential to manhood. For in addition to being hard, a real man cannot be shallow—he must not be afraid of casting into the depths of all truly spiritual matters. Thus he must also be long:

To go wrong on the fundamental problem of “man and woman [Mann und Weib],” to deny the most abysmal antagonism between them and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, to dream perhaps of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and obligations—that is a typical sign of shal- lowness [or superficiality, literally flatheadedness; Flachköpfigkeit], and a thinker who has proved shallow [flach] in this dangerous place—shallow in his instinct [flach im Instinkte!]—may be considered altogether suspicious, even more—betrayed, exposed: probably he will be too “short” [“kurz”] for all fundamental problems of life, of the life yet to come, too, and incapable of attaining any depth [Tiefe]. A man [Ein Mann], on the other hand, who has depth [Tiefe], in his spirit as well as in his desires, including that depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and hardness [Härte] and easily mistaken for them, must always think about woman [das Weib] as Orien- tals do: he must conceive of woman [das Weib] as a possession, as property that can be locked, as something predestined for service and achieving her perfection in that.83

The term Kaufmann translates as “shallow” here is Flachköpfigkeit, which might mean shallow in the sense of superficial, but is also used to indicate shortness of skull, a primary demarcator of racial and sexual difference in the late nineteenth century.84 Nietzsche seems to be suggesting here that European men, in their failure to grasp the truth of the problem of man and woman, have degenerated into a lower racial category, have become short-skulled and smaller-brained (which could also synonymously mean that they have become feminized, insofar as European women and men of “lower” races were deemed scientifically analogous by such measures). And this manliness is of the crudest and most obvious sort, insofar as the “shortness” of European men could refer just as much to their penis length as to their skull length, the need for “depth” in matters concern-

ing the “problem of man and woman” becoming a racialized intellectual and sexual double-entendre. What Nietzsche is claiming, then, is that a real man is long enough to reach into the depths, and hard enough to undertake such penetration (whether in his cranium or in his desire). “Man’s disposition, however, is deep [tief]; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it.”85 His hardness steels him against pity for those who are weaker and allows him to understand the “fundamental problem” of man and woman—that it is not simply an opposition, but also a hierarchy. For if he is truly a man, he thinks about women the way “Orientals” do, who, in their alleged understanding of women as possessions, emerge here as the most masculine Diagnosis: Emasculation 111 in Nietzsche’s schema. Europeans must learn from Easterners to possess women, as those “predestined” for such ownership and who find their perfection in serving him. His hardness helps him maintain and enforce this position of domination, keeping him from unmanly or effeminate pity for those whom he subordinates. Nietzsche’s investment in manliness is thus also quite clearly his investment in European male domination. For Nietzsche is concerned not simply with the possibility that European men and women will become “similar” to or the “same as” one another, but also with the more terrifying possibility that European men will no longer be on top, that their manliness will no longer be the privileged “half” of the racialized gender binary he upholds. He therefore insists that men take the upper hand, that they not rest assured of their dominance over European women, who similarly must not simply remain mothers but preserve their rightful place of subordination to men, a properly timid position that defines woman’s essence for Nietzsche.

She unlearns her fear of man [Mann]: but the woman [das Weib] who “unlearns fear” surrenders her most womanly instincts [seine weiblichsten Instinkte]. That woman [das Weib] ventures forth when the aspect of man [Manne] that inspires fear—let us say more precisely, when the man in man [der Mann im Manne] is no longer desired and cultivated—that is fair enough, also comprehensible enough. What is harder to comprehend is that, by the same token—woman degenerates [das Weib entartet]. This is what is happening today: let us not deceive ourselves about that.86

European women’s obedience to men thus constitutes a restoration of the natural order, an overcoming of décadence. Indeed, this hierarchy is necessary to overcome modern degeneration in every realm, even (or especially?) in love:

Man [Ein Mann], when he loves a woman [ein Weib], wants precisely this love [total devotion] from her and is thus himself as far as can be from the presupposition of feminine love [weiblichen Liebe]. Supposing, however,

that there should also be men [Männer] to whom the desire for total devotion is not alien; well, then they simply are—not men [keine Männer]. A man who loves like a woman becomes like a slave; while a woman who loves like a woman becomes a more perfect woman [Ein Mann, der liebt wie ein Weib, wird damit Sklave; ein Weib aber, das liebt wie ein Weib, wird damit ein vollkommeneres Weib].87

Lending credence to the analogy between European women and men of lower races, Nietzsche characterizes the hierarchical relationship between European men and women as that of master and slave to such an extent that a man behaving like a woman becomes like her, that is, inferiorized, 112 Nietzsche’s Revolution that is, a slave. Manhood is thus equivalent to, and requires mastery from, him, even in love. Nietzsche is adamant about this, insisting it is not simply the natural order of things but also actively desired by women themselves:

Woman [Das Weib] wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, wants to be absorbed into the concept of possession, possessed. Consequently, she wants someone who takes, who does not give himself or give himself away; on the contrary, he is supposed to become richer in “himself”— through the accretion of strength, happiness, and faith given him by the woman who gives herself. Woman [Das Weib] gives herself away, man [der Mann] acquires more—I do not see how one can get around this natural opposition by means of social contracts or with the best will in the world to be just, desirable as it may be not to remind oneself constantly how harsh, terrible, enigmatic, and immoral this antagonism is.88

Here, Nietzsche makes explicit the essential opposition and hierarchy of male and female—man acquires, woman is acquired—explained through the vehicle of “nature.” Manliness, then, essentially means maintaining a position of dominance over women (or at least any woman who “presumes too much”).89 For the most part, Nietzsche simply insists that male and female bodies remain stranded on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide, a divide that exists by nature and ought to remain so, that is also and ought to remain a hierarchy comprised of the male domination of women. He calls men who support the “‘emancipation of woman’” “shallow”90 (again, flachköp- fken—superficial, flatheaded, short-skulled), and claims that “‘feminism’ [‘Femininismus’]” (whether in women or men) “will never permit entrance into [his] labyrinth of audacious insights.” But this is because Nietzsche’s truth requires “hardness as a habit,”91 and to think that a woman could “become hard!” is sheer lunacy. It is an overturning of the given categories and requirements of life itself. This is why Nietzsche can say things like, “when a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually.”92 A “scholarly” or otherwise “masculine”

woman’s instincts have gotten confused; they no longer match up with her body.93 More importantly, however, they transgress the normative hierarchy at stake in this natural opposition: “woman must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water.”94 Thus Nietzsche always concludes that “comparing man and woman [Mann und Weib] on the whole, one may say: woman [das Weib] would not have the genius for finery if she did not have an instinct for a secondary role.”95 Diagnosis: Emasculation 113 Truth as Femme Fatale

While both Nietzsche’s critique of feminism and his hope “that Europe will become more virile” [Vermännlichung]96 are clearly variants of his critique of equality, they are also indisputably his critique of the erosion of European gender hierarchy—of the male domination of women. Nietz- sche has attempted to address this problem for modernity’s sexless women by entreating their return to the natural and necessary task of childbearing and rearing. What is his plan for addressing the equally (if not more) disturbing phenomenon of modernity’s emasculated men? Our entrée into this question is Nietzsche’s famous opening query to the Preface of Beyond Good and Evil: “Supposing truth is a woman— what?” [Vorausgesetzt, dass die Warheit ein Weib ist—, wie?]. Like so many of Nietzsche’s questions, this one too is more than mere supposition; indeed, he presents truth as a woman consistently throughout all his writings, if most prominently in the 1886 works (Book V of The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil). Contrary to most of the scholarship surrounding Nietzsche’s use of this metaphor, however, its meaning—and the elaborate sexual ethics Nietzsche believes follow from it—encapsulates Nietzsche’s views about neither women nor truth so much as about men and Nietzsche himself. For unlike Nietzsche’s critique of feminism and female décadence, which is rooted (however problematically) in the body, Nietzsche’s metaphorical presentation of woman as truth makes no contact with the actuality of either women or women’s bodies. It is an exercise in idealism that gets at the reality of neither (hence “woman” singular [Weib or das Weib], used interchangeably with “the Eternal-Feminine” [Ewig-Weiblichen]); it is a conceptual gimmick Nietzsche uses to illustrate his larger, politico-philosophical assertions.97 Of course it is not simply an abstraction, since there is no such thing for Nietzsche. This metaphor, while it does not emerge in any way from women’s bodies, is rooted in the specific reality of Nietzsche’s body, and it is this body’s experience that his analysis explicates. Indeed, the metaphor of woman as truth functions largely as a screen upon which Nietzsche projects his own reality, a very personal and human, all-too-human, view of women that is undeniably representative of Nietzsche’s own anxieties, desires, and experiences with women.98 It is, like all philosophy, rooted in deep idiosyncrasy, “a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract,”99 a projection of Nietzschean affect regarding women onto the grandiose “entity” of modernity itself.100 Supposing truth is a woman offers Nietzsche a structure that defines, for him, the necessary steps European men must take in order to save modernity (i.e., themselves) from nihilism and death. Far from the robust picture of maternal health Nietzsche describes elsewhere, this version of “woman” as truth is a coquette—mysterious, playful, coy, always a bit beyond one’s reach, and difficult to win over, much less seduce.101 114 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Although this metaphor is overwhelmingly sexual in nature, it is clear from what Nietzsche says about this woman that she is never fully seduced, never “violated” in this way.102 Should penetration of truth occur, not only would her feminine modesty be offended but the beauty of life’s mysteries would be shattered. As Nietzsche says, “I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom sets limits to knowledge too.”103 To see truth fully, to experience her in all her nakedness, is always, for Nietzsche, a kind of rape, insofar as it is a violation of the proper positions and roles of truth and truth-seekers. Such an assault would not occur because truth is defenseless—on the contrary. Although Nietzsche says woman “should proceed toward him who arouses fear” in her,104 she is nevertheless not “such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to require protectors!”105 Rather, Nietzsche insists, it is she who keeps the warriors at bay: “What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won.”106 For it is precisely her unattainabil- ity and her mystery that seduce (“what bewitched him was precisely that she seemed utterly changeable and unfathomable”107), and the respectful knowingness of her seducers, who maintain an appropriate distance from her, since “the magic and the most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance.”108 Should the warrior of truth shatter this aura of mystery and attempt to go “all the way” with her, she would cease to hold any allure. The mystique, the excitement, and the challenge of the pursuit will have evaporated. Nietzsche suggests a number of conclusions that follow from his hypothesis that truth is a woman in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, including among them the possibility that “the gruesome seriousness” [schauerliche Ernst] and “clumsy obtrusiveness” [linkische Zudringlichkeit] with which modern philosophers have “approached truth so far have been awkward and inappropriate methods for winning over a wench” [mit der sie bisher auf die Wahrheit zuzugehen pflegten, ungeschickte und unschick- liche Mittel waren, um gerade ein Frauenzimmer für sich einzunehmen].109 The problem with these philosophers’ approach is that it is dogmatic— unwavering in its pursuit of truth and unyielding in its belief in her

existence. This dogmatism is perhaps disarming—Nietzsche calls it a “noble childishness” [edle Kinderei]—and its clumsiness is the result of these wooers’ inexperience.110 But in practice it means that the seducers of truth are stupid and ignorant, naïvely unaware of the possibility that truth might not exist, that she may be uninterested in his seductions, or that she may be unavailable for such activity by her very definition. Indeed, they are even unaware of their own desire for her, couching their exceedingly sexual pursuit of her in asexual terms. As Zarathustra explains, modern philosophers are “lechers,” pursuers of truth who look at her with “emasculated leers.”111 Unable to resist her and yet unable to conquer her, these dogmatists fail to realize that not only is “the naked truth, which Diagnosis: Emasculation 115 is surely not hard to come by, that the ‘disinterested’ action is an exceedingly interesting and interested action,”112 but also that it is not possible to consummate one’s desire for truth—there is no real “intercourse” with her, no such thing as “objectivity”: “Never yet has truth hung on the arm of the unconditional.”113 Seducing themselves to the chase with claims of their own “disinterestedness,” denying the lasciviousness at the root of their courtship, and blind to the impossibility of ever satisfying their desire, modern philosophers are dogmatists insofar as they are ignorant of their own ignorance—they consistently strike out, yet believe every time that they have hit a home run. Thus, “are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women?”114 There is the additional difficulty that truth is not simply a woman but in fact the female genitalia, an area of the female body Nietzsche finds particularly repugnant and terrifying. In his most mischievous statement of this proposition, Nietzsche invokes the female body as a metaphor for truth and the female genitals in particular as a metaphor for its horror, shame, and disgust:

Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything. “Is it true that God is present everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother; “I think that’s indecent”—a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is—to speak Greek—Baubô?115

Nietzsche’s metaphorics here are a different way of arguing for one of his most fundamental claims about modernity: describing truth as the female genitals is another way of saying that the will to truth ultimately culminates in nihilism: “We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn.”116 This appeal to the loathsomeness of the female body is Nietzsche’s rhetorical ploy to keep truth-seekers within the appropriate bounds of the dance of seduction, to temper their will to truth. For on this account, truth is ultimately a void, a nothingness, a nether region to which even the most adventuresome warrior ought not go: “Not to mention the ‘thing-in-itself,’ the horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians!”117 Woman is an apt metaphor for (Nietzsche’s view of) truth because of the contradictory feelings of both desire and repugnance she inspires (in him): she is simultaneously the object of pursuit, and that which her pursuers fear getting too close to. She is the reason Nietzsche gives for divesting modernity of the will to truth, for remaining “superficial—out of profundity.”118 Because “woman has so much reason for shame,” this 116 Nietzsche’s Revolution can best be “repressed and kept under control by her fear of man,”119 while he must cultivate an erotic ignorance of (what Nietzsche wants to produce as) her horror-inducing feminine form.120 Full truth—total, straightforward revelation of the darkest depths of the female body and female desire—is at best unseemly, at worst, contemptuous and disgusting. Were it to be achieved, and the need for artifice overcome, not only would this dispel the mirage of beauty and seduction that is the mark of the Eternal-Feminine (“I do think adorning herself is part of the Eternal- Feminine?”) but it would thereby dissipate man’s interest in her as well: “Let us men confess it: we honor and love precisely this art [the lie] and this instinct [for appearance and beauty] in woman—we who have a hard time and for our relief like to associate with beings under whose hands, eyes, and tender follies our seriousness, our gravity and profundity almost appear to us like folly.”121 Woman-truth would cease to be attractive if she were fully revealed. She is more desirable when adorned, covered, or veiled, since the female body is ultimately a horror, an atrocity that ruins her beauty and seductive charm.122 It is not only safer, then, but also sexier and more productive of “knowledge” for man to leave the veil intact and to leave woman upright, unviolated. “What is required for [life] is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance.”123 The specter of “feminism” looms here, too, however, threatening male as well as female instincts. For European women’s increasing political, economic, and educational opportunities have resulted in their speaking on their own behalf, not only about themselves but also about men and what women want from them. This self-revelation is the second violation of European women’s appropriate instincts—it constitutes her refusal to remain hidden and artificial; it is her own terrifying defeminization of herself. Nietzsche finds this explicitness both repugnant and shame- ful: “Woman wants to become self-reliant—and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about ‘woman as such’: this is one of the worst developments of the general uglification of Europe . . . Even now female voices are heard which—holy Aristophanes!—are frightening:

they threaten with medical explicitness what woman wants from man, first and last. Is it not in the worst taste when woman sets about becoming scientific that way? So far enlightenment of this sort was fortunately man’s affair, man’s lot—we remained ‘among ourselves’ in this.”124 Ultimately, a full revelation or accounting of woman contradicts her essence as woman: “But she does not want truth: what is truth to woman? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty.”125 By insisting on the inherent duplicity of woman—a seductive image of truth under which lies nothing at all, no truth except unspeak- able horror—Nietzsche seeks to redefine the pursuit of knowledge, casting Diagnosis: Emasculation 117 woman-truth as an impenetrable darkness. Nothing can be gained from intercourse with such a woman—it would drown one in nothingness, submerged and overwhelmed within the loathsome void. Nietzsche therefore proposes an erotic and dominant, yet abstinent, pursuit of truth for the revirilization of modernity and the restoration of properly male instincts. As Zarathustra declares, “Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior.”126 Projecting his idealized notions of manliness onto woman and naming them as her desires, Nietzsche here lists some of the attributes required for manhood. We have already seen its necessary violence—male domination is part and parcel of the definition of what is being eroded in modern formations of gender. But manhood is also brave and unconcerned. Masculinity, then, also requires learning the appropriately bold yet detached way of looking at and responding to truth: “Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophi- cally speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to ‘will’—to be able to suspend decision.”127 Unable to resist her charms, a dogmatist is always vulnerable and subordinate to truth, desperately awaiting the opportunity to consummate his lust. His “objectivity” causes him to “lie servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into [sich-hinein-Stürzen], others and other things.” As we know, such promiscuous weakness of the will exemplifies décadence; Nietzsche insists this “inability to resist a stimulus” is “in many cases” a “pathology, decline [Niedergang], a symptom of exhaustion.”128 By contrast, Nietz- sche claims that strength and vitality are constituted by the ability not to will: “A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand.”129 The “pursuer” of truth in this scenario, then, if he is truly manly/healthy, is not really a pursuer at all. As we notice in Nietzsche’s one-sentence description of the type of warrior woman desires, it is she who is the active party—she wants “us” 130

[so will uns die Weisheit]. He is rather aloof, passive, detached. In his calm self-possession, he lets truth approach him, while he withholds judgment and appraises her warily, from a distance, without physical contact. Indeed, the never-ending sexual tension of the chase must always remain a detached appraisal and never become a capture, much less an embrace: the pursuit of truth is a dance that she herself performs for his pleasure, resisting the graphic barbarity of full disclosure, while he must avoid the dogmatism of either outright lying or refusing to look.131 Thus in order to restore virility and hardness—that is, health—back to its rightful owners, so that life is no longer threatened by this dogmatic nihilism, Nietzsche proposes a different kind of masculinity, albeit one 118 Nietzsche’s Revolution that maintains precisely this willful ignorance and celibacy. As Nietzsche explains, concluding a passage already quoted regarding men’s and women’s ways of loving,

Faithfulness is accordingly included in woman’s love; it follows from the definition. In man, it can easily develop in the wake of his love, perhaps as gratitude or as an idiosyncratic taste and so-called elective affinity; but it is not an essential element of his love—so definitely not that one might almost speak with some justification of a natural counterplay of love and faithfulness in man. For his love consists of wanting to have and not renun- ciation and giving away; but wanting to have always comes to an end with having.132

A man’s desire “consists of wanting to have,” yet “wanting to have always comes to an end with having.” This is why man cannot be faithful to woman and why he would not be faithful to her even if he could satisfy his desire for her by possessing her. For while the unsuspecting reader might think that only sexual conquest would be the mark of real virility, Nietzsche suggests rather the opposite—namely, that sexual abstinence is the activity of the real man/philosopher. Not only is intercourse with truth impossible, as we have seen, but as we also know, it is not actually desirable. It is rather a revolting encounter with nothingness, a subsump- tion by a horrifying abyss. “‘The human being under the skin’ is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love.”133 And underneath her skin, woman is nothing at all: “Women are considered profound. Why? Because one never fathoms their depths. Women aren’t even shallow.”134 This is why real men/philosophers/creators are hard warriors but not conquerors. For they are essentially celibate, and not simply with regard to women (who take up the majority of Nietzsche’s discussions of sexuality) but with regard to anyone at all, even (presumably) themselves. Satis- faction of desire necessarily extinguishes it, dissipating the hardness that is the mark of virility. And manly desire is simply that—desire. Gratifying

it thus becomes, in Nietzsche’s account, a deflation of manliness, a softening, a verweichlichung. This worship of the erect penis as both symbol and embodiment of all manhood and health has surprisingly Platonic resonances in its account of desire. Agreeing with Socrates that desire is fundamentally a lack, Nietzsche suggests that the telos of desire—possession of its object or satisfaction of its aim—contradicts its essence—absence and longing. Indeed, Nietzsche insists, it is the lack itself that is pleasurable—the pursuit of truth is in fact more pleasurable than the possession of her (which is in fact quite awful). If this gratifying character of lack and insistence on pleasurable self- denial sound eerily reminiscent of the ascetic ideal, that is because they Diagnosis: Emasculation 119 are the ascetic ideal (for, of course, it is only a short distance from Plato to asceticism). Nietzsche admits as much:

As long as there are philosophers on earth, and wherever there have been philosophers (from India to England, to take the antithetical poles of philosophical endowment), there unquestionably exists a peculiar philosophers’ irritation at and rancor against sensuality [Sinnlichkeit] . . . There also exists a peculiar philosophers’ prejudice and affection in favor of the whole ascetic ideal; one should not overlook that. Both, to repeat, pertain to the type; if both are lacking in a philosopher, then—one can be sure of it—he is always only a “so-called” philosopher.135

A real philosopher, Nietzsche explains, abhors any obstruction to his will to power—like all animals, he, too, seeks to expend and squander his vital energies (in India, apparently, lie the most well “endowed” philosophers of this kind). And “marriage,” Nietzsche says, is one such obstruction, “a hindrance and calamity on his path to the optimum.” Nietzsche presumably means bad marriages, since “every good marriage, every genuine love affair, transcends” the “antithesis between chastity and sensuality.”136 For Nietzsche, marriage is classed among the commotions and interruptions of everyday life, which he claims philosophers seek to avoid at all costs. They instead choose “freedom from compulsion, disturbance, noise, from tasks, duties, worries” through their adoption of the “three great slogans of the ascetic ideal”: “poverty, humility, chastity.”137 The ascetic ideal, then, is not simply the guise under which philosophy had to appear for thousands of years (as Nietzsche later rationalizingly insists138), but rather is happily adopted by philosophers as “an optimum condition for the highest and boldest spirituality.”139 Like the noise of traffic or the tedium of housework, sexual intercourse only limits, distracts, and derails the philosopher from his work. If a philosopher must be married at all, then (and really, the “married philosopher belongs in comedy”140), only a tanta- lizingly chaste marriage can facilitate a true philosopher’s creation.141 Nietzsche presents himself, here as elsewhere, as the one who knows: “May I here venture the surmise that I know women? That is part of 142 my Dionysian dowry.” Nietzsche is the only philosopher to have recognized the necessary, masculine prerequisites and appropriate means of wooing a woman—he is thus the only real philosophos, or lover of truth. As he autobiographically declares, “Perhaps I am the first psychologist of the eternally feminine. They all love me—an old story—not count- ing abortive [verunglückten] females, the ‘emancipated’ who lack the stuff for children.”143 In Zarathustra, he even brags that “I have seen truth naked—verily, barefoot up to the throat.”144 Nietzsche’s knowingness means either that his seduction is the only one that does not attempt penetration—that is, he respects his own entreaties not to go “all the way” with her—or else that his seduction of truth is the only appropriate kind 120 Nietzsche’s Revolution of seduction, rendering his intercourse with her the only intercourse that is not rape. Yet the former is more plausible than the latter, and not simply because Nietzsche’s empty bragging sounds so familiarly dogmatic, or even because we as readers are likely suspicious of Nietzsche’s real-life suavité in the bedroom. Indeed, although Nietzsche claims his “Diony- sian dowry” is knowledge of the women who love him, the origin of this knowledge is, as he himself insists, psychological, not sexual. This knowledge is what allows him (properly) to resist all entanglement with them. Despite the fact that they “all love” him (excluding the childless ones, of course), Nietzsche does not fall prey to their seductions, for what he knows about women’s psychology is that their love entails his destruction: “I am not willing to be torn to pieces: the perfect woman tears to pieces when she loves.—I know these charming maenads.—Ah, what a dangerous, creeping, subterranean little beast of prey she is!”145 Nietzsche’s sexual withholding from women, then, is indeed his resistance to rape, but not a rape in the more familiar sense of that word, for it is not she who is in jeopardy in this sexual encounter. Rather, it is man who faces destruction and death in the very encounter of sexual penetration and intercourse. The unnatural violation of seeing her mysteries fully revealed is an attack on the integrity and wholeness of the male body, a tearing apart and destruction of truth’s pursuer. As Nietzsche says, “the will to truth, to ‘truth at any price,’ this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound.” Only the naïveté of the young could drive such “madness,” could induce a desire for truth “at any price,” a price Nietzsche is too experienced, burned, and profound to be interested in paying (anymore?). Backing away from the “paroxysms of intoxication” that define the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy, the mark of manly virtue is, once again, the ability to withhold, to stand firm against the temptation of those “maenads,” which, if possessed, would threaten man’s very destruction.146 Nietzsche admits it is this threat of destruction that he finds exciting. “Would a woman be able to hold us (or, as they say, ‘enthrall’ us) if we did

not consider it quite possible that under certain circumstances she could wield a dagger (any kind of dagger) against us?”147 Here, momentarily, Nietzsche admits the enticing possibility of gender role confusion, imag- ining a woman with a “dagger,” a fantasy that has both sexual and political implications. But it is a fantasy that can never be fulfilled. For the terrible danger of man’s desire is that, if consummated, it will induce either nothingness (full disclosure of the female genitalia) or death (because truly possessing a woman will quite literally tear you to pieces—this is what her dagger portends). In either case, man simply cannot survive intercourse with woman-truth. Thus, “man is a coward, confronted with the Eternal-Feminine.”148 Although “a real man wants two things: danger and Diagnosis: Emasculation 121 play,”149 women are ultimately too dangerous for him even to play with. And this is not simply because “woman is essentially unpeaceful,”150 nor even because her sexual explicitness and higher education are castrating, but rather because the Eternal-Feminine is truly a femme fatale: “[H]er nature, which is more ‘natural’ than man’s,” is “the genuine, cunning sup- pleness of a beast of prey, the tiger’s claw under the glove.” Faced with “the naïveté of her egoism, her uneducability and inner wildness, the incom- prehensibility, scope, and movement of her desires and virtues—,” man is as helpless before her as he is with tragedy, each of which “tears to pieces as it enchants.”151 The real Nietzschean man must cultivate his ability to withstand such temptation, conserving his energies and repressing his desire. “That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts.”152 For woman, figured as truth (and not only when figured as truth) is death, “a touch of morbidezza in fair flesh.”153 Nietzsche’s repeated demand for masculine superficiality, and his belief that women do not need protecting so much as men need protecting from them, suggests just how threatened he felt by women and by his own sexual desire for them. For “is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a woman in heat?”154 While he suggests that the natural order consists of women fearing men, it seems rather that it is Nietzsche who is afraid of women. Both powerfully drawn to them and yet horribly afraid (of women? of women revealed? of his uncontrollable desire for women? of his uncontrollable desire for women revealed?), Nietzsche took solace in his belief in the loathsomeness of the female body. Indeed, the very suggestion that the one place a philosopher should not go is the female genitals is precisely the kind of contentless bragging in which dogmatists engage. Taking up the position of knower and gate- keeper of the most hidden truth of the universe, Nietzsche’s warnings to others forbidding entrance to this alleged Bermuda triangle suggest Nietzsche’s own prickliness and ignorance of that which he is safeguard- ing from intrusion. Perhaps Nietzsche, too, is afraid of the truth? All this raises the question, of course, if it is intercourse with woman-

truth, or Nietzsche’s trumped-up anxieties and prejudices about women that lead to nihilism. For the necessary consequence of defining décadence in terms of castration and feminization is that femaleness itself becomes the disease. If healthy bodies are defined as strong, hard, and male, then unhealthy bodies are weak, soft, and female, and womanhood is itself a disorder, a perversion of nature that must be eliminated or overcome. There is some textual basis for this conclusion, for sometimes Nietzsche suggests that ressentiment is not simply definitive of feminism—or of women who are not turned out well—but of “woman” per se. This deceit- ful weakness is her only power: “The strength of the weak.—All women are subtle in exaggerating their weaknesses; they are inventive when it 122 Nietzsche’s Revolution comes to weaknesses in order to appear as utterly fragile ornaments who are hurt even by a speck of dust. Their existence is supposed to make men feel clumsy, and guilty on that score. Thus they defend themselves against the strong and ‘the law of the jungle.’”155 Here, Nietzsche reiterates the identification of weakness with women, strength with men, and says that women’s heightening of their frailty is the means by which they instill guilt in men about their natural domination. This lie is women’s power. It exemplifies the logic of slave morality. As Nietzsche notes in the Genealogy, “sick women” are “especially” good at applying this logic: “The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy—where can it not be discovered, this will to power of the weakest! The sick woman especially—no one can excel her in the wiles to dominate, oppress, and tyrannize. The sick woman spares nothing, living or dead; she will dig up the most deeply buried things (the Bogos say: ‘woman is a hyena’).”156 Ressentiment, that weapon of the weak, is therefore part and parcel of femininity, and is only heightened in the case of the sick woman (if such a locution is not redundant). And might we women—even we feminists—secretly know this truth about ourselves? “Women themselves always still have in the background of all personal vanity an impersonal contempt—for ‘woman’—.”157 (The “Bogos” are apparently ahead of the Europeans on this one.) The threat décadence poses, then, is not simply a softening and feminization of male bodies—a castration—but the very destruction of manhood altogether, for femininity itself is the disease. Although Nietzsche bemoans the specific problem of women’s desexualization, and argues that décadence has unsavory and perverse effects on men and women alike, nevertheless, masculinity is never explicated as itself an illness. Even while men in modernity are threatened by feminization and castration, the opposite is never the case with women—never once are they threatened by the specter of becoming more manly or masculine (unless it is European masculinity to which they have been subjected). But masculinization, as Nietzsche understands it—how could that be problematic? The danger for European women is that they will become defeminized,

unsexed, no sex at all—it would be an “improvement” in the true sense of that term if European women were to become more like men, just as it would be an improvement for European men—they, too, need to become more manly. But this is because, as noted already, Nietzsche maintains his deep investment in masculinity—in the particular way he understands it—as the measure of all value, and in European male domination as the natural, racialized gender order. Although he never ceases bewailing the modern contagion of femininity, Nietzsche does not talk about the fearful masculinization of women because he does not, and cannot, admit such a possibility. She cannot become a “higher man,” or really any man at Diagnosis: Emasculation 123 all—there simply is no room for an actual woman with a “dagger,” for a woman who would be more than metaphorically on top (and even this is too terrifying). Thus, the only alternative to a remasculinization of modernity that Nietzsche can foresee is death, because even death is better than that which may be its only hope for a future—the reign of the castrating woman, the woman with the dagger. For Nietzsche, décadence’s threat to modernity—feminization—is ultimately its threat of the elimination of men. Rather than countenance the possibility that women—or even a caste of castrated men—might take over the world, Nietzsche laments the horrifying elimination of manhood as the tragedy of the dissolution of all hope and health in European modernity.

Nietzsche as John Wayne

It remains an open question whether Nietzsche’s profoundly personal chastity imperative is itself a kind of denial of masculine instincts in the same way that he argues that feminism denies female instincts. If it is unacceptable for female bodies not to fulfill their capacities as child- bearers, how is it then unproblematic for sufficiently “hard” and “long” male bodies not to climax, much less engage in intercourse? Even here, where we would expect Nietzsche’s requisites of length and depth to lead to something other than an abstinence-only policy for true philosophers’ relations with truth, Nietzsche nevertheless maintains his insistence on celibacy: “All people who have depth find happiness in being for once like flying fish, playing on the peaks of waves; what they consider best in things is that they have a surface: their skin-coveredness.”158 Wedded to an all-or-nothing view of sexual coupling and too afraid of any of its possible outcomes (rejection, impotence, or, perhaps worst of all, intercourse and orgasm), Nietzsche can recommend neither pleasurable yet uncommitted intercourse with truth—a perhaps more consistently Nietzschean perspectival view—nor can he simply give up the chase altogether. This may be because Nietzsche cannot admit his own “failure” of masculinity, his own castration. For unlike the real man he so idealizes and longs to be, would not Nietzsche himself be the most faithful lover of truth? Why else would he need so often to remind “us” of the horrible, debilitating nature of any encounter with “woman”? Like the dogmatists of modernity, Nietzsche, too, suffers from the will to truth that seeks enduring possession, that cannot be content with the paradox of having/ not having, thus defensively recommending having nothing at all. But this paradox of having/not having does not exist because, as Nietzsche insists, every true love affair combines sensuality with chastity. It exists rather because truth herself is always unfaithful. Her charms are neither hidden nor singular; as Nietzsche himself argues, they are in fact widely available, revealed to many suitors, and never the same, even when shared 124 Nietzsche’s Revolution over and over again with the same partner: “There would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and clumsiness of some philosophers, one wanted to abolish the ‘apparent world’ altogether—well, supposing you could do that, at least nothing would be left of your ‘truth’ either.”159 And, indeed, this is because truth herself is not one—she simply cannot remain the singular, “eternal” feminine he reactively idealizes. She is rather a multiplicity who is never the same, about whom “the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe” her, “the more complete will our ‘concept’ of” her, “our ‘objectivity,’ be.” Perhaps this “objectivity” is more “manly”? As Nietzsche himself asks, what would restricting our vision to anything less than this multiplicity “mean but to castrate [castriren] the intellect?”160 Moreover, there is no reason to think that truth in her multiplicity must remain either European or heterosexual or traditionally feminine, or that philosophers are only ever “real” (European) men, as Nietzsche insists. Indeed, a promiscuous, gender-ambiguous, miscegenacious polyamory of truth and truth-seekers (akin to the “rendezvous of questions and question marks” that begins Beyond Good and Evil, section 1) seems a much more appropriate sexual metaphor for Nietzsche’s perspectivist attack on the idealism of Western philosophy.161 I hope it is by now an understatement to point out that Nietzsche, the great immoralist, nevertheless retains a profound moralism of his own. He admits as much: “Probably, we, too, are still ‘too good’ for our job; probably, we, too, are still victims of and prey to this moralized contemporary taste and ill with it, however much we think we despise it—probably it infects even us.”162 Yet Nietzsche’s general self-awareness on this issue does not efface his obsessive insistence on the value of masculinity, or his refusal to countenance any possible revaluation of gendered bodies, norms, or roles as the potentially revitalizing treatment for modern décadence. Taking his identification of masculinity with health seriously, we can read this valorization of manliness as Nietzsche’s insistence on his own superabundant health, a ploy we encountered earlier in his diagnostic doctoring in Chapter 2. That is, while Nietzsche often admits to a lack

of complete healthiness, conceding spells of sickness or even bouts of out- and-out décadence, nevertheless, these characterizations are always only partial insofar as Nietzsche insists that he is supremely healthy at bottom. But in the context of the analysis in this chapter, this means that Nietzsche is claiming that he is, unlike his weak and contemptible fellows, still a real man, perhaps the only real man left in the West. Exempting himself as a special case from his otherwise total critique of modernity is Nietzsche’s moralism more generally; it takes the specific form, in his conservative guise, of masculine self-congratulation. Indeed, this is the only means at his disposal that allows him to offer a diagnosis at all, much less treat our afflictions. Yet this is the meaning of any moralism—self-exemption and Diagnosis: Emasculation 125 self-preference used as leverage for enforcing an autobiographical valu- ational standard on everybody else: “Definition of morality: Morality—the idiosyncrasy of décadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life—successfully.”163 This is why Nietzsche can so comfortably retreat into a self-gratifying solitude for security when it comes to gender, reassured by what he calls “my truths”:

At the bottom of us, really deep down,” there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. Whenever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable “this is I”; about man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot relearn but only finish learning—only discover ultimately how this is “settled in him.” At times we find certain solutions of problems that inspire strong faith in us; some call them henceforth their “convictions.” Later—we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, sign-posts to the problem we are—rather, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fatum, to what is unteachable very “deep down.”164

Viewed from this perspective, of course, Nietzsche’s philosophy looks like one big paean to masturbation.165 Taking a page from Nietzsche’s own mode of interpretation, we might suggest that his insistence on “opposite values” is symptomatic of his own declining life. Just like the metaphysicians, he, too, clings to a determination of value—in this case, European manliness—that must be definitively separated and protected from its many “opposites.” Without this separation, the distinction between strength and weakness, sickness and health, cannot be insisted upon, and Nietzsche’s judgment against modernity cannot be definitively rendered. There is then no reason or justification for revolution. Nietzsche’s clinging to this standard of value therefore betrays his investment in truth, in his need for a stable foundation for his very critique of stable foundations. His determination of that standard of value as masculinity reveals a personal investment in his own manhood, an innermost fear of the emasculation of his own creative strength, force, and power. It is perhaps the agony of accepting his own perspectivist view that causes Nietzsche to retreat into a defensive sexual moralism that seeks to discipline truth and dominate women. It may be a testament to the psychic scars left by Nietzsche’s few, brief encounters with women and his unsuccessful love affair with Lou Salomé. Who knows? A definitive such accounting is impossible, anyway. While I follow and recommend Nietzsche’s own symptomological and psychological method of reading, it can no more render the “truth” of Nietzsche’s autobiography any more than a traditional philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche could uncover the “true” authorial intentions behind his texts. No matter. For Nietzsche always insists that “in the end,” truth “is a woman: she should not be 126 Nietzsche’s Revolution violated.”166 She must remain on bottom, at a distance, covered up. In Nietzsche’s own terms, we might say that Nietzsche fetishized masculinity because he was not man enough to let it go. “And does not everything that we take seriously betray us? It always shows what has weight for us and what does not.”167

C HAPTER 5

Treatment: Redemption

The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with a future (my term for this is, as is known, “Dionysian”); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them. The Gay Science §370

Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms—and some wretched loafer of a moralist comments: “No! Man ought to be different.” He even knows what man should be like, this wretched bigot and prig: he paints himself on the wall and comments, “Ecce homo!” Twilight of the Idols Morality as Anti-Nature §6

As I hope is now clear, Nietzsche’s dichotomous essentalizations of the body can be understood as symptoms of his own décadence, indicators of his membership in the time and place he distastefully dismisses as “modernity.”1 Because Nietzsche found modern weakness and emasculation too horrifying to own and affirm, he could not value or affirm the very age that gave him life, and to which he is necessarily indebted as the enabling condition of his own existence. That Nietzsche realizes he himself is infected, that décadence is inescapable even for him, suggests that he wants us to come away from his texts with precisely this lesson. As he says, “It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are extricating themselves from décadence when they merely wage war against it. Extrication lies beyond their strength: what they choose as a means, as salvation, is itself but another expression of décadence; they change its expression, but they do not get rid of décadence itself.”2 Although the subject here is Socrates, not Nietzsche, surely the implied reference to himself is clear enough. As we have already seen, Nietzsche offers sufficient self-criticism regarding his own décadence elsewhere that it is not a complete surprise to conclude that Nietzsche is himself sick. Indeed, such passages suggest that Nietzsche wants us to come away from his texts with precisely this reading. 128 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Although Nietzsche is content to offer self-criticism and analysis regarding his own implication in décadence, admitting his inability to affirm decay, and even valorizing the possibility of such an accomplishment in the form of “the Dionysian god and man” who “cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition [Zersetzung], and negation,”3 he displays no such self-awareness with regard to his views of masculinity and sexual difference. He does not present any analogous possibility for such affirmation of décadence when it is specified as emasculation, nor does Nietzsche think gender itself is subject to the radical decay or transformation that he otherwise argues characterizes all of life. Indeed, Nietzsche refuses to countenance any possibility that the desexing of women or the feminization of men in modernity can be anything except a calamity. This refusal to subject gender to the revaluation necessary to induce modernity’s revitalization constitutes the undoing of Nietzsche’s revolutionary strategies. His gag reflex in response to the stench of sickness and decay means he is caught up in the cycle of bodily loathing and fear of becoming that he otherwise castigates in Christianity. His refusal to cat- egorize his essentialist attitude toward the problem of “man and woman” as something teachable, as something subject to learning, change, growth, or overcoming, strands him in the status quo of modernity, defensively afraid of change in the area thus revealed as most personally significant to him—his masculinity. This very personal and human, all-too-human attachment explains both why Nietzsche uses gender to characterize the fundamental condition of modernity and why his view of gender is not subject to change. If Nietzsche were to accept the revolutions in gender that modern décadence itself brings about, it would mean that they are not symptoms of disease or harbingers of disaster but rather part of the infinite becoming that characterizes all life. Such a view renders Nietzsche’s diagnosis meaningless and deflates his revolutionary demand. Whereas the radical Nietzsche proposes a revolution of will to power as the only antidote to modernity’s widespread weakness and reactivity, the

reactive and conservative Nietzsche deploys any number of problematically moralizing remedies for the disconcerting spectacle of modernity’s emasculation. The main one is his recommendation of a bizarrely solitary and virile practice of masculine self-birthing. This Dionysian, celibate, and exclusively male activity offers the only saving grace to those few men hard enough to undertake it. In his (even) less shining moments, Nietz- sche longs for and entreats the arrival of the Übermensch, an unspecified enigmatic figure who stands as the redeemer of humanity’s otherwise irredeemable illness. This occurs primarily in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but Nietzsche’s analogous longings for the philosophers of the future and even his similar proposal for self-redemption through self-birth render Treatment: Redemption 129 his fixation on redemptive figures a reliable theme of his writing (and Zarathustra itself is, as we will see, in no way free of disgraceful displays of décadent longing). Finally, there is eternal recurrence. It has often been suggested that Nietzsche’s vision of the eternal recurrence—loving the world in its totality, wanting the infinite repetition of its events and existence for all of eternity—is the method for undertaking affirmation, Nietzsche’s solution to the problems of paradox, disorder, and decay. But eternal recurrence—at least as Nietzsche presents it in his published writings—only ever functions as a coping mechanism for someone so bogged down by ressentiment that he can perceive nothing else about the world except the place of himself and his own agony within it. Strik- ingly, each of these redemptive options—masculine self-birth, a redemptive Übermensch, and the eternal recurrence—comes out the same in the end, for each is a fundamentally décadent and resentful reaction against the complexity, change, and becoming of life and embodiment. They are variations on the same solitary, masculinist dream of autonomous self- redemption, and as such, they bespeak the declining life of the philosopher who articulates and advocates them.4 This décadent Nietzsche insists on the definitive difference between strength and weakness, ascending life and descending life, man and woman. If modernity is to be salvaged and life preserved (the clinging to mere “preservation” being, of course, a hallmark of descending life), Nietzsche argues that these differences must be restored and maintained. The only alternative to this conservation of boundaries is nihilism—the impossibility of all distinctions, judgments, truth—in other words, death. It is the goal of this chapter to flesh out these different conservative and redemptive longings at work in Nietzsche’s texts, primarily through a close reading of significant passages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this text, to which Nietzsche repeatedly refers as both his greatest work and his highest gift to humanity, we can read Zarathustra as himself the Übermensch, or simply as the teacher and proclaimer of this Übermensch, the one who readies the ground for his arrival. In either case, however, Zarathustra himself is just as much in need of redemption as Nietzsche,

despite his attempt to redeploy the very meaning of redemption so that it may be channeled into a healthier and more revolutionary outlet. Zara- thustra’s actual discourse on redemption, conducted in the presence of an audience of cripples, reveals the ways in which Zarathustra himself has been disfigured by the resentment and loathing of modernity, thereby undermining his self-serving distinction from them. His relationship with the higher men and the equivocal ending of the fourth part—wherein the higher men are rejected even in their convalescence and Zarathustra remains alone awaiting the speculative arrival of his “children”—suggests that the redemption Zarathustra promises is only theoretical, a nebulous hope for an as yet unapproachable future. His “courtship” of life and 130 Nietzsche’s Revolution the seemingly affirmative nuptial rites that conclude the third part make clear that woman is in fact inessential to Zarathustra’s task, setting up the book’s explicit endorsement of an autonomous self-birth as the only real accomplishment of a truly hard man. And, finally, the ressentiment- suffused character of the eternal recurrence as presented in this text reveals Zarathustra’s inability to overcome nausea, despite what any character in that book may otherwise claim. Unable to accept the conditions of the present that make a return to nobility impossible and too overcome with contempt for “the mob,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra (and indeed the rest of Nietzsche’s corpus) proposes a number of redemptive options characterized by a resentful and self- aggrandizing superiority and driven by an eagerness to flee the present conditions that make his very existence and revolutionary imperatives possible. It is this paradoxical character of the present—both contemptible and yet the condition of his own existence—that will over and over again prove to be both Zarathustra’s and Nietzsche’s agony, the contradiction that justifies the escapist and décadent outlet of redemption. But one thing is clear: it is Nietzsche’s own entrenched décadence—and not “modernity’s,” as he insists—that issues in the death certificate for the West on which the good doctor so enthusiastically puts his stamp. That Nietzsche himself is the one who teaches us that stasis means death does not prevent him from performing precisely this pitfall for us in his advocacy of a restoration of wholeness and health to the modern age.

Longing for Wholeness

As we saw in Chapters 2 and 4, Nietzsche is very concerned about the blurring of boundaries and the mixture of disparate elements. This takes specific shape in his critique of décadence as emasculation, wherein the distinctions between strong and weak, healthy and sick, and male and female were of primary importance for maintaining the natural order and recovering the originary health and hardness of European men. As with so many demands for categorical coherence, Nietzsche’s also takes its cues from a nostalgia for previous eras in which these distinctions were supposedly not only basic and obvious but also integral to social and cultural organization. Indeed, Nietzsche longs explicitly for the wholeness and integrity that preexisted modern emasculation: “In the beginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of the soul—they were more whole [ganzeren] human beings (which also means, at every level, ‘more whole [ganzeren] beasts’).”5 Free from the physiological contradictions of consciousness and responsibility, these “noble castes” were strong in “both” body and soul, which were not different because Treatment: Redemption 131 their bodies were whole—without conflict, sickness, or internal dissen- sion. For Nietzsche, such nobility has surfaced in various other moments or personages in world history: for example, in classical Rome (he calls the Romans themselves “the strong and noble, and nobody stronger and nobler has yet existed on earth or even been dreamed of . . . ”), during the European Renaissance, and in the person of Napoleon, whom Nietzsche calls “the noble ideal as such made flesh,” a “synthesis of Unmensch and Übermensch.”6 There is also, of course, Goethe, whom Nietzsche cites as the closest approximation of wholeness that modernity has yet produced: “What he wanted was totality [Totalität]; he fought the mutual extrane- ousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will . . . he disciplined himself to wholeness [Ganzheit], he created himself.”7 As Nietzsche explains, Goethe is “the last German for whom I feel any reverence,”8 no small tribute from this otherwise hardened detractor of the German people. That wholeness is essential to Goethe’s greatness becomes clear when we contrast Nietz- sche’s view of Goethe with, for example, his indulgent and contemptuous description of Shakespeare:

It is no different with Shakespeare, that amazing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of tastes that would have all but killed an ancient Athenian of Aeschylus’ circle with laughter or irritation. But we—accept precisely this wild abundance of colors, this medley of what is most delicate, coarsest, most artificial, with a secret familiarity and cordiality; we enjoy him as a superb subtlety of art saved up especially for us; and the disgusting odors and the proximity of the English rabble in which Shakespeare’s art and taste live we do not allow to disturb us any more than on the Chiaja of Naples, where we go our way with all our sense awake, enchanted and willing, though the sewer smells of the plebeian quarters fill the air.9

This motleyness and admixture of every kind of element (in particular, the racial mixing of Mediterranean, “Moorish,” and Saxon) bespeaks the refusal to recognize distinctions and order of rank—its sewer smell bespeaks its status as décadent. This “anything goes” mishmash style of modernity, wherein “our instincts now run back everywhere” and “we

ourselves are a kind of chaos” destroys the original integrity of the body and is the very foundation of décadence, which Nietzsche, in one place, significantly defines as a condition in which “the whole is no longer a whole.” Although he specifies that this defines “literary” décadence in particular, he immediately notes its similarity to and analogic relationship with décadence per se:

What is the sign of every literary décadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole [Ganzen]. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, 132 Nietzsche’s Revolution

the page gains life at the expense of the whole [des Ganzen]—the whole is no longer a whole [das Ganze ist kein Ganzes mehr]. But this is the simile of every style of décadence: every time, the anarchy of the atoms, disgregation of the will, “freedom of the individual,” to use moral terms—expanded into a political theory, “equal rights for all.” Life, equal vitality, the vibra- tion and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms; the rest, poor in life. Everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos: both more and more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of organization. The whole [Das Ganze] no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, and artifact.10

The only way out of this dilemma, unfortunately, is further into the muck and decay, for Nietzsche rejects the possibility that modernity could recover the nobility and wholeness of these previous men and eras. He makes this pronunciation on the basis of his doctorly credentials: “A reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that.”11 Modern men simply could not survive the conditions of previous ages because the harder conditions of life necessitated stronger, healthier constitutions than those of today:

We modern men, very tender [zart], very easily hurt, and offering as well as receiving consideration a hundredfold, really have the conceit that this tender humanity [zärtliche Menschlichkeit] which we represent, this attained unanimity in sympathetic regard, in readiness to help, in mutual trust, represents positive progress and that in this respect we are far above the men of the Renaissance. But that is how every age thinks, how it must think. What is certain is that we may not place ourselves in Renaissance conditions, not even by an act of thought: our nerves would not endure that reality, not to speak of our muscles. But such incapacity does not prove progress, only another, later constitution, one which is weaker, frailer [zärtlichere], more easily hurt, and which necessarily generates a morality rich in consideration.12

Note that Nietzsche does not deny the possibility of a return to past

nobility out of a commitment to human progress or from any pride in the advances of Western civilization. Rather, it is with a deep sigh that he concludes we are incapable of such nobility anymore. These past civilizations were stronger, and in fact produced higher types than the contemptible and considerate men of modernity. That is to their credit, all the more to our shame. Indeed, Nietzsche continues by noting that “we moderns, with our thickly padded humanity, which at all costs wants to avoid bumping into a stone, would have provided Cesare Borgia’s contemporaries with a comedy at which they could have laughed themselves to death.”13 Nietzsche’s radical critique of modern décadence thus subtly transforms into a fatalism of sickness and decline in his later works, the doctorly and Treatment: Redemption 133 diagnostic parallel to the discourse of gender and sexual essentialism.14 The decay of our bodies become governing instinct and bequeathed to us by history is irrefutable—not only is modernity sick, but there is no other alternative than for us to get sicker and sicker until we simply wear ourselves out: “Nothing avails: one must go forward—step by step further into décadence (that is my definition of modern ‘progress’). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration [Entartung], gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.”15 Rarely in the later works does Nietzsche anticipate the philosophers of the future as he does so pointedly in Beyond Good and Evil, hinting at those mysterious figures who will be equipped for new, greater, harder tasks. Instead, our physiological hodgepodge of contradictory instincts renders recovery impossible, pushing us ever further into the quicksand of décadence, our bodily constitution becoming an inevitable teleology of decline and death. There is thus no other option than that décadence simply use modern humanity up. This follows by definition, since Nietzsche has “already defined what is modern as physiological self-contradiction.”16 And what else is an emasculated man if not a physiological contradiction? Indeed, by the end of his productive career, Nietzsche resignedly concludes that this self-contradiction can have no other outcome, no other conclusion, than total, final, complete dissolution, for “one anti-natural step virtually compels the second.”17 The word “modernity” is synonymous with the word “fatality”—to say we are modern is simply to say that we are doomed creatures. We cannot overcome this condition, for “one no longer has the presupposition in one’s body.” Our bodily inheritance is instead “the fatality of being an expression of the physiological contradiction—of being modern.”18 As such, Nietzsche concludes that décadence is a condition that not only admits of no cure but is in fact a terrible, terminal disaster: “In times like these, abandonment to one’s instincts is one calamity more. Our instincts contradict, disturb, destroy each other.”19 Décadence is modernity’s fate; we are a breed of animal that has been born only in order to perish. Nietzsche’s despair here is dreadful, to say the least. Modernity can

only head toward exhausting itself, for Nietzsche’s essentialism of strength and weakness, transformed into a fatalism regarding sickness and health, has determined that there is no hope for recovery. Thus, once one has become infected—castrated—there is no hope. “This young man turns pale early and wilts; his friends say: that is due to this or that disease. I say: that he became diseased, that he did not resist the disease, was already the effect of an impoverished life or hereditary exhaustion.”20 Being born into a weak age virtually determines that one is destined to contract the décadence from which it suffers. And this feared impossibility of a healthy outcome for humanity’s transition, coupled with the revolting aspects of its nihilistic disease, often become too much for Nietzsche to bear. As he 134 Nietzsche’s Revolution says, “there are days when I am afflicted with a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man. And to leave no doubt concerning what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am fatefully contemporaneous. The man of today—I suffocate from his unclean breath.”21 But Nietzsche’s lamentations and longings put him in a difficult position. On the one hand, the conclusion of his reflections on modern déca- dence suggests that there is no hope for a species beset by decay. We are either doomed weaklings who must perish or great figures destined to redeem mankind. And ultimately, these latter do not exist anymore, since “those who are half-and-half spoil all that is whole.”22 Even Goethe, the man who offers the closest approximation to wholeness that modernity has yet produced, falls short of Nietzsche’s exacting standards. Goethe’s unyielding discipline, his “magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance,”23 nevertheless is also inadequate.24 Yet on the other hand, Nietzsche also insists that we are unable to go back to or recreate the grandeur of an earlier epoch, for our physiological and cultural resources are too impoverished. This is why and how Nietzsche’s revolutionary longing transforms into a moralizing and redemptive escapism (an excess that haunts all revolutionary zeal) and his radical hope for the future gets traded in for a more salvational longing. Unable to fight his own nausea and contempt for the mediocrity and mendaciousness of modernity, yet dismissive of the possibility of rejuvenation along the model of previous nobilities, Nietzsche escapes his suffering of man by retreating into various visions of redemption, the most transparent of which is his desire for the arrival of some kind of Übermensch. As Nietzsche agonizes in the Genealogy:

But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying [morsche], self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him

rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality—while it is only his absorp- tion, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness—he must come one day.25 Treatment: Redemption 135

Redemption is of course a hallmark of Christianity—it represents a hostility toward life itself, toward the body and its realities. Nietzsche knows this: it is a lesson he himself wants to (be able to) teach. He even tries to redeploy redemption as such, so that his own desire can be reformulated into something healthier and more consistent with the rest of his perspective. As Zarathustra says, turning “every ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’— that alone should I call redemption.”26 Yet even the oft-cited passages from the section entitled “On Redemp- tion” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, wherein Zarathustra declares that he walks “among men as among the fragments of the future—that future which I envisage” and claims that “willing liberates,” nevertheless reveal the ways in which this redeployment of redemption is a ruse that even his audience of weaklings can see through. The redemption for which Nietz- sche longs and which is supposedly promised in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is foreclosed not only by Nietzsche’s own revolutionary commitments, but also by the specific possibilities presented in the text and narrative of Zarathustra itself, which is itself filled to bursting with redemptive sum- monses and predictions of the arrival of the Übermensch. As we will see, even Nietzsche’s own attempt to prevent redemptive excess undermines itself.

On Redemption

The section “On Redemption” is variously cited by commentators as evidence of Nietzsche’s affirmative capacities, his phenomenological approach to modernity as a particular relationship with time, or his belief that ressentiment need not be understood simply as the toxic reactivity of the weak in response to their own weakness. As it relates specifically to my own argument, the section “On Redemption” would seem to suggest that Nietzsche (or Zarathustra) in fact does not retreat into a salvational longing to save modernity from its illness, insofar as it offers a healthy alternative to ressentiment that suggests we live completely in the present through a supreme act of affirmative will. However, a careful account-

ing of the events and context of this section cast doubt not only on this latter reading, but on all of the more valorizing readings of Zarathustra’s affirmative or phenomenological capacities (much less his freedom from ressentiment). What this section in fact reveals is the ways in which Zara- thustra tries unjustifiably to separate himself from the mass of “crippled” humanity, an endeavor that does not simply fail, but is recognized for the illegitimate and reactive self-aggrandizement it is by his supposed inferior, the hunchback. This adjustment in our understanding of this scene in turn casts doubt on many of the other more predictable candidates for affirmation found in the rest of Zarathustra—the marriage to life at the end of Part III, the concluding triumph of Zarathustra’s solitude and 136 Nietzsche’s Revolution

“work” at the end of Part IV, and Nietzsche’s/Zarathustra’s teaching of eternal recurrence. Far from offering a possibility for healthy transformation of an unhealthy age, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is overloaded with the weaknesses and illnesses of the modern age to which its author himself belongs and from which he sometimes illegitimately tried to distinguish himself. Only after a thorough examination of these supposedly affirmative possibilities will it become clear just why Nietzsche cannot truly embrace modernity. “On Redemption” begins with Zarathustra just having crossed a great bridge, suggesting a significant or transitional moment both in Zarathus- tra’s life and for the narrative overall. Upon his arrival, he is surrounded by cripples and beggars who entreat him to heal them so that they will be persuaded to believe in his doctrine. Zarathustra refuses, saying that he is less concerned about these cripples than about those whom he calls “inverse cripples”—men who have overmuch of one capacity and who are thus grotesquely disproportionate and ugly. They are called “geniuses” by the people but they look like deformities to Zarathustra. Zarathustra agrees with the people on one thing, however: demonstrating his difference from Jesus, Zarathustra insists that it is better to leave these cripples as they are than to heal them, for this retains and respects their limitations, which are both their essence and their only experience. After dispensing this bit of wisdom about “inverse cripples,” Zarathus- tra turns away from the hunchback and addresses his disciples, entreating them to renounce revenge and embrace the future by declaring about the past “thus I will it; thus I shall will it.” It is no accident that this teaching is enunciated amidst an audience of cripples upon whom Zarathustra has deliberately turned his back. In a definition of revenge that is nowhere replicated in Nietzsche’s corpus, Zarathustra says,

Willing liberates; but what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fet- ters? “It was”—that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy. . . . Alas, every prisoner becomes a fool; and the imprisoned will redeems himself foolishly. That time does not run backwards, that is his wrath; “that which was” is the name of the stone he cannot move . . . Thus the will, the liberator, took to hurting; and on all who can suffer he wreaks revenge for his inability to go backwards. This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s ill will against time and its “it was.”27

In other words, it is not only the slave who is slavish. Even the strong, “liberating” will is not entirely active, for it too is constrained—not by its own strength, which is not a limitation, but rather by the past, which necessarily defines the conditions of its existence and draws the boundaries of Treatment: Redemption 137 its possibilities. Unlike the revenge of the weak, which demands that the strong become accountable for their strength, what Zarathustra seems to be describing here is the revenge of the strong, which demands that even the past become subject to its will. This is the ressentiment of the liberator that seeks to break the old tablets and inaugurate the reign of new values—his values. What this man resents is the many and their eternal reign and victory over all life. He resents that it is they who are the condition of his creation, they who limit his activity, protesting, challenging, even denying his new values. This ressentiment of the strong is portrayed in Nietzsche’s representation of the many as cripples, where “all ‘it was’ is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident” upon whom Zarathustra turns his back in order to preach “proper” redemption only to his disciples, the truly appropriate audience for such wisdom. Indeed, the present is the past here, for to say of these cripples “thus I will it; thus I shall will it” is to embrace their deformities and limitations as the very condition of his own willing, as the very condition of his overcoming of them in his willing of a new order. While Zarathustra is content to respect these cripples’ limitations when it is theirs, respecting the hump of the hunchback or the blindness of the blind as their spirit and very essence, he is less tolerant when such limitations become the condition of his own activity. And while Zarathustra and his disciples may need a lecture on redemption and revenge during their encounter with these cripples, the more “obviously” handicapped hunchback clearly does not. At the conclusion of Zarathustra’s speech on redemption, Zarathustra receives an unexplained “severe shock,” and looks at his disciples, “appalled,” piercing “their thoughts and their thoughts behind their thoughts” with his eyes “as with arrows.” After a pause, he pacifies himself through introspection and then chuckles, causing the hunchback to speak directly to Zarathustra in an important exchange that concludes the section on redemption:

The hunchback, however, had listened to this discourse and covered his face the while; but when he heard Zarathustra laugh he looked up curi- ously and said slowly: “But why does Zarathustra speak otherwise to us than to his disciples?” Zarathustra answered: “What is surprising in that? With hunchbacks one may well speak in a hunchbacked way.” “All right,” said the hunchback; “and one may well tell pupils tales out of school. But why does Zarathustra speak otherwise to his pupils than to himself?”

The hunchback makes clear his acceptance of the distinction between the cripples and Zarathustra’s disciples, implicitly agreeing that the mob of modernity is different from—indeed, lower than—Zarathustra’s circle. He demonstrates this by listening to Zarathustra’s speech with his face 138 Nietzsche’s Revolution covered, perhaps out of proper shame or to hide some deformity. Yet Zarathustra’s laughter attracts the hunchback’s attention and causes him to uncover his face. Noting Zarathustra’s self-serving separation of himself from his disciples, the hunchback recognizes Zarathustra’s shock and laughter as the contempt for his disciples that they are. It is this distinction the hunchback challenges. For who more than anyone needs to learn to affirm the “it was”? Who more than anyone must learn to embrace the “cripples” that supposedly define and limit what may be possible for his liberating will, upon whom he turns his back and refuses to address? As Zarathustra says of himself, “I walk among men as among the fragments of the future—that future which I envisage. And this is all my creating and striving, that I create and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident. And how could I bear to be a man if man were not also a creator and guesser of riddles and redeemer of accidents?” The hunchback senses that this self-declaration is more than a little bravado and reminds Zarathustra, through his questions, that not only can there be no fully or truly healthy types in this unhealthy age, but that Zarathustra himself is mistaken if he thinks he is somehow more advanced than his own students. Indeed, unlike Zarathustra, the hunchback has no need for self-congratulation—his acceptance of the order of rank that separates himself from Zarathustra’s disciples marks him as unusually free of ressentiment, thereby reversing the otherwise seemingly obvious order of rank in this section. In fact, it is the hunchback who comes across as the most healthy here, unlike Zarathustra who confesses,

Verily, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and limbs of men. This is what is terrible for my eyes, that I find man in ruins and scattered as over a battlefield or a butcher-field. And when my eyes flee from the now to the past, they always find the same: fragments and limbs and dreadful accidents—but no human beings. The now and the past on earth—alas, my friends, that is what I find most unendurable; and I should not know how to live if I were not also a seer of that which must come. A seer, a willer, a creator, a future himself and a bridge to the future—and alas, also, as it were, a cripple at this

bridge: all this is Zarathustra.

Here, Zarathustra confesses his agony at the present and the past, seeing it as crippled, broken, in pieces. It is this fragmentation that he finds unendurable, a disarray that becomes bearable only because Zarathus- tra also has the ability to see, will, and create beyond this disfigurement. Whether this ability is “actual” or only a promise remains to be seen. Significantly, however, it is in the midst of this agony and self-description that Zarathustra includes himself (if only for a moment) as a similarly hobbled member of modernity, noting in the same breath that he is both Treatment: Redemption 139 the bridge to the future and a cripple himself at this bridge. This realization may be another aspect of his “severe shock,” the revelation that he himself belongs to these malformed masses. The hunchback’s question, then—why does Zarathustra speak differently to his disciples than to himself?—troubles not simply the distinction between Zarathustra and his disciples but between Zarathustra’s disciples and the cripples themselves. In blurring both distinctions, the question raised is whether or not Zarathustra himself is really so different from the “crippled,” or if in fact Zarathustra has a terribly adequate understanding of what it means to be “abled.” That the hunchback is allowed to have the last word suggests that the order of rank Zarathustra sets up may itself be a by-product of ressentiment, even if it is a ressentiment of the strong. As the passage on redemption and revenge makes clear, the fundamental problem for Zarathustra is the problem of affirmation. All too often, his affirmation is no embrace of the world but rather a self-aggrandizement that depends necessarily on the denigration of not only “the mob” but even his own disciples, a group whose adoration he seeks even as he ignores or ridicules them.28 It is no big leap from Zarathustra to Nietzsche here who, as demonstrated in Chapter 4, defines sickness as male bodily mutilation. Is this depiction of modernity as “crippled” yet another metaphor for castration, another way of Nietzsche making clear that modernity is an epoch that is no longer whole, damaged beyond repair? Regardless of whether it is “castration” or “crippling,” in either case, there is simply no hope for an age that has been so definitively disfigured by the ravages of Christianity and slave morality. Both Zarathustra and Nietzsche, in other words, suffer from this crippled modern man, precisely in the way in which one suffers from a disease. As Nietzsche admits near the end of his career, “This modernity was our sickness.”29

(Rejecting) the Higher Men

It is no different with the “cripples” than it is with the supposedly “higher men,” whom Zarathustra insists, multiple times, still do not smell good. Zarathustra encounters these so-called higher men in the fourth and final parts of the narrative. These characters, each fluent in a variant of Zara- thustra’s teachings, actually symbolize different weaknesses in Nietzsche’s own character; or, what is the same thing, each is a hallmark in some way of the modern age.30 What is most significant about these higher men, whether we understand them as “separate” from Zarathustra’s ego or constitutive of it, is that Zarathustra ultimately rejects them. Zarathustra’s own inability to face the higher men and overcome his nausea at them suggests that such redemption can never arrive, that the problem of the affirmation of life simply cannot be solved given the terms of the problem as Nietzsche has constructed them. 140 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Zarathustra gives many reasons why he rejects the higher men. He gives two reasons in particular right away in “The Welcome,” the section wherein he first invites them all together into his cave. These reasons render this ostensible welcome an at best equivocal reception. First, Zarathustra makes clear that rejects the higher men because they are not strong enough:

“You may indeed all be higher men,” continued Zarathustra, “But for me you are not high and strong enough. For me—that means, for the inexorable in me that is silent but will not always remain silent. And if you do belong to me, it is not as my right arm. For whoever stands on sick and weak legs himself, as you do, wants consideration above all, whether he knows it or hides it from himself. To my arms and legs, however, I show no consideration; I show my warriors no consideration: how then could you be fit for my war?”31

The higher men are weak because they still desire “consideration” from Zarathustra himself, whether that consideration be pity or affirmation. Like children who still seek their parents’ approval, the higher men have not yet mastered the ability to stand on their own feet or fight their own battles without sanction and consideration from the master. Ironically, then, the second reason Zarathustra finds the higher men lacking is because of their lack of consideration for him: “Nor are you beautiful and well-born enough for me. I need clean, smooth mirrors for my doctrine; on your surface even my own image is distorted. Many a burden, many a reminiscence press on your shoulders; many a wicked dwarf crouches in your nooks. There is hidden mob in you too. And even though you may be high and of a higher kind, much in you is crooked and mis- shapen. There is no smith in the world who could hammer you right and straight for me.”32 Although all of the higher men are, in some sense, Zarathustra’s disciples—they quote his teachings to him, admonish his behavior on the basis of what they have learned from him, and correct one another’s mistakes in an attempt to live more consistently according to Zarathustra’s teachings—they are also inadequate versions or instan- tiations of Zarathustra’s teachings. If Zarathustra is to have disciples, he wants “clean, smooth mirrors” for his “doctrine,” not actual incorporation of it in the form of real, living subjects. For this inevitably involves distortion or corruption of his doctrine by those who are not yet ready for or capable of living it. Although Zarathustra is quite comfortable dispensing or withholding approval of these higher men and their antics, he cannot bear their need for his approval, especially when they cannot even get his teachings right in the first place. We might say that Zarathustra rejects the higher men because they simply are not him. Indeed, Zarathustra’s complaints about the higher men reflect his narcissism—in saying they are not adequate mirrors of Treatment: Redemption 141 his teachings, he is saying that he wants followers who are identical with himself. Although in the first part, Zarathustra entreats against precisely such an attitude toward students and followers,33 by the end of the book he has drifted from this view, such that he can renounce the higher men because—and this is the most important reason—they do not suffer enough to satisfy him.

You higher men, do you suppose I have come to set right what you have set wrong? Or that I have come to you that suffer to bed you more comfortably? Or to you that are restless, have gone astray or climbed astray, to show you new and easier paths? No! No! Three times no! Ever more, ever better ones of your kind shall perish—for it shall be ever worse and harder for you. Thus alone—thus alone, man grows to the height where lightning strikes and breaks him: lofty enough for lightning. My mind and my longing are directed toward the few, the long, the distant; what are your many small short miseries to me? You do not yet suffer enough to suit me! For you suffer from yourselves, you have not yet suffered from man. You would lie if you claimed otherwise! You all do not suffer from what I have suffered.34

While the fourth part of Zarathustra is presented as the final trial, a conclusive reckoning with the last temptation of pity, it is clear that Zarathustra’s problem is not that he will continue to have “consideration” for the higher men. Zarathustra is in fact angry with, and resentful of, the higher men, in part because they do not have consideration for him (they are bent or broken mirrors) and in part because they do not suffer from man in the way or to the extent that he does (which may simply be a specific form of the first problem). But Zarathustra is right—the higher men do not suffer from man as he does. They are gayer, lighter, more easily diverted; they are made happy by their own small triumphs and overcomings.

“Zarathustra was overcome by a slight aversion and by scorn for his company, although he enjoyed their gaiety. For this seemed to him a sign of 35 convalescence.”

“O my new friends,” he said, “you strange higher men, how well I like you since you have become gay again.”36

In fact, it rather seems to be the case that if the higher men did suffer as he did, Zarathustra would have pity for them. But because they are not burdened by the kind of self-loathing and nausea that he is, Zarathustra self-aggrandizingly determines that they must not be men of a superior caliber, thereby performing the ressentiment definitive of slave morality. Zarathustra can only affirm himself by contrasting himself with these 142 Nietzsche’s Revolution pathetic specters of higher humanity, while the higher men are actually more capable of unselfconscious self-affirmation, seeking only the approval of camaraderie with their teacher as one who is like them. Zarathustra is stuck in his cave with the higher men at all because he had only recently left it in search of the source of an overwhelming cry of distress he hears echoing throughout the mountainside. Just before he leaves, however, he encounters the Soothsayer, a man he had already met in the second part and who had at that point tempted Zarathustra to negation with his preaching of weariness and nothingness.37 Although now, in the fourth part, the Soothsayer tells Zarathustra that he has come in order to tempt him again, this time to the final sin of pity for the higher man, what becomes clear is that pity is the least of Zarathustra’s problems. Zarathustra is shocked when the Soothsayer declares that the cry of distress that Zarathustra hears emanates from the higher man:

“The higher man?” cried Zarathustra, seized with horror. “What does he want? What does he want? The higher man! What does he want here?” And his skin was covered with perspiration. The soothsayer, however, made no reply to Zarathustra’s dread, but listened and listened toward the depth. But when there was silence for a long time, he turned his glance back and saw Zarathustra standing there trembling.38

Zarathustra is filled with “horror” [Grausen] and “dread” [Angst] and trembles [zittern] at the thought of the approach of the higher men. Not because he is filled with pity for them, nor because he fears his own love for them, but rather because he is already prepared to deny them. If they arrive, he will be confronted with himself, with a loathing and nausea he does not care to experience and which he can otherwise ignore or repress by living a life of solitude. Indeed, what Zarathustra fears more than anything else (whether he knows it or not) is the opportunity to reject the higher men, to remorselessly declare them human, all-too-human. They may be gay, but “if they learned to laugh from me, it still is not my laughter that they have learned.”39 The Soothsayer detects this anxiety in Zara- thustra and offers the most compelling assessment of him to be found in the entire book:

“O Zarathustra,” he began in a sad tone of voice, “you are not standing there as one made giddy by his happiness: you had better dance lest you fall. But even if you would dance before me, leaping all your side-leaps, no one could say to me, ‘Behold, here dances the last gay man!’ Anybody coming to this height, looking for that man, would come in vain: caves he would find, and caves behind caves, hiding-places for those addicted to hiding, but no mines of happiness or treasure rooms or new gold veins of happiness. Happiness—how should one find happiness among hermits and those buried like this? Must I still seek the last happiness on blessed Treatment: Redemption 143

isles and far away between forgotten seas? But all is the same, nothing is worthwhile, no seeking avails, nor are there any blessed isles anymore.”

In other words, Zarathustra’s final temptation is not pity but the very same temptation it was in the beginning—negation: “all is the same, nothing is worthwhile, no seeking avails, nor are there any blessed isles anymore.” He is still without happiness and joy, despite having supposedly overcome the great nausea in the third part. And he is horrified that the higher men approach his cave because he will have to face once more the fact that he is repulsed by them—he will be reminded of how dreadful even the highest of modern men still looks: “Naked I had once seen both, the greatest man and the smallest man: all-too-similar to each other, even the greatest all-too-human. All-too-small, the greatest!—that was my disgust with man.”40 Far from having pity for them or wishing to preserve them, Zarathustra is revolted at the prospect of having to face them. But if Zarathustra’s fraught reckoning with the higher men is Nietzsche’s anthropomorphization of his wrestling with his own psyche, then to reject the higher men is ultimately to reject himself. He thus fears the encounter with them will culminate in suicide, even if (or perhaps especially if) it is deserved. More than anything, Zarathustra accepts his right to be the judge of the higher men, and this, because he accepts his role as their master, as the one who determines who is truly a “higher man.” After the “Last Supper,” for example, he takes pleasure in their gaiety, looking forward to their gathering strength which he ultimately believes will culminate in their becoming “grateful” to him: “This I take to be the best sign: they become grateful. Not much longer, and they will think up festivals and put up monuments to their old friends.”41 Eager to be appreciated, Zarathustra dreams of the day when the higher men will mark their gratitude to him via “festivals” and “monuments.” Imagine his horror, then, when he dis- covers the higher men engaged in the prayer rituals of the Ass Festival. His first reactions are anger and contempt. He demands an accounting of their behavior from them each in turn and cringes, “Alas, if someone other than Zarathustra had watched you!”42 It is only after the entreaty by the Ugliest Man, who repeats Zarathustra’s own wisdom back to him that “not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter,” that Zarathustra decides that the Ass Festival represents an appropriate display of gaiety, and even of convalescence on the part of the higher men.43 Already too eager to separate himself off from his disciples because he has no need for their pieties, Zarathustra transforms his anger into a self-congratulatory laughter at the higher men’s expense, for “it seems to me such flowers as you are require new festivals, a little brave nonsense, some divine service and ass festival, some old gay fool of a Zarathustra, a roaring wind that blows your souls bright.”44 Although Zarathustra succeeds here in laughing at himself (and this only at his disciple’s prompting), he does not succeed in 144 Nietzsche’s Revolution taking the higher men’s theological antics lightly. Indeed, it is almost as if their weaknesses cause him to like them more: “‘How well I like them now, these higher men!’ But he did not say it out loud, for he respected their happiness and their silence.”45 Because the higher men are Zarathustra’s followers, his power to reject them is also the pleasure of feeling superior to them, beyond them, farther along the path of self-overcoming than they are. Indeed, the higher men’s gratefulness for Zarathustra’s indulgence of their festival leads to a reen- actment of it, this time, with Zarathustra at its center, a position he does not decline.46 This desire to be acknowledged as above or beyond even the best that modern humanity can offer is the most powerful demonstration of Zarathustra’s/Nietzsche’s unhealthiness, rendering the “triumph” that concludes part four of Zarathustra hollow.47 In this concluding scene, Zarathustra declares his overcoming of pity for the higher men, saying, “Am I concerned with happiness? I am concerned with my work.”48 A lion appears and nuzzles at Zarathustra’s feet, while a flock of doves descends over his head. “About all this Zarathustra spoke but a single sentence: ‘My children are near, my children.’” Yet despite the beauty of this moment and the unusual occurrence of Zarathustra’s tears at this sudden zoo of animal love, nevertheless, Nietzsche’s claim that Zarathustra has triumphed over his final trial rings false because Nietzsche cannot write the story he wants to write—he has no instinctual experience of what the overcoming of contempt for humanity might actually be like. There is, of course, the strange mention of Zarathustra’s “work,” unmentioned until now and utterly mysterious in content.49 The appearance of the lion, and his roar that keeps the higher men at bay, this “sign” of Zarathustra’s final overcoming, also seems better read as the lingering traces of Zarathustra’s ressentiment. After all, this passage begins with Zarathustra’s last and most definitive rejection of the higher men: “Well then, they still sleep, these higher men, while I am awake: these are not my proper companions. It is not for them that I wait here in my mountains. I want to go to my work, to my day: but they do not understand the signs of my morning; my stride is for them no summons to awaken. They still sleep in my cave, their dream still drinks of my drunken songs. The ear that listens for me, the heedful ear is lacking in their limbs.” When the higher men do emerge from the cave, the lion roars at them and frightens them back inside, leaving Zarathustra alone again with his animals. Of them, he says, “You are the right animals for me; I love you. But I still lack the right men.” Con- tent with animal companionship, pleased with solitude from all human company, Zarathustra declares his ripeness and his abandonment of the higher men simultaneously, saying he has triumphed over the sin of pity for them. Yet while it is wholly credible that Zarathustra is devoid of pity (even he has a hard time remembering that this was supposed to have Treatment: Redemption 145 been his final trial), Zarathustra clearly seems not to have triumphed over negation. At the very end of the final scene of the book, he declares,

“Well then! The lion came, my children are near, Zarathustra has ripened, my hour has come: this is my morning, my day is breaking: rise now, rise, thou great noon!” Thus spoke Zarathustra, and he left his cave, glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.

Yet Zarathustra does not in fact seem to have overcome the great nausea—he merely avoids experiencing it by isolating himself away on a mountainside, living in a cave, far from the “mob” of humanity. As the Soothsayer noted, “Happiness—how should one find happiness among hermits and those buried like this?” Although Zarathustra insists he is not concerned with happiness, rather with his work, the opacity of that work and his tears at being so openly loved and worshipped by his animals undermine that assertion. More, the likening of Zarathustra to the morning sun, which Zarathustra admires but yet says would have no happiness without those for whom it shines (and Thus Spoke Zarathustra both opens and closes with this observation), suggests that Zarathustra’s own sense of self-sufficiency and purposefulness is, at best, mistaken, at worst, delusional. The solitude that both Zarathustra and Nietzsche praise may indeed be the price of an untimely existence; it may even be necessary in order to achieve the kind of profound self-overcoming that they recommend. “I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself.”50 But this is no doubt also a self-justification in the face of a lack of friends, and a means of self-comfort in the overt recognition that they themselves are sick with contempt of man. “Loneliness can be the escape of the sick; loneliness can also be escape from the sick.”51 In Zarathustra’s/Nietzsche’s case, it was clearly both; and this solitude, while perhaps preserving some kind of purity which both felt they needed in order to survive, nevertheless also crippled them insofar as they longed for the very human recognition they simultaneously so disdained: “Like a cripple [Krüppel] who has become

deaf and blind and dumb: thus have I lived for many years lest I live with the power-, writing-, and pleasure-rabble.”52

Supposing Life Were a Woman

Even the supposedly affirmative ending of the third part of Zarathustra—a seemingly clear-cut and triumphant closing of the narrative circle begun in the first part53—is belied by the fear and loathing literally expressed there. After Zarathustra’s struggle with eternal recurrence (to be discussed later in this chapter) and during his convalescence from this sickness, he is overcome by “The Great Longing,” which leads to a captivating 146 Nietzsche’s Revolution scene of seduction wherein Zarathustra chases, and is chased by, life. It concludes with her submission and their apparent wedding ceremony, wherein Zarathustra pledges his love to this “woman,” the only woman from whom he has ever wanted children, whom he now calls “Eternity.” This ostensibly represents Zarathustra’s successful overcoming of nausea at the eternal recurrence and displays his bold and loving affirmation of all life, forever. Yet of what do this overcoming and affirmation actually consist? These become clearer upon closer investigation of Zarathustra’s “courtship” of life, whom Nietzsche figures as a woman.54 This scene is significant not only because it reveals the real content of Zarathustra’s overcoming and affirmation, but also because it is Nietzsche’s only explicit depiction of the dance of seduction, a process I speculatively constructed in Chapter 4. But my reading of Nietzschean courtship is only confirmed in this narrative of sexual seduction that, predictably enough, culminates in neither intercourse nor procreation.55 Instead, the “romance” of this scene consists of a tug of war between Zarathustra and life, a relentless give-and-take wherein he attempts to pursue, and yet is pursued and also perpetually foiled by, this fickle female. It is almost as if this courtship is an instruction in the ways love for Zarathustra. He begins, clumsily enough, by leaping toward her, legitimately causing her to flee; he discov- ers that it is only when he leaps away from her and her “serpents’ ire”56 that she remains in place, “half turned” toward him, eyes “full of desire.” Here we see Zarathustra learning the advice that Nietzsche will later give regarding the pursuit of women—that is, avoid it. Rather, let her pursue you. His appropriate role is that of the aloof appraiser, warily inspecting the woman whose job it is to present herself to him. When life retreats from him, in fact, Zarathustra observes that “the tongue of your fleeing, flying hair licked me in its sweep” [gegen mich züngelte deines fliehenden fliegenden Haars Zunge!]—a deeply sexualized rendering of life’s hair as a tongue that does not simply “lick” him but literally tongues him [mich züngelte]. And yet this erotically charged description is also ominous, a likening of her hair to the tongues of a fire’s flame, suggesting her touch is 57 a heat that singes, perhaps threatening to consume him entirely. This duet of advance and retreat between life and Zarathustra results in a chase that takes them by “caves and thickets,” “through silent bushes,” along a lake, past animals and plants. Zarathustra dislikes this game, calling life various strange and unkind names during the pursuit (“entwiner” [Binderin], “temptress” [Versucherin], “child-eyed sinner” [kindsäugige Sünderin], “sweet wildcat” [süsser Wildfang], “ingrate” [Undank], “owl” [Eule] “bat” [Fledermaus], “malicious leaping belle” [boschafte Springerin],58 “damned nimble, supple snake and slippery witch” [verfluchte flinke gelenke Schlange und Schlupf-Hexe]), all of which, in their only apparent paradox, capture his ambivalence toward her, his simultaneous desire for, Treatment: Redemption 147 and yet fear of, this enticing creature he seeks and yet does not understand. This echoes (or, understood chronologically, foreshadows) Nietz- sche’s statements about woman-truth analyzed in Chapter 4 regarding his simultaneous desire for women and his fear of intercourse with them. For while Zarathustra is clear that he wants life—“I dance after you, I follow wherever your traces linger. Where are you? Give me your hand! Or only one finger!”—when he looks at her, the face he sees resembles a vicious (if tiny and thus ultimately harmless) wild animal: “Your lovely little white teeth are gnashing at me; out of a curly little mane your evil eyes are flash- ing at me” [Du fletschest mich lieblich an mit weissen Zähnlein, deine bösen Augen springen gegen mich aus lockichtem Mähnlein!].59 Considerably on the defensive, then (and perhaps unsure as to exactly why), Zarathustra bumbles repeatedly. At one point, he trips and falls; at another, he implies that (he feels as though?) he has been slapped in the face by her: “In my face two red blotches from your hand itch.” By the end of this strange chase, however, Zarathustra has had enough. Whereas earlier he had inquired, “I am the hunter: would you be my dog or my doe?”—offering her at least the possibility of a companionship (however subordinate; being the dog is probably still better than being the prey)— now he declares, “I am verily weary of always being your sheepish shepherd. You witch, if I have so far sung to you, now to me you shall—cry out” [translation emended; Ich bin es wahrlich müde, immer dein schafich- ter Schäfer zu sein! Du Hexe, habe ich dir bisher gesungen, nun sollst du mir—schrein!].60 Unwilling to be made vulnerable by his desire, Zarathus- tra voices a desire to punish her. He confesses, “I fear you near, I love you far; your flight lures me, your seeking cures me.” In other words, when close, she is fearful; far away, she inspires love.61 When she runs away she is the most enticing and desirable; by contrast, her pursuit of him relieves him of his desire for her.62 We see, once again, the importance of man not pursuing woman, confirmed in this passage with an almost hydraulic certainty. But in order to maintain this distance from her, and therefore his invulnerability, the inexperienced Zarathustra resorts to an ugly set of defense mechanisms. Already he has said she should “cry out” to him

(from pain? desire? both?). He also nastily implies that if she is thirsty from their exhausting chase, then perhaps she should fellate him:

You are so terribly weary? I’ll carry you there; just let your arms sink. And if you are thirsty—I have got something, but your mouth does not want it to drink.

Du bist so arg müde? Ich trage dich hin, lass nur die Arme sinken! Und hast du Durst,—ich hätte wohl Etwas, aber dein Mund will es nicht trinken!— 148 Nietzsche’s Revolution

He then brandishes a whip and demands that she dance, in time, to its lashes:

Keeping time with my whip, you shall dance for me and cry out to me! For have I forgotten the whip? Not at all!

Nach dem Takt meiner Peitsche sollst du mir tanzen und schrein! Ich vergass doch die Peitsche nicht?—Nein!—[translation emended]

The emergence of the whip confirms the suspicion that Zarathustra wants to punish life for her flightiness. But he does not have to actually whip her—its appearance stops life’s flight from him, ending the chase and rendering her docile. It also, however, assures her distance from him, keeping her safely beyond arm’s reach. The whip thus secures Zarathus- tra’s “hardness” in both senses—it is both an overt sign of his sexual desire and that which maintains his dominance over her. Predictably, however, Zarathustra’s concupiscence and control do not lead to intercourse in this scene. Although Zarathustra looks very much like a potential rapist here, he does not go ahead and “have his way with her”; in fact, the only thing this pair does together is weep. But this is because even when completely in control, Zarathustra cannot leave anything to chance. Any vulnerability—even that brief moment of climax, which would only occur during clearly coerced and violently controlled intercourse—must be avoided. This preservation of phallic dominance is why man cannot forget the whip when he goes to women. 63 Just before the song and dance of seduction with life in “The Other Dancing Song” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra sets down a series of proclamations in a thirty-aphorism section entitled “On Old and New Tablets.” Combining Moses and God into a single personage, Zarathustra performs the simultaneously affirmative and destructive act of lawgiving, entreating man to break the old commandments and values that have heretofore defined all justice and morality, and laying down a new, Zara- thustran set of commandments. Significantly, while there are many, many

old tablets and values for man to break (e.g., “Thou shalt not rob! Thou shalt not kill!”64 “Why live? All is vanity!”65 “And your own reason— you yourself should stifle and strangle it; for it is a reason of this world; thus will you yourself learn to renounce the world,”66 and the belief that human society is based on a contract67), Zarathustra himself articulates only two new commands for mankind to follow. The first is that man must become fertile and invest himself only in his children; the second, laid down in the penultimate aphorism in the section, is the commandment to become hard: Treatment: Redemption 149

(1) O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children’s land shall you love: this love shall be your new nobility—the undiscovered land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails search and search. In your children you shall make up for being the children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past. This new tablet I place over you.68

(2) For creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax, bronze—harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.

This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: become hard!69

The compatibility of these two “tablets,” indeed their necessary coimplication and mutual requirement, is indicated by the concluding aphorism in this section, wherein Zarathustra declares:

That I may one day be ready and ripe in the great noon: as ready and ripe as glowing bronze, clouds pregnant with lightning, and swelling mild udders—ready for myself and my most hidden will: a bow lusting for its arrow, an arrow lusting for its star—a star ready and ripe in its noon, glowing, pierced, enraptured by annihilating sun arrows—a sun itself and an inexorable solar will, ready to annihilate in victory! O will, cessation of all need, my own necessity! Save me for a great victory! Thus spoke Zarathustra.70

—Dass ich einst bereit und reif sei im grossen Mittage: bereit und reif glich glühendem Erze, blitzschwangrer Wole und schwellendem Milch-Euter:— —bereit zu mir selber und zumeinem verborgensten Willen: ein Bogen brünstig nach seinem Pfeile, ein Pfeil brünstig nach seinem Sterne:— —ein Stern bereit und reif in seinem Mittage, glühend, durchbohrt, selig vor vernichtenden Sonnen-Pfeilen:— —eine Sonne selber und ein unerbittlicher Sonnen-Wille, zum Vernichten bereit im Siegen! Oh Wille, Wende aller North, du meine Nothwendigkeit! Spare mich auf zu Einem grossen Siege!—— Also sprach Zarathustra.

The “children” who will compensate for the fathers and children of the past, then, are not the offspring of Zarathustra and life or of any other “higher man” and his female partner. Rather, these “children” are Zarathustra/the “higher men” themselves. The hope is that “I” might one day be “ready for myself and my most hidden will,” that Zarathustra will 150 Nietzsche’s Revolution one day be prepared to gratify his most fervent and veiled desire: that he will be fertile enough (“ripe and ready,” with “swelling mild udders”) to impregnate himself (“with lightning”) and thus give birth to himself. He will be both female and male—“a bow lusting for its arrow”—and child—“an arrow lusting for its star.” In all, this act of creation is his “own necessity” and “a great victory!” The meaning of “affirmation,” then, as explained in the conclusion of Part III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is not Zarathustra’s overcoming of nausea or his celebration of life and participation in its infinite renewal. It is rather a male appropriation of femininity, Zarathustra’s affirming of life by taking on her capacity for childbirth as the province of himself and other “hard” male creators: “For from the depths one loves only one’s child and work; and where there is great love of oneself it is the sign of pregnancy: thus I found it to be.”71 Although the joyful and newly convalescent Zarathustra declares at the conclusion of Part III that life is the only woman from whom he has ever wanted children, when read in light of his two new commandments for humanity and the clearly fruitless by- product of his “union” with her, we have to wonder how seriously to take this repeated entreaty. After all, he clearly does not go and actually have children with her, despite seemingly abundant opportunity. Indeed, after Zarathustra has subdued life with his whip and they are sitting together chatting idly, she complains to him that he is not nearly faithful enough to her, that he does not love her nearly as much as he loves his wisdom, another woman-“lover” of Zarathustra’s, and laments that he is going to leave her soon. Zarathustra agrees:

“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, “but you also know—” and I whispered something into her ear, right through her tangled yellow foolish tresses. “You know that, O Zarathustra? Nobody knows that.” And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was.

The secret that only Zarathustra knows and whispers into her ear is that life is nothing more than a riddle—she is only a temptation, an invitation to a pursuit that can never be concluded or solved.72 Only he can birth the future of humanity; only he possesses the secret capacity for the eternal return of life, a task for which life (or “wisdom,” or “truth,” or any other “woman”) is irrelevant, which is why he will leave her soon.73 Woman may be the enticement but she can never be the task herself. For just as with truth, if life is fully possessed—if man truly consummates his love for her—he will be emasculated, consumed, torn to pieces. The very conditions of life in modernity are thus—to embrace life is thus to accept man’s own crippled inadequacy. This may be why both weep—each wants what s/he can never have—but proving his masculinity once again, it is Treatment: Redemption 151 only with his final revelation and rejection of life that she is “dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was.” To love life, then, to affirm her and marry her and worship her for all eternity, is for Zarathustra to take on her function for himself, to redeem the past by willing it himself, and to affirm life by birthing it himself (all of these being the gendered versions of Zara- thustra’s preaching on redemption and the necessity of willing every “it was”). Procreation, parenting, birth, affirmation, and self-overcoming all require a life of solitude, despite the hardness and brutal loneliness of this path. As Nietzsche remarks on “The Night Song,” Zarathustra’s lachry- mose lamentation of loneliness and longing, it is the cry of one who is too light and powerful to love, “the immortal lament at being condemned by the overabundance of light and power, by his sun-nature, not to love.”74

Celibate Self-birth

Nietzsche’s fear of women’s sexual power leads him to appropriate what he views as their only unique capability—pregnancy and birthing—for men, using procreation as a metaphor for celibate male creative activity and eliminating women themselves from the process of (pro)creation altogether. Nietzsche appropriates childbirth for the male gender, and the trope of childbirth as standing in for the travails of the philosopher/artist/ creator, calling the creative person “a ‘mother type’ in the grand sense.”75 Indeed, Nietzsche claims spiritual childbirth as both a uniquely masculine ability and as higher, better, prouder, and stronger than the feminine physiological capacity. “You creators, you higher men! One is pregnant only with one’s own child.”76 The content of “self-overcoming” is often figured as the birth process, wherein the philosopher, through an agonizing internal struggle we might analogize with (masturbatory?) sexual intercourse, gives birth to himself in a triumphant overcoming of his age and “the mob.” The philosopher-creator is thus not only his own sexual partner, but also his own mother:

We [philosophers] have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and,

like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe.77

To be the child who is newly born, the creator must also want to be the mother who gives birth and the pangs of the birth-giver.78

Remember, Nietzsche’s complaint about the “scientific average man” of modernity is that he is like an “old maid”: “Compared to a genius—that is, to one who either begets or gives birth, taking both terms in their most elevated sense—the scholar, the scientific average man, always rather resembles an old maid: like her he is not conversant with the two most 152 Nietzsche’s Revolution valuable functions of man.”79 As demonstrated already in Chapter 4, the first of these functions is the sexual one—modern knowers are both inexpert and impotent seducers, rendering them unfortunately if unwittingly celibate. But the second of these functions is the procreative one; namely, the ability to become pregnant and give birth (“taking both terms in their most elevated sense” of course). Modern philosophers, scientists, and artists are thus not simply impotent or castrated but sterile. This male (pro)creativity and affirmation is symbolized for Nietzsche by Dionysus, the god of whom he declares himself to be the last disciple.80 Indeed, Nietzsche is such a faithful devotée of this god that he offered up his “firstborn,” The Birth of Tragedy, as a “sacrifice” to him.81 Since the time of this sacrifice, Nietzsche says of himself that “I have learned much, all too much, more about the philosophy of this god, and, as I have said, from mouth to mouth—I, the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus.” In this declaration of initiation, Nietzsche presents a long and evasive description of a mysterious personage, whose attributes include mastery in the feminine knowledge of “how to seem.” This figure indeed turns out to be Dionysus himself, and in what is Nietzsche’s longest and most explicit description of Dionysus anywhere in his published writings, he concludes by telling us the following:

Even that Dionysus is a philosopher, and that gods, too, thus do philosophy, seems to me to be a novelty that is far from innocuous and might arouse suspicion precisely among philosophers. Among you, my friends, it will not seem so offensive, unless it comes too late and not at the right moment; for today, as I have been told, you no longer like to believe in God and gods. Perhaps I shall also have to carry frankness further in my tale than will always be pleasing to the strict habits of your ears? Certainly the god in question went further, very much further, in dialogues of this sort and was always many steps ahead of me. Indeed, if it were permitted to follow human custom in according to him many solemn pomp-and-virtue names, I should have to give abundant praise to his explorer and discoverer courage, his daring honesty, truthfulness, and love of wisdom. But such a god has no use whatever for all such

venerable junk and pomp. “Keep that,” he would say, “for yourself and your likes and whoever else has need of it! I—have no reason for covering my nakedness.” One guesses: this type of deity and philosopher is perhaps lacking in shame?

Unlike the men of modernity, in other words, Dionysus is no dogmatist. Rather, he is a philosopher in the true, creative sense, a lover of wisdom who lacks the clumsiness that defines the modern pursuit of truth for Nietzsche. His honesty and frankness indicate he is aware of his desire and need not disguise it as “objectivity”; his daring and discoverer courage Treatment: Redemption 153 suggest he is capable of consummation, able to approach truth’s darkest depths without being either repulsed or destroyed. Moreover, in his consummation, he remains both whole and securely alone. Fusing the qualities of male pursuer and female pursued into a single divinity, Dio- nysus reveals, and is revealed, as both truth and the pursuer of truth, a unity of opposites that is neither an intercourse nor an obliteration. And while Dionysus possesses/is the truth, he is nevertheless shameless (unlike woman, who “has much reason for shame”82). As Nietzsche says of the Dionysian tragic artist, he is “the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible.”83 He is both pursuer and pursued, saying “yes” to his own question, embracing even the terribleness of nihilism and making it his own. What is the origin of this uncanny ability to simultaneously withstand the temptation of truth while choosing, sanctioning, and affirming the horror of her that threatens man with his own dismemberment? On this subject, Nietzsche is clear: Dionysus—and the Dionysian man and artist—possesses two distinct characteristics that allow him to undertake such a task. First is his ability to endure suffering, which Nietzsche characterizes as “hardness.” Above all, Nietzsche insists that the master/artist/ creator is “hard” (hart) in his steely resistance to pity and pain, and this obvious double-entendre makes clear the exclusively male character of creativity: “The imperative, ‘become hard!’ the most fundamental certainty that all creators are hard, is the distinctive mark of a Dionysian nature.”84 Indeed, the necessary prerequisite to the self-birthing Nietzsche recommends in Twilight of the Idols is, as the subtitle to that work suggests, to philosophize with a hammer. We are told how to do this when Nietzsche bids “The Hammer” “speak” in the conclusive last word of this text, a reprinting of the penultimate aphorism in the section of Zarathus- tra entitled “On Old and New Tablets,” in which Zarathustra lays down the commandment, “become hard!” The second characteristic of the Dionysian that allows the tragic artist to endure and even embrace nihilism is his capacity to overcome suffering, which Nietzsche metaphorizes as pregnancy and self-birth. As Nietzsche

explains, “the desire for destruction, change, and becoming” that is “an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with a future” is Dionysian.85 Nietzsche says here that he knows “no higher symbolism” than this Greek symbolism of sexuality in the Dionysian rites and rituals: “here the most profound instinct of life, that directed toward the future of life, the eternity of life, is experienced religiously—and the way to life, procreation, as the holy way.” This stands in direct opposition to the Christian religion, which slanders life and makes “something unclean of sexuality,” throwing “filth on the origin, on the presupposition of our life.”86 Nietzsche’s sudden and uncharacteristic sex-positivity in Twilight of the Idols continues in Ecce Homo, where he makes a great show of 154 Nietzsche’s Revolution pronouncing sexuality to be essentially natural, decrying chastity as a sin against life itself: “And lest I leave any doubt about my very decent and strict views in these matters, let me still cite a proposition against vice from my moral code: I use the word ‘vice’ in my fight against every kind of antinature or, if you prefer pretty words, idealism. The proposition reads: ‘The preaching of chastity amounts to a public incitement to antinature. Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept ‘impure,’ is the crime par excellence against life—is the real sin against the holy spirit of life.”87 Later, Nietzsche says that any view of sexuality “as something unclean” is indicative of décadence.88 Now, if we recall the analysis from the previous chapter, we will remember that Nietzsche is no free spirit when it comes to the bedroom. Quite the opposite, in fact—sexual intercourse was at the top of the list of things to be avoided if men were to preserve their manhood and survive the experience of desire intact. Indeed, Nietzsche cast sexual withholding as the cardinal masculine virtue. Moreover, Nietzsche was adamant that this virile celibacy in no way replicated the asceticism of Christianity. Rather, this chastity was the asceticism of the philosopher, the creator who cannot be distracted by the noise and clatter of everyday life. Just as every thinker needs a quiet office, so, too, does every creator need celibacy, or, if he must be married, a safely celibate marriage, so that his will to power is not diverted onto sterile paths. But this is because he is a mother, too:

As for the “chastity” of philosophers, finally, this type of spirit clearly has its fruitfulness somewhere else than in children; perhaps it also has the survival of its name elsewhere, its little immortality . . . There is nothing in this of chastity from any kind of ascetic scruple or hatred of the senses, just as it is not chastity when an athlete or jockey abstains from women: it is rather the will of their dominating instinct, at least during their periods of great pregnancy. Every artist knows what a harmful effect intercourse has in states of great spiritual tension and preparation; those with the greatest power and the surest instincts do not need to learn this by experience, by unfortunate experience—their “maternal” instinct ruthlessly disposes of all other stores and accumulations of energy, of animal vigor, for the benefit of 89 the evolving work: the greater energy then uses up the lesser.

But whether the by-product of this birth is himself (via a self-overcoming) or a text or a work of art, the act of intercourse that would necessarily precede this procreation is always absent. Although, elsewhere, Nietz- sche says that if there is to be any art at all, any creation of any kind, “one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy [Rausch] . . . above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy,”90 nevertheless, this frenzy does not involve any other person besides the philosopher-creator-artist himself. For this is the frenzy “of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will,” wherein the essential Treatment: Redemption 155 component is “the feeling of increased strength and fullness.” As might be expected, the Nietzschean creator is always only ever in conversation with himself, with his “overcharged and swollen” [überhäuften und geschwellten] will, this engorgement from which emerges his artistic creation. And is this pregnant creativity not, finally, a restitution of wholeness? “In your egoism, you creators, is the caution and providence of the pregnant. What no one has yet laid eyes on, the fruit: that your whole [ganze] love shelters and saves and nourishes. Where your whole [ganze] love is, with your child, there is also your whole [ganze] virtue. Your work, your will, that is your ‘neighbor’: do not let yourselves be gulled with false values!”91 The frenzy of this “overcharged and swollen” will is properly Diony- sian, in contrast with the frenzy of the Apollinian, which rather “excites the eye above all.”92 Resembling the lascivious “disinterestedness” of the dogmatists who look but cannot touch, the power of the Apollinian is the “power of vision.” Yet “in the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole [entire, gesammte] affective system is excited and enhanced,”93 and one cannot help but wonder if the excitement of the “whole” system is really rather the excitement of the one organ that truly defines masculinity and the creative impulse. As Nietzsche says,

In this state one enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power— until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is—art.94

Man bereichert in diesem Zustande Alles aus seiner eignen Fülle: was man sieht, was man will, man sieht es geschwellt, gedrängt, stark, überladen mit Kraft. Der Mensch dieses Zustandes verwandelt die Dinge, bis sie seine Mach wiederspiegeln,—bis sie Reflexe seiner Vollkommenheit sind. Dies Verwandeln- müssen in’s Vollkommne ist—Kunst.

Creation is a kind of projection of the “swelled, taut, strong” imperative onto the world, an overflowing, erect masculinity wherein everything mirrors his power, which Nietzsche also calls “perfection.” Is this power and perfection his “wholeness”? His “fullness,” his lack of castration? Nietzsche says in this state of Dionysian frenzy, “the essential feature here remains the ease of metamorphosis, the inability not to react.”95 But this is not the reactivity of the castrated and weak-willed, who bow down before nature as a mystery to be observed and penetrated, for “this lying in the dust before petit faits is unworthy of a whole [ganzen] artist.”96 Rather, it is the creation of nature in one’s own image, the instinctual ability to simultaneously create and become nature, the “power of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transformation, and every kind of mimicking and acting.”97 This reactivity is the “ease of metamorphosis,” 156 Nietzsche’s Revolution which is neither the subservient pose of the scientist nor the false his- trionicism of the actor. It is rather the overfull expenditure of frenzied instincts, which can make no final distinction regarding what is “true” and what is “merely” apparent. There is only the creative will and the creation, only the phallus and its offspring, which is a transformation of nature so that it “mirrors” his “power” and “perfection.” As he explains in an earlier formulation, “We philosophers are not free to divide body from soul as the people do; we are even less free to divide soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. Life—that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame—also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other.”98 Nietzsche credits this “psychology of the orgiastic”99 as his improvement on the Greeks’ understanding of both the sexual and the Diony- sian, for the Greeks simply misunderstood the necessary requirements of tragic wisdom and joyful affirmation. Although the Greeks sanctified life by making sexuality a central religious symbol and object, they nevertheless erred in finding “every single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth” deserving of the “most solemn feelings.”100 For although, according to the Greeks’ “doctrine of the mysteries, pain is pronounced holy,” a rightly Dionysian attitude since “all becoming and growing—all that guarantees a future—involves pain,” nevertheless, the pain these Greeks sanctified was “the pangs of the woman giving birth”: “That there may be the eternal joy of creating, that the will to life may eternally affirm itself, the agony of the woman giving birth must also be there eternally.”101As Nietzsche says, the Greeks were successfully superficial, refusing to look beneath truth’s veils and offend her modesty.102 Yet in their sanctification of sexuality, they nevertheless failed to recognize that woman’s pain is not the most profound. At best, the childbearing woman is only a means. She cannot herself be the overman—her greatest 103 “hope” is that she might give birth to him. Nietzsche displaces and surpasses the Greek view of sexuality in his own understanding of Dionysian tragic wisdom, which requires a hardness and pain the Greeks failed to consider:

Saying yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge—Aristotle understood it that way—but in order to Treatment: Redemption 157

be oneself [selbst zu sein] the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity—that joy which included even joy in destroying.104

“Saying yes to life” demands not a discharge of one’s terror and pity, as Aristotle suggested—no cathartic release of tension or swollen buildup of affect. Rather, affirmation requires a going beyond terror and pity. It requires that one is “oneself” the joy of becoming, that one embark on the terrifying task of birthing oneself. To do so surpasses the poisonous feelings of terror and pity, for one no longer laments the loss or overcoming of oneself. A successful self-birth is the achievement of the joy in destroying that is characteristic of Dionysian affirmation. Woman can thus never be the creator Zarathustra entreats his “breth- ren” to become, for she can never become hard. The pain of giving birth, which the Greeks celebrated as the woman’s agony, is rather, for Nietzsche, the nobler, masculine agony—and reward—of one’s own (self-)birth:

For from the depths one loves only one’s child and work; and where there is great love of oneself it is the sign of pregnancy: thus I found it to be.105

If I am a soothsayer and full of that soothsaying spirit which wanders on a high ridge between two seas, wandering like a heavy cloud between past and future, an enemy of all sultry plains and all that is weary and can neither die nor live—in its dark bosom prepared for lightning and the redemptive flash, pregnant with lightning bolts that say Yes and laugh Yes, soothsaying lightning bolts—blessed is he who is thus pregnant!106

This is far from the deconstructionist reading of Nietzsche as “becoming” woman or as “writing with the hand of woman.” It is rather the elimination of women altogether via the appropriation of her one useful capacity—pregnancy and childbirth—for men (and, as we will see, a sublimation of male orgasm into the more suitably “masculine” activity of self-birthing).107 So, in Beyond Good and Evil, although Nietzsche presents Dionysus as expressing at least conditional love for Ariadne (“Thus he once said: ‘Under certain circumstances I love what is human’—and 108 with this he alluded to Ariadne who was present” ), by 1888, Diony- sus has transformed into a divinity who does not even voice occasional desire for women, and treats Ariadne with a mocking that is also clearly a contempt:

“O Dionysus, divine one, why do you pull me by my ears?” Ariadne once asked her philosophic lover during one of those famous dialogues on Naxos. “I find a kind of humor in your ears, Ariadne: why are they not even longer?”109 158 Nietzsche’s Revolution

References to long ears in Nietzsche are, of course, allusions to asses—both the specific Jesus-surrogate of the Ass Festival in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the unconditional braying and foolishness of all modern idols more generally. In this passage, then, Dionysus dismisses Ariadne by intimating that she is unconditional, foolish, an ass, unworthy of serious partner- ship.110 Ultimately, by Twilight of the Idols, Dionysus comes to stand in for all of procreation—sex, sexuality, pregnancy, and birth itself:

For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Diony- sian state, that the basic fact of the Hellenic instinct finds expression—its “will to life.” What was it that the Hellene guaranteed himself by means of these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change; true life as the over-all continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. For the Greeks the sexual symbol was therefore the venerable symbol par excellence, the real profundity in the whole of ancient piety.111

As we saw, this irrelevance of woman is the secret knowledge that Zara- thustra whispers into life’s ear. But it is not only Zarathustra who knows this secret, nor only he who undergoes this metaphorical, masculine self- birthing. In his commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche notes that he, too, possesses this special, secret knowledge: “Nothing like this [‘The Night Song’] has every been written, felt, or suffered: thus suffers a god, a Dionysus. The answer to such a dithyramb of solar solitude in the light would be Ariadne.—Who besides me knows what Ariadne is! [Wer weiss ausser mir, was Ariadne ist!]—For all such riddles nobody so far had any solution; I doubt that anybody even saw any riddles here.”112 The answer to the “dithyramb of solar solitude” suffered by Zarathustra would be Ariadne. But who besides Nietzsche knows what Ariadne is? There is a formidable elision of identities in this passage, wherein Zarathustra’s suffering conflates him with Dionysus, and the answer to Zarathustra’s/Dionysus’s suffering is Ariadne, a Cretan fertility goddess and the woman who gave Theseus the thread that allowed him to find his way out of the labyrinth. This identificatory conflation makes clear that the only ones besides Nietzsche who “know” what Ariadne is are his fictionalized heroes of overcoming and affirmation, “Zarathustra” and “Dionysus,” those invented friends and ideals of higher existence. For in the very next sentence, identities are merged even further: “Zarathustra once defines, quite strictly, his task—it is mine, too—and there is no mistaking his meaning: he says Yes to the point of justifying, of redeeming, even all of the past.” The already consolidated Zarathustra/Dionysus figure is now conflated with Nietzsche himself, the only one who knows “what” Ariadne “is.” This knowledge that only Nietzsche/Zarathustra/ Dionysus possesses is the secret and uncanny power of male procreation. Treatment: Redemption 159

Only (t)he(y) know what Ariadne is—only Nietzsche/Zarathustra/ Dionysus can untangle the labyrinth of life’s secrets, the true meaning of fertility, pregnancy, and birth. (T)he(y) are both the labyrinth and the thread and the hero himself who becomes such upon his successful unraveling of (his own?) mysteries of existence. One has to wonder if this is Nietzsche’s fictionalizing and idealizing of himself as the self-sufficiently hard self-creator he personifies and deifies in both Zarathustra and Dionysus. This desire to appropriate the birthing capacity for himself and other male creators suggests Nietzsche prefers a world that does not really include women at all. My conclusion in the previous chapter that Nietz- sche’s “neutral” concepts also contain a gendered meaning thus raises the question here of how far the sexual and maternal double entendres actually go. Can the notion of “squandering,” for example, be read as a metaphor for the male orgasm?113 Nietzsche says that “great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always, historically and physiologically, that for a long time much has been gathered, stored up, saved up, and conserved for them—that there has been no explosion for a long time.” What follows in the wake of these great men is always “exhaustion of every kind, sterility [Sterilität].”114 Similarly, Nietzsche suggests that once a great deed is accomplished “it turns against the man who did it. By doing it, he has become weak; he no longer endures his deed, he can no longer face it” [Ebendamit, dass er sie that, ist er nunmehr schwach,—er hält seine That nicht mehr aus, er sieht ihr nicht mehr in’s Gesicht].115 This could be an allusion to orgasm (by “doing it,” he has “become weak”—he is no longer hard; he has expelled his creative force). Or it might refer to the more appropriate masculine act of birthing, wherein one’s “child” can always turn against one later in life, or the child cannot be faced because the pregnancy itself was too gruesome. For all the “repellent and bizarre aspects of pregnancy” must “be forgotten if one is to enjoy the child.”116

Fertility or Sterility?

Ressentiment and Eternal Recurrence

It may be protested that Nietzsche’s “doctrine” of eternal recurrence addresses his redemptive excesses, or even mitigates the unsavory gendered inflections of them insofar as it offers a this-worldly interpretation and celebration of the infinite return and reproduction of all existence, one that seems to embrace the world on the basis of an explicitly sexualized metaphor of affirmation.117 Yet it seems to me that the eternal recurrence is yet one more proof of Nietzsche’s own impotence and creative sterility. As we have seen, the central problem for the crippled Zarathus- tra and décadent Nietzsche, who seek to overcome modernity’s horrifying 160 Nietzsche’s Revolution emasculation, is affirmation of that mutilation. Yet in Nietzsche’s very infrequent presentations of eternal recurrence, it emerges either as a “test” of self-acceptance that is suffused with ressentiment, or as an empty affirmation of the circular character of all things, a kind of banal “circle of life” argument that would require no great courage or personal fortitude to acknowledge. Indeed, it seems to me that if the eternal recurrence is such an existential test, it is the resultant of a philosophy that takes the misery of existence as a given, not the squandering that overcomes what is small as part of its inadvertent and superabundant expenditure. More, if the eternal recurrence is an affirmation of the infinitely repeating and rich circle of life, this seems an uninteresting, potentially superficial, and certainly unoriginal philosophical expression of amazement at the won- ders of nature. Instead, I think the eternal recurrence is better read as an important symptomatic moment in Nietzsche’s texts wherein he demonstrates the overall depth of his despair regarding the failings of both modernity and himself. Although Zarathustra is presented as the teacher of eternal return, and Nietzsche himself says that “the idea of the eternal recurrence” is the “fundamental conception” of Zarathustra,118 nevertheless Nietzsche’s most well-known formulation of it occurs before Zarathustra, in Book IV of The Gay Science:

The greatest weight.—What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you 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 more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to 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 upside down 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 possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?119

In this early formulation, the eternal recurrence is presented as a question, one that is posed by a “demon” (who might also be a “god”) during “your loneliest loneliness.” The question this uncanny figure asks is “how well disposed” you are “to yourself and to life.” It is a personal question, one Treatment: Redemption 161 that is asked to you while alone, and it is suggested that its answer comes only via reference to your own actions, decisions, and experiences—in particular, it is implied, all the miserable and unfortunate and small ones. This is confirmed in another single sentence aphorism from earlier in The Gay Science, entitled “The most dangerous point of view,” wherein Nietzsche states that “what I do or do not do now is as important for everything that is yet to come as is the greatest event of the past: in this tremendous perspective of effectiveness all actions appear equally great and small.”120 As presented in these earlier formulations, the possibility that eternal recurrence generates a deep, personal agony depends on whether one could bear to repeat one’s own actions to infinity either (implicitly) because they are for the most part ugly and regrettable, or (explicitly) because they are ultimately of no importance, whether considered relatively or absolutely. Many elements of this initial formulation of eternal recurrence are replicated in Zarathustra. The details of the encounter with eternal recurrence themselves recur—the spider, the moonlight, and the hourglass all reappear, and the eternal recurrence is initially suggested not by a demon but by another unusual figure, a dwarf (who is alternately referred to as “the spirit of gravity” and “the smallest man”). Moreover, Zarathustra is alone, just like the “you” who confronted the demon/god in The Gay Sci- ence. Preceding his revelation of eternal return, in fact, Zarathustra finds himself “intolerably” alone, surrounded by uncanny images and sounds:

Then suddenly I heard a dog howl nearby. Had I ever heard a dog howl like this? My thoughts raced back. Yes, when I was a child, in the most distant childhood: then I heard a dog howl like this. And I saw him too, bristling, his head up, trembling, in the stillest midnight when even dogs believe in ghosts—and I took pity: for just then the full moon, silent as death, passed over the house; just then it stood still, a round glow—still on the flat roof, as if on another’s property—that was why the dog was terrified, for dogs believe in thieves and ghosts.121

Zarathustra is jolted into the vulnerability of childhood by the eerie sound of the dog howling, whom Zarathustra believes is also afraid. But the most uncanny experience of them all is the succeeding appearance of a shepherd convulsing on the ground, choked by a “heavy black snake.” Zarathustra is moved by the singularity of this experience, never having witnessed “so much nausea and pale dread on one face.” He attempts to pull the snake out of the man’s mouth, but to no avail, and suddenly the entreaty emerges of its own accord from Zarathustra’s mouth: “‘Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!’ Thus it cried out of me—my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is good and wicked in me cried out of me with a single cry.” Upon successfully biting off the head of this snake that had threatened to choke him to death, the shepherd rises up, transformed: “No longer shepherd, no longer human—one changed, radiant, laughing! 162 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed!” A clear foreshadowing of Zarathustra’s own struggle with nausea, the shepherd’s trial inspires in Zarathustra a great longing to undergo it himself: “O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. My longing for this laughter gnaws at me; oh, how do I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now!” Although Zarathustra’s instincts appear healthy in their unthinking recommendation for the successful overcoming of nausea (“Bite!”), nevertheless, it is the possibility of undergoing this struggle and being transformed into someone “no longer human,” perhaps über- human, that offers Zarathustra a meaning and justification for his suffering, which he implies had until that moment caused him to long for death—“how could I bear to die now!” Zarathustra’s first exposure to (what will later become) his struggle with eternal recurrence thus suggests already its preservative function, the means by which Zarathustra no longer longs for death. We witness Zarathustra’s own, parallel struggle with eternal recurrence near the end of Part III, in “The Convalescent.” Notably, however, the content of the challenge of eternal recurrence has changed since its initial formulation in The Gay Science. There, the eternal recurrence had been posed in terms of a question, a question with no bearing on anything but oneself: “The question in each and everything thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.” By contrast, the greatest weight for Zarathustra is not his own anguish, loneliness, or existence, but rather the continued or recurring existence of “the small man”:

“The great disgust with man—this choked me and had crawled into my throat; and what the soothsayer said: ‘All is the same, nothing is worthwhile, knowledge chokes.’ A long twilight limped before me, a sadness, weary to death, drunken with death, speaking with a yawning mouth. ‘Eternally recurs the man of whom you are weary, the small man’—thus yawned my sadness and dragged its feet and could not go to sleep. Man’s earth turned into a cave for me, its chest sunken; all that is living became human mold and bones and musty past to me. My sighing and questioning croaked and gagged and gnawed and wailed by day and night: ‘Alas,

man recurs eternally! The small man recurs eternally!’ “Naked I had once seen both, the greatest man and the smallest man: all-too-similar to each other, even the greatest all-too-human. All-too- small, the greatest!—that was my disgust with man. and the eternal recurrence even of the smallest—that was my disgust with all existence. Alas! Nausea! Nausea! Nausea!”122

No longer a concern about how bearable one is to oneself, the eternal recurrence has become, for Zarathustra at least, a test to discern whether Treatment: Redemption 163 or not he can bear the recurrence of others—in particular, the “small” men (and even the “greatest” men). This is Zarathustra’s heavy black snake. The test of eternal recurrence, then, is the test of Zarathustra’s ability to accept and affirm the existence of modern man himself.123 Unfortunately, however, this task is beyond Zarathustra’s abilities. There can be no triumphal biting the head off this snake because Zara- thustra’s nausea is constitutive of his existence, not external to it. Zara- thustra’s earlier excitement at the shepherd’s struggle with the snake and his own agony here at the possibility of the small man’s recurrence both suggest that Zarathustra’s experience of eternal recurrence is suffused with ressentiment. That the eternal recurrence might perform a preservative function for Zarathustra at all is already an indication of his declining life; that it gives meaning to his suffering confirms it as a substitute for the ascetic ideal. In his own trial with eternal recurrence, we see that Zara- thustra is unable to affirm himself, either in himself or for himself. His primary and overwhelming despair at the thought of eternal recurrence is rather that they will also recur with him: “The eternal recurrence even of the smallest—that was my disgust with all existence.”124 What makes life unbearable for Zarathustra is not his own existence, but that of others: “I find it hard to accept that small people are needed.”125 And yet, as Nietz- sche tells us elsewhere, this “need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself—is the essence of ressentiment”:126

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.127

This, indeed this, is bitterness for my bowels, that I can endure you neither naked nor clothed, you men of today.128

To my knowledge, no one has yet noted the constitutive aspect of ressentiment in Zarathustra’s experience of eternal recurrence. This obstacle, however, may be one reason why Nietzsche does not write explicitly about

eternal recurrence again until his final, autobiographical work. There he presents the eternal recurrence a bit differently once again, this time linking it with the “tragic wisdom” embodied by the figure of Dionysus. Dionysian tragic wisdom offers an affirmation of “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things,” which Nietzsche unjustifiably declares to be the “doctrine of Zarathustra.” It consists in being “the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity—that joy which includes even joy in destroying.”129 Zarathustra’s profession of eternal return does not resemble this redefinition of it in Ecce Homo, not only because there is no mention of joyful destruction, but also because the personal or resentful struggle with the recurrence of the “small man” has 164 Nietzsche’s Revolution been eliminated. Moreover, Zarathustra very explicitly defines the eternal recurrence as the recurrence of the same, not as a principle illuminating the circular character of all things.130 Indeed, in response to the dwarf’s “contemptuous” declaration that “all that is straight lies” and that “time itself is a circle,” Zarathustra retorts,

“You spirit of gravity,” I said angrily, “do not make things too easy for yourself! Or I shall let you crouch where you are crouching, lamefoot; and it was I that carried you to this height. “Behold,” I continued, “this moment! From this gateway, Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before? And if everything has been there before—what do you think, dwarf, of this moment? Must not this gateway too have been there before? And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore—itself too? For whatever can walk—in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more. “And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must not all of us have been there before? And return and walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this long dreadful lane—must we not eternally return?”131

Zarathustra denies that time is circular, instead claiming that every individual thing in its inimitable particularity will recur—even the spider and the moonlight—and in precisely the same manner.132 For whatever has been must have been, and will be again, in precisely the same way. The simple circularity of time is “too easy,” and gives in to a spirit of gravity too weak to support itself in the face of the recurrence of identity.133 Zarathustra’s response to the dwarf is correct. If eternal recurrence merely captures “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things,” this is too easy. It suggests the more or less obvious, more or less profound observation that even human beings are caught up in nature’s circle of life. Hannah Arendt’s explication of this meaning of “life” captures it exactly:

Life is a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear, until eventually dead matter, the result of small, single, cycli- cal, life processes, returns into the over-all gigantic circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition . . . A philosophy of life that does not arrive, as did Nietzsche, at the affirmation of “eternal recurrence” as the highest principle of all being, simply does not know what it is talking about.134 Treatment: Redemption 165

Yet such a “philosophy of life” is in no way new or peculiar to Nietzsche. As he himself notes: “The doctrine of the ‘eternal recurrence,’ that is, of the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things— this doctrine of Zarathustra might in the end have been taught already by Heraclitus. At least the Stoa has traces of it, and the Stoics inherited almost all of their principal notions from Heraclitus.”135 Moreover, such a doctrine does not seem terribly difficult to understand or accept. Is this understanding of life really a great weight, a heavy burden, an unbearable agony? Is such a view really the “highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable”?136 It seems to me that insofar as the eternal recurrence is a test, it can only be a test for someone who is basically unhappy, who finds his own existence to be rotten and loathsome, and who is, on the whole, miserable. Why else would the contemplation of one’s entire life’s infinite repetition inspire such anguish and horror? Even a contemplation of the entirety of world history—filled as it is with war, corruption, oppression, and devastation—repeated infinitely and forever, would not necessarily seize one with unbearable dismay (although it might). But the destruction of people(s), countries, or nations is not what disturbs Nietzsche: “Let Europe be relieved of a fourth part of its inhabitants! They and it will be all the better for it!”137 Rather, the eternal recurrence is a difficult thought for Nietzsche in the same way in which it was difficult in The Gay Science—because it threatens the perpetual encounter with one’s own suffering and failures (which in Zarathustra get projected onto the “cripples” or “higher men” of modernity), infinitely and forever. Indeed, Nietzsche himself suggests in that very first formulation that eternal recurrence can serve as an index of “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal.” But as we have also seen in the discussion of Zarathustra, eternal recurrence is also a difficult thought because of the necessary confrontation with the enduring existence of the “small man,” of humanity in its crippled (and even its “higher”) state. In either case, however—whether it is himself or “man” that must be affirmed—there

is something deformed in modernity from which Nietzsche/Zarathus- tra suffers so severely that he can only seek to escape it. This may be, as I suggested earlier, the ressentiment of the strong but it is ressentiment nevertheless. All of this suggests to me that the heavy black snake of nausea did not crawl into Nietzsche/Zarathustra’s throat but rather that it emerged from within him. Suspending disbelief for a moment and simply accepting the possibility that a snake could really crawl that far down a person’s throat without him noticing (was the shepherd asleep? was he drunk?), we notice that if a snake really were to crawl into Zarathustra’s unsuspecting throat, its tail would be sticking out of Zarathustra’s mouth and not its 166 Nietzsche’s Revolution head, making the redemptive conclusion of this struggle an impossibility. Does this suggest that Nietzsche knows the true origin of his agony, that his “dis-ease” comes from within? Second, we might ask why Nietzsche characterizes the experience of choking as specifically that of nausea. I can think of a whole host of physiological responses to the experience of choking—sweating, dizziness, vertigo, tingling in the extremities, blindness— but nausea? That Nietzsche so explicitly associates this choking not only with nausea but also with gagging is significant. In Nietzsche’s physiology handbook, of course, nausea is caused by indigestion or dyspepsia (his disdain for alcohol rules out the hangover). Those with poor digestion, who cannot “have done” with anything, are the dyspeptics of modernity who cannot digest their deeds or fellow men with ease.138 But this sort of dyspepsia is precisely what Zarathustra performs in his struggle with eternal recurrence:

When someone cannot get over a “psychological pain,” that is not the fault of the “psyche” but, to speak crudely, more probably even that of his belly (speaking crudely, to repeat, which does not mean that I want to be heard crudely or understood crudely—). A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (his deeds and misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even when he has to swallow some tough morsels. If he cannot get over an experience and have done with it, this kind of indigestion is as much physiological as the other—and often in fact merely a consequence of the other.139

Whether the eternal recurrence is a struggle to embrace oneself or a struggle to embrace the small man may not matter because Zarathus- tra cannot do either, revealing this “snake” to be the fragmented phallus of modernity on which Nietzsche/Zarathustra so irredeemably gags: “The bite on which I gagged the most is not the knowledge that life itself requires hostility and death and torture-crosses—but once I asked, and I was almost choked by my question: What? does life require even the rabble? Are poisoned wells required, and stinking fires and soiled dreams and maggots in the bread of life? Not my hatred but my nausea gnawed 140 hungrily at life.” Nietzsche/Zarathustra’s survival (and it is indeed survival, not a superabundance or squandering) thus requires not a triumphal biting off of this snake’s head but rather a reactive expulsion of it from his system. For nausea’s turmoil is relieved by vomiting, not heroic triumph and transformation. While throwing up can be a harrowing experience that provides real relief from significant discomfort, it rarely, if ever, is accompanied by such glamorous aftermath as superhuman transformation, much less laughter. Although Zarathustra wants to present his agony in this trial as the suffering of the strong, isn’t his nausea actually a symptom of decline, of a weak constitution? The eternal recurrence, were it to be actually undertaken by Nietzsche/Zarathustra, actually sounds Treatment: Redemption 167 much more like an infinite cycle of spasmodic vomiting, a process no less metaphorical for its author’s having literally suffered from such a condition.141 Yet Nietzsche/Zarathustra cannot successfully throw up anymore than (t)he(y) can consummate their desire for life (or wisdom or truth or “woman” herself), remaining stranded in the in-between condition of pleasure and pain. Nietzsche/Zarathustra could neither love life nor reject it; (t)he(y) could neither incorporate modernity it nor disgorge it. But this means that Nietzsche’s nausea—his unsuccessful attempt to purge (self-)loathing from his system—serves a necessary preservative function for this proclaimer of the death of God, for although “God is a conjecture,” “who could drain all the agony of this conjecture without dying?”142 Nietzsche was precisely the sort who “needed” this funeral spectacle just as much as he “needed” himself, making a “god” of this “vicious circle” of eternal recurrence.143

Nietzsche—Becomes Female

Nietzsche’s “solution” to the problem of modernity’s deformity in terms of either nostalgic traditionalism or solitary, virile self-birthing suggests an inability to face the truly radical consequences of modernity’s emasculation. As we so often see, Nietzsche cannot discuss modernity without bitterness—his critiques are often heavy, burdened, disgusted, irritable. The only means he has of finding modernity bearable at all is through the outlet of the redemptive rhetoric of an Übermensch, some mysterious future figure who is no longer human, all-too-human.144 What this means is that Nietzsche can only be happy about humanity at the prospect of its eradication. This unhappiness is the source of virtually all of Nietzsche’s repellant rhetoric of nobility, slavery, aristocracy, sacrifice of the weak for the benefit of the few, the importance of breeding, an order of rank, et cetera. He simply cannot accept humanity in its fatality, in its femininity; he cannot affirm man as modern, even though, as Nietzsche himself argues, that is the only thing he could possibly be. Neither Zarathustra nor Nietzsche ever overcame “the great nausea,”

and here, as in so many other places, Nietzsche’s numerous attempts to persuade us otherwise are more a testament of his sickness than any affirmation of health we should take at face value. Nietzsche is thus quite the opposite of a “Yes-saying spirit,” his own-most goal and self-description. Another curious case in point: how else to explain his outright fetishization of Richard Wagner? Nietzsche’s relationship to this man takes on a significance that outstrips any of his other obsessions—Schopenhauer, Kant, Socrates, Napoleon, even Dionysus. Nietzsche devoted no less than three of his published texts solely to considerations of Wagner, his music, its relation to modernity, and Nietzsche’s own relationship to all three; the third is actually a rewritten and revised amalgam of all of Nietzsche’s 168 Nietzsche’s Revolution aphoristic discussions of Wagner scattered throughout the rest of his texts. Making yet another oppositional valuation, this text begins by declaring that these aphorisms “read one after the other,” “will leave no doubt about either Richard Wagner or about myself: we are antipodes.”145 When it comes to Wagner, Nietzsche simply assigns Wagner’s name and his own to the respective halves of the gendered bipolarities we have come to expect from him and see so consistently reiterated throughout his writing. Thus, in characterizing his own sickness, Nietzsche says that “I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again: the condition for this—every physiologist would admit that—is that one be healthy at bottom.”146 By contrast, “becoming healthier—is a retrogression, given a nature like Wagner’s.”147 In his fatalistic determinations of modernity’s demise in the 1888 works, not only does Nietzsche take on the status of superabundantly healthy doctor and philosopher, but Wagner correspondingly takes on an overpowering significance as the epitome of modernity. He symbolizes everything Nietzsche detests: effeminacy, falseness, hysteria, moralism. Wagner is significant for Nietzsche because he sums up modernity in a profound way—Wagner is modernity incarnate. Confirming our sus- picions that everything Nietzsche critiques is part of the conspiracy to weaken and enervate modern man, Nietzsche writes, “In the theatre one becomes people, herd, female, pharisee, voting cattle, patron, idiot— Wagnerian.”148 And Nietzsche cannot forgive himself his devotion to Wagner because he was never truly able to overcome it. Despite publicly breaking with Wagner and denouncing the falseness of Wagnerian opera and the superficiality of Bayreuth over and over (and over) again, Nietz- sche’s inability to simply drop the subject speaks more loudly than any of his strident proclamations about what he has recovered from and what he has not. Even The Case of Wagner itself cannot be finished—not only has it a preface and a postscript but yet another, second postscript and then an epilogue. Nietzsche is almost obsessively concerned with being understood correctly in this piece, and his repeated insistence that he is grateful for his Wagnerian illness (the matter that he correctly believes to be least obvious in this essay) is contradicted by the abundance and vehemence

of the criticism therein. Indeed, in the first postscript, Nietzsche begins by telling us he will cite a few lines from another essay he is writing, also about Wagner, entitled “The Price We Are Paying for Wagner.” Although The Case of Wagner finally—finally—concludes with the assertion that “the case of Wagner is for the philosopher a windfall—this essay is inspired, as you hear, by gratitude,” the reader cannot help but be suspicious. What is it about Wagner and Nietzsche’s youthful devotion to him that is so haunting? What is it about this youthful influence that Nietzsche seems unable to purge? Nietzsche tries to explain: Treatment: Redemption 169

Others may be able to get along without Wagner; but the philosopher is not free to do without Wagner. He has to be the bad conscience of his time: for that he needs to understand it best. But confronted with the labyrinth of the modern soul, where could he find a guide more initiated, a more eloquent prophet of the soul, than Wagner? Through Wagner modernity speaks most intimately, concealing neither its good nor its evil—having forgotten all sense of shame.149

Nietzsche thus insists we will understand modernity and its contradictions best only if we examine its “most instructive case.” Although he would lead us to believe that this case is Wagner (as the title suggests), he and we both know better:

A psychologist might still add that what I heard as a young man listening to Wagnerian music really had nothing to do with Wagner; that when I described Dionysian music I described what I had heard—that instinctively I had to transpose and transfigure everything into the new spirit that I carried in me. The proof of that, as strong as any proof can be, is my essay on Wagner in Bayreuth: in all psychologically decisive places I alone am discussed—and one need not hesitate to put down my name or the word “Zarathustra” where the text has the word “Wagner.”150

Wagner, that effeminate hysteric, is—like “woman”—yet another screen on which Nietzsche projects his anxieties about modernity’s castration. And yet Wagner, as Nietzsche admits, is himself. Wagner is essential thus not simply for “the philosopher” who must examine his age and understand it best if he is to oppose it, but specifically for Nietzsche himself, who admits that all of his “subjects” are projections, elaborations of his own deeply idiosyncratic struggles, anxieties, and concerns. Nietzsche in fact goes to some effort to point out precisely how autobiographical his meditations on modernity actually are, whether his “actual” subject is Wagner, Zarathustra, or Dionysus. Notably, however, this admission is not allowed when it comes to “woman.” This is the final step Nietzsche cannot take: he simply cannot admit that “woman”—

much less the castrated masculinity of modernity—is also his ownmost autobiographical confession, that she—is him. Nietzsche’s opposition to full disclosure of the truth thus is, and is not, restricted to the female anatomy—he cannot bear to look directly at the female body anymore than he can bear the sight of himself, but this is because his own body is the female body—he, too, has been castrated by the sickness of modernity. Just as modernity is not an unmarked entity, but rather always already male, so, too, is modern man no mere generalization or abstraction. He is rather the specifically European male body of Nietzsche himself.151 Unwilling to accept the possibility that he might be able to make sense of himself only within the context of a crippled age he detested, resolutely declaring 170 Nietzsche’s Revolution himself an untimely member of an unknown future era, Nietzsche recommended the impossible—an overcoming of oneself that does not own itself, that cannot acknowledge itself for what it is. Nietzsche therefore knows, at some level, that he was never able to recover from décadence, that he himself never overcame the physiological contradictions of being one more emasculated member of modernity. In some ways, this itself is proof for his argument that décadence is incurable— Nietzsche’s unhealthiness supplies the performative proof for his larger argument about modernity as a whole.152 But it also reminds us that if humanity is to recover from its diseased state, and not, as Nietzsche would have it, simply die off or be killed, it is not enough simply to attack or critique. As Nietzsche himself demonstrates with his performative rhetoric of will to power, reversals must themselves be revalued if they are to avoid participation in the poisonous logics they repudiate. Nietzsche’s inability to revalue masculinity and femininity themselves thus bespeaks his own fear of becoming. His longing to renature the antinatural by restoring the phallus to its “proper” owners bespeaks a longing for a rejuvenated health that might save and sustain an otherwise impoverished age. This longing is, I believe, both political and personal—in longing for a remasculinized culture, Nietzsche longed to be saved from himself. Barring the arrival of the Übermensch, however, devoid of any other redemptive possibilities, and faced with the radical insufficiency of eternal recurrence for producing the affirmation necessary for salvific philosophizing, Nietzsche/Zarathustra retreat into the refuge of masculinity, a strategy with which we are by now very familiar. Steeling oneself against the misery and oppression of life, he entreats self-ostracism and the imperative, “become hard!” Thus, one may perhaps become the self-affirming, Dionysian creator. But as we know, this hardness is by no means vanquished or expended—it is perpetual. And the only alternative to becoming “hard” is to “step aside,” “look away,”153 or “pass by”: “where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.”154 But this is, again, at best, a withholding, a celibacy, a refusal of engagement with life and the world. Nietzsche thereby solves the problem of modernity either through redemption via an Übermensch or through the creation of an all-male maternal society into which it is virtually impossible to gain admission. In either case, however—whether it is solitary waiting and suffering or a bizarre Nietzschean incarnation of the Elks’ Club—the effect is the same: a categorization of women and femininity as intrinsically disordered and a reassigning of female qualities and capacities to men, who thereby become the only truly legitimate possessors of such qualities. This is the erasure of women in the name of survival, Nietzsche’s disavowal of the feminine in the name of self-preservation, an assassination of women that is just as surely modernity’s suicide. C HAPTER 6

Queering Revolution

The whole pose of “man against the world,” of man as a “world-negating” principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the end places existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting—the monstrous insipidity of this pose has finally come home to us and we are sick of it. We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of “man and world,” separated by the sublime presumption of the little word “and.” But look, when we laugh like that, have we not simply carried the contempt for man one step further? And thus also pessimism, the contempt for that existence which is knowable by us? Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition—an opposition between the world in which we were at home up to now with our reverences that perhaps made it possible for us to endure life, and another world that consists of us—an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrifying Either/Or: “Either abolish your reverences or—yourselves!” The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be—nihilism?—This is our question mark. The Gay Science, §346

In the GENEALOGY, Nietzsche writes of the artist that “if he were it, he would not represent, conceive, and express it: a Homer would not have created an Achilles nor Goethe a Faust if Homer had been an Achilles or Goethe a Faust.”1 The unspoken, yet implied, addition to this obviously unfulfilled triumvirate is, of course, Nietzsche himself: did Nietzsche create a Zarathustra because he could not be a Zarathustra? A tempting

interpretation, especially given Nietzsche’s boundless praise of this figure and his warning in Ecce Homo that “I am one thing, my writings are another matter.”2 Yet Nietzsche also says disparagingly of artists in the very next aphorism that they are always only the “valets of some morality, philosophy, or religion.” Artists lack the ability to “stand apart; standing alone is contrary to their deepest instincts.”3 By contrast, real creators— philosophers—demand solitude. Unlike artists, whom Nietzsche says always require some “established authority.”4 for direction, philosopher-creators must determine their own why and how, their own goal and virtue: “A virtue must be our own invention, our most necessary self-expression and self-defense: any other kind of virtue is merely a danger.”5 To be able to be 172 Nietzsche’s Revolution such a creator demands self-ostracism from the crowd of common ideas and morality, which have nothing but suspicion and contempt for the hermit. To be this creator one must “live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age.”6 Indeed, Nietzsche calls Thus Spoke Zara- thustra “a dithyramb on solitude.”7 Nietzsche’s own life of solitude dispels the notion that he created Zara- thustra only because he could not be him. Rather, Nietzsche’s suggestion that the “great poet dips only from his own reality”8 and his acknowledgement that Zarathustra’s task is the same as his own—to say “yes to the point of justifying, of redeeming even all of the past”9—suggests that Ecce Homo is not Nietzsche’s only autobiographical work, that Nietzsche’s longing and Zarathustra’s longing are one and the same: “When I have looked into my Zarathustra, I walk up and down in my room for half an hour, unable to master an unbearable fit of sobbing.”10 So when Nietzsche tells us that the “psychological problem” of the “type of Zarathustra is how he that says No and does No to an unheard-of degree, to everything to which one has so far said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No- saying spirit,”11 he suggests that this task and the “psychological problem” it creates is the central one to which he was devoted. This task and this problem is affirmation, a yes-saying that will justify, if not redeem, the entirety of the past. The implication that the past needs such legitimation indicates just how rotten Nietzsche believes it to be, and explains why he is so concerned that his profound No-saying will nevertheless be an affirmative—not resentful—activity. The reason this task creates a psychological problem is because it demands a contradiction: that we be affirmers in our negation of all existence. Nietzsche’s no-saying, which I have characterized as his revolutionary project, must also simultaneously be a project of affirmation, a yes-saying, the very opposite of a no-saying endeavor. It is the argument of this chapter—and this book as a whole—that this contradictory task and psychological problem is precisely the situation and political challenge with which Nietzsche leaves us. First, as I have tried to show, Nietzsche offers a philosophy characterized in its essence by

contradiction—he is both a revolutionary and a conservative, a champion of perspectivism who insists on truth, an advocate of the body who relies on the most complex of philosophical and rhetorical tactics to communicate it, an often crude materialist who nevertheless believes in various ideals of health and gender, a critic of all self-loathing and redemptive excess who nevertheless engaged in both. These contradictions are, in my view, neither superficial nor finally resolvable. They are substantive, rich, real, and definitive of Nietzsche’s thought. They can be summed up by saying that Nietzsche proposes a revolutionary program and platform he himself cannot undertake, a failing that at best undermines his political project, at worst demonstrates its utter futility. This tension is underscored by Queering Revolution 173

Nietzsche’s deliberate choice of the body and its health as both the reason for revolution and its ultimate consequence, yet his qualification of this body as utterly particular and in perpetual flux, deeming its health to be idiosyncratic, historically variable, and dependent upon sickness as its enabling condition. The foundation of Nietzsche’s revolution thus turns out to be no foundation at all, but rather an undermining of the very notion of foundations altogether. Making sense of these contradictions is not impossible, although it cannot be done by resolving them into a singular unity that privileges one “side” over the other, thereby arriving at the “true” Nietzsche or the account of what Nietzsche really meant. Rather, it is through recognizing the very essentiality of these contradictions to the completeness or wholeness of Nietzsche’s thought that we begin to make some headway into understanding his truly revolutionary project, which is not simply a program of revolution but also a revolution in revolution itself. Thus far, I have tried to do this by characterizing Nietzsche’s paradoxes in terms of a revolutionary project he himself was unable to face, much less undertake. I took this inability to be symptomatic of his own décadence, a performance of precisely the nihilistic illness he was diagnosing in the modern age.12 Yet an important aspect of this contradiction has until now gone unremarked—Nietzsche’s choice of a revolutionary platform that is “self-defeating,” his choice of an unstable and impermanent ground on the basis (and in the name) of which to wage revolutionary warfare. This is Nietzsche’s most profound contradiction, for it constitutes not simply revolution, traditionally understood, but also, as I want to claim, a revolution in revolution itself. The body is Nietzsche’s best response to the nihilism of the will to truth because it is contradiction incarnate; it is a foundation that cannot serve as a foundation in any stable or abiding sense. Any other kind of reversal—an insistence on the body and materiality as the only source of knowledge, for example—would remain just that—a mere reversal, another will to truth. It would constitute not a treatment of that disease but reinfection by different means; it would reiterate the will to truth rather than redeploy it. While Nietzsche’s insis-

tence that truth is a body is clearly a revolutionary reversal, it is a reversal undertaken not in the name of truth, but in the name of health and on the basis of the body, neither of which are consistent, self-sustaining, unitary, or permanent. God becomes another body in this account, but the body does not become God.13 Nietzsche’s revolution is thus a revolution in the traditional sense that simultaneously can be seen to shatter the boundaries of that revolution; it is a reversal that undoes the meaning of reversal, rendering all future reversals impossible. This is because revolution is one more symptom by which modernity and the will to truth can be diagnosed. All that remains is contradiction, impermanence, flux, change, becoming. There 174 Nietzsche’s Revolution is nothing to reverse or overturn because there is no existing hierarchy or order by which the world might be rendered definitively intelligible. Thus the far-reaching change that Nietzsche inaugurates in modernity renders all revolutionary projects—including his own—meaningless. It truly is, in this sense, the end of an era—the success of Nietzsche’s revolution undoes both the disease and its “cure.” Although, for many, this outcome may seem cause for despair, it is precisely at this moment that Nietzsche can be taken up by, and for, radical politics—my own preoccupation. Nietzsche’s revolution is clearly not a Marxist one, either in the sense of opposition to capitalism or in the refusal of hierarchy, exploitation, or (class) domination. Indeed, Nietz- sche opposes neither capitalism nor the exploitation of labor but rather Christianity, its secularized will to truth, and the bodily self-loathing induced by each. Moreover, his opposition is based not on any moral or ethical principle but is rather, he thinks, a matter of taste, calling himself “an opponent of Christianity de rigeur.”14 My suggestion, however, is that Nietzsche is a post-Marx revolutionary in his radical opposition to truth itself. Nietzsche’s desire to overthrow the cult of meaning imposed by Christianity reminds us that the Western tradition we are so eager to mark as written from a bourgeois European male perspective is still missing an important set of qualifiers—heterosexual, “appropriately” masculine, and Christian. Indeed, as I demonstrated in Chapter 2, for Nietzsche, it is this latter designation that is most significant for him; Christianity defines the very form of life in the West. It is what allows him to diagnose an entire age and culture as ill and imagine a possible existence outside or beyond its destruction. Insofar as the meaning- and truth-making practices Nietzsche seeks to overthrow are specified by him as Christian, it is no surprise that it is precisely at the crossroads of sex, gender, and sexual difference that Nietzsche becomes unable to act, able only to point the way toward a queer, feminist revolution that nevertheless terrified and repulsed him. For on what other foundation does the profoundly heteronormative sexual and gender moralism of Western culture rest than on Christianity?15 From where else does the insistence on truth, on the need

for a meaning for our suffering emanate than precisely from this Christian imperative?16 This means that Nietzsche’s overcoming of revolution can be construed as an abandonment of politics only if we maintain that worker solidarity (and all its analogic permutations—to race, gender, imperial- ism, etc.) is the only appropriate content of revolutionary activism. The overthrow of Christianity would be an overcoming of the self-loathing and world negation that constitute it, which explains why affirmation is Nietzsche’s fundamental and most difficult revolutionary task. But this means, then, that Nietzsche’s project can clearly be read as culminating in revolutionary politics, at least from a particular queer, feminist, and Queering Revolution 175 antiracist perspective, for “affirmation” in the realms of sex, gender, and sexuality demands an embrace of the fundamental decay of European gendered roles and bodies Nietzsche himself was witness to in the late nineteenth century, a decay that includes the demasculinization of men, the “unsexing” of women, and the dilution of European stock, a mixing of masculinities and races that continues to this day. This affirmation is precisely a resistance to truth when it comes to the body even as it is based on the revolutionary claim that truths cannot exist without bodies. And this is by no means an abandonment or apathetic desertion of politics. It is rather an opening, an invitation, a challenge to do revolutionary politics otherwise, to reconceptualize thinking and reengage action from a perspective no longer governed and dominated by the parameters of the will to truth.17 Although Nietzsche could not undertake this shift, could not remain “in-between” bodies in the very way that he himself argues they only ever exist, nevertheless, the fact that he undertook the delegiti- mation of his own revolutionary authority regarding will to power makes clear such a step is possible, indeed desirable, and perhaps even hoped for by Nietzsche himself. Ironically, in this display of décadent inability, Nietzsche authorizes what he finds most loathsome in what must also be construed as a supreme display of revolutionary squandering, wasting his energies on an undeserving age and conferring his project onto future others who will take it up in ways he could not himself sanction. Although many have noted that this is the meaning of Nietzsche’s self-declaration that he will be born posthumously,18 none has recognized the overwhelming strength, self-sufficiency, and self-affirmation required for such magnanimity. For Nietzsche here commissions his own dispossession. This is the very opposite of the anxious and irritable Zarathustra, who still cares who is a higher man, much less what he looks and smells like. This is the activity of one who is overfull of energy and power, who cannot help but use himself up in his attempt at philosophical and artistic creation. It is in this sense that we can say that Nietzsche is truly healthy, in the fully Nietzschean and nonmasculinist sense—he is able to renounce precisely that which he

holds most dear in service of his revolutionary attempt to affirm himself and the world. Insofar as it is precisely this that is foreclosed by Chris- tianity’s death grip on modernity, Nietzsche thus also presents us with a successful performance of his own revolutionary revolution.

The Problem of Privileging

As we have seen, Nietzsche’s investment in modernity is actually his investment in his own European masculinity. Consistently pointing out his superior healthiness, Nietzsche presents himself as the only real man left in modernity. This superior separateness depends on his dichotomous 176 Nietzsche’s Revolution essentalizations of bodies as either strong or weak, healthy or sick, male or female, binarisms that both frame and exemplify his diagnosis of modernity. Rather than consider the possibility that a revaluation of sexuality, sexual difference, and gender might lead to a host of unanticipated and fertile developments for the human race, Nietzsche instead retreats into a longing for redemption from modernity’s décadence through some sort of superhuman—that is, supermasculine—intervention. Nietzsche’s entirely unprofessional recoil from décadence renders him incapable of filling his own prescription for modernity, an age whose loathsomeness is often impossible for him to directly confront or bear. Identifying sickness with the feminine, Nietzsche’s horror at décadence— which is really, or also, his horror at castration—causes him to see the modern age as crippled, as no longer whole. Nietzsche thus does not present any possibility for an affirmation of décadence when it is specified as emasculation, nor does he think gender itself is subject to the radical decay or transformation that he otherwise argues characterizes all of life. Nevertheless, this gendered reading of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity neither exhausts the meaning of his philosophy nor definitively limits its usefulness. As is perhaps obvious, there is no necessity that modernity be conflated with manhood or masculinity, nor that décadence be conflated with emasculation or feminization. Philosophically, one could subscribe to the interpretation of Nietzsche offered in either Part I or Part II of this book without necessarily endorsing the other. In fact, these readings are, to some extent, incompatible, insofar as commitment to the feminist reading offered in Part II would likely entail dismissal of the “neutrality” of the reading of Part I, while the reading of Part I offers an exciting potential and openness in Nietzsche’s philosophy that is almost definitively foreclosed by the reading of Part II.19 The very independence of these two analyses suggests the décadent idiosyncrasy of Nietzsche’s own conflation of them. It indicates, in fact, that these two “halves” of Nietzsche’s philosophy form a “whole” not because they logically entail one another, but rather because of some autobiographical particularity, some nuance about Nietzsche that cannot be bent to the yoke of logical coherence.

To take a singe example of this inextricable if otherwise illogical conflation, in a characteristic passage, we see Nietzsche’s ambivalent identification of modernity and man, décadence and castration, and the bizarre difficulty of definitively disentangling these two readings/diagnoses from one another. In the preface to The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes, “The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy. Even love of life is still possible, only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman that causes doubts in us.”20 Queering Revolution 177

At first glance, this looks simply like a sexist wisecrack, best labeled as such and then dismissed or even ignored altogether. But when paired with the knowledge that Nietzsche will conclude this same text with the assertion that life is a woman (“Vita femina . . . Yes, life is a woman”21), and go on to personify life as a woman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (a text that the last aphorism of Book IV of The Gay Science both invites and anticipates), it becomes clear that Nietzsche’s remarks about life and his remarks about women are, for him, at least, largely inseparable. In this passage, for example, he explicitly admits the possibility of cultivating a new way of loving life, one that perhaps does not insist on its being stable or knowable. This is a clear admission of the possibility of affirmation. Yet in the very next sentence, Nietzsche says he is doubtful about similar such prospects when it comes to woman. But if life is a woman, then the prospects for a cheerful affirmation of life become doubtful, too. This brief set of sentences encapsulates the ambivalence of Nietzsche’s gender-neutral analysis of modernity and décadence that is also and simultaneously (if at times unwittingly) a specifically marked analysis of gender, sexuality, and sexual difference. Nietzsche shows us both how his gender analysis is detachable from his analysis of modernity, and the unlikelihood that he can either always see this possibility or necessarily undertake it. But the fact that neither “half” of this analysis entails the other does not mean that one of them is more “true” than the other, either for Nietz- sche or as a diagnosis of modernity. Both analyses and positions are true, without either necessarily refuting the other. Indeed, nothing can decide between them, but this discounts the truth of neither one. For they are true in the way anything about the body or a text is true—as an autobiographical confession of the particularity of its author. The degree to which we find either (or both) side(s) of Nietzsche’s thought compelling (whether as descriptions of him or as descriptions of modernity) indicates the degree to which our own bodies share something in common with his. But there can be no doubt about the contradictory character of Nietz- sche’s body; indeed, Nietzsche himself declares as much multiple times, particularly in Ecce Homo:

The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its fatality: I am, to express it in the form of a riddle, already dead as my father,

while as my mother I am still living and becoming old. This dual descent, as it were, both from the highest and the lowest rung on the ladder of life, at the same time a décadent and a beginning—this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from all partiality in relation to the total problem of life, that perhaps distinguishes me. I have a subtler sense of smell for the signs of ascent and decline than any other human being before me; I am the teacher par excellence for this—I know both, I am both.22

Apart from the fact that I am a décadent, I am also the opposite.23 178 Nietzsche’s Revolution

This dual set of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, is repeated in my nature in every respect: I am a Doppelgänger, I have a “second” face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third.24

As he himself admits (and as has been observed in this book a number of times), Nietzsche is both healthy and sick, superabundant and yet in decline, an astute critic of Christian modernity and a benighted sufferer of the very Christian self-loathing he so virulently criticizes. Both are true without either one invalidating the other. It is essential to maintain both of these halves intact—and to recognize their ambivalent identity—because neither without the other constitutes the philosopher whom we recognize as Nietzsche. To privilege the healthy Nietzsche over the décadent one, or the décadent Nietzsche over the healthy one (much less the “gender-neutral” Nietzsche over the misogynist one, or vice versa) as the “true” Nietzsche or the “real” Nietzsche or even the “better” Nietzsche—the Nietzsche he or we wish he would have been—is to negate the other side that is equally essential to his identity. For it is both sides together that make Nietzsche Nietzsche. Privileging only one “half” discounts definitive aspects of Nietzsche as superfluous, thereby denying the fullness of the autobiography revealed in his texts. This is ultimately a negation of Nietzsche himself, a wish or demand that he be otherwise. To sever one part of Nietzsche from the rest because it is irrelevant, inconsistent, ugly, or irrational (much less misogynist or racist) is nothing less than an active alteration of that text/body; at worst, it is an evisceration of the life portrayed and embodied there.25 This is not to say that there could ever be a full or complete accounting of Nietzsche—all interpretations are by definition reductive—nor is it to say that there exists some kind of original integrity to Nietzsche’s texts (much less his body!) that we should seek to capture or could ever understand. But the incorporation of Nietzsche into the philosophical tradition of the Western canon has too often meant that the basic life principle of his thought has been mangled or distorted in the service of rendering him consistent, unitary, systematic, or otherwise identifiable as one thing or another (even if that thing is, as in deconstruction, that he is not definitively identifiable as any particular thing whatsoever). Yet it is no accident that Nietzsche does not write philosophical treatises, fails to offer fully developed “doctrines,”26 engages in self-referential paradoxes, and writes in a manner that is often mistaken for literature. He does these things precisely because he is attempting to undermine the very will to truth that excludes such behavior from the activity of knowledge production in the first place. Like literature and art, the body, too, is neither an example of, nor does it present us with or make, foolproof philosophical arguments, which are impossible anyway because, of course, “you know that no philosopher so far has been proved right.”27 As Nietzsche himself is trying to tell us, truth is incompatible neither with embodiment nor Queering Revolution 179 with contradiction. Indeed, these may all very well be the same thing. For the body is the very site and source of contradiction (the bane of all philosophical argumentation); its mere existence is often held to challenge the very possibility of the rational. Yet the body is nevertheless also the site and source of truths, which could come from no other source anyway and are perpetually autobiographically revealed in the body’s activities, pursuits, and morphāi. And there simply is no obvious reason why these truths must be internally or logically consistent. Certainly, many theories of human behavior or philosophies of human nature either presume or dic- tate consistency as necessary for intelligibility, but why is this a descriptive activity and not a regulative, if not clearly normative, injunction to consistency? As Nietzsche himself speculates, it may be that “without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self- identical . . . man could not live.”28 This does not, however, mean that the body or its activities are, in fact, self-identical (much less unconditional!). We may demand noncontradiction as a criterion of truth and dismiss the body and its drives for their failure to conform to this principle, but this merely purchases truth at the expense of self-denigration, dismissal, and contempt. Moreover, it may miss something more fundamental by depriving us of what Nietzsche calls the “rich ambiguity” of “existence.”29 That truth is a body and that the body is contradictory is not a failing of either; it is, rather, the enabling condition of all life: “The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.”30 Resisting a definitive reading of Nietzsche as truly one thing or the other does not authorize just any reading or interpretation of Nietzsche whatsoever, nor does it entail concluding that Nietzsche is simply ambiguous. Rather, I am arguing for a simultaneity of truths in Nietzsche’s texts, wherein he can be acknowledged as both a proclaimer of truth as well as its deconstructor, both a radical and a conservative. I do not think we can definitively conclude that either side of these claims simply or clearly exhausts the full meaning of Nietzsche’s texts. But it does not mean these disputes are not there, nor does it mean that there is insufficient thematic evidence available to conclude that there is nothing definitive of the text whatsoever. It means, instead, that Nietzsche’s contradictory positions are real, present, decisive currents in the text, movements that we can clearly trace and extract, and yet that stand in frequent, startling, and irreconcilable contradiction with one another. Recognizing them and yet being unable to decide between them is quite different from concluding that only one is true or that neither of them can ever fully be true. Rather, my claim is that both are true, at the same time, and despite their very irreconcilability. This is the very opposite of textual indeterminacy, and yet it still resists every singular determination all too often and too easily made about just who or what Nietzsche is.31 180 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Admittedly, this, too, is a statement of who and what Nietzsche is. Such statements are unavoidable in any project of interpretation. But it is a statement of Nietzsche that also flees the very demand that what he is become speakable. It is an answer to every interpretative question about Nietzsche with a “yes, but,” or rather a “yes, and,” a statement of the “truth” of Nietzsche that undermines the very will to truth that demands such a statement for interpretive sufficiency. To interpret Nietzsche with the specific aim of resolving his contradictions (or overcoming, dismiss- ing, or dissolving them) or worse, of highlighting his textual and physiological inadequacies in order to demonstrate one’s readerly superiority to him, is to miss entirely the essential characteristic of his philosophy, which is contradiction. For Nietzsche is identifiable—he boldly makes his presences known. He is just not singly identifiable—he is not simply one thing or another (not even nothing at all)—he is rather everything all at once, both at the same time, both himself and not himself, both himself and his opposite.

Bodily Contradictions

It is thus no surprise that Nietzsche’s own philosophy resists such definitive knowing, that precisely in those moments when we feel most sure we understand what he means, an “inconsistency” surfaces, a stray remark emerges that we simply cannot account for.32 But the interpretive violence that would deliberately ignore or attempt to reform this contradictory essence of Nietzsche’s philosophy has another consequence—it divests him of his revolutionary project. For the contradiction that is the essence of Nietzsche’s thought is also the “foundation” of his critique of modernity and his revolutionary project to overhaul it. Nietzsche seeks to divest modernity of its “will to truth,” the will “to make all being thinkable.”33 He seeks to divest us of our insistence that all “good things”—for example, morality, truth, God, virtue, peace, love, justice, pity, et cetera—do not and cannot originate in their opposites. He wants to overcome our insistence that good things are “good” because they are both internally

and externally consistent, both within themselves and over time. That they are good because they are stable and unchanging, unitary and pure; that they are “true” when they are universalizable. This independent, self- sustaining, and utterly consistent character of “good” things—that is, everything that we value in modernity—makes clear that contradiction, inconsistency, and irrationality are bad, objections to a thing, arguments against it, reasons for its rejection and likely irredeemable character. But because Nietzsche looks at life and embodiment and sees nothing but flux, impermanence, inconsistency, and change, he concludes that the defining characteristic of European modernity is its rejection of all life and embodiment. For nothing about this world possesses the characteristics Queering Revolution 181 of these so-called good things—nothing about the world is permanent, unadulterated, unconditional, autonomous, or self-sustaining in these ways. Thus, modernity must believe that the world, too, is bad. Nietzsche attempts to overthrow the reign of this will to truth through a reversal of existing values, a move that has led many to conclude that will to power constitutes some kind of truth for Nietzsche, whether of the world or, as I might have it, of the body. But does Nietzsche strike a revolutionary posture merely to substitute himself for Plato, advocating a mere reversal of values and not, as he actually claims, a revaluation of values? There is plenty of evidence for this view. After all, as we have seen, Nietzsche explicitly insists that we reverse the reversal of Christian- ity and renature the antinatural, defining this activity as his lifelong task. In the Genealogy, he suggests reversal as a possible solution to the ills of Christianity:

We modern men are the heirs of the conscience-vivisection and self-torture of millennia: this is what we have practiced longest, it is our distinctive art perhaps, and in any case our subtlety in which we have acquired a refined taste. Man has all too long had an “evil eye” for his natural inclinations, so that they have finally become inseparable from his “bad conscience.” An attempt at the reverse would in itself be possible—but who is strong enough for it?—that is, to wed the bad conscience to all the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which runs coun- ter to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short all ideals hitherto, which are one and all hostile to life and ideals that slander the world.34

As is clearly on display in this passage, Nietzsche is committed to categories of natural and unnatural, aligning life and instincts with nature, and “the beyond” and ideals with the unnatural. He vigorously insists on the truth of such assertions throughout his writings, castigating the antinature of anyone who dares deny them. And he does so out of a deep conviction that such claims are not only true, but drastically needed in a décadent age whose philosophical mantra is “above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent enough to behave as if it were real!”35 Not only does Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity (and slave morality more generally) rely on his claims about what is natural and unnatural, healthy or unhealthy, but he even goes so far as to couch this critique in terms of truth and lying, casting himself as the speaker of truth to Christianity’s power. He sees the Christian and egalitarian process of “weakness . . . being lied into something meritorious”36 as the process of décadence itself, declaring Christianity the religion of lies and lying: “every word in the mouth of a ‘first Christian’ is a lie; every act he performs a falseness of instinct.”37 As early on as The Gay Science, even, Nietzsche 182 Nietzsche’s Revolution begins his discussion and definition of Christian morality and its positing of a divine realm by proposing their status as lies: “Even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is truth, that truth is divine.—But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?”38 Nietzsche says that he is “the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies.”39 Nietzsche’s philosophy, then, is a philosophy that stands opposed to lying itself, for “instinctive falseness, the inclination to lie in order to lie, and the incapacity for straight glances and steps are the expression of décadence.”40 Indeed, as we have seen, Nietzsche declares that his “fate” is to “stand in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia,”41 by which he means Christianity and all its variants. And Christianity has triumphed as the result of an elaborate series of lies. The first and biggest is the lie of subjectivity—rather than confront and accept inequality as constitutive of life, Christianity attempts the subjectification of inequality described in Chapter 2, demanding that strength become accountable for its differentiation. But Nietzsche is also the proclaimer of truth insofar as he claims to reveal the very mechanism of Christianity itself, exposing its “truth” for what it is—an imposition, an interpretation, or, polemically, a lie. This kind of lying Nietzsche calls dishonesty. It is similar to Marx’s critique of mystification—Nietzsche argues that Christianity obscures its own production of morality, subjectivity, and conscience as an imposition of power by calling it “truth.” It is a “dishonest mendaciousness—a mendaciousness that is abysmal but innocent, truehearted, blue-eyed, and virtuous.”42 This kind of dishonesty and self-denial about one’s own lying is what Nietzsche actually detests: “All honor to the ascetic ideal insofar as it is honest!”43 As described in Chapter 3, Nietzsche enacts his treatment for modernity via a militant deployment of the rhetoric of will to power, a claim

about life that he unapologetically declares to be the truth to which modernity has become disastrously blind. Nietzsche thus objects to the lying of Christianity because it denies the life of this world: the body, drives, activity, power, growth, decay, death. He criticizes this first-order lying by calling it “anti-nature,” and it is what he means when he says things like “morality negates life.”44 But Nietzsche’s self-proclaimed status as the doctor of modernity and his role as the unmasker of the “lies of millennia”45 is also, like the lying of Christianity, of a first- and a second- order variety. At the first-order level, Nietzsche indeed proclaims a truth of the body that Christianity denies with its first-order lies of “all these concepts, ‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘sin,’ ‘beyond,’ ‘truth,’ ‘eternal life.’”46 Yet Queering Revolution 183

Nietzsche does not claim that his views of life, the body, and health are true at this second-order level, in a way that “permits no other interpretation, no other goal”; that “rejects, denies, affirms, and sanctions solely from the point of view of its interpretation” as the ascetic ideal does.47 Rather, Nietzsche is arguing for a truth of the body that is, like the body itself, not enduring; a truth that decays and dies off, that is regenerated and recirculated as new practices emerge through the endless cycle of (the reproduction of) life. As Nietzsche notes in The Gay Science, “the ultimate question about the conditions of life” is “to what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.”48 His concern with lying, then, is always and only a concern with the body: “The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment . . . The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating.”49 The body is the reason why Nietzsche is not actually “opposed” to lying per se, and also why lying can never be eliminated: it is a function of embodiment itself. Our very modes of perception determine that lying is constitutive of our experience: “Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its ‘inventors.’ All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying.”50 For Nietzsche, there simply is no such thing as pure or raw perception divorced from the bodily particularity of the organism doing the perceiving. Nietzsche often calls this intrinsic structure of perception “falsification” or “error,” but, as such, it is unavoidable since “all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error.”51 This essential perspectivism of life means that all perception is a “falsification” that is irreducibly particular to the perceiver in question. To “oppose” this falsification, then, perhaps out of some moral principle that values truth over error, is simply to oppose one’s own body, one’s own “self.” For Nietzsche, then, dishonesty and falseness are never matters of inaccuracy—neither constitutes a failure of our ability to represent or adequately capture the outside world.

Rather, they are physiological problems of self-loathing or bodily denial. Thus, Nietzsche defines “error (faith in the ideal)” as “not blindness” but rather “cowardice”;52 thus, Nietzsche specifies that “By lie I mean: wishing not to see something that one does see; wishing not to see something as one sees it.”53 Physiological evaluations are thus the only possible measure of the relative merits of any lie. As Nietzsche points out, it is even possible that noble morality, that seeming exemplar of all health and well-being, lies, for “looking down from a superior height, falsifies the image of that which it despises.” What is more important than this lying is that it is “a much less serious falsification than that perpetrated on its opponent . . . by the 184 Nietzsche’s Revolution submerged hatred, the vengefulness of the impotent.”54 It is less serious because “there is indeed too much carelessness, too much taking lightly, too much looking away and impatience involved in contempt, even too much joyfulness, for it to be able to transform its object into a real caricature and monster.”55 Were such noble falsification to become true—a “real caricature and monster” (emphasis added)—it would cease to be harmless. It would not be merely a lie—that is, a perception—but rather a dishonest lie, a world-interpretation that reproduces itself ideologically as immutable through the discourse of truth. Truth, then, is Christianity by other means.56 It is the philosophical practice of omitting the body, “a long concealed vampire in the background who begins with the senses and in the end is left with, and leaves, mere bones, mere clatter[.] I mean categories, formulas, words (for, forgive me, what was left of Spinoza, amor intellectualis dei, is mere clatter and no more than that: What is amor, what deus, if there is not a drop of blood in them?).”57 Bemoaning philosophers’ hatred of becoming, Nietzsche complains that everything “philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable idolators of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship.”58 Like Christianity, modernity’s will to truth ultimately culminates in nihilism:

In rare and isolated cases it may really be the case that such a will to truth, some extravagant and adventurous courage, a metaphysician’s ambition to hold a hopeless position, may participate and ultimately prefer a even a handful of “certainty” to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities; there may actually be puritanical fanatics of conscience who prefer even a certain nothing to an uncertain something to lie down on—and die. But this is nihilism and the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul—however cou- rageous the gestures of such a virtue may look.59

Nietzsche’s equation of nihilism with death in this passage is no accident, for the Christian faith in god and the “scientific” will to truth both culminate in nothingness. Both are desires for the impossible—for the unchanging, for the enduring, for that which does not become. “‘Will to truth’—that might be a concealed will to death.”60 While Nietzsche undoubtedly utilizes the rhetoric of truth and falsehood in all his texts, the standard for the evaluation of that truth is the body itself. He calls this standard “health.” Yet even this health is not an ideal, for as a “standard,” it is an utterly idiosyncratic measure of value since bodies change both over the course of a lifetime, and over the course of history itself:

For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy Queering Revolution 185

for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the ‘equality of men,’ the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men.61

In other words, Nietzsche is attempting to collapse “life” and “truth” into this single, historically variable, inconstant standard of value-assessment— health. “Health” is Nietzsche’s suggested yardstick for a this-worldly evaluation of ways of life, which can be confirmed as “truly” healthy only insofar as they can be incorporated by the particular bodies under investigation. “Physiology” is thus substituted for valuation; the body becomes the measure of all truth. As he famously puts it in Beyond Good and Evil, “we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments a priori) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life.”62 This means, then, that even Nietzsche’s first-order claims about the truth of the body—his attempt to overcome the antinature of Christian- ity—are not an entrenched foundation of biological essentialism. Rather, these are truths that will themselves be overcome. Nietzsche’s “truths,” in other words—his theory of will to power, health and décadence, consciousness and instinct, weakness and nobility—are a perspective that is destined to overcome itself. If it were not, it would become a faith on par with Christian morality or the modern will to truth and no longer be a redeployment of those drives. Nietzsche’s doctoring, in other words, would not be a treatment of modernity’s illness but rather a bolstering of it—a reinfection. All of this holds for Nietzsche’s lawgiving as well. In unifying practices of morality and justice with bodily activity, Nietzsche makes the body the measure of laws and lawgiving, thus laying down a new law that simultaneously makes possible its necessary and inevitable overcoming. As that which emanates from the body and seeks to effect changes in bodily constitution, law is neither immortal nor omnipotent, and cannot remain static without ceasing to exist. Nietzsche’s law, like all law, can only attain life through incorporation and growth and will, of necessity, die out as a consequence of its having lived. The only measure of the “truth” of Nietzsche’s lawgiving is the test of incorporation. Nietz- sche thus traffics in a rhetoric of lawfulness at the same time as he demonstrates that there is no such claim to lawfulness: Nietzsche deliberately gives laws that can never be legitimate(d). 186 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Truth is therefore, like the body itself, both material and metaphorical. It is manifested by bodies symptomatically through their successful incorporations, and is simultaneously undermined as permanent or universal because of the very temporality and historicity of those bodies’ manifesta- tions. Indeed, the “body” can only become a firm ground for truth on the basis of an idealist understanding of it. But if we recall Nietzsche’s claim that the body is the sensible form(s) will to power take(s), we realize that even this “ground” is unstable, impossible to fully or definitively circumscribe. Nietzsche’s “task,” then, while not a cure for modernity’s illness, is an attempt to achieve reconciliation with it, to achieve a faith in reality that nevertheless does not admit of a final truth, even its own. “Whatever I create and however much I love it—soon I must oppose it and my love; thus my will wills it.”63 This would be a world governed entirely by perspective valuations; or, in other words, a world measured entirely by the demands and incorporations of the body. Such an accomplishment would be both the triumph of Nietzsche’s revolution and its simultaneous overcoming, for it would acknowledge precisely what Nietzsche wants to show—that any valuation can achieve only temporary dominion in a world defined simply as becoming. “And life itself confided this secret to me: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must always overcome itself.’”64 Thus, Nietzsche offers a platform for revolutionary overthrow that is unstable and impermanent—the body as the site of will to power, whose health is a continual process of convalescence. This is a revolution founded on a self-referential paradox, a revolution that undermines its own claim to revolutionary authority. This paradoxical authority is necessary because any other position would merely be the will to truth reiterated: If Nietz- sche were simply to assert the body as the source and meaning of all goodness and truth in existence, he would be guilty of the same sin— sick with the same disease—as his Christian contemporaries. He would remain stranded in the same discourse of punishment and redemption, reversing its terms without undermining its valuative foundation. Treat- ment for the will to truth, then, cannot consist in opposing it simply, for its legitimating power incorporates even opposition into its fold, render-

ing resistance a fully legible and allowable activity, insofar as it, too, does not call into question the value of truth. That Nietzsche resists this fatal flaw of revolutionary fervor suggests, among other things, that Nietzsche’s critique of will to truth also functions as a critique of revolutionary reversals, which maintain their investment in interpretive authority in their insistence that some view or other is “true” to the necessary exclusion of all others. In claiming that what is called “good” is actually bad, or that what is considered “just” is really unjust, the insistence on the truth of the revolutionary reversal retains the vestige of authority that legitimates the terms “good” and “just” to begin with. The same would be true for Nietzsche if his insistence on the health Queering Revolution 187 of the body were to become a new standard of truth, a mode of incorporation to which everyone must measure up if modernity is to be saved or humanity redeemed. The healthy body would become an ideal on par with the virtuous soul, a coercive norm that is just as life-denying as any morality. Viewed in this way, “revolution” becomes the simple substitu- tion of one god for another. Yet, for Nietzsche, all gods are idols, and all idealism is ascetic—a retreat from the world, a self-denial, a suicidal tendency. To conclude, then, that Nietzsche simply is a revolutionary would actually undermine his revolutionary goals, for it would narrow the scope of his political project to mere reversal (rather than revaluation) and leave intact the very modernity he seeks to overthrow by rendering his philosophy one more instantiation of the will to truth.

Castrating Nietzsche

The difficulty, however, as we have already seen, is that Nietzsche becomes unable to follow through with his own revolutionary program insofar as it is also simultaneously a gendered diagnosis of décadence as emasculation. Now, Nietzsche is certainly a revolutionary in the more traditional sense, offering a critique of everything existing, portending an imminent crisis of epic proportions, and insisting on his view of life, the body, and health as the true foundation for a therapeutic revolution that is the only hope for Western civilization. This is necessary because “the whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows.”65 Nevertheless, when it comes to the gendering of bodies, Nietzsche becomes an inflexible essentialist, seeing certain physiological characteristics or capacities as definitive of bodies and not subject to change. Rather than consider the possibility of a revaluation of sexuality, sexual difference, and gender hierarchy as the possibility for a different kind of future for humanity, Nietzsche instead warns us of the terrifying consequences of gender (and thus racial) “mixing,” bemoaning the lack of coherent gender identity and discernible sexual difference as the dissolution of European health and wholeness. Indeed, when it comes

to sex, Nietzsche snaps rigidly back into modernity’s place, insisting precisely on the need for certainty, constancy, and “opposite values” that bespeak the “frog perspective” of declining life he otherwise critiques in the metaphysicians. At one level, this is a contradiction, pure and simple. While Nietzsche’s revolution is founded on the unstable and impermanent ground of the ever-changing and idiosyncratic health of the body, he falters when it comes to making good on this promise in the realms of sex, gender, and sexuality. He is unable to revalue his standard of masculinity that comes to stand in for the meaning of health; as we have seen, although Nietzsche believes a new and different way of loving life is possible, he still has his 188 Nietzsche’s Revolution doubts when it comes to woman. This is substantial and profound evidence in favor of reading Nietzsche as a conservative—not only does this reticence completely harmonize with that brand of social conservatism that sees the decay of traditional gender roles, the sexual division of labor, and the heterosexual nuclear family as the destruction of social life and even Western civilization itself. But the fact that Nietzsche himself comes to a stop here can be read as his warning against such dangerous degeneration, an indication that such alterations of the natural order will wreak nothing but nihilism and destruction. Nietzsche’s own limitations here would thus indicate the natural limits on life itself. My own autobiographical investments, however, prevent me from coming to a stop just here. I do not say the conservative reading is wrong, for clearly it is not. But it is also the case that the conservative reading does not fully exhaust the political possibilities still to be mined from Nietzsche’s texts. My own “real-life” leftism and my interest in contesting Nietzschean interpretive orthodoxies thus come to a head here, insofar as it is precisely the leftist version of Nietzsche who has been so carefully hidden from view, deliberately closeted by reactionary readers—of various political dispositions—who either refuse the possibility of Nietz- sche’s leftism outright or else reject the brand of leftism they see as following from his philosophy.66 What I see in Nietzsche’s inability to follow through with his own revolutionary project, however, is a contradiction that is not simply a failure but an instructive and productive failure. Nietz- sche’s inability to follow through on the promise of his treatment of will to power when it comes to sex and gender reveals the very toxicity of the will to truth he is critiquing. In his virulent insistence on the truth of strong and weak, man and woman, health and sickness, Nietzsche brings us face-to-face with the gruesomeness of our own illness, forcing us to breathe the unclean breath of our own rotting disease. In that brief passage from the preface to The Gay Science, for example, it seems to me that Nietzsche does not simply show us inadequacy; he also presents us with (and perhaps unwittingly invites us to undertake) the necessity of that which he most feared—a revaluation of sex, sexual difference, and gender

hierarchy. For if his first task is to be accomplished—learning a new and different way of loving life—then this second, Nietzsche’s “doubts” about “woman,” must be satisfactorily revalued. Only if the yardstick by which health and sickness is itself measured—only if “emasculation” is no longer or simply emasculation—will a recovery of culture and the revaluation of values for which Nietzsche so longs become possible.67 The fact that Nietzsche himself undermines his own revolutionary platform when it comes to the specifics of the body, health, and will to power, suggests the essential next revolutionary step that he himself is unable to undertake—an embrace of décadence, and precisely when it is specified as the emasculation of men, the de-sexing of women, and the dilution Queering Revolution 189 of European purity. Overcoming the fearfulness of this decay renders Nietzsche’s assertion that there simply are strong or weak bodies, healthy or sick bodies, male or female bodies both defensive and reactionary, a critique we can see as itself emerging from a Nietzschean understanding of being as becoming. It exposes the latent essentialism in defining manhood or masculinity in terms of the phallus, womanhood or femininity in terms of castration or lack. If we surmount this essentialism, bodies can more safely reside at places that are “in-between” Nietzsche’s hard-and- fast dichotomies, a recommendation we might otherwise think he could endorse. Rather than accept the logic of castration that defines the female as lack or nothingness, we might seriously reckon with the possibility of what a castrated masculinity might look like or produce—which would also inaugurate an unprecedented revaluation of “the feminine.” For this would require severing manhood from the phallus once and for all, a revolutionary project if ever there was one. Indeed, although Nietzsche himself never entertained or recommended such unconventional gender transgressions, nevertheless, the affirmation of such radical revaluations appears to be the only possible revolutionary future from the perspective of his gendered reading of modernity. This affirmation would in fact be the fulfillment of his project, rather than an after-the-fact interpretive triumph over his weakness that demonstrates our readerly superiority and mastery over him(a methodological approach I reject and am trying very hard not to unwittingly undertake myself). It would constitute an attempt to realize the potentiality of Nietzsche on Nietzsche’s own terms, contradictory though they might be. In very rare instances, Nietzsche hints that he is aware of the necessity of this difficult and agonizing task. In his most explicit admission, he writes:

When the least organ in an organism fails, however slightly, to enforce with complete assurance its self-preservation, its “egoism,” restitution of its energies—the whole degenerates [so entartet das Ganze]. The physiologist demands excision [Ausschneidung] of the degenerating part; he denies all solidarity with what degenerates; he is worlds removed from pity for it. But

the priest desires precisely the degeneration of the whole [die Entartung des Ganzen], of humanity [der Menschheit]: for that reason, he conserves what degenerates—at this price he rules.68

Contrasting himself with the ascetic priest who seeks to conserve what degenerates, Nietzsche the physiologist instead demands Ausschneidung— excision, cutting out, removal of the degenerating part; otherwise, the “whole” will become sick. But what else is this strange proclamation if not a rare acknowledgement on Nietzsche’s part of the necessity of castration, even an actual demand for and insistence upon modern emasculation itself?69 Here, Nietzsche seems to suggest that if modernity is 190 Nietzsche’s Revolution defined by its weakness of will, by sterility and impotence and soft effeminacy, then modernity’s doctor must rid it of its degeneration, remove the decay and cut it out in hard solidarity with the remaining healthy parts of the organism. But does this not also suggest the possibility of a contradiction, of something like a castrated wholeness? The priest’s sick desire for the degeneration of the entire organism is décadent because it is concerned solely with preservation, even at the expense of the organism’s health. By contrast, Nietzsche the hard and unyielding physiologist demands that the rotting part be removed, in order that the organism’s health be diverted away from that diseased organ and toward the health of the whole: “Today the individual still has to be made possible by being pruned [or circumcised! beschneidet]: possible here means whole [ganz].”70 This hair-raising possibility is Nietzsche’s admission that wholeness and castration may be entirely compatible. As a treatment, it may be unavoidable since “radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate”71: “To be physicians here, to be inexorable here, to wield the scalpel here—that is our part, that is our love of man, that is how we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans.”72 In this unlikely moment, Nietzsche recommends what he himself could not do—embrace castration as the fundamental condition of, and only future for, modernity. Indeed, he even prescribes it as a kind of antidote to degeneration here, a preemptive strike against décadence that stops the decay dead in its tracks before it can spread to the rest of the organism. This prescription is wholly different from Nietzsche’s anxious and viciously misogynist warnings against sexual intercourse with woman, lest man be confronted with nihilism or torn to pieces. That taboo on sexuality issues from the Nietzsche who, afraid of revealing any weakness or vulnerability, withdraws into himself and sublimates his sexual desire into an utterly solipsistic reverie of struggle and self-overcoming, metaphorized as a process of pregnancy and birth: “One must avoid chance and outside stimuli as much as possible; a kind of walling oneself in belongs among the foremost instinctive precautions of spiritual pregnancy.”73 As noted already, this perspective bears a striking resemblance to the logic of the

ascetic ideal, which Nietzsche vigorously denies he is replicating in his own chastity imperative. Just like this reactionary Nietzsche, however, Christianity—which Nietzsche defines as a religion of castratism—seeks to root out lust entirely in its hostility toward all sensuality and sexual desire: “There [in the New Testament] it is said, for example, with particular reference to sexuality: ‘if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out.’ Fortunately, no Christian acts in accordance with this concept.”74 In Nietzsche’s opinion, the castratism of Christianity is revelatory of its weakness and decay: “The same means in the fight against a craving—castration, extirpation [Verschneidung, Ausrottung]—is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate [degenerirt], to be able to impose moderation Queering Revolution 191 on themselves.”75 So, too, then, the Nietzsche who recommends abstinence is himself in a stage of decline, too weak to “impose moderation” on himself when it comes to intercourse with woman-truth.76 By contrast, the Nietzsche who recommends excision of the degenerating part is neither décadent nor misogynist, nor is he simply succumbing to the insidious logic of the ascetic ideal. Rather, as with almost everything Nietzsche critiques (e.g., pessimism, negation, lying, pity, and virtue), there is both a healthy kind and a degenerate kind. So, too, with castration—there is an excision that is symptomatic of strength and another that is emblematic of weakness. When Nietzsche the “physiologist” demands excision of the degenerating part because he has no solidarity with what decays, he is offering a glimpse of what we might otherwise guess is the future of his revolutionary project that he himself was unable to undertake—the inauguration of an era of emasculated manhood. While Nietzsche lacked the strength and stamina (much less the stomach) to face such gruesome possibilities, this does not obviate the fact that this is the next step entailed by his essentialist rejection of gendered bodily becoming. That Nietzsche (literally!) undercuts his own truth-telling authority when it comes to the body and will to power indicates the possibility of doing the exact same thing when it comes to his diagnosis of the disorders of sex, gender, and sexuality. That he is so often unable to undertake this task, capitulating to the ugly logic of the will to truth at precisely the moment when castration comes onto the scene, suggests the necessity of castration if Nietzsche’s revolutionary overhaul of modernity is to succeed. It is therefore precisely at the moment where he falters that we ourselves can take up his revolutionary banner. It even seems possible that in the passages above, Nietzsche authorizes us to do so.

Nietzsche, Granddaddy of Queer Theory

Insofar as Nietzsche either actively endorses castration, or simply understands it as the necessary next step in his revolutionary attempt to overthrow the will to truth, authorizing others stronger than he to take it on,

he himself is clearly the first in a long line of castrating feminists. Insofar as this embrace of castration irrevocably muddies the definitional waters of just who or what constitutes a “man” or a “woman,” we can see Nietz- sche as the predecessor and authorizing figure of a productive and rich queer theory, thus predating (and birthing?) Freud. After all, the questions raised by Nietzsche’s project are the same questions that issue from many radical feminist and queer critical analyses: for example, what happens when the word “man” can be used to refer even to those who do not have a penis, even to those folks who are “castrated”? What remains of sex or gender when that ultimate demarcator of the truth of sex and its puta- tive value—the phallus—is no longer reliably either “true” or valuable? 192 Nietzsche’s Revolution

Can just anyone become a “man”? Can a “castrated” man be something other than a tragedy or a monstrosity? And wait just a minute—is this castrated man in fact exactly what we’re aiming for? There is thus plenty of truth to the nasty stereotype of the castrating feminist, a stereotype Nietzsche did not originate but into which he certainly breathes new and rejuvenating life, insofar as “castration” means the overthrow of any masculinity that requires women’s subordination for its identity and coherence. Indeed, if one’s social positioning within gender hierarchy is conflated with the biological contingency of “possession” of a penis (or lack thereof), as in Nietzsche’s schema, then feminism certainly is castrating insofar as it seeks to overthrow this very social order (Nietzsche is therefore right to link feminism with décadence). The nastiness of the stereotype comes from confusing the penis for the cause of dominance, rather than recognizing it as dominance’s frequent form and most obvious symbol (as the phallus). But if superiority no longer requires the “possession” of a penis, is it still superiority? If the phallus no longer means superiority and domination, is it still the phallus? Feminism is thus engaged in a quite radical denaturalization of gender, insofar as attacking the hierarchy that constructs the identities “man” and “woman” necessarily guts these identities and demands their reconstruction.77 Queer thought and praxis go even further, asking after the so-called natural or biological basis of gender in sex and (hetero)sexual desire. This was one of the many contributions of Judith Butler’s groundbreaking queer feminist critique in Gender Trouble. In two powerful pages, she summarily does away with the sex/gender distinction, revealing its investment in the very binary gender system it sought to challenge.78 The implicit claim of feminism’s sex/gender distinction is that sex—whether one is male or female—does not and should not have any necessary consequences for gender—whether and how one is a man or a woman. So, for example, there is no reason why a male cannot be a kindergarten teacher or a full-time mom; similarly, there is no reason why a female cannot be an army commander or emotionally unavailable. In this sense, the sex/ gender distinction can be understood as feminism’s version of the natural-

istic fallacy—from the “is” of biological sex, no “ought” can be concluded regarding gender. What Butler notices about this distinction is that it authorizes a kind of gender free-for-all: “Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders.”79 The result is that “gender itself becomes a free- floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.” But why, then, retain any investment in “sex”? Why, indeed, does sex remain binary when gender itself has been loosed from this arbitrary and fallacious constraint? Where does sex come Queering Revolution 193 from, anyway? And why is it somehow immune to cultural construction when gender is not? Butler’s superb set of rhetorical questions makes the case more strongly:

Can we refer to a “given” sex or a “given” gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is “sex” anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such “facts” for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.80

Butler in fact proposes that sex is a by-product of gender, gender being understood as a coercive “apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established.”81 Thus rather than gender being an interpretation and variation of sex, sex is in fact the retroactively produced “truth” of gender, generated in order to anchor this otherwise “free-floating artifice” and secured by the legitimators of nature and science. This is an utterly Nietzschean analysis. If Butler were discussing anything besides gender—free will, say, or subjectivity—the Nietzschean cast of her argument would be obvious.82 After all, doesn’t Nietzsche say that it is the grammatical necessity of the “I” that creates for us an experience, not to say existence, of subjectivity? That the effects of language or power become naturalized and thereby mistaken for causes, for first principles or points of departure? We call these origins “I,” soul, or God. We even dress them up in the garb of empirical scientific validity and call them atoms. But they are not, for that, any more or less real than the language that constructs them; indeed, it is their naming that brings them into existence, into the specificity of their existence. Why, then, would it be any different when it comes to “sex”? Butler’s deconstruction of the sex/ gender distinction is the logical next step of Nietzsche’s revolution. He himself rehearses it with regard to will to power in particular, thereby indicating just how possible it is with regard to the gendered body. For Nietzsche is only too aware of the way in which his naming of life as will, much less a will to, even that much more a will to power, unreasonably and illegitimately reifies precisely what he is seeking to desubstantialize (I examined this movement in depth in Chapters 1 and 3). Even Nietz- sche’s own understanding of life and the body is a linguistic construction, and he goes out of his way to point this out, consistently undermining 194 Nietzsche’s Revolution his own perspective as the true one even as he insists it is indeed the only truth. He even recommends a particular brand of health, just as he repeatedly notes the impossibility of finally distinguishing between sickness and health, sickness being health’s enabling condition and health requiring sickness for its intelligibility. It is thus ultimately impossible to know where one begins and the other ends. Now, once this health becomes specified as emasculation, Nietzsche can go no further in his perspectivist analysis. But that he so defensively retreats into the safety of a familiarly gendered world—wherein real men have penises and real women have babies—at precisely the moment when décadence threatens to dissolve all possible stable demarcators of sexual difference reveals just how contingent Nietzsche feared these gendered demarcations to be. If Christian morality could induce such radical changes in the human animal as the development of consciousness, guilt, responsibility, and sin, then why could it (or something else equally as powerful) not transform even sex/gender itself, that which seems among the most natural and irrefutable “facts of life”? The most obvious—and among the most conservative—of Nietz- sche’s answers to this question is the spectral threat of nihilism. Indeed, Nietzsche argued that nihilism loomed large on modernity’s horizon. He explained how the will to truth eventually undoes itself, culminating in its own impossibility and leaving us with nothing except our own need for certitude amidst a chaos we can no longer order, sucked into an abyss of meaninglessness that we cannot endure. The nihilism portended by décadence promises an uprooting of all anchors, a purposelessness and meaninglessness that likely cannot be borne by modern human beings, whose fundamental existence is consumed by “the crying question, ‘why do I suffer?”83 What nihilism reveals is that there is no reason why. There is only suffering. Before Christianity and the development of consciousness, suffering was merely pain. But pain has been transformed into suffering because of our Christianity-induced need to construct a meaning or cause for it. In other words, not only is there no reason for pain but our suffering is of our own making. Although it is a terrible and torturous agony to be confronted with these truths, they are the hard and terrible facts of existence and, as such, they are immune to any judgment or condemnation. Like life, they simply are:

Man is not the effect of some special purpose, of a will, and end; nor is he the object of an attempt to attain an “ideal of humanity” or an “ideal of happiness” or an “ideal of morality.” It is absurd to wish to devolve one’s essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of “end”: in reality there is no end. One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole [Ganzen], one is in the whole; there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, Queering Revolution 195

comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole.84

This perspective is difficult to accept, not only because it means there is no standard by which to evaluate or give meaning to our lives, but also because if the only world that exists is the one we inhabit, then not even pain can be marshaled to the cause of meaning-making (as suffering): “There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure: both belong among the factors that contribute the most to the preservation of the species. If pain did not, it would have perished long ago; that it hurts is no argument against it but its essence.”85 These same consequences hold for gender nihilism. Once the penis is severed from manhood, rendering manhood itself a “free-floating artifice” that reliably demarcates neither maleness nor superiority, then no mark- ers remain by which to establish any gendered value, power, or truth. Instead there simply is a constant play of meanings and significations, depending on the context of the bodies and relations within which they are negotiated. Butler has already written at length about the inherent “detachability” of the phallus insofar as it functions as an ideal, rendering all “actual” penises inadequate and thus not fully phallic (the phallus thereby becoming the quintessential fetish). She has concomitantly noted the generously endowed lesbian phallus in particular, which “can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things.”86 But if “castration” can define a “man” as well as a “woman,” the result is that it is utterly unclear who or what constitutes a man, who or what constitutes a woman (and obviously it also then becomes difficult to decide just who or what exactly a “lesbian” is). “Masculine” and “feminine” become words that can describe not simply any body, but any particular activity, piece of clothing, use of language, or choice of erotic object. Even sexual activity itself, which, in the history of Western political thought, has been traditionally and quintessentially gendered (penetration being the activity of the male or masculine party; being penetrated, the feminine or female role87), becomes radically indeterminate. For it is not necessarily the case either that a man will have a penis or that he will want to do the penetrat- ing. He may have a penis and nevertheless want to be penetrated. He may not have a penis and nevertheless want to penetrate. He may regard penetration as something that is not done with a penis, anyway, rendering the penis itself moot. And if gender is this indeterminate, then obviously stable demarcations of sexual “orientation” become impossible as well. For how to determine whether this “man” is “homo”sexual or “hetero”sexual? On the basis of his body? His partner’s[’] body/ies? On the basis of com- parisons between his and his partners’ bodies, their relative similarity to or difference from one another? (As Eve Sedgwick has pointed out, there is no reason to think that people of the “same” sex are more likely to actually 196 Nietzsche’s Revolution be the same, much less than they will be more similar to one another than they would be to any other member of the “opposite” sex.88) Or perhaps we should judge his sexual orientation on the basis of his sexual activity, on the basis of either the sex acts he performs or the ones he would like to have performed on him. But how to know which sex acts are “male” and which “female,” the necessary prerequisite to determining “his” “sexual orientation”? Do the bodies of those who perform these acts change or undermine the gendered identity of these acts? Is there, for example, a “feminine” penetration, a “masculine” reception? Or, should we rather assess sexual “orientation” on the basis of his sexual desires? If they do not map directly onto his actual sexual activity—that is, if his fantasy life and his sexual life bear no clear relationship to one another—then which matters more, fantasy or “reality,” desire or act? And what role does his body and the body of his partner(s) play in negotiating the gendering of either of these desires, much less their sexual “orientation”? We have seen in previous chapters how revolted Nietzsche is by such gender and sexual “mixing.” Indeed, if contemporary political and religious discourse is any clue, Nietzsche is certainly not alone in this revulsion. But the point of Nietzsche’s diagnosis is that the response, the revolutionary rejoinder to nihilism, should be neither to “will nothingness,” embracing the abyss as the only truth (á la modern science), nor to “not will,” resignedly drowning oneself in an act of suicidal resignation. It is the will to truth itself that would lead one to believe these are the only two possible responses (and they are the only two responses modernity has thus far produced). But Nietzsche proposes a third alternative—amor fati, the love of fate. This is his “criterion of greatness in a human being.”89 Amor fati consists in wanting “nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” It requires that one “not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it,” but also that one “love it.”90 Life is, in some sense, a woman, then, insofar as life is what Nietzsche could love only at a distance. To love life, however, and to joyfully affirm it, is not to be an estranged observer of it. It is to reach out to it, to welcome it and enfold it into yourself.

If the eternal recurrence is anything at all for Nietzsche, then perhaps it is a mechanism for thinking through the meaning of amor fati, an attempt to think through life—his own, his age’s—as perpetual, as recurring eternally in its complete and utter(ly loathsome) identity. The eternal recurrence facilitates this burden-bearing recognition by forcing Nietz- sche to struggle with the possibility that those things he finds most repulsive will recur eternally. What is required by Nietzsche’s reformulation of eternal recurrence into amor fati is to love fate even while acknowledging that fate has no true meaning or purpose that might justify it. Indeed, it is to love fate even knowing that fate may consist primarily of pain and suffering, and that it most certainly will consist of death—that life Queering Revolution 197 will never be anything but a perpetual process of decay and degeneration, that fragmentation, emasculation, and debilitation are the best and only things humanity can “hope” for.91 This love of fate is difficult, Nietzsche believes, not simply because one must be confronted either with one’s own recurrence or with the recurrence of “the smallest man,” but because it requires the two things our Christianized and décadent souls cannot endure: divesting existence (whether our own or otherwise) of meaning, and thereby affirming pain, destruction, and death. This acknowledgement of life’s intrinsic meaninglessness, wherein even pain and destruction do not constitute objections to it, is precisely what must be faced, embraced, and loved, for

judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one’s fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life is thus an objection to him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom.92

This is why the challenge of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the task of affirmation. It is a yes-saying to all pain, death, suffering, and destruction, even as it becomes increasingly clear that there is no reason or meaning for this terrible spectacle. This affirmation is necessary, not only because there is nothing else but because not to do so is to remain stranded in the negation of Christianity. It is to wallow in self-loathing, to remain beholden to the need for explanations and in perpetual despair at their absence. When it comes to gender nihilism, this means that not even castration is an objection to gender decay that, in the face of the revolutionary overthrow of the domination of meaning, no longer looks like decay anymore and instead just looks like becoming. The phallus is no longer the demarcator of what is up, and so castration is no longer the sign of what is down. Indeed, it is no longer possible, definitively, to distinguish between what is up and what is down.93 This flux and indeterminacy is what must be embraced, for the only alternatives to it are either to be swallowed up by nihilism or reappropriated by the will to truth, both of which constitute a slow suicide. Indeed, although Nietzsche notes that “one would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem,”94 nevertheless, the challenge with which he leaves us is to affirm life anyway, despite its pain and our self-induced suffering that has come to define it. To do 198 Nietzsche’s Revolution otherwise is either to capitulate to the toxicity of the will to truth or sub- mit oneself to the deluge of nihilism. This is both Nietzsche’s/Zarathustra’s task and the psychological problem it engenders—being an affirmative spirit in one’s profound no-saying to present existence. Or, put differently, being a yes-sayer in one’s profound rejection of present existence. This is the task and the contradiction of Nietzsche’s revolutionary project. Unsurprisingly, what justifies the affirmative side of this contradictory task is, once again, the body. Although, as Nietzsche’s rationalist exercises in the value of life above reveal, it is in some sense not “fair” or “objective” to say that life itself is a value for us (it may in fact be agonizing to do so), it nevertheless is—and therefore should be—impossible for us to do anything different: “A species cannot do otherwise but thus affirm itself alone.”95 For to be so detached from life that it is no longer a value is not simply to commit oneself to a Zarathustrian solitude, it is to refuse the status of perspective for oneself; it is to refuse one’s own embodiment: “To remain stuck to one’s own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird who flees ever higher to see ever more below him” is “the danger of the flier.”96 It tempts him with the possibility of achieving a bird’s eye view of the world, which can see everything from everywhere all at once. But this is another seduction of the Christian will to truth; it is an apolitical perspective, an abstraction, a disembodiment that does not acknowledge its own implication in the world around it. It is the positing of “an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense.”97 Indeed, to refuse life as a value is to pretend to some “objective” view of it that we cannot, as living beings, have, a view which would thus erase its own perspective—that is, its embodied and particularistic character.98 This refusal of embodiment is the Socratic refusal of politics. It returns us to the city in speech of the Republic, wherein all bodies are one, and that single, unitary body is merely a hindrance to the soul, the only thing that can truly know. The eye “turned in no particular direction” is the disembodied eye of theôria, which is no particular perspective, or the truly “objective” perspective that can see all. Yet it would be a ruthless idealism of cruelty to insist that living bodies not affirm themselves as living, to be unable to acknowledge will to power as constitutive of their embodied perspective. This is the suicidal tendency encapsulated; it is not an overcoming of the will to truth but another submission to its thus far unremitting domination. Queering Revolution 199 Postscript: Politics

Critics have long complained that the post-structuralist turn authorized by Nietzsche, popularized by Foucault, and widely taken up in Left scholarship today, destroys the possibility of liberatory politics. Worried about the eradication of the category “women,” the erasure of queer identificatory specificity, or the obscuring of the material basis of exploitation, critics see the indeterminacy of a postmodern politics as undermining the foundation of Left political commitment, inaugurating a dangerous apathy that unwittingly colludes with the status quo.99 In academia, for example, feminist critics have claimed it is “too soon” for a post-identity politics. While the logical force of a philosophical argument like Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble may perhaps “prove” there is no such thing as a woman, critics argue this does nothing to alleviate actual women’s suffering or eradicate patriarchal domination in the “real” world.100 Similarly, the translation of Butler’s post-structuralist approach into the political activism of groups like the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, an organization that, in their words, “works to ensure that classrooms, communities, and workplaces are safe for everyone to learn, grow, and succeed—whether or not they meet expectations for masculinity and femininity,”101has been protested by queer activists who decry the erasure of specifically transsexual experience in the “mainstreaming” of gender norms as oppressive of all people, regardless of trans-status.102 Finally, Marxian-influenced critics insist that post-structuralist politics neglects the materiality of class relations and exploitation in favor of an abstracted and highly intellectualized “play” of bodies and pleasures that is divorced from the realities of capi- talist domination. In each of these complaints, the claim is that there is some reality or other—whether of suffering or of the body or of relations of domination—to which post-structural analysis is willfully, naïvely, or destructively blind. In the first, it is the reality of women-as-a-group and the fact of their oppression; in the second, it is the specificity of transsexuals’ experience; in the third, it is the reality of class and class domination, as epitomized by the exploitation of the worker’s labor. These critical demands for unflagging commitment to some particular political reality, when coupled with the post-structuralist critique of the dogmatism of such demands, leaves us in a quandary: how to remain committed to liberatory politics without becoming implicated in the very domination we seek to challenge. I come to this quandary both as a student of Friedrich Nietzsche, who I see as an important intellectual progenitor of post-structuralism,103 and as an activist with incorrigible revolutionary tendencies. Nietzsche’s Revolution is my attempt to bring these two seemingly irreconcilable pieces together. Thus far, I have argued that Nietzsche himself is a revolutionary in his attempt to overthrow the domination of Christianity in European civilization. Like Rousseau and Marx before him, Nietzsche pronounces all of modernity to be shot 200 Nietzsche’s Revolution through with corruption and decay and, in his case, declares Christianity to blame for it. Also like his revolutionary predecessors, Nietzsche seeks to overthrow his (Christian) antagonist through what he calls a revaluation of all values. Thus far, this would seem to be a particularly tidy, modern revolutionary narrative. A story of decay that is overcome through a radical break or rupture that will establish the new seems to fit squarely within the parameters of modern political thought, which is fixated on the problem of beginnings (having forsaken Christianity and God as the proper origins of politics) and regards human power as the only means by which social progress is secured.104 Yet Nietzsche is not simply a modern thinker, but also an inaugurator of a time and place often referred to as postmodernity. For even as Nietzsche declares Christianity responsible for every travesty hitherto visited upon Western civilization and demands its violent overthrow, he also repeatedly undercuts the validity and truth of these very revolutionary proclamations. This is because Nietzsche knows and shows that the logic of revolutionary desire is itself Christian. The promise of liberation from existing conditions of corruption and decay betrays a transparently Christian promise of a salvific future. The coherence of the diagnosis itself, of the corruption and decay which are hidden by the lies of an outside, damaging force—in this case, Christianity (for Marx, capitalism; for Rousseau, inequality or dependence)—is possible only on the basis of an equally religious belief in the truth of one’s own revolutionary critique. Thus, revolutionary desire replicates two basic elements of Christianity— dogmatism and salvational teleology. It is Nietzsche himself who points out that these are by-products of Christianity and that anyone who advocates in their name is not to be trusted. Nietzsche is thus the first revolutionary to fundamentally undercut his own revolutionary authority. In his demand that we unite with him to overthrow Christianity, he invites us to undermine him as the leader of this revolution and overthrow him, too, insofar as he is also ill with the sickness of Christianity. We can see why it is, then, that critics are so concerned with post- structuralist critique—it seems to eradicate the possibility of revolution 105 once and for all. However, I want to hold out hope for the possibility of committing to revolution in a non-Christian way. I want to reject the arguments of those who insist we retain a dogmatic commitment to the “truth” of identity or materiality in order to be either revolutionaries or leftists. I want to reject the claim that utopia or another kind of salvific promise is essential to the logic of revolution. I want to insist that liberatory political commitment does not conflict with rigorous and unre- lenting post-structuralist critique. The challenge, then, is to think the possibility of revolution that forsakes neither its liberatory commitment nor its radical transformative promise, yet does not itself become another dogma or oppressive prescription. Queering Revolution 201

As we have seen, many are concerned that if “women” or “transsexuals” or “labor” are dissolved as stable or material referents, then the basis for opposing oppression is lost. It seems to me, however, that each of these claims betrays an anxiety about the future; namely, that there will not be one without a clear and determinate articulation of the present. This is what Wendy Brown argues we have lost with the decay of revolution—we have lost a vision of the future, a “utopian imaginary” that can structure and animate our critique of the present.106 But the present, as these critics define it, is irretrievably rooted in the past. For identificatory categories like woman, transsexual, and worker are the by-products of relations of power that produce these categories as the very names of “difference,” names which then function to justify the domination that instituted them in the first place. So the fear of post-structuralist critique is a fear that the future will be lost if we do not maintain or hold onto the past, a strangely nostalgic anxiety. In order to preserve the future and our hope for a brighter tomorrow, then, we must justify ourselves in the present, which is only intelligible through recourse to an oppressive past that, in this schema, is not allowed to pass away.107 The past is thus never fully past; it weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. The critical leftist demand for commitment to some “reality” or other, then, is a purchas- ing of our present legitimacy on the promise of an unseen but redemptive future, an avoidance of the realization that, on these terms, the future will be merely a repetition compulsion, a revisiting of the past to which it is inextricably tethered. In her eulogy for revolution, Brown argues that we must preserve the “utopian impulse” that animates revolutionary critique without surren- dering to the fundamentalism implicit in its future social promises. In other words, we must preserve the desire for revolution without undertaking its gratification. Brown is explicit that this means retooling the temporality of modernity, which thus far has been wedded to a redemptive image of the future. She writes,

How, then, to cultivate the fecundity of revolutionary opening without the revolutionary push toward the knowable and controllable? How to cultivate this remainder of revolution in the form of a utopian imaginary

stripped of its promise to redeem the past and be realized in the future? Above all, how to suspend this utopian impulse in a different temporality such that it could fuel rather than haunt or taunt left political life in our time? Our task would seem to be that of prying apart an exuberant critical utopian impulse from immediate institutional and historical solutions so that the impulse can survive stumbling, disorientation, disappointment, and even failure and so that the impulse remains incitational of thought and possibility rather than turning fundamentalist. The task, then, would be to recuperate a utopian imaginary absent a revolutionary mechanism for its realization such that this imaginary could have a political use, that is, 202 Nietzsche’s Revolution

participate in the making of social transformation and not only constitute an escape from the felt impossibility of such transformation.108

While Brown is correct that a different temporality is in order, her demand for a revolutionary desire without a revolutionary “mechanism” seems to duplicate the Christian structure of modernity in its incitement of a desire that must remain ungratified. But does the seduction to revolution become less objectionable simply because it is more knowing? Is post-structuralist critique Brown’s proposed sublimation of revolutionary desire? What I wonder, instead, is if Lee Edelman offers us one possible way of inaugurating this postrevolutionary temporality, a temporality of revolutionary desire that lacks both a “revolutionary mechanism” and the pro- hibition on its gratification. Indeed, in a discordantly Marcusian echo, Edelman’s revolution is all about gratification. Edelman has recently and provocatively argued that there is indeed no future for queer politics, but this is because politics itself is what designates feminists and queers (and anyone else radically outside the social order) as futureless. Defined as abor- tionists and nonreproductive sexual nihilists, the positioning of feminists and queers as culture’s utterly self-indulgent, sex-obsessed death drive in fact functions to secure the health, happiness, and adult normality of het- erosexually reproducing humanity. Edelman argues that this relationship between death and life, futurelessness and futurity, is secured ideologically and iconographically through the image of the Child, that embodiment of all futurity and hope.109 Although, in the end, Edelman really only considers white gay men (i.e., “homosexuals”) as this deathly threat,110 we can easily and consistently add to his list, insofar as “queer” in his usage indicates anyone who does not abide by the rules of social temporality or sacrifices the future for the sake of the present (rather than vice versa).111 “Queer,” then, names a broad array of misfits and perverts along the lines of Cathy Cohen’s promised coalition of “Punks, Bull-Daggers and Wel- fare Queens,”112 including within its purview the “inherently criminal,” the uncontrollably reproductive (e.g., immigrants, Cadillac-driving welfare queens), or—as Jasbir Puar has recently argued—Muslims, Arabs,

South Asians, and Africans cast by Islamophobia and homonationalism alike as terrorist threats, all of whom function as ominous harbingers of the death of all futurity and social well-being.113 Edelman recognizes that the very resistance made possible by politics is only what remains within its terms. He also recognizes that politics offers marriage and children—and, it must be added, citizenship and upward mobility—as the enticement for perpetuating this logic of abjection. Mainstream U.S. progressive politics has largely fallen prey to this seduction, taking the bait of futurity in its proliferation of gay marriage, gay adoption, gay patriotism, gay priesthood, gays in the military, gay veterans, gay victims of 9/11, and gay police officers. As Puar argues, Queering Revolution 203 this political visibility has gone hand-in-hand with the infinite detention of perverse terrorist bodies,114 the routine incarceration and disenfran- chisement of people of color, in particular African-American men; the elimination of welfare “as we know it”; the linking of U.S. foreign aid and international AIDS funding to marriage-promotion initiatives and abstinence programs,115 and Islamophobia. This tandem development illustrates the way in which the logic of no future can deftly accommodate the “homosexual” at the price of foisting off culture’s death drive onto some other, stigmatized, “futureless” population, an illustration that bolster’s Edelman’s argument rather than undermines it.116 Instead of falling prey to the logic of the Child, however, and its imperatives of protection, sacrifice, futurity, and hope, Edelman encourages queers to embrace our stigmatized positioning as the negativity, death, and futurelessness of social life. He boldly admits that this means, in the case of feminists and gay people, adopting the conservative Right’s belief that abortion and nonprocreative sexual pleasure lead to the undoing of social life and the downfall of civilization. But this is because social conservatives are right in their insistence that civilization itself depends on the Child or, more generally, in the hope and belief in a future that will validate all present human activity. Queerness, then, undermines this future, and indeed threatens to annihilate its very possibility in its nihilistic excesses. In this analysis, then, “queer” is the name of what threatens the integrity and coherence of social life, a nimble and capacious designation that can encompass far more and disparate numbers of people than simply “homosexuals.” If, for example, Reaganites are correct in seeing welfare benefits as stimuli to procreation on the part of helplessly dependent and drug-addicted mothers of color, then Edelman’s proposal amounts to demanding that queer politics align and identify itself with these welfare queens (a move that would productively double and ironize the “queen” of this otherwise derogatory term). If Puar’s analysis of homonationalism is correct, and if George W. Bush is to be believed that one is either with the U.S. government or one is with the terrorists, then this means that a revolutionary queer project of no future must necessarily align itself with the 117 terrorists as well. Edelman correctly characterizes this position as “oppositional to the structural logic of opposition”118(a Nietzschean tactic, to be sure), insofar as it refuses to consider childlessness or the lack of futurity— that is, the abyss into which queers would be thrown—an objection. In short, Edelman’s suggestion amounts to saying, “More abyss, please!”119 I think the militancy of Edelman’s rhetoric belies a revolutionary desire that augurs liberation from precisely such stultifying heteronormativity. In a superb display of revolutionary rhetoric, for example, Edelman declares:

Queers must respond . . . not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote 204 Nietzsche’s Revolution

that order’s coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what [Ber- nard] Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws with both capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.120

This is an emancipatory commitment he would surely deny. Edelman insists that he offers no such liberatory hope, since any and all futurity— even revolutionary futurity—is already co-opted by the cult of the Child in whose name the future is always wagered and promised, and from which queers are necessarily prohibited. To hope is thus, in Edelman’s view, the political version of “Smearing the Queer.” Indeed, Edelman gleefully notes that this choice to own and occupy the space of no future deliberately overcomes the need or possibility for anything like hope. As he says, “we do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future.”121 The future of queer politics, then, is no future at all—it is rather the very narcissistic, future-sacrificing, self-indulgent jouissance for its own sake to which queers are condemned, anyway. I think Edelman is right that we queers—again, an expansive term that includes “all so stigmatized for failing to comply with heteronormative mandates”122—ought to embrace the very position of nihilistic future- assassins to which culture and politics consign us. Where Edelman goes awry, however, is in his conclusion that this signifies the death of hope as well. While it is true that hope is routinely—perhaps even uniquely— symbolized in and by this logic of the Child (a logic we see even in Nietz- sche with his redemptive emphasis on self-birthing and Zarathustra’s final metamorphosis of the spirit into the child), it still seems to me that if we embrace Edelman’s proposal, this is nothing less than the embrace of an explicitly revolutionary politics which lacks dogma but is inextricable from gratification. Indeed, Edelman suggests that we accept the dictates of politics that identifies jouissance with self-indulgence, that sees sex (or insistent presentism) and politics as opposed, and impolitic sex (or carnal- ity) as death. And while this undermining of the very terms of politics is indeed nihilistic, this undermining is also not nihilistic, or else Edelman could not, by definition, advocate it as such. Indeed, unbeknownst to him, Edelman occupies the contradictory and thus revolutionary Nietz- schean position of affirming negation. For it is not the Child per se—that is, futurity per se—that is the problem, but the Christian structures of meaning-making that insist that life have a future other than death, that we sacrifice ourselves on the cross of something greater than ourselves. In this sense, Edelman may be diagnosing our current moment of modernity Queering Revolution 205 as beholden to the cross of the Child—perhaps this is the next install- ment in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality: first Christianity, then modern science, and now, reproductive futurity. But Edelman cannot help but perform for us that even a politics of no future is both a politics and a future. For, unless we are already dead, death is the future, for all of us. His demand that we not sacrifice ourselves prematurely to it, that we not forsake the present for the future, nor demand that this present wallow in the determinations of the past, is quite undeniably a political proscrip- tion, one bent on undermining and in fact undoing the entire social order, the goal of all revolutionaries, last I checked. Unflagging commitment to liberatory political transformation is thus strangely compatible with post-structuralist critique, and I think Edel- man (like Nietzsche, and despite Edelman’s own protestations) embodies this discordant harmony himself. His longing for a total eradication of the very structures of meaning and temporality that make politics intelligible is nothing less than a desire for the overthrow of everything existing. He is clear, at many points, that this structure is an oppressive one, one that functions on the basis of a binary division imposed on humanity between those selfless people who sacrifice themselves for the future and those selfish ones who, in their endless pursuit of their own gratification, are responsible for the decay of morality, the dissolution of the social order, teen pregnancy, skyrocketing delinquency, and the AIDS epidem- ic—much less the vulnerability of the United States to those terrorists, illegal immigrants, and welfare dependents who threaten the freedom, health, and economic strength of the nation. That this dichotomy is not simply a false one, but in fact an imposition of power, and indeed the enabling condition of politics itself, suggests that Edelman has a clearly revolutionary analysis. Edelman’s declaration that he is going beyond the politics of opposition by embracing its constitutive outside and declaring it his home is also Nietzsche’s position, and it is, I think, the only possible meaning we can ascribe to the word “queer.” As Edelman says, “Queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.”123 But Edelman and

Marxist critics alike would be wrong to ascribe to this perpetual resistance an apolitical character—or instead, as Puar warns, as itself a normative idealization of resistance in an implicitly voluntarist model of agency.124 For queer is contradiction, the both/and, the refusal to be singularly determinate: in the case of gender and sexuality in particular, it is the refusal of the will to truth precisely in the realms of life believed to be the most natural, the most immune to “deconstruction”—the body, its desire, and its sex. That this in-between position, this both/and continues to be the space of the abject and the unthinkable, the futurelessness of desire with no telos and the death of civilization—refugees and other stateless people also raise these fundamental, discomfiting dilemmas—suggests that for 206 Nietzsche’s Revolution revolution to remain revolutionary it must queer itself. It cannot remain wedded to a particular domain of truth or materiality as the foundation for the future, for this is itself a violation of its own radical credentials. Nor can it any longer hope for a salvific future wherein all corruption and dissatisfaction have been eliminated. This is quite different from either the dogmatic moralizing of revolutionaries past or the valorization of resistance as the only appropriate mode of subjectivity. Rather, it is not so far from what Puar recommends we adopt in thinking through the consequences of queer politics—allowing for “complicities” with power that do not signal “the failure of the radical, resistant, or oppositional potential of queernesses.”125 This means that both Nietzsche’s revolution and his revolutionary pos- turing are positions of no future. Or, rather, that queered revolutionary commitment stakes its future on the eradication of the past, not its preservation. It is a position built not on the foundation of the Child, but on the ground of the graveyard. But it is also not a refusal of hope, as Edel- man suggests, nor is it a tacitly Christian incitement of a revolutionary desire that cannot, and ought not, go ungratified, as Brown proposes. It is rather a recognition that hope is contradictorily compatible with death, with the insistent presentism of revolutionary commitment and futureless gratification of affirmation (or the futureless affirmation of gratification). Which concludes this book almost exactly where it started: for Nietzsche, our only choices are revolution or death, as Christianity poses the greatest threat to human existence thus far dreamed up. I think it is clear he wanted us to choose revolution, but I think it is also clear that he knew the choice was a setup—like all dichotomies, false.

Notes

Introduction

1. Trans. David J. Parent (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 2. John Richardson, “Introduction” in Nietzsche: Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 18. 3. Ken Gemes, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth,” in Nietzsche: Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40–58. 4. Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Brian Leiter, “Perspectivism in Genealogy of Morals,” in Nietzsche, Geneal- ogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). 5. Maudemarie Clark, for example, has argued that we must take a revive and rescue position with regard to Nietzsche’s truths if we are “interested in maintaining Nietzsche’s stature as an important philosopher.” Maudemarie Clark, “Nietzsche’s Doctrines of the Will to Power,” in Nietzsche: Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2001), 140. 6. John Richardson, “Introduction,” 5. 7. For different versions of this view, see Ofelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche With- out Masks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). 8. Wendy Brown, “Democracy Against Itself: Nietzsche’s Challenge,” in Politics Out of His- tory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 121–37; William Connolly, Identity\ Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Lawrence Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1995); Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993). A slightly different case for a Nietzschean democracy is made by Dana Villa’s critique of this foregoing literature and his connection of Nietzsche with Arendt in “Democratizing the Agon: Nietzsche, Arendt, and the Agonistic Tendency in Recent Political Theory,” in Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics, ed. Alan Schrift (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).

9. See, for example, Babette Babich, “Nietzsche and the Condition of Postmodern Thought: Post-Nietzschean Postmodernism,” in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed.

Clayton Koelb (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990); Jacques Derrida, Éperons/Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Sara Kofman, “Baubô: Theological Perversion and Fetishism,” in Nietzsche’s New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, ed. Michael Gillespie and Tracy Strong (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1988); David Farrell Krell, Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and Kathi Weeks, Constituting Feminist Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). For a persuasive argument demonstrating Nietzsche’s relationship to post-structuralism in general and deconstruction in particular, see Alan Schrift, Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1995). 208 Notes

10. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Rout- ledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Rout- ledge, 1993). 11. Daniel W. Conway, “Das Weib an sich: The Slave Revolt in Epistemology,” in Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton (New York: Routledge, 1993). 12. Wendy Brown, “Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Rebecca Stringer, “‘A Nietzschean Breed’: Feminism, Victimology, Ressentiment,” in Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics, ed. Alan Schrift (Berkeley and Los Ange- les: University of California Press, 2000). 13. Fredrick Appel, Nietzsche Contra Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, eds., Why We Are Not Nietzscheans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Soli- darity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ofelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism; Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought. 14. Ofelia Schutte, “Nietzsche’s Psychology of Gender Difference,” In Modern Engendering: Critical Feminist Readings in Modern Western Philosophy, ed. Bat-Ami Bar On (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994) and Beyond Nihilism; Linda Singer, “Nietzschean Mythologies: The Inversion of Value and the War Against Women,” in Feminist Interpretations of Nietzsche, ed. Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). 15. Devoted translator Walter Kaufmann’s interpretation of Nietzsche as an existentialist lover of Socrates managed to introduce Nietzsche into the highly specialized world of academic, English-language philosophy, but at the expense of declaring him to be fundamentally “anti-political.” See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Vintage, 1974). Many still argue that Nietzsche is either apolitical or antipolitical; see, for example, Leslie Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature; William Connolly, Identity\Difference and Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Soli- darity. Despite this, it is now grudgingly accepted amongst most professional philosophers in the United States that Nietzsche can be read as a political philosopher or, at the very least, that he has views about politics. For two very different accounts of the issues at stake in claiming Nietzsche as a political thinker, see Daniel W. Conway’s Nietzsche and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1997) and Bruce Detwiler’s Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism. 16. GS §377. 17. BGE §257. 18. Wendy Brown, “Politics Without Banisters: Genealogical Politics in Nietzsche and Fou-

cault,” in Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 91–120.

19. See, for this argument, Butler, Gender Trouble; Butler, Bodies That Matter; Judith But- ler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); Michel Foucault, “Politics and the Study of Discourse,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govern- mentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 20. Henry Staten is admirably attentive to this constitutive contradiction, documenting its multiple moments in Nietzsche’s texts through a practice of reading he calls “psychodia- lectic,” a method that is “as attentive to the logical economy of the text as . . . the libidinal economy with which it interacts.” Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice (Ithaca: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 1990), 8. Yet Staten’s careful and insightful study overlooks the political aspirations that constitute the objects of Nietzsche’s libidinal economy, and the necessarily Notes 209

political uses and meanings of Nietzsche’s use of rhetoric. This book seeks to build on Staten’s work by rectifying this omission. 21. Some construe Nietzsche’s emphasis on contradiction as an agonistic struggle between equal yet opposite parties, a struggle that is necessary for the betterment of the contenders and results in the victory of the stronger or more excellent party (see, for example, Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy, 61–64). While the foregrounding of struggle in this reading is correct, I nevertheless do not think that for Nietzsche the outcome of any particular struggle is necessarily explainable in terms of merit, excellence, or desert. Triumph is not so simple or transparent; struggles are not so intentionally determined or consciously known; and the contending parties are not always so clearly distinguishable from one another. Indeed, it may often be the case that a victor—be it a drive or a morality or a political party—triumphs because of an accident, a piece of forgetfulness, a misplaced desire, or even a lack of awareness of its participation in the struggle altogether. It is also the case that drives or moralities or parties can be difficult to distinguish from one another, sometimes merging and then separating again or coalescing at unexpected points and reshaping one another. So while there may be a kind of agonism at work in Nietzsche’s philosophy, the contests themselves are not nearly so distinct and their triumphant outcomes are not nearly so meaningful. 22. For example, Martha Nussbaum’s criteria for determining whether or not a theory is political are whether or not (or the degree to which) it addresses the specific normative concerns of a multicultural, welfare- or wealth-redistributive liberal state. Martha Nussbaum, “Is Nietzsche a Political Thinker?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 5, no. 1 (1997), 1–12. Although Brian Leiter does not construe political theory so narrowly, he is clear that Nietzsche has “has no political philosophy” because he has no “theory of the state and its legitimacy.” Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (New York: Routledge, 2002), 296. 23. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977– 1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 1997); cf. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Indeed, it may well be the case that our presumption of the state as being the primary or only site and origin of power is itself a function of a larger and more diffuse functioning of power relations that Foucault has named governmentality. 24. It is in this spirit that Foucault declares it is necessary “to cut off the head of the king” in political theory and begin to think about power as operative in ways other than that of the solely prohibitive, sovereign law; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 88–89, and “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997). 25. As Mark Warren rightly notes, Nietzsche “shows how subjects are possible as historical

achievements. He shows us how capacities of the self evolved together with domination, and how they might be reconceived to go beyond their origins.” Mark Warren, Nietzsche

and Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1988), 2. 26. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 3. 27. As Foucault argues, “Philosophers or even, more generally, intellectuals justify and mark out their identity by trying to establish an almost uncrossable line between the domain of knowledge, seen as that of truth and freedom, and the domain of the exercise of power. What struck me, in observing the human sciences, was the development of all these branches of knowledge can in no way be dissociated from the exercise of power . . . generally speaking, the fact that societies can become the object of scientific observation, that human behavior became, from a certain point on, a problem to be analyzed and resolved, all that is bound up, I believe, with mechanisms of power.” He continues: “Truth is no doubt a form of power. And in saying that, I am only taking up one of the fundamental 210 Notes

problems of Western philosophy when it poses these questions: Why, in fact, are we attached to the truth? Why the truth rather than lies? Why the truth rather than myth? Why the truth rather than illusion? And I think that, instead of trying to find out what truth, as opposed to error, is, it might be more interesting to take up the problem posed by Nietzsche: how is it that, in our societies, ‘the truth’ has been given this value, thus placing us absolutely under its thrall?” Michel Foucault, “On Power,” trans. Alan Sheridan, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture—Interviews and Other 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 106–7. 28. This means that I do not see Nietzsche as a political thinker because he devotes himself to the political goal of the enhancement of the type man, which Bruce Detwiler, for example, argues is Nietzsche’s primary political project in Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) or because he asks the fundamental question of politics, “What ought man to become?” as Daniel W. Conway argues in Nietzsche and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1997). The first reading strikes me as inconsistent with Nietzsche’s revolutionary tendencies (to be discussed in a moment) insofar as it is accompanied by the claim that only a few of those men will be enhanced— i.e., this reading of Nietzsche’s political project is one of aristocratic radicalism, whereas I see Nietzsche’s politics as fundamentally revolutionary and thus mass-based. The second reading of Nietzsche as a political thinker strikes me as potentially reliant upon a historical construal of either the nature of human beings or the nature of power. 29. I owe this point—and the interpretive approach underlying it—to Daniel W. Conway’s marvelous and methodologically groundbreaking study of Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s Danger- ous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 30. In this, I in part follow Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur (Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and Literature [New York: Routledge, 1993]), who have made a forceful and persuasive case for overlooking all of Nietzsche’s unpublished writings. See also R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer- sity Press, 1965) and Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Vintage, 1974). 31. Maudemarie Clark (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy), Bruce Detwiler (Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism), Tracy Strong (Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000]), and Mark War- ren (Nietzsche and Political Thought) all take this approach. 32. Brian Leiter, “Perspectivism in Genealogy of Morals”; Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philoso- phy of Contradictions; John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 33. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 10. 34. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche. 4 vols. Trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCol- lins, 1991).

35. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1998).

36. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 10. 37. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 26. 38. Richardson, “Introduction,” 12. 39. Even Heidegger notes the difficulty of attributing importance to the order of aphorisms in The Will to Power, one that “does not stem from Nietzsche himself, is arbitrary and inessential,” and that Heidegger admits produces a similar “arbitrariness, within certain limits” in his own interpretation of Nietzsche (Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, 24). Notes 211 Chapter 1

1. Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 368d–369a. 2. Plato, Republic, 462d. 3. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992) Book II, Lemma 7, Scholium. 4. Even Locke dabbles in this body politic imagery, arguing that “when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority: for that which acts any community, being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it being necessary to that which is one body to move one way; it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority: or else it is impossible it should act or continue one body, one community, which the consent of every individual that united into it, agreed that it should.” John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), §96. 5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 112. 6. Plato, Republic, 462a-c. 7. This assumption also implies a desire for politics itself to run as smoothly and uncon- sciously as bodily processes. Socrates’ proposal that the polis function as a body thus suggests a longing that politics undertake its most important functions as effortlessly and unthinkingly as your body breathes, swallows, and regulates your temperature while you read this book, admirably focusing on “more important” things. Cf. Rousseau’s claim in the Social Contract that if the General Will were truly general and completely unified, there would be little to no dialogue—much less discord—at the seemingly endless meetings of the Assembly: “As long as several men together consider themselves to be a single body, they have only a single will, which relates to their common preservation and the general welfare. Then all the mechanisms of the state are vigorous and simple; its maxims are clear and luminous; it has no tangled, contradictory interests; the common good is clearly apparent everywhere, and requires only good sense in order to be perceived . . . A state governed in this way needs very few laws; and to the degree that it becomes necessary to promulgate new ones, this necessity is universally seen. The first to propose them merely says what everyone has already felt; and there is no question of intrigues nor of eloquence to pass into law of what each has already resolved to do as soon as he is sure the others will do likewise.” On the Social Contract, Book VI, chapter 1, ed. Roger Masters, trans. Judith Masters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), 108. 8. BGE §19. 9. See, for example, Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychol- ogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Leslie Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche

and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1990).

10. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Athlone Press, 1983), 40. 11. BGE §117. 12. BGE §19. 13. Ibid. 14. BGE §12. As we will see, although Nietzsche’s view is very much opposed to the Platonic/ Christian model of the soul, it resembles, in many respects, the account offered by Aris- totle in De Anima, defining psychē as the principle of living things. Indeed, in its usage by Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, and Aesop, psychē means “breath,” “esp. as in the sign of life”; it is only the Platonic usage that refers to psychē as “the soul or spirit of man,” as 212 Notes

that which is “opposed to sōma.” Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 903. 15. Z I:4 “On the Despisers of the Body.” 16. In Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, ed. James Strachey, trans. Joan Riviere (W. W. Norton: New York and London, 1960), 26. 17. GM III:16. 18. BGE §12. 19. Ibid. 20. EH “Z” §4. In BGE, section 54, Nietzsche argues that all modern philosophy has been attempting the same thing: “Since Descartes—actually more despite him than because of his precedent—all the philosophers seek to assassinate the old soul concept,” making modern philosophy essentially “anti-Christian,” if not, unfortunately, “anti-religious.” Nietzsche, for his part, is more definitive: “What is it that my whole body really expects of music? For there is no soul” (GS §368). 21. BGE §23. 22. GM II:12. 23. I therefore disagree with Elizabeth Grosz’s claim that “Nietzsche does not have a coherent theory of the body as such.” Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 121. Conway’s conceptualization of the soul as the “invisible body” that informs and is informed by the visible one admirably makes clear Nietzsche’s refusal of any soul/body dualism (Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1997], 23–30), yet the emphasis on vision as the primary psychological sense unwittingly reinstates this dualism by reifying the “visible” body as a perceptible, material container for Nietzsche’s invisible and “sumptuary” soul. The distinction between the body (morphē) and the drives that construct it (will to power) cannot be so easily made for Nietzsche. As Joanne Faulkner argues, “Nietzsche uses the body as a metaphor for the intellect, and intellect for the body, such that the reader is left chasing him through the labyrinth of his thought, which refuses to stop on either side of the spirit-body divide.” Joanne Faulkner, “The Body as Text in the Writings of Nietzsche and Freud,” Minerva 7 [2003], 112. Further, as we will see in the next chapter, the crucial diagnostic sense for assessment of this discernible conglomeration of drives is not vision but smell. 24. GS §120. 25. EH “Books” §4. 26. BGE §214. 27. BGE §212. 28. TI “Anti-Nature” §3. In this aphorism, Nietzsche warns that “one remains young only as long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace.” 29. GS §322. 30. For example, Graham Parkes insists on the necessity of a provisional “tyranny” (Composing

the Soul, 351–58) and Leslie Thiele argues that Nietzsche believes a “tensioned order” is necessary, to which end “leadership is found indispensable.” Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and

the Politics of the Soul, 63. 31. GS §290. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 185, 192–93; cf. Thiele, Friedrich Nietz- sche and the Politics of the Soul, 63. 32. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 7. 33. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 191. 34. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 190. 35. Moreover, what is at stake in insisting that Nietzsche really does value order more than disorder? Is it meant to ensure that his view of the soul cannot sanction “just anything”? Thiele, Parkes, and even Nehamas, at times, all seem to suggest that it is sufficient for psychological health simply for one’s soul to be ordered, with the particular ordering of secondary (or non-) importance. Yet there is also a lurking anxiety at the heart of these studies Notes 213

about the possibility that Nietzsche may not recommend an ordering of the soul, much less any particular kind of psychic discipline whatsoever. Although Nehamas is the only one of these three to (indirectly) take on this issue, arguing that we need not like Nietzsche or Nietzschean figures in order to appreciate their greatness (Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 192ff.), in his more recent reflections on this issue, Nehamas “confesses” that he has not faced this question directly and ultimately casts his lot with Kant on this ethical question, concluding that Nietzsche must be rejected insofar as he “refuses to reject the evil hero unconditionally.” Alexander Nehamas, “Nietzsche and ‘Hitler,’” in Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 91, 105. 36. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 181. 37. Ibid., 83. 38. Ibid., 181, emphasis added. 39. An ideal is still an ideal, and therefore regulative. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Femi- nism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 40. Thiele ultimately comes to this conclusion as well, arguing that “health and order of the soul are always an overcoming of illness and disorder.” Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, 91. Health is therefore the process of overcoming sickness, a condition from which sickness is never definitively absent. 41. GM III:9. Nietzsche credits his own illness as being responsible for all of his distinctive and distinctively admirable characteristics: “A long, all too long, series of years signifies recovery for me; unfortunately it also signifies relapse, decay, the periodicity of a kind of décadence . . . Even that filigree art of grasping and comprehending in general, those fingers for nuances, that psychology of ‘looking around the corner,’ and whatever else is characteristic of me, was learned only then, is the true present of those days in which everything in me became subtler—observation itself as well as organs of observation” (EH “Wise” §1). 42. GM II:16. See Daniel W. Conway, “The Birth of the Soul: Toward a Psychology of Deca- dence,” in Nietzsche and Depth Psychology, ed. Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald Lehrer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) for a discussion of the development of the soul as the body’s contraction of illness. 43. Spinoza, Ethics, Book II, Lemma 2. 44. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45. 45. Hobbes, Leviathan, 38. 46. Hobbes, Leviathan, 62. 47. Hobbes, Leviathan, 62. 48. Hobbes, Leviathan, 70. 49. Hobbes, Leviathan, 70. 50. Hobbes, Leviathan, 70.

51. Hobbes, Leviathan, 70. 52. GM III:7.

53. BGE §23. 54. BGE §3. 55. BGE §289. 56. Hobbes, Leviathan, 44. 57. GM II:12. 58. As Paul Patton aptly notes, “Whereas Hobbes’s dynamic is one of preservation or increase in the capacities of a given body, or preservation through increase of the body’s capacities, Nietzsche’s dynamic includes activity which might lead to its destruction or to its transformation into a different kind of body, as well as activity directed at the maintenance or increase of the power of the body in question. For Nietzsche, the power of a given body is a function of the activity of which that body is capable and not simply the powers 214 Notes

of others which it can command.” Paul Patton, “Nietzsche and Hobbes,” International Studies in Philosophy 33, no. 3 (2001), 106. It is for this reason that Nandita Biswas Mel- lamphy concludes that Hobbesian power is essentially reactive, unlike the activity of will to power. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “Corporealizing Thought: Retranslating the Eternal Return Back Into Politics,” in Nietzsche, Power and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, ed. Herman Siemens and Vasti Roodt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 709–10. 59. Not only is this viewpoint problematic for all of the above-mentioned reasons, it is also based upon a presumption that Nietzsche refuses again and again: equality. The importance of inequality for Nietzsche’s understanding of life will be discussed in the final section of this chapter. 60. BGE §13. 61. BGE §186. 62. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols., trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCol- lins, 1991). Arthur Danto’s important study claims: “It is hardly avoidable that we think of Will-to-Power in almost exactly the terms in which men once thought of substance, as that which underlies everything else and was the most fundamental of all . . . It is a metaphysical or, better, an ontological concept, for “Will-to-Power is Nietzsche’s answer to the question ‘What is there?’” Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 215. More recently, John Richardson has argued that will to power is metaphysical insofar as it constitutes a systematic truth about essence. See John Richard- son, Nietzsche’s System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 63. Bernd Magnus agrees, noting that “without the Nachlass it is virtually impossible to read eternal recurrence and will to power as first-order descriptions of the way the world is in itself.” Bernd Magnus, “The Use and Abuse of The Will to Power,” in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 233. Laurence Lampert cites Heidegger’s reliance on the unpublished notes as a prominent reason for his resolute interpretation of will to power as a metaphysical principle (Laurence Lampert, “Heidegger’s Nietzsche Interpretation,” Man and World 7, no. 4 [1974]), and Danto’s claim that will to power is an ontological concept depends on his multiple citations from the Nachlass. An exception to this generalization is Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, who cites generously from the unpublished writings and yet nevertheless concludes that “Nietzsche’s philosophy excludes as irrelevant to actual events the question of the ground of being in the sense of traditional metaphysics.” Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 60. 64. As will become clear, I therefore strongly disagree with Lampert’s assertion that Nietzsche’s published writings “do contain references to the metaphysical aspects of will to power” (Lampert, “Heidegger’s Nietzsche Interpretation,” 360). The aphorisms he cites as proof— BGE §§22, 36, and 259—will be discussed in detail.

65. Heidegger nowhere, to my knowledge, takes such concerns into account in his reading of Nietzsche. John Richardson openly rejects this methodology, seeing no difficulty in read-

ing Nietzsche’s philosophy as one “more like that we already practice,” which allows us to hear him “using language with the same straightforward intent as thinkers before him have done” (Richardson, Nietzsche’s System, 6); cf. Brian Leiter’s choice to present Nietzsche as “aspir[ing] to speak clear, precise, ‘analytical’ philosophical English” (Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (New York: Routledge [2002], xii). Richardson’s claim of course presumes that previous thinkers have used language with “straightforward intent,” and raises the question of why, then, Nietzsche seems so clearly to refuse this mode of presentation. One is also left wondering what is to be gained by refusing to reckon with such an obvious and distinctive feature of Nietzsche’s philosophy in our interpretation of it. Leiter insists that his methodological choice does not mean that he thinks Nietzsche is “really a ‘closet’ analytic philosopher.” Rather, Leiter claims that if Nietzsche is “to speak to us,” he must do within Notes 215

the terms of analytic philosophy as it developed in the twentieth century. Those terms are far superior to any other sort, he says, and interpreting Nietzsche in any other way would be“irresponsible.” While Leiter is correct to note that if Nietzsche is to speak to us we must be able to understand his language, this is very different from claiming either that Nietzsche speaks the language of analytic philosophy or that it is the only language “we” ourselves speak. 66. See, for example, Nancy Love, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1986), 206, 5n. It is only recently that this aphorism has begun to be read with care by Nietzsche interpreters. Maudemarie Clark emphasizes the hypothetical and tentative status of the proposed thesis that the world is will to power in this section, concluding that it cannot legitimately be attributed to Nietzsche at all (Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). Dan- iel W. Conway urges us to read this section in the experimental tone in which it is couched, as one more indication of the overall experimental status of Nietzsche’s use of will to power (Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]). Müller-Lauter comes to the opposite conclusion but only by taking a careful reading of section 36 seriously (Wolfgang Müller- Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions). 67. Despite the reams of scholarship on Nietzsche’s inimitable style, I have yet to encounter more than a single discussion of Nietzsche’s use of quotation marks, nor any acknowledgment of their function as a distancing mechanism or sarcasm. Eric Blondel argues that Nietzsche’s quotation marks highlight two distinctions: the first, between moral language and his own (therefore indicating that moral language is “improper, if not vulgar, slang, obscene, or incorrect”), and, second, to suggest the gap between language in general (which, like moral language, is always already metaphysical) and his own. See Eric Blondel, Nietzsche, the Body, and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 148–56. Blondel at least agrees that these “inverted commas” function as a means of indicating that the words being used are not those in some sense intended, desired, or employed literally by Nietzsche himself: “Inverted commas indicate that appearances are deceptive” (174). 68. In BGE, section 56, Nietzsche tells us that he has not only thought pessimism “through to its depths,” but also sought to “liberate it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it has finally presented itself to our century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.” 69. BGE §36. 70. D P§4. 71. GM I:13. 72. TI “Errors” §3. 73. I therefore quite agree with Clark’s conclusion that the statement in BGE, section 36, that the world is will to power cannot stand because as an argument it “depends on the causal-

ity of the will, something [Nietzsche] nowhere accepts.” Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 217. On denial of causality per se, see GS §112; BGE §16, §21, §360; A §39;

on denial of the causality of the will, see TI “Philosophy” §5, “Errors” §3; GS §127; BGE §19, A §15. 74. BGE §230, in “Our Virtues.” 75. BGE §14. 76. GM III:12. 77. GS §374. 78. GS §373. Nietzsche sees this mechanicism in modern philosophy, too, particularly among British thinkers, and castigates Hobbes specifically for this methodology in BGE §252. 79. GS §373. Nietzsche’s setting up of the contrast between science’s interpretation of the world and his own is also an obvious sales pitch, a means of showcasing will to power as both shocking yet compelling, frightening yet overfull of explanatory power, questionable 216 Notes

yet characterized by the power and charm of reversal which oppositional refutations so often display. 80. D §507. 81. Not only is “will to power” put in quotes, but so, too, is “the world” at the end of BGE, section 22. Blondel calls this Nietzsche’s “double game of saying and unsaying” (Blondel, Nietzsche, the Body, and Culture, 152), noting in reference to section 1067 of The Will to Power: “So here again, Nietzsche forbids us to speak of ‘world’ in general, but writes: ‘Do you know what “the world” is for me?’” 82. D P§5. 83. BGE §§13, 259. 84. GS §349. Section 349 occurs in Book V of the Gay Science, which was written the same year as BGE and appended to the previously completed Books I through IV. 85. GM II:12. 86. II:12 “On Self-Overcoming.” 87. CW, Epilogue. 88. GS §349. 89. Z II:12 “On Self-Overcoming.” 90. Ibid. 91. A §17. 92. TI “Errors” §2. 93. Some commentators have argued that will to power nevertheless remains a teleological drive, if for no other reason than because it seems necessitated by the “to” (zu) of “will to power” (Wille zur Macht). See Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32 and John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 1. Yet is grammar the key interpretive point here? If will “to” power is a drive “toward” expenditure, but that expenditure is neither a predeterminable end state nor a static condition; if, in fact, the Macht toward which Wille zur Macht drives can never be known or predicted, then what becomes of telos? Indeed, what remains of zu? Is this instead an example of how “‘being’ is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause” rather than the effect of language? “Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naïve power of persuasion than the error concerning being . . . After all, every word we say and every sentence speak in its favor” (TI “Philosophy” §5). Becom- ing can thus have no advocate by definition; this does not mean, however, that Nietzsche’s own use of Wille zur Macht makes him the unsuspecting spokesperson for being. 94. GS P§4. 95. GS §382; cf. EH “Z” §2. 96. For an important discussion of active and reactive in Nietzsche, see Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. 97. TI “Skirmishes” §14. 98. Z Prologue §4.

99. TI “Skirmishes” §44. 100. TI “Skirmishes” §37.

101. D P§4; cf. TI preface: “Excess of strength alone is the proof of strength.” 102. BGE §188. 103. Z Prologue §7. 104. TI “Skirmishes” §44. 105. BGE §259. 106. GS §111. 107. GM II:1. 108. GM II:11. 109. BGE §229. 110. This is the case despite Deleuze’s famous argument to the contrary (Nietzsche and Phi- losophy, chap. 1). It is one thing to deny Nietzsche’s essentialism, another to deny his Notes 217

inegalitarianism—the first is justifiable, but the second is not. While I think Nietzsche is committed to the existence of hierarchy—without it, after all, life is impossible—nevertheless this does not mean that the hierarchy is fixed, inscribed immutably into the constitution of bodies, enduring over time, or immune to transformation. Indeed, the unceasing flux of growth and decay that Nietzsche argues characterizes life makes clear just how fleeting any particular hierarchy is. But this does not undermine his insistence that hierarchy exists and is necessary. 111. In this claim, Nietzsche is in good company—this critique of liberal equality is by now a familiar one. See, for example, Wendy Brown, “Liberalism’s Family Values,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Poli- tics,” in Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Adrien Katherine Wing (New York: New York University Press, 1993); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Ques- tion,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 112. Z II:12 “On Self-Overcoming.” 113. GS §118.

Chapter 2

1. Daniel Ahern, Nietzsche as Cultural Physician (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer- sity Press, 1995). 2. GM III:11. 3. GM III:28. 4. For a compelling study of Nietzsche’s philosophy that takes the centrality of décadence and Nietzsche’s self-professed obsession with it as its starting point, see Daniel W. Con- way’s rich and insightful Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Nietzsche’s obsession with décadence is by no means idiosyncratic—many late nineteenth-century European writers, fearful of the multiple social, political, and economic upheavals occurring on the continent and beyond attributed these changes to the decay of morality, the family, and traditional structures of authority. The prognosis for such disintegration was nothing less than the millenarian

demise of European culture as a whole. See Edward J. Chamberlin and Sander Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);

Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990). 5. TI “Socrates” §2, “Anti-Nature” §5. I return to this claim in Chapter 6. 6. GM III:1, 28. 7. HL §5. 8. HL §10. 9. Ibid. 218 Notes

10. SE §2. 11. BGE §208. 12. BGE §212. 13. BGE §208. 14. BGE §223. 15. BGE §200. 16. BGE §242. 17. A §1. 18. GM III:28. 19. GM III:19. 20. Z Prologue §5. 21. TI “Skirmishes” §37. 22. TI “Skirmishes” §37. These passages (and occasional others in Beyond Good and Evil) lend credence to the notion that Nietzsche’s critique of modern man is not simply an attack on weakness, but also a (reminiscently Rousseauan) critique of a particular stratum of the weak—the bourgeoisie. Thus the reader sometimes encounters Nietzsche’s critiques of the vulgarity of theater-going crowds (and not just at Bayreuth), his contempt for the newspaper reading masses and his sometimes romanticization of the working class (as, for example, in BGE §58). Moore notes this as a moment wherein Nietzsche’s critique of déca- dence subverts the dominant condemnations of degeneration prominent in his day: instead of cultural degeneration inducing a rising tidal wave of crime, sexual indulgence, and drug/ alcohol abuse, Nietzsche instead deploys a notion of “healthy criminality” (modeled on Napoleon and Cesare Borgia), with which he contrasts with the “decadent criminality” of the Christian, bourgeois type. Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor, 143. 23. BGE §242. 24. BGE §258. 25. GS §23. 26. Ibid. 27. BGE §262. 28. GS §377. 29. Or at least through Twilight of the Idols; see TI “Anti-Nature” §2, “Errors” §2, and “Ger- mans” §6. 30. A §6. Unlike his disavowal of conservatism, in this case what Nietzsche says about himself (at the end of his career, perhaps in retrospective reflection) is wholly true: “Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of décadence—I had reasons” (CW P). Richard Gilman notes that Nietzsche is the philosopher who made decadence his central and critical problem. Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975). Gregory Moore notes that “few thinkers, either before or since, have contemplated this problem as deeply or as consistently as [Nietzsche], or have placed it at the very centre of their philosophical inquiry” (Moore, Nietzsche, Biology,

and Metaphor, 219). See also Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (Baltimore, MD:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 31. Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game, chap. 2. 32. It may also be one more token of Nietzsche’s deep admiration for all things French: “I believe only in French culture and consider everything else in Europe today that calls itself ‘culture’ a misunderstanding—not to speak of German culture” (EH “Clever” §3). Con- way suspects Nietzsche appropriated the term from Paul Bourget, a French psychologist whom Nietzsche particularly admired. Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game, 57. 33. A §17. 34. As Derrida notes, “The degenerate is not a lesser vitality; it is a life principle hostile to life.” Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lin- coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 27. Bernheimer does not mark this transition Notes 219

from disinterest to despair in Nietzsche’s understanding of decay (in part because Bern- heimer relies too much on the unpublished notes), yet he recognizes the nuance in Nietz- sche’s account, noting that “decadence has a necessary and beneficial place in the economy of life. It is not a problem in itself—it becomes problematic only if it threatens to exceed its limits and infect the organism as a whole” (Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects, 30). Yet he con- tends that Nietzsche has “no clear idea” of what he means by décadence (ibid., 29), because everything from modernity, subjectivity, truth, morality, Wagner, and “woman” seem to be instances of it. But this “bewilder[ing], confus[ing], even exasperat[ing]” list (ibid.,48) does not undermine the possibility of specifying what Nietzsche means by décadence—it is rather a testimonial of just how widespread he believes the disease to be. Indeed, Nietz- sche’s assimilation of so many different events to mere epiphenomena of the underlying problem of décadence is part and parcel of his revolutionary posture, a deployment of revolutionary rhetoric that seeks to induce crisis through a single, comprehensive interpretation and critique of everything existing (a topic to be explored more fully in the next chapter). 35. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995); Showalter, Sexual Anarchy. 36. Comprehensively documented by Moore in Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor. 37. André Comte-Sponville, for example, insists that “Nietzsche’s thinking is racist in its essence through its conjunction (under cover of heredity) of elitism with biologism.” André Comte-Sponville, “The Brute, the Sophist, and the Aesthete: ‘Art in the Service of an Illusion,’” in Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, eds. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 33. 38. Although Robert Solomon admits that Nietzsche’s “enthusiasm for genetics and racial stereotyping” is “overly abused,” he nevertheless sees a “quasi-biological deterministic thesis” lurking in Nietzsche’s tests, a thesis that “suggests that weakness and strength as such are singular, concrete characteristics—as fixed and unambiguous as eye color, and as all- encompassing as the defining characteristics of a biological species.” Robert Solomon, “One Hundred Years of Ressentiment,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietz- sche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 121. 39. As Moore notes, “Even [Nietzsche’s] openly racist interpreters often complained that he had no clearly defined concept of ‘race.’” Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor, 157. 40. GM III:17. 41. §208. Moore argues that this is Nietzsche’s primary tactic, whereby Rasse is “often used interchangeably or in close connection with the word Stand,” denoting something like “estate, class, caste,” or “any group which shares a common ancestry (such as a clan or dynasty)” (Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor, 125.) Cf. Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 111. In contemporary terms, then, this would make Nietzsche’s race/class designation

something more akin to an ethnic group than a “race.” 42. BGE §205.

43. BGE §252. 44. BGE §251. 45. GS §357. 46. BGE §62. 47. BGE §48. 48. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 52. 49. Nietzsche explicitly disavows Spencer in his only published elaboration of genealogical method in GM II:13 (I discuss this aphorism more fully in Chapter 3). 50. TI “Skirmishes” §14. 51. BGE §262. For Germany’s colonial endeavors and their role in shaping Germans’ self- conceptions with regard to race and class, see Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 220 Notes

1884–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) and Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fan- tasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 52. For example, Max Nordau’s Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1913). As Mike Hawkins argues, because Darwin himself neither applied his theory of natural selection to human beings in The Origin of Species nor specified the necessary “direction” of evolutionary change, social Darwinism became an instrument for documenting both social progress and decline. Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 34. Hawkins also points out the extraordinary “flexibility” of Darwinism with regard to its “unit of selection,” wherein evolution and natural selection may “act upon” an individual organism or, as became popular in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, the “species, tribe, nation, race” (33). 53. Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor, 116. 54. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 18, 31–35. Indeed, Brian Leiter claims that Nietzsche’s critique of modern mediocrity misplaces its cause in morality as opposed to, say, the leveling effects of the free market. Brian Leiter, “Nietzsche and the Morality Critics,” in Nietzsche: Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 248. Cf. Mark Warren’s claim that Nietzsche’s political proclamations must be overlooked or ignored as the “naïve” ruminations of someone blind to the increasing industrialization and modernizing changes occurring in the Europe of his day. Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). 55. Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 92. 56. BT P§5. 57. EH “Destiny” §4. 58. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality. 59. BT P§5. 60. EH “D” §2. 61. GM III:1. 62. CW 2nd postscript. 63. BGE §62. 64. CW 2nd postscript. 65. TI “Skirmishes” §43. 66. MacMaster, Racism in Europe, 6; Tzvetan Todorov, “Race and Racism,” trans. Catherine Porter, in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, ed. Les Back and John Solomos (New York: Routledge, 2000), 65–67. 67. BGE §268. 68. GM I:12. 69. BGE §257. 70. Cf. Fanon: “It is the settler who has brought the native into existence.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). See also

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). 71. No doubt he is also emphasizing the bloodiness of these events, but, on this count, Nietz-

sche is more than fair and this emphasis renders him neither responsible for such violence nor its advocate. As Henry Staten has argued regarding Nietzsche’s discussions of slavery, it is important to be attentive not merely to Nietzsche’s claims but also his tone, which reveals neither an unproblematic advocacy nor the unquestioning condemnation that contemporary readers might want. Rather, Nietzsche speaks in tones of “horrified fascination,” understanding that “there is something terrible mixed with the beauty of nature.” Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 83. As Staten says, this is the fundamental “economic dilemma with which Nietzsche struggled to the very end—the problem of how to stomach history as he imagines it, as the totality of affect of suffering humanity, how to keep from vomiting it back up when he tries to swallow it” (86). Notes 221

72. GS §23. 73. BGE §262. 74. BGE §242. 75. BGE §200. 76. GS §377; cf. BGE §256. 77. Both here and in HH §475; GS §§357, 377; BGE P, §§241, 243, 254. 78. BGE §251. 79. GS §377; BGE §208, §251. 80. GS §362; BGE §199; GM I:16, EH “CW” §2. 81. BGE §§208, 241, 254. 82. Peter Bergmann, Nietzsche: “The Last Antipolitical German” (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1987), 162. 83. GS §377. 84. BGE §256. 85. Moore seems to favor the line of causality offered in Figure 2.2 (Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor, 156–59) but I am not convinced there is much textual evidence to support it. Much depends on the plausibility of his reading of Nietzsche’s anti-Semitic anti- Christianism as an attempt to smear anti-Semites by tarring them with their own brush (see Note 88). 86. See, for example, D §206; BGE §264, §272; TI “Improvers” §3, §4; A §46. 87. See, for example, GM I:5, I:12; TI “Improvers” §4. Moore argues that Nietzsche’s use of “Aryan” as a label of superiority is an ironic appropriation of the racialist discourse that defined contemporary arguments about race and religion and which he uses to ridicule the Christians, anti-Semites, and German nationalists involved in such debates. It is these people, not Jews or “inferior races,” who are Nietzsche’s real targets (Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor, 158). While Moore is right to note that Nietzsche uses “Aryan” to refer to “non-white” groups like the Japanese or Semitic groups like the Arabs (GM I:11) such that his “mythical ‘blond beast’ serves as an emblem for the ‘predatory type’ in all cultures” (157), the fact that “other” groups can be described as “Aryan” does not dislodge the category from its status as signifier of what is highest or best. Nor does Nietzsche offer his genealogy of morality simply in refutation of late nineteenth-century debates about the Jews and German health. Rather, it is also a diagnosis of the fundamental decline of the modern age and a warning regarding its impending nihilism—he is speaking, in other words, not simply to his own contemporaries but also to a broader, historical audience. While Nietzsche relinquishes the belief in racialist categories and mocks the eugenicist ambitions of his Wagnerian contemporaries, he nevertheless retains racist disregard for Jews and other “blacks.” Moreover, although racism and racialism frequently overlap, they are nevertheless distinct phenomena such that one can be a racist, as, in my view, Nietz- sche is, without also being a racialist, as, in my view, Nietzsche is not (but many social Darwinists and German nationalists of his day clearly were). On the distinction between

racism and racialism, see Todorov, “Race and Racism,” 65–67. As we will see in Chapter 4, it is not race but gender (understood not merely as a surrogate or place-holder for race/

racial health) that reveals Nietzsche’s deepest investments in the causality of European décadence. 88. Walter Kaufmann offers a cursory defense of Nietzsche on this count, arguing that Nietz- sche’s multiple criticisms of anti-Semites (including Wagner) mean he cannot himself be anti-Semitic. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Vintage, 1974), 298–304. Moore claims Nietzsche deliberately transposes many of the vicious stereotypes about Jews onto Christians, thereby fortifying his own self-stylization as the Antichrist(ian) and leaving any possible verdict on his anti-Semitism, at best, ambiguous (Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor, 153–55). But, obviously, Nietzsche can revile both Jews and anti-Semites at the same time, and the notion that he is slandering Christians with anti-Semitic Jewish stereotypes suggests as much (Comte-Sponville, “The 222 Notes

Brute, the Sophist, and the Aesthete,” 32). In the nineteenth century, Jews were generally considered to be “black” or “swarthy,” thereby combining imperial or “anti-black” racism with the already widespread continental anti-Semitism. See Sander Gilman, The Jewish Body (New York: Routledge, 1991) and MacMaster, Racism in Europe. And, in TI “Improvers,” section 4, Nietzsche calls Christianity “sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil,” the “anti-Aryan religion par excellence.” For discussions of Nietzsche’s relationship with both Judaism and anti-Semitism, see Jacob Golomb, ed., Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997) and Weaver San- taniello, Nietzsche, God, and the Jews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 89. GM I:12. 90. Z I:21 “On Free Death”; cf. I:9 “On the Preachers of Death”; D §206. 91. For example, A §2, BGE §258, GM II:12. 92. It is important not to read a retrospective teleology of fascism into Nietzsche’s texts, since any ideology—from Christianity to Marxism to social Darwinism to democratic freedom—can be appropriated for destructive political purposes by despicable rulers and regimes. This is an argument against those regimes, not the ideologies by which they justify their actions. Ideologies do not cause political behavior any more than they intrinsically justify it, and powerful regimes can obviously use any ideology they want to legitimate their otherwise loathsome behavior. For further commentary on these issues, see Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1992); Jacob Golomb and Robert Wistrich, eds., Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 93. This is not to say that Nietzsche no longer uses the word race (Rasse), which surfaces often enough in both Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist(ian). But it is to say that the kind of speculation about what constitutes a race (racialization), the various qualities and characteristics of particular races and nations that made up the Europe of his day (racialized nationalism), and the concern regarding both “race-mixing” (Vermischung) and the unification of Europe, which we find primarily in Beyond Good and Evil and scattered throughout the Genealogy, simply do not recur in the 1888 writings. 94. GM III:25. 95. TI “Skirmishes” §48. 96. TI “Socrates” §11. 97. TI “Errors” §2. 98. TI “Skirmishes” §35. 99. CW §5. 100. GM II:17. 101. GM II:16. All of the rest of the citations in this paragraph are taken from GM II:16; cf. GS §354. 102. GM II:1. Cf. HL §1: “Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over; it does not know how to dissimu-

late, it conceals nothing and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore never be anything but honest. Man, on the other hand, braces himself against the great

and ever greater pressure of what is past: it pushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden which he can sometimes appear to disown and which in traffic with his fellow men he is only to glad to disown, so as to excite their envy.” 103. GM III:13. 104. GM II:1. Cf. HL §1: “In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness, however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration.” This is quite different from Bernard Yack’s claim that, for Nietzsche, modern culture “degrades and dehumanizes us” (The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992], Notes 223

320). “Dehumanization” is not really a word that makes sense with regard to Nietzsche— for him, the human is essentially “dehumanized” insofar as what it means to be human is simply to be a sick and deranged animal (and for this sentence even to make sense one has to rely on the very humanist usage of the word “human” that Nietzsche rejects). The “realization of humanity in the world” is thus quite far from anything for which Nietzsche longs; no doubt it would be too gruesome and horrifying a prospect ever to affirm. 105. GM I:8. 106. GM II:4. 107. Ibid. 108. GM II:14. 109. GM II:20. 110. GM II:14. 111. While it is plausible to argue that Nietzsche sees any deviation from our animal past as the first step on the road toward décadence, I do not construe Nietzsche in this way because it engages in a kind of retrospective teleology that is otherwise incompatible with his genealogical method. Although the transition from consciousness to bad conscience, from sickness to sin, may seem both immediate and virtually imperceptible, Nietzsche nevertheless offers an analytic distinction between the two in the second essay of the Genealogy, and sometimes even a temporal one, as in his discussion of the ascetic priest in the third essay, under whom “the invalid has been transformed into ‘the sinner’” (III:20). Moreover, although the transition from consciousness to bad conscience may look, in hindsight, both effortless and inevitable, the bad conscience was neither the necessary consequence of the historicization of consciousness, nor was it an intended or predictable result of that historicization, which Nietzsche claims constituted mankind’s “entire prehistoric labor” on itself (GM II:2). As Nietzsche himself reminds us, “The ‘evolution’ of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of force—but a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions” (GM II:12). 112. GM I:13. Cf. Foucault: “With the Christian pastorate we see the birth of an absolutely new form of power. Also . . . we see the emergence of what could be called absolutely specific modes of individualization . . . What the history of the pastorate involves, therefore, is the entire history of procedures of human individualization in the West. Let’s say also that it involves the history of the subject.” Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 183–84. 113. GM II:14. 114. Again, to cite Foucault: “I think this typical constitution of the modern Western subject makes the pastorate one of the decisive moments in the history of power in Western societ-

ies.” Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 185. 115. A §51.

116. GM III:28. 117. A §58. 118. GM I:12. 119. A §44. 120. GM I:14. 121. CW §5. 122. BGE §30. 123. GM III:14. 124. EH “Destiny” §1. 125. TI “Philosophy” §3. Freud, too, places great importance on smelling, hypothesizing that the human assumption of an erect posture was the calamitous step on the road to 224 Notes

civilization and unhappiness since it led to a devaluation of the otherwise centrally important capacity of smell. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1961). Nietzsche seems to have escaped this particular sensory erosion triggered by the onset of civilization, which potentially explains why, despite being décadent himself, he can nevertheless diagnose it where others remain oblivious. Significantly, Nietzsche affirmatively contrasts the nose with the eye—and a technologically enhanced eye at that—claiming that the nose “is able to detect minimal differences of motion which even a spectroscope cannot detect.” For a marvelous exposition of the use of metaphors of smelling and “sniffing out” in Nietzsche’s texts, see Eric Blondel, Nietzsche, the Body, and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 113–24. 126. EH “Destiny” §1. 127. EH “Wise” §8. 128. EH “Wise” §1. 129. EH “Clever” §10. 130. Ibid. 131. EH “Wise” §2. 132. Ibid. 133. GS P§3. 134. EH “Wise” §6. 135. EH “Wise” §6. 136. EH “Wise” §4. 137. EH “TI” §2. 138. EH “TI” §1. 139. TI “Anti-Nature” §4. Notice that Nietzsche has set up the problem nostalgically from the outset—he seeks to renature the antinatural, to, as he says in Beyond Good and Evil, “translate man back into nature” (§230, emphasis added). 140. EH “Destiny” §7. Cf. A §47: “That we find no God—either in history of in nature or behind nature—is not what differentiates us, but that we experience what has been revered as God, not as ‘godlike’ but as miserable, as absurd, as harmful, not merely as an error but as a crime against life. We deny God as God. If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him. In a formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio [God, as Paul created him, is the negation of God].” 141. GM P§6.

Chapter 3

1. Daniel Conway, for example, argues that Nietzsche “offers no cures, no therapies, and no hopes for a regimen of self-constitution that might make [decadent souls] whole.” Daniel Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 67. See also Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political

(New York: Routledge, 1997). 2. In this, I follow Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Dis- content from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 3. As Arthur Danto notes, Nietzsche “sometimes urged Will-to-Power with a blind and driving urgency, which is so characteristic of him, as though he were flailing his readers with a weapon.” Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 217. 4. As Catherine Zuckert notes, “Nietzsche consistently present[s] ‘legislation,’ that is, the declaration of the highest values, as the proper work of the philosopher.” Catherine Zuck- ert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 22. Notes 225

5. Observing that Nietzsche’s “invective appears more frequently in the later writings,” Danto unwittingly merges these metaphors, noting that “it is almost as though the work of diagnosis were over, the time having now come to combat” (Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 182). 6. And in taking a “medical” approach and using philosophy as a kind of therapy, Nietzsche is by no means pathbreaking in this regard; see Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire for an exhaustive accounting of the ways in which Hellenistic philosophers employed precisely this therapeutic approach (The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994]). 7. On the world-making power of revolutionary writing, manifestos in particular, see Mar- tin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). In Nietzsche’s particular case, Bruce Detwiler puts it well when he says: “In the best of cases the philosopher is not simply one who ascends from the cave and perceives the sun; rather he is one who out of the depths of his own creativity becomes a new sun for mankind.” Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 29. Or, in Brian Leiter’s words, Nietzsche’s term “philosopher” functions as an “honorific for the one who creates values.” Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11. 8. This is a fact about which his Anglo-American commentators in particular complain (with regard to will to power and much else). However, rather than insisting on measuring Nietz- sche by a yardstick on which he perennially comes up short, we might instead consider if this lack of (adequate) argumentation suggests that he is up to something other than the more familiar philosophical project of argument construction, which might therefore demand we at least supplement more traditional philosophical reading techniques with an additional or different set of interpretive strategies. This is not to say that Nietzsche does not make arguments at all, or that we can no longer assess his claims according to standards of argumentative validity or coherence or consistency, but it is to say that berating Nietzsche for failing to be a philosopher of the analytic variety may be a deficiency not in Nietzsche’s texts but in our demand that he be an analytic philosopher. As David Owen points out, “Nietzsche is acutely attentive to issues of expression” and with regard to the Genealogy specifically, Owen argues that “if we are to offer a compelling account of Nietz- sche’s Genealogy, it must be one that makes sense of the rhetorical strategies that he deploys in this work.” David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 59. 9. Others have also argued that Nietzsche performs the things he describes or criticizes in his writings, focusing on the ways in which Nietzsche’s writings reveal his own weakness, décadence, or asceticism, thereby “proving” his diagnosis of modernity through his own manifestation of its symptoms of degeneracy. See, for example, Conway, Nietzsche’s Dan- gerous Game; Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Kelly Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Feminine” (New York:

Routledge, 1995). This analysis strikes me as exactly right, and my own project is obviously indebted to this line of thinking. This chapter, however, explores the performance of

the affirmative and revolutionary Nietzsche, taking him at his word not simply that he is a décadent but also supremely healthy. 10. And this is, I think, the closest thing to a philosophical “justification” for will to power that we are going to get from Nietzsche. Owen argues that if Nietzsche’s project is to be effective, he needs to provide reasons for will to power “that are authoritative-for-us, given our existing perspective, and stand in the right kind of motivational relationship to both our existing perspective and Nietzsche’s perspective” (Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, 42). Aaron Ridley goes to some lengths to demonstrate the ways in which Nietzsche does, in fact, do this work in a careful and nuanced documentation of the possible ways in which Nietzsche undertakes the critical reevaluation of values. Aaron Ridley, “Nietzsche and the Re-evaluation of Values,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 2005. But what Owen seeks 226 Notes

and Ridley supplies are, at best, elusive in Nietzsche, at worst, irrelevant insofar as we take his primarily rhetorical presentation of will to power seriously. For Nietzsche’s “problem of authority” may in fact be what is most significant about his revolutionary project. Does the multiplicity of his rhetorical tactics—their variability in both level of sophistication and intended conscious or subconscious target—suggest Nietzsche’s own unsureness as to his own authority—his questions regarding what would actually “work” on his readers (and thus constitute sufficient reasons)? Is Nietzsche in fact deliberately showcasing his lack of reasons, perhaps in order to highlight their inadequate explanatory power or overall unimportance? Is dislodging the relevance and necessity of reasons actually part of his very revolutionary project? And if the latter is the case, how could he persuade us that he is right about this? I am not saying that Nietzsche never offers reasons, but I do think he is skeptical about their overall importance and savvy regarding the impossibility of ever definitively knowing them, and that the possible lack of compelling reasons for will to power may instead be read as a performance of his more literal suggestion that reasons are important primarily because of our own weaknesses and inadequacies. 11. BGE §212. 12. This is how John Richardson describes the task of the philosopher in the introduction to the Nietzsche volume of the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series. John Richardson, “Introduction,” in Nietzsche: Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 14). 13. Z I:4 “On the Despisers of the Body.” 14. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Vintage, 1974). 15. Martha Nussbaum, “Is Nietzsche a Political Thinker?” International Journal of Philosophi- cal Studies 5, no. 1 1–12. 16. Leslie Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individual- ism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); cf. Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 186–90; Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1989). 17. This seems to be the view of Brian Leiter, who recognizes Nietzsche’s basic project as the revaluation of values but claims this as a primarily moral or ethical project. Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality. 18. Ansell-Pearson argues that from Nietzsche’s beginning reckonings with the Greeks through his “middle period” to the mature works, “Nietzsche’s commitment to culture over politics is unwavering,” even when it comes to his project of great politics, the revaluation of values. Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95. 19. Arthur Danto acknowledges the revolutionary character of Nietzsche’s philosophy a num-

ber of times without pursuing the claim distinctly, as, for example, when he notes that adequately conceiving of the world in a Nietzschean way would require “a total revolution

in logic, science, morality, and in philosophy itself.” Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 35. 20. Yack sees Nietzsche as deeply invested in “total” revolution—i.e., revolutionary transformation not merely of social life or institutions but the very meaning of what it means to be human—but qualifies this transformation as “sub-political.” Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution, 10. 21. Nehamas has argued of Nietzsche that “the last thing he is is a social reformer or revolutionary” and that Nietzsche neither advocates nor foresees “a radical change in the lives of most people.” Alexander Nehamas, Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 225. Cf. Brian Leiter, “Nietzsche and the Morality Critics,” in Nietzsche: Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 247. Notes 227

22. BGE §210. 23. I therefore find it difficult to understand how Nietzsche’s revolution could not affect most, if not all, human beings in modernity if its transformative effects would permeate the very constitution of our being. As Detwiler aptly notes, “there is strong evidence for the conclusion that the great politics of the future, which is integrally related to Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values, is also a politics of the real world. There is every reason to believe that ‘all power structures of the old society’ will be ‘exploded’ in fact and not just in thought.” Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 56. 24. EH “Destiny” §7. 25. EH Destiny §8. 26. EH “Destiny” §1. 27. EH “CW” §4. Nietzsche initially conceived of the Antichrist(ian) as the first of four volumes of a larger work to be entitled Revaluation of All Values. It is clear that he saw this potential magnum opus not only as an incisive statement of his overall critique of and project for modernity, but also that it was crafted as a piece of revolutionary rhetoric intended to bring about the very revolution he claimed to foresee. 28. EH “Destiny” §8. 29. EH “Destiny” §1. Compare Marx’s language in the Manifesto, which, by contrast, reads as tame, almost conservative, in tone after Nietzsche’s impassioned invective. See Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978). Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat (474). The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable (483). 30. A §62. 31. EH “Destiny” §2. 32. EH “Untimely Ones” §2, “Destiny” §2. 33. EH “Destiny” §1; cf. EH “TI” §2. 34. EH “Destiny” §1. 35. EH “Books” §2; cf. EH “Destiny” §§8–9. 36. TI Preface. 37. EH “Destiny” §1. 38. Claudia Crawford goes a step further, arguing that Nietzsche’s rhetoric is not simply revolutionary but apocalyptic; that he is not merely a radical but a prophet. Claudia Crawford,

“Nietzsche’s Psychology and Rhetoric of World Redemption: Dionysus versus the Cruci- fied,” in Nietzsche and Depth Psychology, ed. Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ron-

ald Lehrer (New York: SUNY Press, 1999). While Crawford is right to note Nietzsche’s often religiously inflected rhetoric (especially in Ecce Homo and The Antichrist[ian]), I wonder if this has more to do with the object of Nietzsche’s critique—Christianity—than with either his own self-positioning or the intended character of his revolution. To argue that Nietzsche’s writings are both prophetic and apocalyptic means claiming that Nietz- sche’s rhetoric of revolution is moralizing, that it believes in itself as a truth that is unimpli- cated in the body, transcending the flux and chaos of “this” world, meant as both universal and ahistorical. While it is indisputable that Nietzsche declares his views to be “true” (a rhetorical strategy that Conway argues displaces all others post-1886; Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game), his conflation of truth with the body (see Chapter 1) suggests Nietzsche knew that even his most fervent beliefs would decay and die off. Moreover, Nietzsche’s utilization of 228 Notes

the rhetoric of performativity (to be discussed in the next section) is an obvious recognition of the “fallibility” of truth claims, standing his proselytizing in direct contradiction to Crawford’s evangelical interpretation. Finally, in an issue to be addressed more fully in Chapter 6, there seems to be no clear vision of salvation promised by Nietzsche’s revolutionary rhetoric. As Yack argues, the character of revolutionary longing post-Kant takes its cues not from its utopic vision of a redemptive future world, but rather from its overwhelming discontent and critique of present and past obstacles to the realization of our humanity. Thus, “although one may indeed call it utopian to plunge forward into a future defined only by the negation of the obstacles to satisfaction, such utopianism is inspired by hatred of present obstacles, not by an infatuation with kingdoms of the imagination.” Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution, 27. 39. EH “Destiny” §8. 40. A §62. 41. GM II:22. After such nausea, the next aphorism begins with Nietzsche noting dryly, “This should dispose once and for all of the question of how the ‘holy God’ originated” (GM II:23). 42. GM II:24. 43. GM III:20. 44. GM III:22. 45. Nietzsche’s rhetoric therefore qualifies him as a revolutionary in at least three of the four senses that Hannah Arendt argues are definitive of modern revolutions: “novelty, beginning, and violence”; Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 37. Her fourth criterion—“irresistibility”—raises the question of how best to interpret the frequent revolutionary claim that the revolution itself is inevitable. Do revolutionaries only document the impending crisis that will necessarily lead to the overthrow they claim to predict? Or is this “objectivity” rather one more tactic by which they seek to produce the very revolution for which they so long? Martin Puchner has argued that “the modern, revolutionary manifesto seeks to obtain an authority it does not yet possess,” meaning that “it is through the very speech acts of the manifesto that the context and the agent are being wrought” (Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 24), putting a different spin on revolutionary inevitabil- ity. While Arendt’s reading of Marx on this issue cannot be engaged here, I find this ambiguity of rhetorical interpretation is, at best, irresolvable in the case of Nietzsche and clearly exemplified in his use of performative rhetoric, a rhetorical strategy that undercuts the possibility of ultimately distinguishing between reality and metaphor, empirical description and philosophical imposition. It also makes impossible the project of definitively falsifying his revolutionary predictions. 46. BGE §39. The allusion is of course to Thomas Nagle’s famous essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review (October 1974). 47. EH “UM” §3. 48. BGE §6.

49. BGE §9. 50. BGE §211.

51. GS §58. 52. GS §57. 53. GS §57. 54. GM III:7. 55. GM II:12. 56. BGE §204. 57. GM III:18. 58. BGE §259. 59. Nietzsche’s activity here is thus a precursor to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s conceptualization of politics as hegemonic articulation, a politics that rejects any “distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices” (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Notes 229

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics [London: Verso, 1985], 107). It also resonates with what Judith Butler calls a politics of the performative, which consists in “misappropriating the force of speech from those prior contexts” we did not authorize, a resignification of the terms of political discourse itself that foregrounds “nonstate-centered forms of agency and resistance” (Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Poli- tics of the Performative [New York: Routledge, 1997], 40, 19). 60. “All our political theories and constitutions—and the ‘German Reich’ is by no means an exception—are consequences, necessary consequences, of decline; the unconscious effect of décadence has assumed mastery even over the ideals of some of the sciences” (TI “Skir- mishes” §37). 61. GM II:12. 62. GS §§349, 357; BGE §§14, 213, 253; TI “Skirmishes” §14. On the relationship between Nietzsche and Darwin, see the very different accounts given by Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and John Richard- son, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 63. GM II:12. 64. We might well note the importance of determining Nietzsche’s own method for understanding his philosophy, which I have argued is a performative rhetoric of will to power. This is perhaps another way Nietzsche shows us both the importance of method and the very method he is employing. 65. GS §349; BGE §13. 66. BGE §36. I discuss this aphorism at length in Chapter 1. 67. A §59. 68. GM III:24. 69. BGE §259. See chapter 1 for a discussion of this claim. 70. GM II:12. 71. TI “Socrates” §6; cf. GM III:25. 72. CW 1st postscript. 73. TI “Skirmishes” §51. 74. CW Second Postscript. 75. EH “CW” §2. 76. BGE §214. 77. EH “Books” §1. 78. GS P§1. 79. BGE §27. 80. TI “Maxims” §43. 81. A Preface; cf. EH “Books” §1; TI “Maxims” §15. 82. EH “BGE” §1. 83. As Puchner notes regarding The Communist Manifesto, “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” is “addressed to a recipient that does not yet fully exist . . . it needs to create,

performatively, the proletariat as a self-conscious agent” (Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 31). We might argue the same thing about the concluding sentence of the Antichrist(ian):

“Revaluation of all values!” Both Conway and Oliver offer similar analyses of Nietzsche’s debt to future disciples. Oliver relies on Derrida for her analysis, acknowledging that the “credit” of Nietzsche’s words will only be fully “redeemed” by his future readers (Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche, 157–58). Conway sees this strategy as an indication of Nietzsche’s exhaustion and decrepitude, his inability to solve the problem of décadence himself, claiming that Nietzsche’s resort to broader-based strategies of disciple cultivation reveals his awareness that his purely esotericist strategies have failed. Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game, chap. 5. 84. EH “BGE” §1. 85. EH P§1. 86. BGE §6. 230 Notes

87. Ibid. 88. EH “D” §2. 89. See, for example, Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 41, 182–83. 90. To be clear, this is by no means an exclusive or exhaustive interpretation of Ecce Homo, a dense and deeply complex book. Moreover, Nietzsche’s individual discussions of his texts in this book are enigmatic and do not simply (or even at all, in some cases) constitute a summing up of each work’s “main points.” Nevertheless, we certainly cannot discount the possibility that Nietzsche is ridiculing our obtuseness as readers through his use of exceedingly clear language, larger-than-life self-descriptions, and pedantic, step-by-step guidance through the story of his life. While it is clearly a particular story crafted to produce particular effects in his readers, this is not mutually exclusive with the possibility that Nietzsche in fact believes large parts of it and intends us to believe them as well, along with his grandiose self-descriptions that he no doubt does believe and does not primarily intend to be self- mocking. While Nietzsche’s self-assessments may be arrogant and occasionally mistaken in their details (for example, Nietzsche is certainly clever but not necessarily because of his dietetic recommendations), nevertheless, it is difficult to quarrel with many of his larger assertions, two of which are most important for my own project: his masterful writing and his role as the inaugurator of crisis in the modern West. 91. EH “Destiny” §1. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. EH “Destiny” §2. 95. EH “Destiny” §8. 96. EH P§1. 97. A §50. 98. A §62. Again, as Puchner observes regarding Marx, “the Manifesto speaks for the proletariat; it creates—makes in the sense of a performative poesis—the proletariat; and it theatrically enacts its future . . . the Manifesto projects itself forward, anticipating what will have happened; it is the space of unauthorized theatricality and performative poesis. In this sense, the Manifesto practices not only a form of political speech act but a form of futuristic speech act . . . Otherwise, a simple command would be enough: ‘Revolution now!’—and it never is.” Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 31–32. 99. EH “Books” §1; cf. GS P§1. 100. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche, the Body, and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Sara Kofman, Nietzsche and Meta- phor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 101. As Joanne Faulkner observes, “[Nietzsche] does not reduce the mind to body, in the manner of materialism. Rather, the metaphor equivocates between the mind and body. Accord- ing to Nietzsche, we can never depart from language in order to discover its pure bodily source. The scientific materialist assumes that the body, as an object of observation, is that

inert, unseeing body of the very mind-body dualism that [Nietzsche] seeks to overcome. Rather, Nietzsche attempts to reveal the full dimensions of corporeality through a use of

language that exploits the creativity of will to power instead of employing a descriptive language to reduce all thought to twitching flesh.” Joanne Faulkner, “The Body as Text in the Writings of Nietzsche and Freud,” Minerva 7 [2003], 115–16). 102. EH “Books” §1. 103. BGE §128. 104. For example, BGE §11; Nietzsche also appeals to differences in color to capture degrees of distinction, as in BGE §215 and GM P§7. Vision, of course, is the primary metaphor for the activity of theoriā, which implies the possibility of an impartial and complete van- tage point from which one might survey and comprehend the whole and is the model of philosophical understanding in Western thought. Nietzsche’s redeployment of vision as perspective, his claim that a multiplicity of perspectives constitutes “objectivity,” and his Notes 231

refusal of the unthinkable eye of theoriā “turned in no particular direction” (GM III:12) indicate a notable break with the primacy of vision and the visual metaphor for knowledge in Western philosophy. Indeed, for Nietzsche, the most important philosophical senses are smell and hearing, typically the dullest of the human senses. 105. A frequent metaphor for interpretive care in Nietzsche (see, for example, BGE §§22, 44, 186; EH “Wise” §1, “Clever” §5, “CW” §4; TI “Germans” §7; NCW “Where Wagner Belongs”). Poor readings or interpretations are thus, by implication, ham-fisted—clumsy, blunt, incapable of grasping detail, approaching the text or world as mere resistance, nothing more. 106. SE §7. 107. BGE §198. 108. BGE §296. 109. EH “BT” §1. 110. EH “D” §1. 111. GM P§1. 112. GM I:5. 113. TI P. 114. EH “Wise” §1. 115. EH “Clever” §10. 116. CW §5. 117. EH “Books” §4. 118. EH “Books” §3. 119. EH “Books” §4. 120. EH “Wise” §3. 121. “EH “Books” §3. 122. A §13. 123. EH “Destiny” §1.

Chapter 4

1. BGE §47. 2. BGE §208. 3. EH “Clever” §1. 4. TI “Socrates” §4. 5. GM I:12. 6. GS §59. 7. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche, the Body, and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 220. 8. EH Destiny §6; cf. Z II:6 “On the Rabble,” III:13 “The Convalescent” §2; GM III:14; A

§38; EH Wise §8. 9. EH “Wise” §7.

10. GM III:25. 11. This is Walter Kaufmann’s tack, who may be partially forgiven insofar as this interpretive strategy served the larger goal of gaining Nietzsche admission into the English-speaking world as a legitimate philosopher (a realm in which “explicit” misogyny at least nominally disqualifies one for membership); see Kaufmann’s footnotes to GS §§71, 72, 75; BGE §§232, 238, and his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Vintage, 1974), wherein his only word on the subject is to dismiss Nietzsche’s views on women as just as “philosophically irrelevant” as his ad hominem attacks on philosophers and other contemporaries (84). Of course, Nietzsche’s ad hominem attacks may in fact be essential to understanding his problem with other philosophers, especially if Nietzsche is to be taken seriously that all philosophy is autobiography(which renders any criticism of any 232 Notes

philosopher necessarily ad hominem attack). While Kaufmann’s view of the irrelevance of Nietzsche’s remarks on women is no longer influential in Nietzsche scholarship, which increasingly tends not to disregard these remarks, nevertheless, his approach remains a default standard of “objectivity” in philosophy classrooms and at professional gatherings where scholars are eager to discuss the “real” issues in Nietzsche without being distracted by side issues or “political” detours. 12. Meaning, therefore, that femininity or womanhood is a disease. On this issue, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s classic For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1978), 101–33. More on this in the section of this chapter entitled “Truth as Femme Fatale.” 13. This is in direct contrast to his use and discussion of the category “race,” which I tried to show in Chapter 2 is characterized much more by flexibility and antiessentialism than by rigid racialized categorizations or dogmatic insistence on the separation and ranking of different races. Nietzsche’s discussion of gender simply lacks this flexibility and is decidedly essentialist in its categorization of sexual difference. As we will see, however, Nietzsche’s discussion of gender does not lack its own racialized investments. 14. BGE §276. 15. Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 40. 16. With few exceptions (not all of them feminist), an unspoken consensus has emerged in Nietzsche scholarship since Kaufmann that Nietzsche’s views on women and gender are either to remain undiscussed or else be defended, excused, or complicated out of existence (those exceptions include Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching [New Haven: Yale Uni- versity Press, 2001]; Kelly Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Femi- nine” [New York: Routledge, 1995]; Frances Nesbitt Oppel, Nietzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005]; Ofelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984]). While this shift toward either disavowal or disinterest constitutes a perhaps necessary cor- rective to Kaufmann’s myopic dogmatism on the issue, the result has been that a central claim of Nietzsche’s philosophy has been either ignored or rationalized away for precisely the same reason that Kaufmann tried to hide it altogether: it is simply too difficult to take Nietzsche’s misogyny seriously as a central, animating principle of his thought. Hence the multitude of explanations, whether defensive or deferential, for Nietzsche’s obviously misogynist pronouncements regarding sex and gender. To take only a handful of examples from an already substantial literature: Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins find that Nietzsche’s reputation as a misogynist is an unfortunate rumor, the fame and inaccuracy of which is second only to the widespread belief that “Nietzsche was crazy” (Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, What Nietzsche Really Said [New York: Schocken Books, 2000]), while Higgins herself argues that The Gay Science “presents an entrée into gender theory

that is genuinely exciting,” claiming Nietzsche as a “pioneer in gender theory” (Kathleen Higgins, “Gender in The Gay Science,” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Kelly Oliver

and Marilyn Pearsall [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998]). John Richardson has attempted to recruit Nietzsche for the ranks of care feminism, arguing that his claim to be the first psychologist of the Eternal-Feminine means he saw himself as possessing traditionally feminine qualities like empathy and psychological insightfulness, the basis for his assertion that he “knows” women so well (John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 192). While analytic philosophers fall more often on the side of defending Nietzsche, continental interpreters have reliably found Nietzsche’s remarks about women less groundbreaking than evasive; thus, David Farrell Krell determines that Nietzsche’s full examination of the “convergence of sensuality and death in the figure of woman” is perpetually deferred (David Krell, Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986]), while Notes 233

Babette Babich declares that “throughout all of Nietzsche’s texts, women, truth, and even philosophers are concinnously double played, or, at the very least, double voiced,” imply- ing that whatever Nietzsche says about women he indirectly declares of himself, and vice versa (Babette Babich, “Nietzsche and the Condition of Postmodern Thought: Post-Nietz- schean Postmodernism,” in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb [Albany: SUNY Press, 1990], 261). Jacques Derrida has of course argued that “there is no such thing as a woman, as a truth in itself of woman in itself. That much, at least, Nietzsche has said” (Éperons/Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow [Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1978], 102–3) (an interpretive certainty Oliver rightly notes is inconsistent with Derrida’s overall claim that all of Nietzsche’s text may be “monstrously” indeterminate, of the same (in)essential character as his scribbled notebook remark, “I have forgotten my umbrella” [Womanizing Nietzsche]). Sara Kofman, following Derrida, reiterates that there is no woman-as-such in Nietzsche, stating that there are rather “types” of women, all of whom are historical constructs (Sara Kofman, “The Psychologist of the Eternal Feminine,” Yale French Studies 1995 [87]), and attempts to save Nietzsche from the charge of misogyny by staking a claim for the ultimate “ambivalence” of his “many het- erogeneous texts on woman” (Sara Kofman, “Baubô: Theological Perversion and Fetish- ism,” in Nietzsche’s New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, ed. Michael Gillespie and Tracy Strong [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988]). In this regard, Oppel’s recent book is a breath of fresh air, offering an innovative defense of Nietzsche’s views of both women and gender from an avowedly feminist perspective that forsakes neither interpretive care nor the necessary confrontation with Nietzsche’s most unsavory remarks (Oppel, Nietzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman). For my part, I find Nietz- sche’s remarks on women and gender to be neither ambiguous nor defensible, but nevertheless basic to his thought and his overall project—as basic as the body, health, and will to power. 17. Martha Nussbaum claims Nietzsche’s views regarding women and gender can be forgotten because Nietzsche—unlike, say, Rousseau—lacks a fully developed argument regarding women and gender, and that his scattered and fragmentary remarks amount to nothing more than “the silly posturings of an inexperienced vain adolescent male.” Martha Nuss- baum, “Is Nietzsche a Political Thinker?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 5, no. 1,[1997] 5. While the latter may be true, the former surely is not, and the latter may in fact be quite important if Nietzsche is engaged in a project of massive autobiographical projection (which he claims all philosophy necessarily is). 18. Leslie Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individual- ism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 89–90. In a similar vein, Alan Schrift has carefully pointed out the ways in which Nietzsche disavows the reality of oppositional values and refuses the stark and graceless divisions of binary opposites, seeing Nietzsche as a crucial precursor to Derridean deconstruction (Alan Schrift, Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism [New York: Routledge, 1995]). Oppel argues that Nietzsche’s

views on gender offer an opening into the deconstruction of gender binarism itself (Oppel, Nietzsche On Gender).

19. BGE §44. 20. EH “CW” §4. 21. CW Epilogue. 22. BGE §2. 23. TI “Socrates” §2. 24. Schrift, Nietzsche’s French Legacy. Schrift’s interpretation of Nietzsche as anticipating the movement of Derridean deconstruction is utterly persuasive. 25. I:16. 26. III:25. 27. EH “BT” §2. 28. EH “Destiny” §9. 234 Notes

29. GS §118. 30. GS §26. 31. GM I:10; emphasis added. This aside makes good sense, for there is no way in which any deed could be purely active, undetermined by any force or consideration other than itself. Such an acknowledgement suggests (that Nietzsche knows) the ultimate uselessness of “active” as a description of deeds or forms of life at all. Although Rüdiger Bittner has argued that Nietzsche fetishizes a notion of creativity that only God can be said to possess—that is, creation of the utterly and entirely new ex nihilo—it seems that here, at least, Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges its impossibility. Rüdiger Bittner, “Masters Without Substance,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 32. BGE §260; cf. GM I:16. 33. BGE §21. 34. As Lynne Tirrell notes, “Nietzsche is willing to explore this sort of possibility, this ‘dangerous “maybe”’ [i.e., that opposites are of the same essence] when it applies to the more standard philosophical oppositions such as good/evil, mind/body, truth/falsity, conscious/ unconscious thought, but when it comes to man/woman, Nietzsche has more difficulty towing his own philosophical line.” Lynne Tirrell, “Sexual Dualism and Women’s Self- Creation: On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading Nietzsche for Feminists,” in Nietzsche and the Feminine, ed. Peter Burgard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 162. Oppel claims that Tirrell overlooks the obviously “hyperbolic and illogical” character of Nietzsche’s misogynist remarks, which perform this deconstruction of binary opposition in their very rhetorical excess and philosophical error. Oppel, Nietzsche on Gender, 189. This resembles her overall claim throughout that the views of women Nietzsche typically espouses are so fallacious, hackneyed, and/or outrageous that they cannot seriously be meant as his actual views, but are instead meant to draw attention to the very illogical, clichéd, and overblown character of misogynist gender stereotypes current in Nietzsche’s day. Yet Oppel lacks an analysis of Nietzsche’s rhetorical philosophical strategies overall, which seem very much to include both hyperbole and fallacy as a matter of course, regardless of his subject matter. If this is so, then Nietzsche’s remarks on gender are neither unique in this regard nor automatically discountable because of it. Moreover, it seems too easy to assume that because a remark is either rhetorical or illogical, Nietzsche means it only in jest, a methodological approach that seems more accurately to reflect our historically located prejudices regarding the requirements of “true” philosophical argument and the appropriateness or credibility of certain political claims. 35. TI “Skirmishes” §45. 36. TI “Skirmishes” §37. 37. Z IV:13[3] “On the Higher Man.” 38. TI “Anti-Nature” §1; cf. A §45. Christianity is unlike Islam, then, which Nietzsche calls a religion of “men” (Männer) and “male instincts” (Männer-Instinkten) (A §§59–60)[0].

39. BGE §202, emphasis added.

40. GS §377. 41. BGE §209. Cf. GS §362, “Our faith that Europe will become more virile [Vermännlichung],” wherein Nietzsche praises Napoleon for allowing “man” to once again “become master over the businessman and the philistine—and perhaps even over ‘woman’ who has been pampered by Christianity and the enthusiastic spirit of the eighteenth century, and even more by ‘modern ideas.’” 42. GM I:13. 43. GM III:14. 44. GM III:19. 45. GM III:19; cf. D P§4. 46. TI “Skirmishes” §37. Notes 235

47. BGE §206. The first of these is the sexual function, the second is the procreative, albeit in Nietzsche’s specific understanding of procreation. More on the first later on; the second is discussed in the following chapter. 48. TI “Skirmishes” §3. 49. TI “Skirmishes” §6. 50. Nietzsche in fact claims that Sand and other nineteenth-century European women writers are “the best involuntary counterarguments against emancipation and feminine vainglory [or self-mastery; weibliche Selbstherrlichkeit]” (BGE §233). 51. GM III:21. 52. Kaufmann translates each of these words as “abortive,” which, given Nietzsche’s meaning, is not far off. For Nietzsche could be saying either that the poorly turned out woman is the one with no children—that her lack of maternity (whether through infertility or choice) is her “abortive”-ness—or, he could be saying that a childless woman is a failed woman, that she herself is incomplete, an abortion, a botched job. 53. See, for example, Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995). 54. GS §362. 55. See Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985). 56. That these bourgeois norms were inevitably formed through constant negotiation with the project of empire has been persuasively demonstrated by McClintock (Imperial Leather); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); and Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). The consideration of how Nietzsche in particular has specifically engaged “the East” as a foil and counterpart to Europe and European decay, however, remains unexplored thus far in either Nietzsche studies or post- colonial studies. 57. BGE §202. 58. Nietzsche tends to be unambiguous on this point, using Mann and Männer to specify the gendered nature of his claims; moreover, he is explicit that these men are European. The ambiguity of the German Menschen—which can be translated as either “men” or “human beings”—does not complicate this claim but rather exemplifies it. A feature of many languages, the interchangeability of the male designation with the gender-neutral or “inclu- sive” designation does not mean that women are included as human beings in a term like “humanity,” but rather that to be human is to be a man and vice versa (this slide between “man” and “human” is on display in a number of Nietzsche’s aphorisms; for example, in the discussion of “the higher men” [die höheren Menschen] in Zarathustra; cf. TI “Skirmishes”

§§37, 45). This coimplication of maleness and humanity is an identification from which women always constitute a deviation and a special problem, and who therefore require

special linguistic indicators like adjective endings, articles, and gender specific plurals to mark their presence. That women are invisible unless otherwise specified suggests that the unmarked is never really neutral but rather the masculine in universalist disguise. 59. BGE §293. 60. GS §377. Hysteria, which literally means “womb” and names a condition in which a mental disturbance manifests itself physically (that is, an illness that is “all in your head”), was the late nineteenth-century diagnosis of pathological femininity. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 104; Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor, 129; Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidem- ics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). A clear (if deeply ineffective) expression of upper-class white women’s resistance to patriarchal control and 236 Notes

subordination, it was alleged to have been caused by the woman’s own unruly womb, metonymously wandering around her body and refusing to stay in its “proper place.” Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good; Showalter, Hystories. 61. Z III:5(2) “On the Virtue that Makes Small.” 62. BGE §239. The metonymic slide between “man” and “human being” is clearly on display in this aphorism, with Nietzsche using Menschen in a context in which he clearly means the more specific Männer. 63. EH “Books” §5. 64. BGE §239. 65. Z I:18 “On Little Old and Young Women.” 66. Z III:12(23) “On Old and New Tablets.” 67. EH “Books” §5. 68. BGE §239. Notice in this passage that the word Kaufmann translates as “master” is the word Herr, which is automatically gendered male or masculine, having been modernized into the address “Mister.” 69. Ibid. 70. As indicated already (see Chapter 2), Nietzsche has a remarkably solipsistic view of Europe’s health and development—he does not see it as part of a larger international, hemispheric, or global context. Thus, it is no surprise that the kind of “feminism” he is most worried about is the kind that was taking root in Europe and which is now often referred to in the West as feminism’s “first wave,” characterized primarily by the movement for white/ European women’s suffrage, a movement that actively excluded indigenous, colonized, native, slave, and other women of color in its movement for political enfranchisement. See Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945; Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 71. BGE §239. 72. EH “Books” §5. 73. Ibid. 74. BGE §239. 75. As Elaine Showalter has shown, this reconfiguration of gender roles was widely considered to be a dramatic cultural crisis throughout both Europe and the United States. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking Press, 1990). As McClintock (The Education of Desire), Stoler (Imperial Leather), and Wildenthal (German Women for Empire) make clear, these concerns are inextricably related to the interests of European Empire. 76. BGE §210. 77. BGE §75. 78. GM III:14. 79. BGE §293.

80. Z II:3 “On the Pitying,” III:1 “The Wanderer,” III:12(29) “On Old and New Tablets”; BGE §§210, 212, 227; TI “The Hammer Speaks.”

81. BGE §147. 82. IV:5(2) “The Magician.” David Krell notes that the Magician is actually the first appearance of what is later to become Ariadne in “The Plaint of Ariadne,” one of Nietzsche’s Dionysian Dithyrambs. Krell, Postponements, 15. 83. BGE §238. 84. “Especially significant for the analogical science of human difference and similarity were the systematic study and measurement of the human skull. The importance of the skull to students of human difference lay in the fact that it housed the brain, differences in whose shape and size were presumed to correlate with equally presumed differences in intelligence and social behavior. It was measurements of the skull, brain weights, and brain convolutions that gave apparent precision to the analogies between anthropoid apes, lower Notes 237

races, women, criminal types, lower classes, and the child” (Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race and Gender,” 43). I am grateful to Franz Ulm for pointing out this usage of Flachköpfigkeit to me. 85. Z I:18 “On Little Old and Young Women.” 86. BGE §239. 87. GS §363. 88. GS 363. Similarly, Nietzsche proposes that we might index (racial?) differences among men based on their different views of “having and possessing” a woman (BGE §194). 89. “Has my definition of love been heard? It is the only one worthy of a philosopher. Love—in its means, war; at bottom, the deadly hatred of the sexes” (EH “Books” §5); cf. also CW §2: “But love as fatum, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel—and precisely this is a piece of nature. That love which is war in its means, and at bottom the deadly hatred of the sexes!—I know no case where the tragic joke that constitutes the essence of love is expressed so strictly, translated with equal terror into a formula, as in Don Jose’s last cry, which concludes the work: Yes, I have killed her, I—my adored Carmen! Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it raises a work of art above thousands.” 90. BGE §239. 91. EH “Books” §3. 92. BGE §144. 93. Presumably this would hold for “lower” races as well, whose attempt at education would constitute a kind of instinctual violation of nature. 94. Z I:18 “On Little Old and Young Women.” Nietzsche thus transposes the familiar conceptualization of the respective “inner” and “outer” of female and male genitalia, appropriating the “labyrinth” for men and calling them “deep,” while women are superficial, surface, or shallow. As we will see in the next chapter, this is part and parcel of Nietzsche’s appropriation of femininity for the higher capacities of male creators. 95. BGE §145; cf. GS §66. 96. GS §362. 97. It is thus no surprise that this aspect of Nietzsche’s views on women has received so much scholarly attention—it is his least concrete “commentary” on women, the one most divorced from the political realities of gender, on which Nietzsche’s philosophy is (by his own reckoning) necessarily based (therefore making it the most “philosophical”? It certainly thereby becomes the most fruitful resource for defenses of Nietzsche’s “ambivalence” regarding women). It is also undeniable that this idealist exercise is the sexiest part of Nietz- sche’s views on gender, not only because this version of “woman” is seductive but also because women’s bodies are here used as a means, the sexed-up vehicle by which Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and modern forms of life is communicated. As commentators, then,

it is worth interrogating our own fixation on (and reification of?) this most un-Nietzschean aspect of Nietzsche’s thought. What is our investment in truth being a woman? Is it pos-

sible that Nietzsche has no politics because of our own scholarly preference for and prioritization of the immaterial and the abstract? Do we, too, share modernity’s lascivious longing for “truth”? 98. That it has resonated so resoundingly with so many commentators perhaps reflects the shared anxieties, desires, and experiences of these readers, who remain, by and large, both a male and a masculinist bunch. In this sense, Derrida is right that “there is no truth as such of woman as such” in Nietzsche, but this is not because Nietzsche is an anti-essentialist. Rather, it is because Nietzsche is not really talking about “woman” at all but unintentionally explaining himself, an activity decidedly different from the post-structuralist “feminist” reading of Nietzsche as “becoming” woman or “writing with the hand of woman.” Derrida, Éperons/ Spurs; Krell, Postponements. 238 Notes

99. BGE §5. 100. Parts of this section of Chapter 4 have appeared in my article “Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple of Dionysus and Queer Fear of the Feminine,” differences: A Journal of Femi- nist Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (August 2008): 90–125. I am grateful to differences and Duke University Press for permission to reprint these passages. 101. As Kelly Oliver notes, most discussions of “woman” in Nietzsche do not account for the fact that he has two versions of her—the maternal and the feminine (Womanizing Nietz- sche). Oliver argues that these two versions of “woman” are mutually exclusive, that the maternal body is in some sense asexual (both because it lacks sexual desire and because it does not seem to participate in sexual activity). I follow Oliver in this analysis, although I disagree with her larger assertion that it is primarily the maternal that both fascinates and terrifies Nietzsche (144). Rather, it seems to me that Nietzsche is both excited and revolted by women in particular as sexual beings, the only way in which they escape his/men’s ultimate control. 102. Thus neither of Nietzsche’s versions of “woman” are sexually active, even if the Eternal- Feminine (unlike the maternal) is quite obviously sexualized. 103. TI “Maxims” §5. 104. Z I:18 “On Little Old and Young Women.” 105. BGE §25. 106. BGE P. 107. GS §67. 108. GS §60. 109. Here, Kaufmann fails to translate Nietzsche’s use of the word Frauenzimmer, an archaic but indisputably derogatory word for woman that has no good English equivalent but that I have here rendered “wench” (other equally archaic possibilities in English might include “dame” or “broad”; it remains to be seen if the increasingly colloquialized “bitch” might be a plausible twenty-first-century equivalent). 110. BGE P. 111. Z II:15 “On Immaculate Perception.” 112. BGE §220. 113. Z I:12 “On the Flies in the Marketplace.” 114. BGE P. 115. GS P§4. Nietzsche reprints this aphorism in the epilogue to Nietzsche Contra Wagner, his final work, adding after the first sentence, “Tout comprendre—c’est tout mépriser” [“To understand all is to despise all”]. Apparently, such allusions are so distasteful he cannot even pronounce them in his own tongue, speaking first Greek, then French. For more allusions to truth as the female genitalia, see GS §§59, 64, 339; BGE §§127, 204; TI “Maxims” §16. 116. GS P§4. 117. TI “Errors” §3.

118. GS P§4. 119. BGE §232.

120. Sara Kofman prefers to construe this masculine distaste as demure feminine modesty, defining décadence as the denial of perspective, the desire to “look through the keyhole” at truth in its entirety and “outrage feminine modesty” (Kofman, “Baubô”). To make this rather conventional “defense” of Nietzsche’s view of women, however, Kofman nevertheless must accept Nietzsche’s depiction of (and very use of the term) the “Eternal-Feminine,” and his association of the female body with “horror” (her word). In a more nuanced essay, Derrida argues that woman’s modesty veils (to men) the truth that she is untruth—“Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth” (Éperons/Spurs, 51). She thus knows what dogmatic male philosophers do not—that possession of the truth is castration, even death (59). This still less than flattering view of women is later presented by Derrida in terms of three different positions that he argues women inhabit in Nietzsche’s texts: (1) as the “debased” and Notes 239

“despised” figure of falsehood; (2) as the “censured, debased, and despised” figure of truth; and (3) as “an affirmative power,” “beyond the double negation of the first two” positions, as “a dissimulatress, an artist, a dionysiac” (97). Derrida stakes the credibility of this last option—the only position for women that is neither “despised” nor “debased”—entirely on a single aphorism from The Gay Science (§339) wherein Nietzsche discusses life, not truth, as a woman. This equation is tenuous not simply because life and truth are not necessarily interchangeable but also because Nietzsche subjectifies life as woman in only two places: this passage, and the specific literary and rhetorical context of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is thus difficult to form a generalization regarding woman’s position in Nietzsche’s texts as an affirmative figure on the basis of such minimal textual support. Moreover, we must further believe that Nietzsche makes room for the possibility of women “artists” and “dionysiacs,” skepticism of which is entirely justified by Nietzsche’s adamant insistence on the immu- tability of sexual difference, the naturalness of gender hierarchy, and the requirement that artists and creators be “hard.” It is not enough to say, with Derrida, that there may not be a sexual difference or a woman-as-such in Nietzsche in order for there to nevertheless be sexual differences or women-as-such for Nietzsche: plurality does not an antiessentialist (much less an antimisogynist) make. It is also unsatisfying, if not a bit disappointing, to encounter these playful rereadings of Nietzsche’s texts that allegedly issue in more “feminist” interpretations but that seem almost deliberately to discount significant portions of what he actually says about women (leading one to wonder if political commitments have forestalled a more thorough reading of the text). On this front, compare Derrida’s female “dionysiacs” with Kofman’s tortured equation of Baubô with Dionysus as a similarly veiled and sexually indeterminate deity of fecundity and eternal return (196–99). Whence these labored apologias for Nietzsche’s view of women? For more suspicion of deconstructionist feminist readings of Nietzsche, see Oliver’s Womanizing Nietzsche, and also her “Who is Nietzsche’s Woman?” in Modern Engendering: Critical Feminist Readings in Modern Western Philosophy, ed. Bat-Ami Bar On (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). 121. BGE §232. 122. As Showalter has demonstrated, female sexuality was often figured as veiled in the late nineteenth century, and male scrutiny of the veiled female form was a frequent metaphor for medical and scientific observation (Sexual Anarchy). Cf. Nietzsche: “Oh, this dreadful science!’ sigh [women’s] instinct and embarrassment; ‘it always gets to the bottom of things!’” (BGE §204). And: “Science offends the modesty of all real women. It makes them feel as if one wanted to peep under their skin—yet worse, under their dress and finery” (BGE §126). Nietzsche, of course, has nothing but contempt for such scientific “knowledge”; in this latter aphorism, we notice, even “worse” than peeping under woman’s skin (at the blood, organs, intestines, etc.) is seeing what is under her “dress and finery.” 123. GS P§4. Of course, it is entirely possible that such intercourse can never happen, if the truth of woman is that she is a lie. As Nietzsche says, when one is in love with a woman it becomes clear that “they ‘give themselves,’ even when they—give themselves” [Dass sie “sich

geben,” selbst noch, wenn sie—sich geben] (GS §361). 124. BGE §232.

125. Ibid. 126. Z I:7 “On Reading and Writing.” Nietzsche places great weight on this statement, affixing it as an epigraph to essay III of the Genealogy and declaring that essay to be an exposition of its meaning. As Oliver has pointed out, in his transposition of this quotation, Nietzsche omits the word “brave” [mut]; for her interpretation of this omission, see her Womanizing Nietzsche, 36–37. 127. TI “Germans” §6. 128. Ibid. 129. TI “Germans” §6. “Another counsel of prudence and self-defense is to react as rarely as possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend, as it were, one’s ‘freedom’ and initiative and to become a mere reagent. As a parable I choose 240 Notes

association with books [emphasis added]. Scholars who at bottom do little nowadays but thumb books—philologists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day—ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for themselves. When they don’t thumb, they don’t think. They respond to a stimulus (a thought they have read) whenever they think—in the end, they do nothing but react . . . The instinct of self-defense has become worn-out in them; otherwise they would resist books. The scholar—a décadent” (EH “Clever” §8). 130. As Oliver observes, Nietzsche “puts the warrior in the passive position; wisdom or woman is the lover and the warrior is the conquered beloved” (Womanizing Nietzsche, 22). In another passage, Zarathustra personifies happiness as a woman, saying, “Happiness runs after me. That is because I do not run after women. For happiness is a woman” (Z III:3; “On Involuntary Bliss”). 131. An enactment of this type of dance is enacted in Zarathustra’s pursuit of life in the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in “The Other Dancing Song” §2. I discuss this “courtship” at length in the next chapter. 132. GS §363. 133. GS §59. 134. TI “Maxims” §27. Zarathustra suggests this prospect may be worse than even the “dirt” on the surface of truth’s body: “It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters” (Z I:13 “On Chastity”). 135. GM III:7. 136. GM II:2. 137. GM III:8. 138. GM III:9. 139. GM III:7. 140. Ibid. 141. Nietzsche says that “as for that exception, Socrates—the malicious Socrates, it would seem, married ironically, just to demonstrate this proposition.” Yet Socrates may be the exception that proves Nietzsche’s bizarre rule that truly masculine sexual desire ought not be fulfilled, merely relished for the unconsummated longing it is. The only difference is object choice: Socrates is famous for his sexual abstinence with regard to the men he desired. This possibility, however, simply does not register for Nietzsche (despite his scholarly infatuation with Greek life and culture) because he is really just rather traditional in his conceptualization of sexuality in general. Despite the current fashionableness in asserting Nietzsche’s (conscious or repressed) homosexuality (as exemplified by Joachim Köhler’s tell-all biography Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Ronald Taylor [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002]), “intercourse” in Nietzsche’s texts is only ever figured as the married, heterosexual, traditionally gendered, reproductive kind, and Nietzsche neither expresses sexual desire for men in his published texts nor takes any position whatsoever as to whether such a desire should be gratified. For more on this subject, see my “Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple of Dionysus and Queer Fear of the Femi-

nine,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (August 2008): 90–125. 142. EH “Books” §5.

143. EH “Books” §5. See Note 52 for the interpretation of verunglückt. 144. Z II:18 “On Great Events.” 145. EH “Books” §5. 146. As Henry Staten notes, “What Nietzsche in The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil pictures as the absolute desire of the most appropriative man, his ultimate possessiveness, is also that which most threatens a man’s integrity, his self-possession” (Nietzsche’s Voice, 164). Even Krell notes the obvious confluence of women with both sex and death in Nietzsche’s texts, no matter how often Nietzsche may have “postponed” this encounter (Postponements). 147. GS §69. 148. CW §3. Notes 241

149. Z I:7 “On Reading and Writing.” 150. BGE §131. 151. BGE §239. 152. TI “Germans” §6. 153. GM III:1. 154. Z I:13 “On Chastity.” 155. GS §66. 156. GM III:14. 157. BGE §86. 158. GS §256. 159. BGE §34. 160. GM III:12. Of course, this is still an observation, rather than a copulation, leaving a questionable and defensive distance between man and truth. 161. As we have seen, however, the conservative or reactive Nietzsche is, in many senses, a Christian—“sexuality” is synonymous with traditionally gendered heterosexual reproductive intercourse, “morality” with chastity (and, as we will see in the next chapter, “life” with pregnancy and birth). Although Nietzsche insists that he is not advocating for the ascetic ideal (or at least the one that turns against life, anyway), I find he is not fully persuasive on this count. In modernity, what other kind of ideal could there possibly be? 162. GM III:20. 163. EH “Destiny” §7. 164. BGE §231. 165. Nietzsche’s misogynist remarks about women in Beyond Good and Evil have often been excused on the basis of this preview disclaimer that they are only his truths, a qualification that for many has seemed reason enough to disregard them. Yet aren’t all of Nietzsche’s remarks only his truths? Isn’t commentators’ observation of this fact a banality and Nietz- sche’s acknowledgement of it a tautology, given his claim that perspective is “the basic condition of all life” (BGE P)? Does acknowledgment of Nietzsche’s truths as his thereby disqualify them as truths? And if so, doesn’t this disqualify all of his claims, not simply the misogynist ones? 166. BGE §220. 167. GS §88

Chapter 5

1. That Nietzsche exemplifies—and even admits—his implication in the décadence he diagnoses has been persuasively demonstrated by Daniel W. Conway in his Nietzsche’s Danger- ous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

2. TI “Socrates” §11. The philosopher thus takes on the same role as the ascetic priest, who does not cure the underlying problem of ressentiment, but merely alters its direction, alle-

viating symptoms and preserving (not enhancing or overcoming) endangered life (GM III:15–17). For an excellent analysis of the similarities between Nietzsche and the ascetic priest he criticizes, see Daniel Conway’s “Comedians of the Ascetic Ideal: The Performance of Genealogy,” in The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal, ed. Daniel Conway and John E. Seery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). 3. GS 370; cf. NCW “We Antipodes.” 4. And, in fact, I think it is the solitary, masculine self-birth that is actually the most prominent and well-defined option of these three possibilities. Although the standard philosophical reading of Nietzsche would have us include both the Übermensch and eternal recurrence (along with will to power and sometimes amor fati) as his primary “positive” doctrines, as Arthur Danto observes in his insightful and largely traditional philosophical 242 Notes

accounting of Nietzsche’s thought, both of these “doctrines” are, at best, “puzzling,” and by and large merit very little attention in Nietzsche’s published writings. For example, “The Übermensch idea, for all its notoriety, hardly appears in Nietzsche except in Zarathustra, and it differs from most of the characteristic views he held which are found much reiterated throughout the sprawling corpus. Even in Zarathustra itself, no specific characterization is really furnished.” Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 196–97. As for “the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence,” it “hardly appears in any of the published works. Even when it does, it is announced and presented, but there is no attempt at argument or proof. There is in the Nachlass, though it is difficult to know how much weight to give it” (203–4). 5. BGE §257. 6. GM I:16; cf. A §59. 7. TI “Skirmishes” §49. 8. TI “Skirmishes” §51. 9. BGE §224. 10. CW §7. 11. TI “Skirmishes” §43. 12. TI “Skirmishes” §37. 13. Ibid. 14. Conway convincingly documents the unstoppable inertia of décadence Nietzsche narrates in his post-Zarathustra writings, especially in the 1888 works (Conway, Nietzsche’s Danger- ous Game, chap. 2). However, gender and its essential importance to Nietzsche’s understanding of décadence are not considered as the crucial explanatory causes of Nietzsche’s fatalism. 15. TI “Skirmishes” §43. 16. TI “Skirmishes” §41. 17. EH “HH” §3. 18. CW, 2nd postscript. 19. TI “Skirmishes” §41. 20. TI “Errors” §2. Although Foucault’s focus is on the historical emergence of sexuality and not décadence, his remarks on the ways in which the European obsession with décadence informed and produced sexuality seem apposite to Nietzsche, and add historical justification to my methodological choice of refusing to sever Nietzsche’s remarks about modernity and truth from his remarks about health, race and gender. In this sense, Nietzsche’s dark diagnoses and anxious prognoses regarding modernity’s impoverished and sexual(ized) weaknesses are exemplary of this particular historical discursive configuration of power- knowledge: “The medicine of perversions and the programs of eugenics were the two great innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the nineteenth century. Innovations that merged together quite well, for the theory of ‘degenerescence’ made it possible for them to perpetually refer back to one another; it explained how a heredity

that was burdened with various maladies (it made little difference whether these were

organic, functional, or psychical) ended by producing a sexual pervert . . . [i.e., the emasculated man of European modernity]; but it went on to explain how a sexual perversion resulted in the depletion of one’s line of descent—rickets in children, the sterility of future generations. The series composed of perversion-heredity-degenerescence formed the solid nucleus of the new technologies of sex. And let it not be imagined that this was nothing more than a medical theory which was scientifically lacking and improperly moralistic. Its application was widespread and its implantation went deep. Psychiatry, to be sure, but also jurisprudence, legal medicine, agencies of social control, the surveillance of dangerous or endangered children, all functioned for a long time on the basis of ‘degenerescence’ and the heredity-perversion system. An entire social practice, which took the exasperated but coherent form of a state-directed racism, furnished this technology of sex with a formidable Notes 243

power and far-reaching consequences.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 118–19. 21. A §38. 22. Z III:8(1) “On Apostates.” 23. TI “Skirmishes” §49. 24. TI “Ancients” §4. This is because, Nietzsche tells us, Goethe failed to understand the Greeks. The significance of this misunderstanding, which in fact constitutes Goethe’s failure to understand the Dionysian, the “psychology of the orgiastic” that is the only guaran- tor of a future “where even pain still has the effect of a stimulus” (TI “Ancients” §5) will become clear a bit further on. As we will see, Goethe fails to achieve wholeness, to return (a return that Nietzsche tells us is really an “ascent”) to nature, because he fails to achieve a sufficient Dionysian hardness, thereby rendering him incapable of self-birth. 25. GM II:24. 26. EH “Z” §8. 27. Z II:20 “On Redemption.” Revenge is certainly a kind of rebellion against natural or necessary constraint, but, for the most part, Nietzsche defines revenge or ressentiment as a protest against the limitations of the body—of weakness or sickness—and not that of time. For example: “The sick are man’s greatest danger; not the evil, not the “beasts of prey.” Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed—it is they, the weakest, who much undermine life among men, who call into question and poison most dangerously our trust in life, in man, in ourselves . . . It is on such soil, on swampy ground, that every weed, every poisonous plant grows, always so small, so hidden, so false, so saccharine. Here the worms of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and concealment; here the web of the most malicious of all conspiracies is being spun constantly—the conspiracy of the suffering against the well-constituted and victorious, here the aspect of the victorious is hated” (GM III:14). 28. As Conway notes, “the drama of Zarathustra is fueled largely by the central character’s failure to acknowledge the extent of his reliance on the recognition of others.” Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game, 170. 29. A §1. 30. As Graham Parkes observes, “all the characters in the book are aspects of Zarathustra’s personality.” Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 360). 31. IV:11 “The Welcome.” 32. Ibid. 33. I:22 “On the Gift-Giving Virtue.” 34. Z IV:13(6) “On the Higher Man.” 35. Z IV:17(1) “The Awakening.” 36. Z IV:18(3) “The Ass Festival.”

37. Z II:19 “The Soothsayer.” 38. Z IV:2 “The Cry of Distress.”

39. Z IV:17(1) “The Awakening.” 40. Z III:13(2) “The Convalescent.” 41. Z IV:17(1); “The Awakening.” 42. Z IV:18(1); “The Ass Festival.” 43. Z IV:18(3) “The Ass Festival.” 44. Ibid. 45. Z IV:19(1) “The Drunken Song.” 46. Z IV:19[1–2]; “The Drunken Song.” As Conway notes, “Zarathustra both assumes and denies the role of successor god.” Daniel W. Conway, “Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: The Deconstruction of Zarathustra,” in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 105. 244 Notes

47. As Robert Gooding-Williams has pointedly observed, although Thus Spoke Zarathustra ends by predicting the coming of his children, it is “marked by the absence of his children.” Robert Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 303). Gooding-Williams suggests that this absence may mean that “Zarathustra deceives himself if he expects that he or anyone else will one day realize a Dionysian interruption of European modernity.” By contrast, Conway claims that the fourth part of Zarathustra evidences a kind of critical perspective that Nietzsche could no longer muster by 1888. He argues that this section is actually a kind of satyr play, a self- parody added by Nietzsche before the onset of his incipient madness. Conway, “Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche.” 48. Z IV:20 “The Sign.” 49. Kathleen Higgins rightly draws attention to this in her Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Philadel- phia: Temple University Press, 1990). We might have assumed, based on the first and second parts, that Zarathustra’s work was to bring his redemptive message and teaching to humanity. In the face of the decisive failure of this project, Zarathustra turns to work on himself, facing his own nausea at existence and attempting an affirmation of life despite its preponderance of wretched failures. Now, if the conclusion of the third part is to be believed, this latter work at least is a success. And since Zarathustra clearly has no intention of returning once again to humanity, what exactly is left for Zarathustra to do? 50. GS §338. 51. Z III:6 “Upon the Mount of Olives.” 52. Z II:6 “On the Rabble.” 53. As Laurence Lampert has pointed out, the parts I-III of Zarathustra form a coherent whole, and there is a way in which the Fourth Part “violates the ending of part III.” Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 287. 54. Parts of this section of Chapter 5 have appeared in my article “Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple of Dionysus and Queer Fear of the Feminine,” differences: A Journal of Femi- nist Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (August 2008): 90–125. I am grateful to differences and Duke University Press for permission to republish these passages. 55. III: 15(1–2) “The Other Dancing Song.” 56. Kaufmann is poetically translating Schlangen here—serpents—as “serpents’ ire.” Now, it may be that Nietzsche wishes to associate life with the deviousness and cunning of a snake, and thus she may indeed be full of “serpents’ ire,” but it may also literally be the case that life comes with her own entourage of serpents, and therefore that this animal does not belong exclusively to Zarathustra. While this suggests that life (or “woman”) too can take possession of the phallus, there is ambivalence even in this image, resonating as it does with devious Eve who brings about the downfall of “man” through her collaboration with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In either case, life’s Schlangen are a warning, a sign of unnaturalness and danger.

57. The combination of these two images—the serpents and the hair—together conjures up

a Medusa-like figure who has the ability to render impotent any man who looks at her directly. While Freud famously reads Medusa’s head of serpentine hair as standing in for the threat of castration, others have speculated that Medusa’s fearfulness resonates with the male fear of the vagina dentata, an anxiety that intercourse will cause castration because of the penis’s submersion in the devouring, toothy vagina. Although Nietzsche does not explain his reticence regarding the female genitalia in precisely this way, the specifically masculine anxiety he suffers in relation to the female sex organs is certainly not unfamiliar, and Zarathustra clearly regards life with a kind of wariness in this passage that suggests his anxiety regarding both her and his desire for her, each of which feels threatening to him. Conversations with Floris Biskamp about both German translation and anxious masculinity have enhanced my understanding of this passage. Notes 245

58. Another rendering, not quite as pretty, but with just as much poetic license and a bit more faithfulness to tone, might be “bouncing bitch.” 59. This is Nietzsche’s version of life as a terrier—or perhaps a particularly nasty housecat. It recalls the other passages from Beyond Good and Evil already encountered in Chapter 4, wherein Nietzsche warns about woman being “essentially unpeaceful, like a cat, however well she may have trained herself to seem peacable” (BGE §131) or a “beast of prey, the tiger’s claw under the glove.” This “beautiful cat ‘woman’” elicits pity because she “appears to suffer more, to be more vulnerable, more in need of love,” yet also causes fear because she, like tragedy, “tears to pieces as it enchants” (BGE §239). 60. Z III:15(2) “The Other Dancing Song.” 61. “The magic and the most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in distans; but this requires first of all and above all—distance” (GS §60). 62. “Failures.—Those poor women always fail who in the presence of the man they love become restless and unsure of themselves and talk too much. For what seduces men most surely is a certain secretive and phlegmatic tenderness” (BGE §74). 63. I have little patience for interpretations that seek to make excuses for this most obviously misogynist entreaty of Nietzsche’s (a misogyny I find virtually indisputable despite the fact it not spoken in “his own” voice). Laurence Lampert goes farther than mere excuse mongering in this regard, actively sentimentalizing this unnerving “courtship” of life and obscuring its sinister resonances in Nietzsche’s Teaching. First, Lampert unjustifiably speculates that the secret Zarathustra whispers into life’s ear (after the “chase” and whip- brandishing, to be discussed in a moment) is that “she is of all things the sweetest” and that he has no aim or desire to alter her (238–39). Yet Lampert then admits that the whip “transforms” life, causing her to become “yielding and submissive” (236) and notes that in marrying her, Zarathustra gives life a new name—“Eternity” (“As is appropriate for a bride, Life receives a new name from her husband,” 240). Each of these moments belies Lampert’s own assertion that Zarathustra has no wish to change life, that he accepts her as she is. Moreover, Lampert fails to note the remarkable lack of offspring from this “marriage,” thus allowing him to describe his own interpretation of this scene as an “affirmative” reading. Far worse than these inconsistencies, however, is their foundation in Lampert’s acceptance and romanticization of Zarathustra’s right to own, appropriate, and dominate “life”—whether through a name or through violence—and Lampert’s disturbing failure to note the obvious fact that a whip-bearing lover who purports to father offspring with a “yielding and submissive” partner is not simply a suitor but also a potential rapist. Indeed, what exactly does Lampert’s “affirmative” reading actually affirm? As I hope I have made clear in the preceding chapter, denying Nietzsche’s misogyny need not be the prerequisite to taking him seriously as a philosopher; speaking for myself, however, I do wish taking endorsements of women’s violent subordination seriously were the prerequisite for professional philosophizing. On this count, Frances Oppel offers by far the most credible, insightful, and feminist interpretation of this scene—and of Zarathustra overall—that I

have thus far encountered in the literature on Nietzsche, an interpretation that is compel-

ling in part because she does take the possibility of rape seriously. In the end, Oppel does not see anything like the vicious subordination I read here, and I think there is no way definitively to settle which of our readings is the “correct” one, a much more delightful and quintessentially Nietzschean interpretive dilemma. Oppel, Nietzsche on Gender, chap. 5. 64. Z III:12(10). 65. Z III:12(13). 66. Z III:12(15). 67. Z III:12(25). 68. Z III:12(12) “On Old and New Tablets.” 69. Z III:12(29) “On Old and New Tablets.” 70. Z III:12(30) “On Old and New Tablets.” 246 Notes

71. Z III:3 “On Involuntary Bliss.” My conclusion here owes much to Kelly Oliver’s superb work on gender and maternality in Nietzsche, in particular, her Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Feminine” (New York: Routledge, 1995). 72. The significance of her hair reappears, too. No longer a fire but now a nest, its tangled foolishness (a kind of labyrinth?) poses an obstacle to his words, which they nevertheless penetrate easily, providing a singular (and admittedly oblique) moment of intimacy and consummation. 73. We recall that at the very end of the book, Zarathustra describes himself as being “ripened” [reif]. Perhaps his future self-birthing is his “work”? 74. EH “Z” §7. 75. GS §369. 76. Z IV:13(11) “On the Higher Man.” 77. GS P§3. 78. Z II:2 “Upon the Blessed Isles.” See also GS §72; Z II:1 “The Child with the Mirror,” II:5 “On the Virtuous,” II:15 “On Immaculate Perception”; BGE §206, §248; GM III:8. Not even Socrates, that other famous womb envier, attempted such an appropriation, content to declare himself a midwife. Kelly Oliver argues that Nietzsche’s appropriation of childbirth is by no means of the “imitation is the highest form of flattery” variety but is rather symptomatic of philosophy’s matricidal exclusion of the feminine. Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche; see also Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 79. BGE §206. 80. Eve Sedgwick sees Nietzsche’s proliferating metaphors of fecundity and procreation as offering an unconventional, “sexy thematics” of relations between men. Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 135–36). For commentary on Sedgwick’s claim, as well as an in-depth examination of Nietzsche’s declaration of his Dionysian discipleship, see my “Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple of Dionysus and Queer Fear of the Feminine.” 81. BGE §295. 82. BGE §232. 83. TI “Philosophy” §6. 84. EH “Z” §8. 85. GS §370. 86. TI “Ancients” §4. 87. EH “Books” §5. 88. EH “Destiny” §7. 89. GM III:8. As Zarathustra tries to explain, “Verily, some are chaste through and through: they are gentler of heart, fonder of laughter, and laugh more than you. They laugh at chastity too and ask, ‘What is chastity? Is chastity not folly? Yet this folly came to us, not we to it. We offered this guest hostel and heart: now it dwells with us—may it stay as long as it

will!’ Thus spoke Zarathustra” (I:13 “On Chastity”). 90. TI “Skirmishes” §8.

91. Z IV:13(11) “On the Higher Man.” 92. TI “Skirmishes” §10. 93. Ibid., emphasis added. 94. TI “Skirmishes” §9. 95. TI “Skirmishes” §10. 96. TI “Skirmishes” §7. 97. TI “Skirmishes” §10. 98. GS P§3. 99. TI “Ancients” §5. 100. TI “Ancients” §4. 101. Ibid. Notes 247

102. GS P§4. 103. Z I:18 “On Little Old and Young Women.” Recall that Nietzsche names Napoleon’s mother as among the most “powerful and influential women of the world” (BGE §239). 104. TI “Ancients” §5. 105. Z II:2 “Upon the Blessed Isles.” 106. III:16(1) “The Seven Seals.” 107. As Kelly Oliver has persuasively argued, Nietzsche’s (and Derrida’s) appropriation of the feminine does not thereby make them into women (much less feminists); it is rather a usurpation of the feminine by these men, who allow it to exist only when first possessed and incorporated by them. Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche. 108. BGE §295. 109. TI “Skirmishes” §19. 110. A premiere quality of the ass is that it always says yes—the only “speaking” the ass does in Zarathustra is a braying that sounds eerily like “yes” [Ja], and as the litany recites, “He [the ass/God] does not speak, except he always says Yes to the world he created: thus he praises his world. It is his cleverness that does not speak: thus he is rarely found to be wrong” and “What hidden wisdom it is that he has long ears and only says Yes and never No! Has he not created the world in his own image, namely, as stupid as possible?” (Z IV:17(2) “The Awakening”). One can only image the potential danger and mortal threat posed by the possibility of a woman who has similarly lost the ability to say no (cf. GS §43). 111. TI “Ancients” §4; see also TI “Ancients” §5. 112. EH “Z” §8. 113. This is how Irigaray reads the eternal recurrence—as an endless loop of solipsistic male orgasm. Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. 114. TI “Skirmishes” §44. 115. EH “Z” §5. 116. GM III:4. 117. Indeed, many hold that the eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s central and most important teaching—see, for example, Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000). Yet while Nietzsche declares eternal recurrence to be “the fundamental conception” of Zarathustra (EH “Z” §1), nowhere does he state in any published writing that eternal recurrence is his own most important idea or “teaching.” Moreover, as Conway has pointed out, “The eternal recurrence is so often hailed as shelter- ing his esoteric wisdom not because of any properties or elements deemed essential to this vague doctrine, but because nothing else in his corpus stands out as a likely candidate for a ‘final teaching’ befitting him” (Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game, 159). 118. EH “Z” §1.

119. GS §341. 120. GS §233.

121. Z III:2(2) “On the Vision and the Riddle.” 122. Z III:13(2) “The Convalescent.” 123. The possibility that this snake, too, is a phallic symbol cannot be overlooked, making Zara- thustra’s choking on the existence of modern man a very literal experience (I am indebted to Aliza Shapiro for this insight). Indeed, that the solution to this unbearable choking and nausea is to bite the snake’s head off indicates the necessity of castration or male bodily mutilation if modernity is to survive. This overcoming of negation is what Zarathustra witnesses in the shepherd’s transformation—he laughs at his own struggle and emasculation, his own crippling or lack of wholeness, affirming what otherwise threatened to kill him, displaying his superabundance and strength in the process. As we will see in the next chapter, this transformation and self-mockery is a task that Nietzsche himself could 248 Notes

only recommend, not undertake (we know already that affirmation was impossible for Zarathustra). 124. Z III:13(2) “The Convalescent.” 125. Z III:5 “On the Virtue That Makes Small.” 126. GM I:10. 127. Z Prologue §5. 128. Z II:14 “On the Land of Education.” 129. EH “BT” §3; cf. TI “Ancients” §4. 130. Similarly so in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche suggests that such a “world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is” is someone “who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo” (§56). If this is, in fact, a reference to the eternal recurrence (it is not named as such in the aphorism), it would require the repeated return of the same, of all that “was and is repeated into all eternity.” 131. Z III:2(2) “On the Vision and the Riddle.” 132. As already noted, these elements are themselves recurrences from Nietzsche’s initial formulation in section 341 of GS. The significance of these two particular aspects of the setting is not entirely clear, although Nietzsche’s other references to spiders (and in particular his explanation of the “tarantulas” in Z II:7, “On the Tarantulas”) typically associate them with ressentiment, as creatures who catch their prey through devious entrapment (either in a sticky web or by poisoning). Similarly, the moon is often figured in Zarathustra as the feminine counterpart to the masculine sun, and characterized as deceptive because of her femaleness (as, for example, in II:15, “On Immaculate Perception”). 133. In either case—whether eternal recurrence is the recurrence of the identical or is rather a broad characterization of the circular character of existence—I think it is clear that eternal recurrence is not and can in no way be a “selective” principle, whereby reactive forces (Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson [New York: the Athlone Press, 1983]), death itself (Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985]), those unable to bear the weight of recurrence (Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching), or the nihilistic aspects of one’s personality (Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration) do not recur. Despite the popularity of this thesis, the eternal recurrence is not, as Kelly Oliver claims, the return of “difference” (Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche, 106]) but rather of the “identical” or “same” (cf. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998]). 134. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 96. 135. EH “BT” §3. 136. EH “Z” §1. 137. D §206.

138. GM I:11, II:1. 139. GM III:17.

140. Z II:6 “On the Rabble.” 141. The obvious homophobia of this imagery suggests that, just like the appropriately masculine desire for women, Nietzsche did not think that sexual desire for men should be consummated, either—it is, like all sexual gratification, simply a vile and loathsome experience. 142. Z II:2 “Upon the Blessed Isles.” 143. BGE §56. 144. It is possible to read the incessant demand for the arrival of the Übermensch in Zarathustra as simply a desire for humanity to work toward the goal of self-overcoming. Alan Schrift, for example, offers a very nice exposition of the Übermensch as a process of overcoming and as such a term that is better translated as “becoming-Übermensch.” Alan Schrift, Notes 249

“Rethinking the Subject: Or, How One Becomes-Other Than What One Is,” in Nietz- sche’s Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); cf. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Yet while such an interpretation is wholly consistent with Nietzsche in his best, most nuanced, and healthiest moments, nevertheless, it is not clear that this was an interpretation he himself was fully able to recommend or endorse. Although Nietzsche himself warns against interpreting the Übermensch “as an ‘idealistic’ type of a higher kind of man, half ‘saint,’ half ‘genius’” (EH “Books” §1), he nevertheless also says in the same breath that the word functions as “the designation of a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to ‘modern’ men, to ‘good’ men, to Christians and other nihilists.” The problem with the former interpretations lies in the words in quotation marks—idealistic, saint, and genius—but not with the connotation of either “supreme achievement” or total opposition to modern men. As I hope is clear, this Übermensch can be the by-product of a genuinely virile artist’s act of self-birth just as much as some superheroic figure who arrives in the great noon to induce humanity’s own redemptive self-overcoming. 145. NCW, preface. 146. EH “Wise” §2. 147. EH “Clever” §6. 148. NCW, “Where I offer objections.” Reprinted from GS §368, where the litany reads “one is common people, audience, herd, female, pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbor, fellow man.” 149. CW Preface. 150. EH “BT” §4. 151. As Foucault notes, “This class [the bourgeoisie] must be seen rather as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based on it, a ‘class’ body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race: the autosexual- ization of its body, the incarnation of sex in its body, the endogamy of sex and the body” (Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. I: An Introduction, 124). As Moira Gatens has argued, any analogue between the body politic and the individual citizen/body in modern political thought is always the particular white/European male body in “human” disguise, serving as the norm for who counts as human (Moria Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality [New York: Routledge, 1996]). Gatens concludes that “the metaphor of the body politic is ultimately a psychotic fascination with an impossible desire for a unified, holistic, or single body which is interchangeable with every other body—“a ‘dream of men’” (25–26). Such a psychotic fascination is clearly the outcome (and perhaps also the cause) of Nietzsche’s “solutions” to the castration of modern masculinity. 152. Conway’s original and persuasive proof of this claim in Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game has obviously influenced my own reading of Nietzsche immeasurably. 153. BGE §47; GS §321; cf. GS §276; Z III:1 “The Wanderer.”

154. Z III:7 “On Passing By”; cf. Z I:17 “On the Way of the Creator.”

Chapter 6

1. GM III:4. 2. EH “Books” §1. 3. GM III:5. 4. Ibid. 5. A §11. 6. GS §338. 7. EH “Wise” §8. 8. EH “Clever” §4. 250 Notes

9. EH “Z” §8. 10. EH “Clever” §4. 11. EH “Z” §6. 12. I also credited Daniel W. Conway for this insight, which he compellingly demonstrates in Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 13. I therefore do not accept the argument of Maudemarie Clark and others who claim that Nietzsche comes to believe in the existence of a kind of empirical reality that can be accessed and revealed through science in the 1888 writings (Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). Rather, I see this as a rhetorical strategy to induce a revolution that does not conclude with a mere privileging of the body, but also seeks ultimately to undermine that very privileging. 14. EH “Wise” §7. 15. Gayle Rubin names Pauline Christianity in particular as this foundation, noting that current forms of sexual moralism (in medicine, psychiatry, education, politics, etc.) need no longer be explicitly linked with Christian doctrine to nevertheless be indebted to it as their unspoken origin and legitimation. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (Boston: Routledge, 1984). Richard Dyer argues that despite the decline of Christianity as organized religion, “its ways of thinking and feeling are none the less still constitutive of both European culture and consciousness and the colonies and ex- colonies (notably the USA) that it has spawned. Many of the fundamentals of all levels of Western culture—the forms of parenting, especially motherhood, and sex, the value of suffering, guilt, the shock of post-Enlightenment materialism—come to us from Christi- anity, whether or not we know the Bible story or recognise the specific items of Christian iconography.” Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 15. Dyer also usefully points out the ways in which the iconography and meaning of whiteness are Christian, thus making sense of Nietzsche’s racialized anxieties about gender decay as described in Chapter 4. 16. The only other possible culprit Nietzsche suggests is Plato, calling Christianity “Platonism for the people” (BGE preface). He is inconsistent on this count, however, equivocating on the relative value and influence of Plato in a way he is absolute with regard to Christian- ity. On this, Nietzsche is conclusive—Christianity is the very religion of meaning, having “interpreted a whole mysterious machinery of salvation into suffering” (GM II:7). 17. As Judith Butler has argued, “to problematize the matter of bodies may entail a loss of epistemological certainty, but loss of certainty is not the same thing as political nihilism. On the contrary, such a loss may well indicate a significant and promising shift in political thinking.” Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 30). 18. See, for example, Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game; Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the

Other, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985); and Kelly Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Feminine”

(New York: Routledge, 1995). 19. This is the difficulty of offering a feminist reading of Nietzsche while still remaining a scholar of Nietzsche, and goes some way toward accounting for the frustrating pattern in Nietzsche scholarship (discussed in Chapter 4, note 16) that preserves Nietzsche’s status as a great philosopher at the expense of either ignoring or excusing his misogyny. There is the additional difficulty that feminist analysis is still not considered sufficiently “objective,” an unspoken presumption that works to confine feminist readings of philosophy either to rationalizations of misogyny or explorations of the multivalent and endlessly shifting permutations of “woman” in Nietzsche’s texts. However, simply focusing on gender (much less “woman”) does not make a reading feminist. Indeed, I suspect that the fear of castration lurks here as well, reproduced under the normative guise of “good scholarship,” and Notes 251

rebounding back onto feminist analysis by policing the boundaries of what constitutes its appropriate focus and critical content. It is no surprise, then, that feminist critics might be on their guard. Thus, in her essay in Feminist Interpretations of Nietzsche, Kathleen Hig- gins encourages feminists not to lose their senses of humor when encountering Nietzsche’s “jokes” about women, insisting without a hint of irony that in doing so she is not reha- bilitating that very stereotype. Kathleen Higgins, “Gender in The Gay Science,” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (University Park: Pennsylva- nia State University Press, 1998), 150. Similarly, Maudemarie Clark argues in her essay in Feminist Interpretations that the ultimate issue for Nietzsche is “whether women really want enlightenment about themselves, whether we can will it.” Maudemarie Clark, “Nietzsche’s Misogyny,” in Feminist Interpretations of Nietzsche, ed. Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pears- all (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 197. Thus accepting a misogynist premise in Nietzsche, Clark concludes by arguing that women should take Nietzsche at his word on this count: “feminists interested in this possibility could do worse than to look both seriously and with a sense of humor at Nietzsche’s attempt to turn resentment into laughter in Beyond Good and Evil VII.” But as Kelly Oliver rightfully points out, “Nietzsche’s woman reader must laugh or she will feel wounded by his texts.” Kelly Oli- ver, Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Feminine” (New York: Routledge, 1995), 24, emphasis added. So, too, if she is to be considered a “good scholar”? 20. GS P§3. 21. GS §339. 22. EH “Wise” §1. 23. EH “Wise” §2. 24. EH “Wise” §3. 25. What Nietzsche says of moralists holds equally well here for interpreters: “But even when the moralist addresses himself only to the single human being and says to him, ‘You ought to be such and such!’ he does not cease to make himself ridiculous. The single human being is a piece of fatum from the front and from the rear, one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet to come and to be. To say to him, ‘Change yourself!’ is to demand that everything be changed, even retroactively. And indeed there have been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, that is, virtuous—they wanted him remade in their own image, as a prig: to that end, they negated the world! No small madness! No modest kind of immodesty!” (TI “Anti-Nature” §6). 26. This has not prevented commentators from attempting to construct “doctrines” from the Nachlass regarding will to power, eternal recurrence, and the like. Yet Nietzsche simply does not offer complete sets of philosophical concepts that could be marshaled into something like a “doctrine,” much less an ideology. Any reconstruction of Nietzsche’s thought of this sort (such as I myself presented in Chapter 1) is always at best partial and incomplete. Turning to the Nachlass thus becomes an interpretive necessity for those determined to make Nietzsche into a traditional philosopher who engages in traditional sorts of philo-

sophical activities. As I have already argued, this is a methodological approach that remains insensitive to the form of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which, in its purposeful and rhetorical

style, is decidedly not a good example of conventional philosophizing. 27. BGE §25. 28. BGE §4. 29. GS §373. 30. HH §515. 31. Some commentators, recognizing the constitutive contradictions at the center of Nietz- sche’s thought, have proposed reading Nietzsche “against” himself. Lawrence Hatab, for example, seeks to do this in order to produce a democratic politics that need not privilege equality as its centerpiece, a project more invested in staking out a theory of democracy and how Nietzsche can serve it, than in Nietzsche interpretation per se. Lawrence Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open 252 Notes

Court Books, 1995). Conway deploys this strategy in a slightly different manner in Nietz- sche’s Dangerous Game, brilliantly separating out the diagnostic Nietzsche from the décadent Nietzsche in order to deploy former against the latter, thereby revealing the unwitting déca- dent confession contained within Nietzsche’s philosophy. See, especially, chapters 1 and 5; cf. also Daniel W. Conway, “Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: The Deconstruction of Zara- thustra,” in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). My own reading of Nietzsche’s contradictions obviously owes much to Conway’s methodological innovations. However, Conway reads Nietzsche’s devolution of his task to others as a “dangerous game” that he ultimately fails to play successfully, arguing that Nietzsche’s “signature teachings, which he at one time hoped might catalyze a rebirth of tragic culture in Europe, have become bargaining chips in a pathetic scheme to broker the discipleship of his decrepit readers” (170). While nothing disproves Conway’s masterful interpretation here, he is more persuaded than I by Nietzsche’s account of his own and his readers’ deficiencies. In my view, the overwrought grandiosity of Nietzsche’s proclamations of décadence are themselves meaningful as symptoms: Nietzsche’s diagnoses of modernity’s horror are better read as projections of his own “dis-ease,” in particular when it comes to sexuality and gender, the place where he becomes most essentialist and thus most in need of redemption. But this contradictory display of sickness gives us due reason to reject Nietzsche’s redemptive immoderacy, thereby only committing us only more firmly to his revolutionary endeavor. Thus, I agree that Nietz- sche seeks readers who will take up his project in unexpected ways, producing “a hybrid production, a bastard son born to him and his readers.” Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game, 155. But I think Nietzsche’s self-revelation successfully authorizes that production, a project that is even more illegitimate than Conway may have believed insofar as it is no longer necessarily a “son.” 32. This is certainly the case regarding the readings offered in this book; indeed, this is the very experience and situation of Nietzsche interpretation. But by inducing this experience, I think Nietzsche is encouraging us to realize just how aptly this characterizes the situation of all interpretation—of ourselves, others, events, cultures, politics—of the “world” in sum. Every will to truth ultimately undoes itself, revealing its “certainty” as the metaphysical need it actually serves. 33. Z II:12 “On Self-Overcoming.” 34. GM II:24. 35. TI “Philosophy” §1. 36. GM I:14. 37. A §46. 38. GS §344. 39. EH “Destiny” §1. 40. A §52. 41. EH “Destiny” §1.

42. GM III:19. Nietzsche says such dishonesty characterizes “all philosophers,” whose dishonesty at least is unwitting. They “are not honest enough in their work, although they all

make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self- development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic . . . while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration’—most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract—that they defend with reason they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize ‘truths’—and very far from having the courage of the conscience that admits this, precisely this, to itself” (BGE §5). 43. GM III:26. 44. CW P. 45. EH “Destiny” §1. Notes 253

46. EH “Clever” §10. 47. GM III:23. In the Preface to The Birth of Tragedy (§5), Nietzsche explicitly links Christian morality with “unconditional” morality, using them synonymously, although it may be more accurate to say that, for Nietzsche, Christianity epitomizes unconditional morality and sets the standard for all other moralities. 48. GS §110. 49. BGE §4. 50. BGE §192. 51. BT P§5. 52. EH P§3. 53. A §55. 54. GM I:10. 55. Ibid. 56. Or, as Nietzsche memorably puts it in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Christianity is “Platonism for the people.” 57. GS §372. Nietzsche, by contrast, claims to write in “blood and aphorisms” (Z I:7 “On Reading and Writing”). 58. TI “Philosophy” §1. 59. BGE §10. 60. GS §343. 61. GS §120. 62. BGE §4. 63. Z II:12 “On Self-Overcoming.” 64. Ibid. 65. TI “Skirmishes” §39. 66. See, for example, Luc Ferry and Alain Renault’s Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Fredrick Appel, Nietzsche Contra Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/E: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); and, to some extent, Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). In Alan Schrift’s commentary on reactionary readers’ attempts to reify Nietzsche as an incontestable racist (in a volume that seems intended as a clear response to Why We Are Not Nietzscheans), Schrift suggests that the best response to such an interpretation is not necessarily step-by-step refutation, but rather effective demonstration of the kinds of progressive political projects that are possible through engagement with a dangerous thinker like Nietzsche. Alan Schrift, “Nietzsche’s Contest: Nietzsche and the Culture Wars,” in Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics, ed. Alan Schrift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). This section is one attempt to make good on Schrift’s suggestion.

67. That this revaluation may ultimately lead to the overcoming of Nietzsche’s own philosophy, insofar as it can be seen, in its entirety, as one gigantic critique of emasculation, is but

one more argument in favor such a revaluation—an argument Nietzsche himself recommends, and a movement of overcoming he himself suggests inheres in the very definition of life (GM III:27). 68. EH “D” §2. 69. Note that Nietzsche here relies on a variation of the same word [schneiden, to cut], that he used to refer to the dilution and emasculation [verschneiden, verschnitten] of modern masculinity. Here, the explicitly privative character of the word is foregrounded via the aus—affixed to its beginning, demarcating specifically a cutting out. 70. TI “Skirmishes” §41. 71. TI “Anti-Nature” §2. 72. A §7. 254 Notes

73. EH “Clever” §3. 74. TI “Anti-Nature” §1. 75. TI “Anti-Nature” §2. 76. As noted already, some kind of “moderation” or uncommitted “intercourse” seems much more in keeping with the sexual metaphorics of Nietzsche’s perspectivist view of truth, truth-seekers, and the activity of truth-seeking than either abstinence or monogamy (much less marriage). But because Nietzsche cannot reside contentedly at this in-between place, he resorts to an all-or-nothing principle of sexual moralism, wherein all is nothing and thus abstinence is the only option if philosopher-man is to survive his terrifying encounter with woman-truth. As Nietzsche himself concludes in this aphorism, “the most poisonous things against the senses have been said not by the impotent, nor by ascetics, but by the impossible ascetics, by those who really were in dire need of being ascetics” (TI “Anti- Nature” §2). 77. Insofar as some feminists argue that this hierarchy is constitutive of sexuality as well— namely, that domination and subordination are essential to sexual desire and definitive of sexual activity—then an overthrow of gender hierarchy would necessarily also demand a revaluation of sexuality and sexual desire. As Catharine MacKinnon notes, “maybe feminists are considered castrating because equality is not sexy.” Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 145. 78. In Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Rout- ledge, 1990). Itself an important liberatory tool, the sex/gender distinction differentiates between sex, considered to consist of biological aspects of the body like genitals, hormones, chromosomes, gonads, body fat and hair distribution, et cetera, and gender, the social roles, qualities, and characteristics contained in and entailed by the words “man” and “woman.” Gayle Rubin is often credited with its innovation; see her “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975); cf. Donna Haraway, “‘Gender’ for a Marxist Dictionary: the Sexual Politics of a Word,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinven- tion of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 79. Butler, Gender Trouble, 6. 80. Butler, Gender Trouble, 6–7. 81. Butler, Gender Trouble, 7. 82. Frances Nesbitt Oppel acknowledges Nietzsche’s role in inaugurating precisely such radical interrogation of sex and gender; see her Nietzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005). On the issue of subjectivity in particular, Butler acknowledges Nietzsche’s importance, citing his authorizing insistence in the Genealogy that there is no being behind doing, no doer behind the deed (Gender Trouble, 25). Cf. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 45–46. 83. GM III:28.

84. TI “Errors” §8.

85. GS §318. 86. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 86–88. 87. As Socrates notes in the Republic, the possibility of women guardians has to be admitted insofar as men and women “differ in this alone, that the female bears and the male mounts.” Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 454e. 88. Eve Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 89. EH “Clever” §10; cf. GS §276; EH “CW” §4. 90. EH “Clever” §10. 91. As we will see in the next section, eternal recurrence may thus be Nietzsche’s only explicit formulation of a politics of no future. 92. TI “Socrates” §2. Notes 255

93. As transsexual woman Julia Serano notes in a revolutionary tone, “so it’s no wonder that most people assume that I must be mentally ill, because in this culture, wanting to be a woman is something most people find literally unimaginable. And when I do have SRS [sex reassignment surgery], my surgically constructed genitals will no doubt be seen by some to be an abomination or a blasphemy. Because my cunt will be the ultimate question mark, asking, How powerful can the penis really be if a sane and smart person like me decides she can do without it? And if the world supposedly revolves around the penis, then my SRS will knock it off its axis. And phallic symbols will come crashing down like nothing more than a house of cards.” Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), 231. 94. TI “Anti-Nature” §5. 95. TI “Skirmishes” §19. 96. BGE §41. 97. GM III:12. 98. Cf. the Nietzschean resonances in Donna Haraway’s understanding of “situated knowledges” as embodied perspectives in her critique of scientific objectivity. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Rout- ledge, 1991). Nietzsche, of course, claims this observer’s neutrality for himself, attributing his objectivity to his depth of experience with both sickness and health: “This dual descent, as it were, both from the highest and the lowest run on the ladder of life, at the same time a décadent and a beginning—this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from all partiality in relation to the total problem of life, that perhaps distinguishes me” (EH “Wise” §1). 99. See, for example, the volumes Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990); Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, and Agency, ed. Deborah Orr et al. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); and Radically Speaking, ed. Diane Bell and Renate Klein (North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex, 1996), especially sections 2 and 3. See also Jan Rehmann, “Deconstructing Postmodernist Neo-Nietzscheanism,” Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination 2, no. 1 (2007); Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000); Suzanne Danuta Wal- ters, “From Here to Queer: Radical Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Lesbian Menace (Or, Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Fag?),” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21, no. 4 (Summer 1996): 830–69. 100. Raising this critique to the level of righteous and resentful indictment, Martha Nussbaum accuses Butler of a “hip quietism” that colludes with “evil.” Martha Nussbaum, “The Pro- fessor of Parody,” The New Republic, February 22, 1999, 220(8):37–45. 101. Gender Public Advocacy Coalition: About GenderPAC, http://www.gpac.org/about, emphasis added (accessed 5/19/08). 102. Pauline Park, “GenderPAC, the Transgender Rights Movement, and the Perils of a Post-

Identity Politics Paradigm,” The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 4 (2003):747.

103. For a persuasive defense of this view, see Alan Schrift, Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1995). 104. Cf. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006). 105. Wendy Brown claims this explicitly with regard to feminism, when she writes that “post- structuralist insights were the final blow to the project of transforming, emancipating, or eliminating gender in a revolutionary mode.” Wendy Brown, “Feminism Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics,” in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 111, emphasis in original. Foucault’s methodological proscriptions regarding the study of configurations of power-knowledge have also been taken to discount the possibility of revolutionary breaks or transformations; as he himself notes, “there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all 256 Notes

rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case.” Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95–96. 106. Brown, “Feminism Unbound,” 114. 107. Brown illustrates the tendency of identity politics to cling to injury as the primary source of meaning and comfort (and thereby rendering it a slave morality consumed by ressentiment). Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 108. Brown, “Feminism Unbound,” 113–14, emphasis added. Note that my analysis differs from Brown’s insofar as I do not read Marx as offering a Communist future in order to redeem a corrupt past. I do not see Marx solely as an Enlightenment thinker who invests too much hope in the redemptive capacities of reason and human power to rectify the past’s mistakes. Rather, I think Marx follows through on the elimination of origins already begun in Rousseau’s Second Discourse, where the historicization of a state of nature which Rousseau himself admits is likely irretrievable, if not an outright fiction, makes possible the elimination of the need for origins altogether. Indeed, Marx insists that he will not begin in any fictitious “primordial state” but rather with the empirical premises of productive activity. Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. and trans. Martin Milligan (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 68. Thus, in rendering history the history of class struggle, Marx renders the origin of that struggle irrelevant, if not ideological. Yet Marx may retain a revolutionary or utopic future promise. My aim in this part of the chapter is to make headway in the project of thinking revolution not simply without a past, as Marx does, but without a future as well. 109. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke Univer- sity Press, 2004). For a denser and complementary (if less irreverent and polemical) theorization of queer futurelessness, see Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 110. Which Tavia Nyong’o notes may be a kind of nostalgia on Edelman’s part for a political moment already past, a moment when “homosexuality” did indeed pose an ominous and spectral threat to the social order. Tavia Nyong’o, “Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)? Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s,” Radical History Review 100 (Winter 2008), 115. 111. Elsewhere, Edelman concedes this implication with regard to time itself, arguing that the constant imperative to turn time into history “makes all subjects queer,” insofar as “we aren’t, in fact, subjects of history constrained by the death-in-life of futurism and its illusion of productivity . . . The universality proclaimed by queerness lies in identifying the subject with just this repetitive performance of a death drive, with what’s, quite literally, unbecoming.” Lee Edelman, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discus- sion,” GLQ 13, no. 2–3 (2007), 181. 112. Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bull-Daggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press,

2005). 113. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2007). 114. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. 115. Janet Jakobsen, “Perverse Justice: AIDS, Economics, and the ‘War on Terror,’” paper presented at Harvard University, March 13, 2008. 116. Puar calls this simultaneity of enfranchisement of certain homosexuals within the fold of American citizenship and the abjection of perversely sexualized terrorist bodies of Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, and anyone else who “looks like a terrorist” homonationalism, a configuration of ascendant whiteness wherein certain gay and lesbian subjects are interpellated as the proper citizens of a sexually exceptional U.S. polity while perverse others are queered as the monster terrorist fag, thereby rendering perversity always already an Orientalized attribute of non-Western cultures while allowing the United States to remain an exemplar Notes 257

of sexual openness and toleration. Puar rightly notes that homonationalism upholds the implicit separation of homosexuality and race/racialization, such that the homonational subject is presumptively white while the immigrant or terrorist other is presumptively heterosexual. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. 117. Although Puar rejects Edelman’s futureless politics, it is because she overlooks the broad sweep of the term queer within his project, an understandable oversight given his pen- chant for reducing queerness to white gayness. But what she says, in supposed criticism of him, is in fact harmonious with his construal of queerness and reproductive futurity, if we understand “queer” as the refusal to sacrifice the present for the sake of the future. Insist- ing that reproduction not be privileged in defining queerness, Puar argues we must rather “understand how the biopolitics of regenerative capacity already demarcate racialized and sexualized statistical population aggregates as those in decay, destined for no future, based not upon whether they can or cannot reproduce children but on what capacities they can and cannot regenerate and what kinds of assemblages they compel, repel, spur, deflate” (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 211). But whether reproductive or not, the issue is ultimately futurity itself, in whose ideological name biopower regulates populations according to various and shifting criteria like “health, vitality, capacity, fertility, ‘market virility,’ and so on” (211). 118. Edelman, No Future, 22. 119. Indeed, we must not confuse Edelman’s project with something like a politics of subversive redeployment of signifiers, as advocated by the Judith Butler of Gender Trouble, or the perpetual refiguration of identity’s constitutive outside, as suggested by the Butler of Excit- able Speech. This is nothing but humanist futurism in a new guise. As Edelman notes, “No doubt, as Butler helps us to see, the norms of the social order do, in fact, change through catachresis, and those who once were persecuted as figures of ‘moralized sexual horror’ may trade their chill and silent tombs for a place on the public stage. But that redistribution of social roles doesn’t stop the cultural production of figures . . . to bear the burden of embodying such a ‘moralized sexual horror.” Edelman, No Future, 107. 120. Edelman, No Future, 29. 121. Ibid., 31. 122. Ibid., 17. 123. Ibid. 124. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 23–24. 125. Ibid., 24. I do not deny the unfortunate tendency of queer resistance to exert its own set of normativizing tactics through its valorization of transgression, in both academic and activist contexts. However, I do wish to contest the necessity of this development as the essential logic of queerness, and to recommend against abandoning queerness in the face of this often-disappointing development.

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Bibliography

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Index

affirmation and negation, 139–45, contradiction, 4 146–51, 153, 156–57, 172, 196–98, and Nietzsche scholarship, 1–2, 4, 204 175–80 amor fati, 196–98 and Nietzsche’s revolutionary project, Ariadne, 157–59 172–75 Aristotle, 211–12n14 and Nietzsche’s thought, 1, 4–5, 7–8, Asceticism. See philosophy 172–85, 177–80 autobiography. See philosophy and philosophy, 2, 8 and queerness, 205–6 binary oppositions and bodies, 95–100, 130, 188 décadence, 41–65 and health, 95–103, 125, 130–35 and Christianity, 51–53, 56–62 male appropriation of femininity, 148–53 and consciousness, 59–62 Nietzsche and Wagner, 168–69 and corruption, 46–47 and revolution, 100 as diagnosis of modernity, 7, 8, 41–42, body, 11–16, 19 48, 52, 58–59, 94–95, 130–35 body politic, 12–13, 19, 207n7 as illness, 41–42, 47–48, 62–64, and health, 18 95–103, 121–23, 130–34 Nietzsche’s own, 86–88, 113 in literature, 131 and rhetoric, 84–86 and lying, 62 and the soul, 12–13, 14–16, 18 and metaphysics/philosophy, 97–98 and truth, 175, 179, 185–87 and/as mixing of the sexes, 92, 130–31 unity or multiplicity of, 11–13, 14 and morality, 59–62, 124–26, 127–28 See also health; will to power Nietzsche’s fixation on, 217n4, Brown, W., 3–4, 201–2, 206, 207n8, 218n30, 219n34 208n12, 255–56n105 Nietzsche’s own, 127–29, 159–60, Butler, J., 192–93, 195, 199, 208n10, 169–70, 176, 177–78, 241n1 208n19, 229n59, 250n17, See also Christianity; modernity; 254n78, 257n119 morality; sickness

Deleuze, G., 14 Christianity Dionysus, 152–59 and/as decadence, 51–53, 56–62, 101 as lying, 62 Edelman, L., 202–6, 256n111, 257n119 and/as modernity, 43–44, 174 epistemology and/as nihilism, 194 perspectivism, 125, 198, 241n166 and race, 51–53, 56–58 self-referential paradox, 1–2, 4, 186–87 and redemption, 135, 199 equality and the soul, 15–16 as defining characteristic of modernity, See also decadence; equality; modernity; 57–58, 103 race; redemption and race, 48, 56–58 270 Index equality (continued) life. See body; health; will to power as threat to life, 57–58, 76, 101–3, Locke, J., 211n4 216–17n110 and women, 92–99, 106–8 masculinity Eternal Recurrence, 159–67, 196, and chastity/celibacy, 119–23, 154, 247n117, 248n130, 248n133 240n142, 248n141, 254n76 as ressentiment, 129, 163–67 and effeminacy/emasculation, 7, 92, and Zarathustra, 161–67 93–95, 100–106, 108–9, 112, 113, 120–21, 123–26, 127–28, Faulkner J., 212n23, 230n101 130, 188–91 femininity. See feminism; woman/women and/as health, 93, 100–106, 108–9 feminism, 92–95, 191–98, 202–6, 236n70 and male genitals, 109–11, 112, 118, Nietzsche as intellectual forerunner 147–51, 165–67, 196, 244–45, of, 191–206, 250–51n19 247–48n123 and ressentiment, 92 and male self-procreation, 129–30, and women’s equality, 92–93, 107–8, 148–53, 156–59 116–17 as mastery, 109–12, 117–21, 123–24 Nietzsche’s investment in, 123–26, See also decadence; equality; woman/ 127–28, 187–90 women See also feminism; sex/uality; woman/ Foucault, M., 6, 208n19, 209nn23–27, women 199, 223n113, 223n115 modernity Freud, S., 15, 191, 224n126 and castration, 190 as Christian, 43–44, 174 gender. See feminism; masculinity; sex/ as cultural designation, 41 uality; woman/women as decadent, 41–42, 100–103 Goethe, J. W., 131, 134, 243n24 as effeminate, 100–106, 108–9 as heterosexual, 174 health, 16–19, 20, 33–34, 95 as masculine, 174 and binary oppositions, 95–103 Nietzsche’s relationship with, 127–35 and domination, 16, 35–36 as nihilistic, 41–42 and masculinity, 93, 100–106, and postmodernity, 199–206 117–18 and/as Wagner, 168–69 Nietzsche’s, 86–88, 124 and weakness, 43–48, 132–35 and order, 16–19 See also Christianity; décadence; and Socrates,16–17 masculinity

and struggle, 33–37 morality

and values/valuation, 185–87 and Christianity, 60, 253n47 See also life; wholeness; will to power and decadence, 60 Heidegger, M., 24 and guilt, 60–62 heterosexuality. See sexuality and lying, 62, 182 Hobbes, T., 12, 21–23 Nietzsche’s own, 124–26, 127–28, homosexuality. See sexuality 181, 254n76 revaluation of values, 181, 185–87 Jesus, 136 slave morality, 61 Index 271

Zarathustra’s laws and decadence, 44–46, 49 See also Christianity; décadence and essentialism, 53–55 and European women, 94, 104–8 Napoleon, 103, 131 race-mixing, 44–46, 48–58 and sex/sexuality, 94, 103–4 olfaction, 91 See also Christianity; décadence; race; as diagnostic faculty, 62–65 sex/uality; woman/women redemption philosophy and Christianity, 7, 199 and asceticism, 118–20, 154, 190–91 as escapist, 134 and/as autobiography, 75, 81–82 Nietzsche’s longing for, 7, 54, 128 as creation/imposition of truth, Nietzsche’s pessimism regarding, 67–70, 73–76, 77–79 52–53, 129–35, 139 and dogmatism, 114–15 and race, 54 and Nietzsche’s methodology, 76–79 and the übermensch, 128–29, and politics, 67–70, 75–76, 78–79 134–35, 249–50n144 and rhetoric/polemics, 73–76 in Zarathustra, 128–30, 134 See also politics; revolution See also Zarathustra Plato revolution, 67–88 and health, 16 and Christianity, 71–73, 199–200 Platonist interpretations of Nietzsche, as doctoring/therapeutic treatment, 17–19 64–65, 68–69, 78–79 and the Republic, 11–15, 19 and gender and sex/uality, 188–206 perspectivism. See epistemology and Marx/Marxism, 67, 174, 199, politics 227n29, 229n83, 230n98, 256n108 conservative, 3, 46–47, 188, 203 Nietzsche’s demurral from, 7–8, Nietzsche’s status as a political 123–26, 127–28, 132–35, 167–70, thinker, 3, 67, 208n15, 209n22, 172–75, 187–88 210n28, 226nn19–21 Nietzsche’s longing for, 72–73, and philosophy, 5, 67–70, 75–76, 83–84, 128–35 78–79, 209–10n27 Nietzschean revolution, 172–75, and political theory, 2, 5–6 185–98, 199–206, 227n23, progressive, 2–3 228n45, 250n13 totalitarian/fascist, 57–58, 222n93 obstacles to, 79–80 See also philosophy; revolution and post-structuralism/postmodern- post-structuralism. See politics ism, 199–206, 255–56n105

Puar, J., 202–3, 205, 256–57nn116–17 and philosophy, 67–70, 71–76

purity. See wholeness and rhetoric, 67–70, 80–81, 82–88, 229n83 queer politics, 191–98, 202 and utopia, 199–206 Nietzsche as intellectual progenitor of, and will to power, 128 174–75, 191–98 See also philosophy; politics rhetoric race and the body, 84–86 and Christianity, 51–53, 56–58 Nietzsche’s views on, 87 272 Index rhetoric (continued) See also binary oppositions; health and philosophy, 73–76 will to power, 19–37, 216n93 and revolution, 67–70, 80–81, and domination, 18, 35–36 82–88, 225n7, 229n83, 230n98 Hobbes’s concept of, 21–23, See also body; philosophy; politics; 213–14n58 revolution and inequality, 35–37, 76 Rousseau, J.-J., 12, 67, 199–200, 211n7 and the kitchen sink hypothesis, 24–31, 214n62, 214n63 Schopenhauer, A., 215n68 and/as life, 16, 31–37, 76, 78–79 sex/uality Nietzsche’s concept of, 19–21, and modernity, 100–103 22–23, 24–37, 187, 213–14n58 Nietzsche’s attitude toward, 92–95, and rhetoric, 68 100–106, 108–9, 112, 113, See also décadence; equality; health; 117–21, 123–26, 127–29, 154, life; rhetoric; sickness 187–91, 194, 232n13 woman/women Nietzsche’s own, 124–26 and/as death or disease,121–23 and race, 94 and defemininization, 103–4, 105–8, and truth, 124 112, 116, 122–23 See also Dionysus; feminism; mascu- and female genitals, 92, 115–16, linity; woman/women 244–45n57 sickness, 19, 33–34, 62–64, 72–73, 95, importance of in Nietzsche’s thought, 101–3, 131, 213n41 6–7, 232–33n16 as absence of will to power, 32–33 as life, 145–51, 176–77, 238–39n121 and/as woman/women, 121–23 Nietzsche as woman, 169–70 skull Nietzsche’s desire for, 146–48, 238n102 shortness of, 110, 236–37n85 Nietzsche’s fear of, 95, 101, 103–4, See also race; woman/women 111, 120–23, 146–48, 238n102 Social Darwinism, 49–54, 220n53 Nietzsche’s knowledge of, 119 Socrates, 11–15, 211n7, 240n142, 254n87 and procreation, 106–8, 123, 235n52 and good order, 16 and/as truth, 7, 113–16, 123–24, Spinoza, B., 20, 32 237n98 See also décadence; feminism; mascu- truth linity; sex/uality; truth Nietzsche’s investment in, 125 as target of Nietzsche’s revolutionary Zarathustra project, 174, 180–87 and the cripples, 136–39 will to, 123, 178, 180–81 as embodiment of Nietzsche’s own

See also body; philosophy; woman/ internal struggle, 143–45 women and eternal recurrence, 161–67 and the “higher men,” 139–45 übermensch. See redemption as lawgiver, 148–50 and his marriage to life, 145–48, 245n63 Wagner, R., 167–69 and modern man, 162 and/as modernity, 168–69 Nietzsche’s relationship to, 171–72 See also binary oppositions and the problem of affirmation and wholeness, 8, 130–35, 155 negation, 139–45, 146–51, 153 castration as compatible with, 189–91 and revenge, 136–37