An Unstable Heritage: The Influence of Nietzsche on Freud and Foucault Nietzsches influence presents a curious trouble in analyzing Freud

and Foucault. They were certifiably familiar, if not deeply influenced by his writings. Foucault declared himself an outright Nietzschean in his final interview1, and remains faithful to the genealogical method in many of his works, Discipline & Punish among them. Rank assures us that Freud read Nietzsche later in life, beginning at least some time before 19262, and thus prior to writing Civilization and its Discontents. Yet, there are profound differences between the two of them. For example, Foucault situates Freuds thoughts on sexuality historically in the History of Sexuality, much of which may be taken as a rather scathing criticism of psychoanalysis. However, I do not intend to address all the differences between Foucault and Freud here. This paper will instead evaluate the similarities and dissimilarities between Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault on the topic of subjectivity. Specifically, I maintain that Freud focuses on the interplay between the drives that govern human behavior and the social forces these drives encounter, whereas Foucault places such psychological claims within the greater framework of power. Freud and Foucault agree, most fundamentally, that the complex exchange of existential forces can produce, reproduce and transform various sorts of human subjects, but disagree on the terms according to which these interactions occur. This paper will also discuss Nietzsches own views about the transformation of individuals, as well as the way Freud and Foucault make reference to his work. I will split this paper into five main sections. First I will survey Nietzsches understanding of subjectivity and the methods by which subjects are cultivated in his seminal work, On the Genealogy of Morality. Rather than outright surveying Freud and Foucaults

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Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture p. 251 David L. Smith, Freuds Philosophy of the Unconscious 1999 p. 19

works (namely, the two previously mentioned), the rest of this essay will discuss broad points of comparison, making references to Nietzsche as necessary. The next section will address repression. The third section concerns the varying methods of internalization described by the named authors. Finally, I will make some concluding remarks about my findings on these complex authorial relationships. [I] Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Morality traces the development of (his) contemporary moral thought back to a shift from master morality to slave morality. We are due some definitions first. By master morality, Nietzsche means a system wherein it is the rules who determine the concept good, and it is the exalted, proud states of the soul that are perceived as conferring distinction and ordering rank (Beyond Good and Evil 260). In contrast, the slave looks at the virtues of the powerful with resentment: he has scepticism and mistrust, he has refinement of mistrust toward every good that is honored there (Beyond Good and Evil 260). Of course, as system of slave morality acts on this skepticism, punishing displays of strength. It follows that, through the course of history, the latter has displaced the former: the morality of the common people has triumphed (GM I.9). This particular Nietzschean text interrogates the genealogy of this transition. The transition begins by constituting the notion of a static subject. By static subject, I mean a stable, unchanging perpetrator of actions, who wills himself to act in particular ways. I emphasize here that this subject is divorced from his actions, characterized as the causal entity behind bodily forces. This move is necessary in order to separate strength form the manifestations of strength (I.13). Accordingly, moralists discuss actions as though there were an indifferent substratum behind the strong person which had the freedom to manifest strength or

not (I.13). Such a distinction establishes a particular understanding of causality that anticipates the development of culpability or blameworthiness. Moreover, and complicit with the formation of culpability, the notion of a subject is entrenched by instituting memory. Nietzsche acknowledges the propensity of humans to forget, to shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and battle with which our underworld of serviceable organs work with and against each other (II.1). This is key to making subjects who can become reliable, regular, necessary, even in his own self-image, so that he, as someone making a promise is, is answerable for his own future (II.1).This sense of predictability refers to what I previously called a stable subject, subjects are reliable. Insofar as one can promise, act predictably, the relationship of creditor and debtor can be generalized into an ethics of guilt. Nietzsche argues that the relationship of buyer and seller, creditor and debtor is the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is (II.8). The feelings of guilt and of personal obligation originate there (II.8). These contractural relationships become immutable laws which establish the lawbreaker as a debtor (II.9). Thus societies come to treat every offence as being something that can be paid off, so that, at least to a certain degree, the wrongdoer is isolated from his deed (II.10). Though guilt emerges as a purely juridical concept, a moral substitute for the legal word debt, a process of internalization transposes it into bad conscience. Nietzsche presents this concept almost immediately: All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards this is what I call the internalization of man: with it there now evolves in man what will later be called his soul (II.16). Such a thing could only be accomplished through an art of shaping individuals, for which Nietzsche hypothesizes a violent modus operandis:

the shaping of a population, which had up til now been unrestrained and shapeless, into a fixed form, as happened at the beginning with an act of violence, could only be concluded with acts of violence, - that consequently the oldest state emerged as a terrible tyranny, as a repressive and ruthless machinery, and continued working until the raw material of people and semi-animals had been finally not just kneaded and made compliant, but shaped. (II.17) This shaping was carried out by some pack of blond beasts of prey, with a conqueror and master race (II.17). Make no mistake, Nietzsche does not intend to criticize the actions of the blond beasts, but rather remarks that this violent outburst created the conditions whereby the internalization of freedom grew into a sense of resentiment. Thus the instinct of freedom, forcibly made latent, becomes able only to discharge and unleash itself... against itself (II.17), and so becomes bad conscience as a result of the internalization and improper diffusion of freedom. Most importantly, Nietzsche does not see this process as something that proceeded spontaneously, but rather was the result of a conscious effort on the part of strategic individuals. Nietzsche lays a grand portion of the blame on the ascetic priest, whose methods include the total dampening of the awareness of life and herd organization (III.19). Nietzsche calls the sickness they inflict the greatest danger for the healthy (III.14). The power to shape others belongs to those who exercise the will to power, but this disease threatens to engender a will to nothingness (III.14), debilitating the infected by inducing a crippling nihilism. [II] One can situate the Nietzschean view of forgetfulness with great proximity to Freuds notion of repression. As previously stated, humans are born with a propensity to shut certain things out of the world, to forget about their past. While the conscious mind may mistake this for a passive affair, Nietzsche assures us that forgetfulness is rather an active ability to suppress,

positive in the strongest sense of the word (II.1). Forgetfulness serves a profoundly important role; since the multiplicity of sensory experiences aer vast, and the world replete with suffering, forgetfulness enables us to cope. Freuds theory of repression takes a similar form, although he places it in a more psychologically complex system. According to Freud, the ego emerges as a response to external stimuli; the child psyche means to separate sources of pleasure from sources of displeasure. The ego is thus the result of a displacement, according to the tendency to separate from the ego everything that can become a source of unpleasure, to throw it outside and to create a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a strange and threatening outside (Freud 14). Inevitably, this process errs: some of the things that one is unwilling to give up, because they give pleasure, are nevertheless not ego but object; and some sufferings that one seeks to expel turn out to be inseparable from the ego in virtue of their internal origin (14). What follows, for Freud, is the differentiation of the reality principle from the pleasure principle. However, what is important for this particular essay is the marked similarity of forgetfulness and repression. They serve roles that contribute to the health of the individual, and both consist in the exteriorization of particular experiences. In particular processes of subjection, both Freud and Nietzsche recognizes the inversion of the repressive apparatus. It is important to note that the two cite different processes in the genealogy of this inversion; whereas Nietzsche blames the common man who institutionalizes bad conscience, Freud associates this reversal with the superego and the internalization of aggression. Nietzsche, as previously demonstrated, links the internalization of the instinct for freedom, the will to power, as the source of resentiment. This resentiment then coalesces in the form of bad conscience and guilt-morality. This process depends on a system

of memory to be in place, creating predictable, culpable subjects. Freud points out how the repression of instincts, under conditions imposed by social ordering, causes libidinal elements [to be] turned into symptoms, and... aggressive components into a sense of guilt (103). Only insofar as aggressiveness has been internalized can it become manifest in the form of guilt. Thus, for both authors, there is an inversion of repression whereby otherwise healthy persons feel guilty In contrast, Foucault offers no psychological explanation of anything like repression, and in fact strays away from any comprehensive theory of guilt. Foucault has no interest in psychological theories because, for him, the human sciences must always remain historically situated. The bulk of the project begun in Folie et draison means to examine the contingency of psychology and its offspring upon a certain sort of moralization. Nonetheless, Foucault discusses a different sort of repression, of a non-psychological and all the more political variety, which parallels the function of the repression (and subsequent inversion) proposed by Freud and Nietzsche. Repression for Nietzsche and Freud means an externalization of suffering, though that brand of repression is something entirely personal. Foucault, rather, discusses repression as a strategy of power typically found on a macro-social scale. Take, for example, Foucaults discussion of leprosy. In this era, the leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate (Foucault 198). Social repression pushed outside (I mean this figuratively and literally) that which threatened social solidarity. Then comes the inversion of this procedure; repressive means fade away in favor of techniques of normalization. As previously demonstrated, for Nietzsche and Freud, this inversion meant transforming repression from a means of exteriorization into an interiorization of guilt. For Foucault, interiorization is better described as a doctrine of inclusiveness. He cites the plague as an example: This

enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded... all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism (197). Over and against systems of separation, segmentation means each individual has an appropriate place: for the marks that once indicated status, privilege and affiliation were increasingly replaced... by a whole range of degrees of normality... playing a part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank (184).Thus, despite their differences, Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault share in common the analysis and emphasis on the importance of this process of inversion from exteriorization to interiorization within the greater goal of transforming and subjectifying people. [III] As previously discussed, Nietzsche takes internalization to be the consequence of the inability to express an instinct. Nietzsche speaks of the internalization if the instinct of freedom, which more loosely for him means the will to power. This will to power guides everything that occurs in the organic world, and actively seeks to overpower and dominate others (GM II.12). Similarly, Freud describes mans inherent aggressiveness men are not gentle creatures... they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness (Freud 68). The social requirements of community-involvement force the inhibition of this aggressive tendency, which becomes introjected, internalized... directed towards his own ego (84). Thus emerges conscience: there it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over the rest of the ego as super-ego... ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals (84). Indeed, in a direct allusion to Nietzsche, Freud notes that the state of guilt ought not be called bad conscience,

for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love (85). Regardless of these semantics, it remains clear that Freud and Nietzsche both acknowledge the role of internalization in social control. For Nietzsche, the instinct of freedom became internalized because individuals were shaped by blond beasts. For Freud, the instinct of aggressiveness turned inward when it was inhibited by social limits. There are nonetheless differences; Nietzsche attributes the feeling of guilt to the prerogative to punish. Freud, in contrast, identifies more personal causes: such a motive... can best be designated as fear of loss of love. if he loses the love of another person upon whom he is dependant, he also ceases to be protected from a variety of dangers... at the beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with loss of love (85). In steps the idea of badness, which compels people to behave in particular ways. Thus, for the two named authors, internalization plays a tremendously important role in the political transfiguration of human subjects. Foucault, as usual, disparages himself of any particular psychological explanations. Indeed, Discipline & Punish lacks any account of how norms are enforceable in the abstract sense; such a discussion can be found in Madness and Civilization, but this is beyond the scope of this essay. What we do find in Discipline & Punish is a description of disciplinary power, which constitutes its own particular field of power, and introduces a particular variety of norm. Disciplinary power can be described as a set of techniques which dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns into an aptitude, a capacity, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection (138). The word discipline thus designates a specific strategy of power which utilizes a specific set of techniques to produce a body with both an an increased aptitude and an increased domination (138). These techniques function

by a conditioning of the subject. Much like one might train an animal to perform tasks or tricks, humans may be trained. The norm is backed by the threat of punishment, but this punishment takes on a radically different character than the corporal sorts: It brings five distinct operations into play: it refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed. It differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected or as an optimum towards which one must move. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of the value of abilities, the level, the nature of individuals. It introduces, through this value-giving measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal... The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes... (Foucault 183) Thus Foucaults theory of normalization stands in for the process of internalization described by Nietzsche and Freud, but there are two serious parallels between Foucault and Freud of which we ought to take stock: the transparency and omnipresence of internalization/normalization. Contrary to the power described in Nietzsche, Foucault observes a shift toward invisibility with the emergence of disciplinary power: Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility... it is the fact of being constantly see, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection (187). Is this not precisely the mechanism of the superego in Freud? The superego is most menacing for its omniscience: the fear of being found out comes to an end... since nothing can be hidden from the superego, not even thoughts (Freud 86). However, the very fact of Freuds writing Civilization and Its Discontents, investigating the genealogy of the superego, questioning the psychical developments of the feeling of guilt, implies the transparency of this process; the origins of our

superego, and even the conditions of the guilt it presses upon us, are unknown. This transparency is reflected in Nietzsches notion of customs; communities follow the law as a custom whose origin is eventually forgotten, and the law is relegated to the status of holiness (Human I.92). This omnipresence takes on a special significance for both authors as well. Freud has already emphasized that nothing can hide from the superego; what this means is the selfregulation of the moral code. Originally, writes Freud, renunciation of the instinct was the result of fear of an external authority (Freud 89). With the superego, however, instinctual renunciation is not enough, for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the superego (89). Similarly, Foucault describes an omnipresent gaze; the outcome of a panoptic society. Disciplinary power exhibits a gaze, one which can: induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers (Foucault 201). The most significant movement here is from the external to the internal in Foucault. The norm becomes something internalized by inmates, they become the bearers of power over and against themselves. Thus Foucault steps remarkably close to Freud. [IV] For all their differences we have discovered a remarkable congruity among the works of Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault. Make no mistake, they utilize different methodologies (Nietzsches aphorism vs Foucaults historical narrative), give different explanations (Freudian psychology), and often come to radically different conclusions. Nonetheless, their human subject is a malleable one, who can be manipulated by means of a complex network of social forces.