Nietzsche

**Nietzsche**
**1AC/1NC
1AC – Generic
Haven't you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran
around the marketplace crying incessantly, 'I'm looking for [the Motherland]! l'm
looking for [the Fatherland]!' Since many of those who did not believe in [nationalism]
were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. […] The madman
jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. 'Where is [our Nation]?' he
cried; 'I'll tel1 you! We have killed [it] - you and I! We are all [its] murderers. But how
did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth
from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all
suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all
directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren't we straying as though through an
infinite nothing? Isn't empty space breathing at us? Hasn't it got colder? Isn't night
and more night coming again and again? Don't lanterns have to be lit in the morning?
Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying [the
Nation]? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? – [Nations], too,
decompose! [The Nation] is dead! [The Nation] remains dead! And we have killed[it]!
How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderersl The holiest and the
mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who
will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What
festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the
magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become
[states] merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed - and whoever
is horn after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history
up to now!' Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too
were silent and looked at him disconcertedly. Finally he threw his lantern on the
ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. 'I come too early', he then said; 'my
time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet
reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder need time; the light of the stars needs
time; deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard. This
deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars - and yet they have done it
themselves!' It is still recounted how on the same day the madman forced his way into
several churches and there started singing his requiem [grant the Nation eternal rest].
Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but, 'What
then are [politics] now if not the tombs and sepulchers of [the Nation]?' 1
1
Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science 125. Trans. Josefine Nauckoff. Cambridge 2001.
The State is a metaphysical fiction that secures our belief in it via fear-mongering and
ideological manipulation. Think here of how the 24-hour news cycle demands more
and more of your time, how thoughts of the Donald seep further and further into the
depths of your consciousness, of how you are told from childhood about how horrible
life would be were it not for the State! Such arguments are far from objective and
neutral. They blunt the edge of critical thinking by demanding that we focus so closely
on the narrow present that we don’t think about how Nations themselves are recent
inventions, how they rise and fall out of existence. To resist the difference, mobility,
and dynamism that characterizes (social) life, the State homogenizes the population
and insists upon a particular model of thought. State-thinking deploys the logic of the
border, of the interior/exterior distinction, of metaphysical states as opposed to
nomadism, hybridity, and flux. The logic of the border does not just operate in
discourses about citizenship and immigration; it operates in spaces like this one where
we are all-too-eager to determine who’s in and who’s out; it operates in how we view
ourselves, what’s within and outside our power. To make politics possible once again
we must reject the metaphysics of the State in favor of nomadism.
SHAPIRO 16 (Gary, Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the

University of Richmond, Nietzsche’s Earth, University of Chicago Press, 46-56)
Nietzsche’s “vivisection of his own time in thought,” as he conducted it during the early Bismarck era’s
culture wars, intensively interrogates the relations among state, universities, and journalism, in
which the future of philosophy (or philosophy of the future) is hotly contested. Given changing fashions
in academic nomenclature, we might say that Nietzsche is concerned with the state of theory in the
expanded post-1970s sense that “theory” has acquired in Anglophone university discourse. What is the
point of theory or philosophy and how can it be articulated with a theory of the state? Nietzsche asks
whether philosophy (or theory) has veered into journalism (another move prepared by Hegel) by taking its
task to be the analysis of current events as they unfold. Nietzsche’s critique of post-Hegelian German
philosophy goes to the heart of what links and separates philosophy and journalism as two ways of
thinking about time. He charges philosophy with having become journalistic, so far as it aims to
analyze and serve its era, from the standpoint of a certain conception of time. Underlying the claim
that pessimism has been rendered irrelevant by the new Bismarckian configuration of Europe (Strauss), or
by the new imperialistic and technological vigor of global capitalism (Hartmann), is the assumption that
these are “great events.” When it is hastily assumed that we know and understand the “world-
historical” importance of such an event (say the Reichsgründung or the formation of the European
Union), we think journalistically. We lack the perspective of temporal distance. The problem is not
only unreflective acceptance of “minor” or “nonevents” as great events, it is the implicit journalistic
commitment to the category of the event itself, the event understood as “news” (Nietzsche, as we will
see in reading UO IV, has his own more radical conception of the event). The Zeitung must tell us the
news of the day, of the time. When Hegel famously said that the Zeitung was the morning Mass of the
modern world, he presumably meant something like this: reading the daily paper puts us in touch with
higher powers (politics, culture) as well as grounding us in the local (reading local news and
business performs a function comparable to the social interchange of churchgoing). Readers of the
morning paper (or electronic equivalent) pay their devotions to the world. Beyond that, both
participating in the Mass and reading the paper as a modern reader involve accepting a metaphysics.
In the case of Christianity this is the mystery of Incarnation with its own account of the beginning and end
of time. In the world of the newspaper (or the 24/7 news cycle), it is the perpetual appearance,
expectation, analysis, and fear of the event. Events must often be manufactured (most obviously in
cultural areas like sports and entertainment, but also in politics) because the Zeitung cannot tolerate
empty time. The journalist founders when there is no news du jour. Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer gives us
the ability to analyze (or deconstruct) our time “as thoroughly as possible, so as to leave absolutely no
doubt as to its nature.”23 Schopenhauer gives us an opening into a “thorough” analysis of and
confrontation with our time. To be thorough, to go deeply, is to disclose the era’s very way of
construing time: the journalistic obsession with the event. Thinking that is all too timely takes for
granted what it means to live in a time or an era (consider recent expressions like “the new
normal,” “post-9/11,” and the like). Philosophy as generally practiced now, Nietzsche says, the
philosophy of the universities, has been captured by the journalistic model, or as Alain Badiou would
say, it has been sutured to journalism. Nietzsche calls for a sharp decision in decoupling philosophy and
journalism, as Badiou does in demanding a desuturing of philosophy from poetry.24 Here is Nietzsche
exploring the consequences of philosophy’s fascination with the Zeit of the Zeitung: Whoever is seeking
to answer the question of what the philosopher as educator can mean in our time has to contest this
view [that the Reich has annihilated pessimism] which is very widespread and is propagated especially
in our universities; he must declare it a downright scandal that such nauseating, idolatrous flattery can be
rendered to our time by supposedly thinking and honorable men—a proof that one no longer has the
slightest notion how different the seriousness of philosophy is from the seriousness of a newspaper.
Such men have lost the last remnant not only of a philosophical but also of a religious mode of thinking,
and in their place have acquired not even optimism but journalism, the spirit and spiritlessness of our day
and our daily papers. Every philosophy that believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not
to say solved, by a political event [Ereigniss] is a joke and ass-backwards philosophy [Spaass- und
Afterphilosophie] (UO III.4). The political event in question is the foundation of the Reich, but
Nietzsche’s skepticism about such events could easily be extended to those (like the European
Economic Community as seen by Kojève or the collapse of the USSR by Fukuyama) that have excited
similar responses more recently. “Many states have been founded since the world began,” Nietzsche
continues, “that is an old story. How should a political innovation suffice to turn men once and for
all into contented inhabitants of the earth?” Implicit in the “university philosophy” of Nietzsche’s
day (and he does not hesitate to name names, almost all now rightly forgotten) is the view that “the state
is the highest goal of mankind.” A higher duty than serving the state is “destroy[ing] stupidity in
every form, and therefore in this form too.” Schopenhauer, so the argument goes, was a true
philosopher, and not a mere professor of philosophy. The professors, on Nietzsche’s view and in German
practice, are civil servants (officials or Beamten), so any examination of philosophy’s condition must
be untimely enough to unearth the connections between state and thought. Accordingly, Nietzsche
provides an analysis of the general principles of the cultural and ideological politics of the “so-
called nation-state,” with emphasis and examples drawn from the contemporary world. Nietzsche
gives only a sketchy explanation here as to why the nationstate is only “so-called” (see chapter 3). The
sketch in this Observation emphasizes the increasingly atomistic and chaotic direction of society.
Individuals are less and less bound to one another by natality, ethnicity, and territory. Nietzsche
asserts ( but does not argue) that his world faces perils of collapse and explosion, and that these
dangers are being precariously limited or deferred by the nation-state (Nietzsche was writing not
only in the wake of Prussia’s wars and the Reichsgründung but also during the great world financial crisis
and depression of 1873 and in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, which gave him the horrors). Since
the natality ingredient in the idea of nation is a factor of decreasing importance, the state maintains
itself in two ways, by fear and ideology. As to fear: For a century we have been preparing for
absolutely fundamental convulsions; and if there have recently been attempts to oppose this deepest
of modern inclinations, to collapse or to explode, with the constitutive power of the so-called nation-
state, the latter too will for a long time serve only to augment the universal insecurity and
atmosphere of menace (UO III.4). The fear promoted by the state in the early 1870s may at first seem
quaint and remote when compared to recent fears of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
Bismarck, for example, was pursuing a Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church and the Jesuits.25
However, in both cases there is fear of an insidious foreign body, with a secret command center,
supposedly striving to undermine or destroy national power. When the Church issued its doctrine of
papal infallibility at the same time that the German Reich was proclaimed at Versailles, these
apprehensions increased. Nietzsche’s response to Bismarckian politics was prescient. Rather than
accepting it as the final and destined expression of the age or a people, he understood that it rested on a
fragile foundation of chauvinism by stoking the fear of foreign religious agents operating under
false pretenses. The state attempts to develop and maintain citizens’ loyalty by promoting an
ideology. For example, it underwrites the teaching of philosophy. Nietzsche makes a comparison between
medieval and modern solutions to the problem of order. Ever since the Middle Ages, he claims, we
(Europeans?) have been struggling with competing forces that threaten to dissolve political and social
formations. In those earlier times, it was the Church that held things together through its system of belief,
practice, and even a common language (Latin). Now, as we face the threat of “atomistic chaos . . . the
state certainly makes an attempt to organize everything anew out of itself and to bind and constrain
all those mutually hostile forces; that is to say, it wants men to render it the same idolatry they formerly
rendered the church” (UO III.4). The state’s absolute authority is parasitic on previous claims about
the Church’s. Here Nietzsche touches again on questions of political theology that will loom larger in his
“philosophy of the Antichrist” (announced in BGE 256). We can distinguish two levels in the statist
ideology that Nietzsche has in mind. One is specific to the particular state, or even more specifically to
the state in a certain era; in modernity, these tend to be forms of nationalism, like the Bismarck era’s
pan-Germanism. Another level is the sometimes implicit and unspoken idea that it is only through
the state that humans are capable of realizing their humanity. Of course, thinkers like Hegel do argue
explicitly for this claim. Nietzsche thinks it obvious that the modern state is in the grip of the “money-
makers and military despots,” foreshadowing what US President Dwight Eisenhower called the
military-industrial complex. Such a state must favor thought that promotes its own rule. Deleuze
points to an important Nietzschean contrast between state-oriented and nomadic thought; in
Dialogues (cowritten with Claire Parnet), Nietzsche is credited with having said everything on this point
in Schopenhauer as Educator. 26 Deleuze has in mind more than the question of whether philosophers
serve the state or think, speak, and write from an independent position. State philosophy is understood
here to involve a certain image of thinking that both parallels a specific political structure and
offers legitimacy to the state itself. What the state does is to draw sharp borders between the inside
and the outside. One is either within the state or outside it, not only geographically but
psychologically or spiritually. The state has a specific identity that characterizes the interiority it
establishes. Even when a US citizen travels beyond the state’s borders, she carries a passport and
retains her identification with the interior. State-oriented thought produces a corresponding mental
space of interiority that reinforces and enables the acceptance of the state as a bounded territorial
political form. Such philosophy, Deleuze and Parnet say, borrows its properly philosophical image
from the state as beautiful, substantial or subjective interiority. It invents a properly spiritual State,
as an absolute state, which is by no means a dream, since it operates effectively in the mind. Hence
the importance of notions such as universality, method, question and answer, judgment, or
recognition . . . of always having correct ideas. Hence the importance of themes like those of a
republic of spirits, an enquiry of the understanding, a court of reason, a pure “right” of thought,
with ministers of the Interior and bureaucrats of pure thought. Deleuze and Parnet, then, suggest a
far-reaching parallel between political and philosophical structures, a convergence of ideology and
practice. The political and judicial philosophemes cited are widespread, and deployed sometimes with
extravagance (think of Kant on reason’s tribunal), so that they do indeed constitute an “image of thought,”
a picture holding us captive (as Wittgenstein—also a great reader of Schopenhauer—puts it). Deleuze
describes Nietzsche’s nomadic “counter-philosophy”: “its statements can be conceived as the
products of a mobile war-machine and not the utterances of a rational, administrative machine,
whose philosophers would be bureaucrats of pure reason” and says that perhaps it is here that
Nietzsche announces a “new politics.”27 If the state codifies through law and contract, nomads
decodify without recodifying. Deleuze charges that Marx and Freud are ultimately conservative thinkers
insofar as they recodify on the basis of a new and perfected socialist state or on a reconstituted story of
the family. Kant testifies to the strength of the figure when he dismisses skeptics as nomads; they play a
salutary but temporary role in their rebellion against the despotism of the dogmatists, but are
fundamentally anarchistic enemies of civilization.28 Yet not all philosophers follow Kant into the arms of
the state (or the expanded version of a multistate pact on offer in Perpetual Peace). Nietzsche copied into
his notebooks a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “History” in praise of “spiritual nomadism”:
“A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon and
roams through all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc [Mongol]. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, he
sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite. And associates as happily as beside his own chimneys. Or
perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his faculties of observation, which yield
him points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes.”29 There is a protophenomenology of
different relations to the earth here. History and the history of philosophy belong to the state,
geography and geophilosophy to the nomads. It is not a question of whether the state or its
philosophical equivalent comes first (in this sense, it should be noted, neither Deleuze nor Nietzsche
holds a crudely reductionist view of the relation between what Marxists call base and superstructure. And,
in this respect, recall Marx’s declaration, “I am not a Marxist”). Beyond the question of German
philosophers’ conscious and unconscious acceptance of the ideology of the state that Nietzsche raises in
the Schopenhauer essay, there is the question whether philosophers can invent other images of their
task. As Deleuze notes, these questions about political and philosophical images are bound up with
similar images of the self or psyche. Is the self (or whatever we choose to call it) to be construed as a
kind of interior fortress, a ghost in a machine? And even if we abandon such “Cartesian” images,
must we also be vigilant about other models of mind and the human that make it a function of
language and social interchange? From this perspective, recent forms of critical theory, as in Jürgen
Habermas’s attempts to outline the structure of an ideal speech situation, are shifts from a monarchical
state model to a democratic one, with both presupposing a fundamental parallel of state and thought.
Those imbued with the state-oriented model of thought typically suppose any alternatives to the
hegemonic model of philosophy must be forms of irrationalism or mysticism. This is to fall into a
dualism that simply reinscribes the core image of inside and outside, the reasonably regulated life
of the state and the anarchic chaos or undifferentiated unity that lies outside it. Despite Deleuze’s
claim that Nietzsche says everything that there is to be said about the two models of thought in
Schopenhauer, he does not use the term “nomadic” there, although it later becomes a crucial
component of his analysis of the hybrid, cosmopolitan, and nomadic multitude (Menge). However, in
Emerson’s Essays, one of Nietzsche’s inspirations for the Unmodern series (especially important, as
Stanley Cavell has shown, for Schopenhauer), there are passages that constitute a proto-Deleuzian reply
to Hegel’s understanding of world-history as exclusively a story of states. Early in “History,” Emerson
gives a significant catalogue of its subject matter: “Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic,
democracy, are merely the application of [the human] manifold spirit to the manifold world.”30 While
Emerson speaks the language of “spirit” (like Hegel, but also like Nietzsche in some contexts), spirit
expresses itself in the manifold and does not necessarily work toward Hegelian unity. The brief catalogue
suggests that, in addition to the Hegelian state, temporary and mobile inhabitations, like the “camp”
and what Hegel dismisses as “refuted” state forms (republic, democracy) are equally genuine
aspects of “the manifold world.” Later in “History,” Emerson more explicitly includes the nomadic as a
constant dimension of history, not simply its prehistoric presupposition. Since Nietzsche will also develop
a related notion of the nomadic later (especially in BGE), I cite Emerson in part: In the early history of
Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and
Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil, or the
advantages of a market, had induced to build towns. Agriculture, therefore, was a religious injunction,
because of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in these late and civil countries of England and
America, these propensities still fight out the old battle in the nation and in the individual.31 Contrary to
Hegel, Emerson sees these as two constant rivals, two general, agonistic tendencies whose battle is fought
even within the individual, rather than as a sequence of stages. There is no expectation that the state
will subsume the nomadic and no exclusion of nomadic peoples from history (we might say that
Emerson has dropped the “world” in the Hegelian “world-history”). The need for a religious justification
of sedentary life can be read as a deflationary version of Hegel’s argument for the necessity of monarchy
and state religion, and the application to the contemporary (England and America) foreshadows
Nietzsche’s claim that nineteenth-century Europe is the incubator of a new nomadism (BGE 242). While
Nietzsche does not explicitly develop Emerson’s concept of “spiritual nomadism” in the Schopenhauer
essay, he does suggest that while modernity’s main tendency has been to consolidate the converging
models of state, philosophy, and psyche, we can discern other exemplary possibilities in forging images
of the human, and each is also a figure of the philosopher. Nietzsche identifies three such responses to
modernity, which he associates with the figures of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schopenhauer (UO III.4).
Deleuze, again inspired by the third Unmodern, will call them conceptual personae. Each names a “line
of flight” (to borrow another Deleuzian term), that is, a distinctive individual path that rigorously and
idiosyncratically commits itself to pursuing a certain way of life. In this case, the three lines of flight
are rebellion (Rousseau), cultivation of one’s powers (Goethe), and self-sacrifice for the truth
(Schopenhauer). The identification with Schopenhauer involves a highly critical stance toward the state
and the danger the state poses to thought that seeks to accommodate it or, worse, enlist in its service.
From this perspective, Rousseauian rebellion simply rejects one state form for a future one or for sheer
destruction. An idealist of this sort can morph into a “Catilinist,” that is, a political nihilist who wants to
hasten the destruction of all political institutions. Nihilism is not identical with nomadism. Goethean
cultivation, involving “contemplation in the grand style,” may preserve and conciliate, but runs the danger
of degenerating into philistinism, if its expansive ambitions include some acceptance of modern society
and its politics. In this respect, the danger is that the very idea of philosophy will be confused with
and displaced by “German dream- and thought-mongering [Traum und Denkwirtschaft]” in which
thought positions itself for the market (UO III.8; interestingly, Marx and Engels use similar language in
The German Ideology to describe the post-Hegelian German speculation and trade in ideas32). The
contemporary world is the enemy of “the rebirth of the philosopher” that Schopenhauer heralds. It is
“shrouded in humbug [Flaussen]; it does not have to be religious dogma, it can also be such bogus
concepts as ‘progress,’ ‘universal education,’ ‘national,’ ‘modern state,’ ‘culture war’ [Culturkampf ]”
(UO III.7). The last term designates Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, directed against the Jesuits, and more
generally the Catholic Church (except for the deviant “old Catholics,” who questioned the new doctrine of
papal infallibility).33 Still avoiding Schopenhauer’s (conventionally acknowledged) central texts and
ideas, Nietzsche concentrates on the great pessimist’s essay “On Philosophy at the Universities.” As the
famous philosophical story goes, the brash young Schopenhauer offered a course at the same time as the
more established Hegel. Not surprisingly, no students appeared, and he did not teach again. Nietzsche
aspired unsuccessfully to a chair in philosophy around the time he was writing the Schopenhauer essay.
What Nietzsche shares with Schopenhauer is a view of the relations of philosophy, and especially
Hegelian philosophy, to the state. Schopenhauer, a man of private means, did not need the economic
security of teaching and was famously misanthropic. Given his economic security, Schopenhauer had no
need for a teaching position. He recognized that besides wanting a comfortable bourgeois life, a professor
(or aspiring professor) might have a need to “shine and show off.” Schopenhauer sought the equivalent in
literary fame (as with Nietzsche, this was mostly posthumous). That involved creating the character
Schopenhauer, lonely and dedicated truth-seeker, who could inspire Nietzsche’s encomium. While
working on the Schopenhauer essay, Nietzsche was also writing an essay on “Philosophy in the Tragic
Age of the Greeks,” which explores the question of how the philosopher communicates with his
contemporaries by performance and the projection of a persona. Along with his educator, indeed outdoing
him in this respect, Nietzsche worked at creating an authorial persona, adapting the strategies and tactics
of ancient rhetoric to the print-driven culture of the nineteenth century.34 The stance of the mysterious,
solitary author (evoked at the extreme in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None) is a
distinctively recent invention, and possible only in the world of books, print, and mass literacy— that is,
precisely in the cultural atmosphere that Nietzsche often denounces. This construction of an unmodern
persona by deploying modern techniques is meant, of course, to offer a compelling figure of the
philosopher as an alternative to that of official, university philosophy. Hegel becomes the emblem of
that official philosophy through his relation to state and university. Schopenhauer asks “how is anyone
who seeks an honest living for himself and his family to devote himself simultaneously to truth, which
has at all times been a dangerous companion and everywhere an unwelcome guest?”35 Take this together
with his binary division: “We can divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who
think for others.”36 The philosopher as the servant of the university, and therefore of the state, is a
comic figure, his supposed commitment to truth shredded by his need to flatter or at least not
offend the authorities. Accordingly, Schopenhauer’s essay exaggerates the comic: it is a burlesque,
carnivalesque screed for the initiated, peppered with Greek and Latin jokes anticipating Nietzsche’s
polemics, subjecting the now long-forgotten chaired philosophers of his day to withering sarcasm,
especially for their devotion to the present in its crudest form. He says of the era that “it calls itself with
one of its home-made words, as characteristic as it is euphonious, the ‘present time’ (Jetztzeit); present
time indeed, in other words, because one thinks only of the Now and does not venture to glance at the
time that will come and condemn.”37 The projection of the mysterious or flamboyant modern/unmodern
philosophical persona became a striking feature of university culture in the 1960s with the emergence of
figures like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, both explicitly working in a Nietzschean vein.
Each plays a flirtatious game of hide-and-seek with his readers and students, with Foucault
notoriously admonishing them not to ask who he is (i.e., not to seek consistency across his writings),
while Derrida thematized the “secret” and wrote a number of texts that parody or question the
genre of autobiography (The Post Card, Circumfessions). Given that these thinkers were well paid and
privileged French civil servants, they presumably were acutely conscious of the need to demonstrate a
sovereign independence of thought and esprit that the butts of Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s essays
lacked. All these maneuvers, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the “French theorists,” contribute to
problematizing the Hegelian “we,” the monstrous first-person plural Nietzsche had identified in Strauss’s
Prussian cultural philistines and in the nihilistic self-knowledge of those who emerged in humankind’s
old age at the end of Hartmann’s Weltprozess. Later, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says that his essays on
Schopenhauer and Wagner are both really about himself. In Schopenhauer he begins to formulate the
question how, outside the university and so outside the state’s security, as a thinker of the outside
and externality, of earth rather than world, it is possible to find a way of thinking for oneself while
developing a mode of addressing an audience, even if one’s writing itself is meant in part to conjure
that future audience into being. Like the other Unmoderns, this project has to do with forms of
temporality. The state philosopher is caught in the timely, the time of journalism. At this point in his
planned series, then, Nietzsche has undermined three basic ways in which his time has attempted to
think time itself. He began with a critique of the self-congratulatory discourse (Strauss’s “cultural
philistinism”) that justifies the present as the historically realized fullness of human possibilities (at
least in Germany). The next step was to show that historicism itself involves value-laden choices that
can be critically evaluated; more specifically, the tragic and apocalyptic form of end-of-history
narratives (like Hartmann’s) naïvely reinscribes old stories, while ostensibly combining those “modern”
thinkers Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Darwin. The corrective to such grand narratives, whether tragic
or comic in tone and structure, is not to surrender to the all-too- timely “now.” Each of these
approaches to time carries its own political orientation with it. Strauss articulated a conservative
political position on the basis of his triumphant “new faith.” In accepting the inevitability of the
Weltprozess, Hartmann found a justification for political passivity and acceptance of what Nietzsche
would later call the “last human.” The journalistic time of contemporary Germany’s state philosophers
involves a floating or coasting on the surface of the present, a mode or habitus that puts them de
facto in the service of established power. It could be said that Nietzsche’s selection of the four focal
figures of his critiques betrays a certain limitation to the German “world.” Yet he has been challenging
that conception of world. In the Wagner essay, Nietzsche, however sketchily, begins to formulate a
conception of a “great event of the earth” eluding (or twisting free from) the confines of Hegelian world-
history. It is the direction of the earth that is at stake. The future is not the necessary conclusion of
world-history, but an unpredictable, improbable event in the making that requires our active
loyalty.
The State is a Leviathan indeed, a death-dealing bloodthirsty monster that wages
wars, execute deviants, and eliminates anthropological and normative pluralism by
rendering peoples calculable and homogeneous. When a dividual swallows the fatal
lie that they are a citizen, that the State constitutes their identity, they have already
died. No value. No life. Your State-approved ID card is a death certificate. Your
country will not thank you for your sacrifice.

In a talk in or near this town, Zarathustra issues a prophetic denunciation of the state, a discourse “On the
New Idol.” With its Biblical resonances and parodies, we hear echoes of Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and
Amos in this polemic. It is a jeremiad against false idols. The state is portrayed as a monster or machine
of death. Like many of the talks of the book’s first part, it is structured around the life/death binary. The
state brings death; life begins where the state ceases. Just as life/death is an absolute duality, so one is
either inside or outside the state. The boundary line is not in question. In this respect, Zarathustra
apparently agrees with the state’s self-definition, which insists on its authority within clearly
delineated territory. Is the state’s death-making too obvious to mention? Many of Nietzsche’s close
readers do not even remark on the emphatic and repeated claim that the state is a death-dealing
monster.22 What makes the state an agent of death? Zarathustra does not speak explicitly here of the
state’s power to kill in war, extending both to enemies and to subjects, who may be ordered to risk
or sacrifice their lives. The closest he comes to such a discussion is “On the Pale Criminal,” addressing
the “scarlet judges,” who cruelly enjoy sending the murderer to be executed (Z I.6). Here the
murderer not only finally admits legal guilt but, more importantly, recognizes that his conscious intention
(that of the lesser self or ego) was a self deception, for the desire of the greater self was to kill. So
Zarathustra’s listeners or disciples have already been told that the officials of the state are using the
appearance of honor it gives them (in their scarlet robes) as a conscious or more likely unconscious
device for their own bloodthirsty desires.23 “On the New Idol” is directed to those in the state. You are
either in it or outside it: “In some places there are still peoples and herds left, but not with us, my
brothers: here there are states.” So, in the largest relevant context, call it the earth, there are at least three
forms of human organization: peoples, herds, and state humans or Staatmenschen, those who live within
the world of the state. I use the word “world” advisedly, both to preserve a certain relation between world
and state, and to allow that within the world of states there are expats, immigrants, and exiles (all
defined in relation to the state), as well as state officials and even hereditary monarchs and tyrants.
Unless we see the anthropological or geophilosophical pluralism presupposed here, we will not
understand the force of Zarathustra’s definition of the state as a wielder of death, including not
only the most obvious forms just cited, but the threat of death, and the encouragement of living
death or “slow suicide.” “The state? What is that?” So Zarathustra puts the question. And here comes the
definition: Well then, now open your ears for me, for now I say to you my word about the death of
peoples. State is the name for the coldest of all cold monsters (Ungeheuer). Coldly it tells lies; and this
lie crawls (kriecht) out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” Hearing the state described as a
“cold monster,” it is difficult not to think of the Hobbesian Leviathan. Seeing what Zarathustra means by
the death of peoples requires uncovering the Leviathan’s lie as a lie. The state kills its own people
through sending them to war, committing genocide, or executing them, and through soul-murder as
it deceives a people into confusing itself with the state. If a people swallows this lie it is lost. Once a
people, it now becomes the population of a state claiming authority over their lives. The state as we
moderns know it practices biopolitics by transforming people into population. So far as they are
members of the population, no longer rooted in the life of a people, they become “many-too-many
(Viel-zu-Vielen)” or “superfluous people (Überflussige).” The point here is not to distinguish superior
and inferior classes or ranks within the state but to suggest that all those who accept their position in the
state are, as such, simply elements of population. Zarathustra had denounced the last humans for
subjecting life to measurement, which is fundamental in the state’s relation to population. Life
subjected to measurement, calculation, and control is, Zarathustra claims, a kind of death, a living
death (“slow suicide”), if you will. Biopolitics is necessarily thanatopolitics. Michel Foucault observed
that traditional political power could be characterized as letting live and making die, while modern
power is defined rather by making live and letting die.24 Whether managing the population’s
public health and education by means of discipline and surveillance or sifting billions of electronic
messages and transactions for market research or detection of political deviants, population is
analyzed, shaped, and actions channeled through quantitative reduction. This analysis, shaping, and
channeling is the modern way of making live. It is a shaping and measuring that devitalizes.25 “Far too
many are born; for the superfluous was the state invented!” All are superfluous. The greater the
numbers, the more zeroes both numerically and metaphorically. As superfluous, they are on the
way to the condition of “bare life” as conceptualized by Giorgio Agamben. The state is happy to have
surplus population. It is a monstrous apparatus for manipulating the surplus through staging a
competition for riches and power. That great cynic Hartmann had said pretty much the same thing,
although he thought this was simply the inevitable final stage of the Weltprozess. Indeed, Hartmann drew
the same conclusion as Nietzsche: a life managed by the modern state, in which all are subject to its
economy, are virtually dead. They must eventually see that this last chance for human happiness is
hopeless, so as good Schopenhaurians they will all die by choice, exhaustion, or mutual destruction.
Peter Sloterdijk elaborates the same theme when he argues that the early modern state encouraged
overpopulation. Seventeenth-century witch hunts, coinciding with the rise of the absolute state,
were directed against midwives, who frequently shared contraceptive information and helped to
terminate unwanted pregnancies. This suppression led to excess population, which could then serve
statist economic and political interests.26 With a bit of nostalgia, Zarathustra observes that once upon
a time, and perhaps still “elsewhere,” there are or were peoples who received love and faith from
the creators of the people’s values. Without such originary creative force there is no people. The
annihilators who set up states “hang a sword and a hundred desires over them all.” The sword is
the ultimate threat of death, and the desires are those promoted by the state to bind the population
to the way of life, or “slow suicide,” that feeds the monstrous apparatus (think of Hobbes’s absolute
sovereign and his idea of the “commonwealth”). The state engages in systematic linguistic confusion,
exchanging and perverting the notions of good and evil, presumably the good and evil established
by the creators. Such confusion is the sign (Zeichen) of the state. “Verily, the will to death is what this
sign signifies. Verily, it beckons to the preachers of death.” So, behind the primal lie by which the state
tries to pass itself off as the people and its confusing transvaluation of the people’s values, we can
detect a “will to death,” a will that allies the state with “the preachers of death.” Zarathustra had
already devoted a speech to these preachers. The state reveals its “will to death” by allying itself with
them. The state is imbricated from the beginning with such preachers; we might say that it relies
necessarily on an explicit or implicit political theology. Whether they preach death directly (like
Hartmann and the Buddhists) or indirectly, say, by preaching the superiority of “eternal life” to earthly,
these preachers support the state’s ideology.
The State suspends the rule of law to secure its boundaries, to block out the dangers
that lie beyond the border. As citizens, as legal immigrants, we internalize this logic
and replicate it within our psyche. Encounter difference? See the outside? Lock down,
close up, attack! Detain the deplorable, secure the psychic border! A mental border
patrol is polices our interactions, our intellectual lives. Even in debate, we insist on
what kinds of thoughts belong and what kinds don’t. This closes us off from the
dynamism that is life.

Nietzsche extends his account of the state of exception by showing how its logic is already at work in
our internal psychic economy. This picture of the self as a community is comparable to Plato’s
reading justice or injustice in the state as modes of the individual human soul writ large, and
Freud’s understanding of the self as a complex balance of id, ego, and superego. In a chapter on “The
Human Alone with Itself ” he writes: Self-observation.—The human (Mensch) is very well defended
against himself, against being reconnoitered and placed under siege (Belagerung) by himself, he is
usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even
invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path
(HAH 491). The human being is in a state of exception with regard to himself, a strange doubling
logic, but no stranger than the explicitly political state of exception. We do not know our own well-
defended inner fortress. We resist self-knowledge by declaring a state of exception that makes our
core as uncanny as the sovereign imposition of a law that suspends law. Both in the case of the
individual and in that of the state, friends and enemies, forces of the outside, are necessary to break
the defenses and the martial law that claim justification to resist the siege. The tightly constructed
individual identity (think of Freud’s superego) and the nationalistic political state are powerful yet
fragile, and the struggles to dissolve both of these artificial unities have a common structure. Many
individuals borrow the principle of the state of exception from the political realm to make their own
injustices acceptable: “There are not a few who understand the unclean art of self-duping by means
of which every unjust act they perform is reminted into an injustice done to them by others and the
law of exception for necessary defense (Ausnahmerecht der Notwehr) is reserved to what they
themselves have done” (AOM 52). Such people are in need of an “intervention,” in contemporary
therapeutic language. Perhaps most unsettling, given Nietzsche’s project of opening up possibilities for
thought that are free of state-oriented concepts (as in Schopenhauer as Educator), is the danger that
philosophers themselves may begin to think like states. Nietzsche argued this in the Schopenhauer
essay with respect to the Hegelian and journalistic state-employed philosophy professors of Bismarck’s
Germany. Yet the problem is more deeply rooted. In a long aphorism of Dawn he takes a critical look at
aging philosophers, once original and daring thinkers, who end by wanting to institutionalize their ideas.
This can stifle the creativity in others that they had enjoyed themselves. Toward the end of their careers,
thinkers like Plato and August Comte become weary, shift their concern from fresh thinking to preserving
their legacy, and seek to enshrine their ideas in a “temple of enduring stone.” Probably the “most
dangerous characteristic” of this weariness is their “belief in their own genius, which usually assails great
and semi-great men of the spirit only at this frontier of their life: the belief that they occupy an
exceptional position (Ausnahmestellung) and enjoy the law of exception (Ausnahmerecht)” (D 542).
When the aging philosopher comes to believe that the preservation of his thoughts is threatened by
misunderstanding or rivals, he appoints himself as sovereign (or “decider”) in the realm of the
spirit. Nietzsche wrote about a legend according to which Plato took pains to have all of Democritus’s
writings destroyed; more recently Comte attempted to establish a church of positivism.13 The thought of
the state privileges interiority and the maintenance of its borders. In a note of 1874, Nietzsche writes
that philosophy “is gradually turning into nothing but the guarding of borders.”14 Remarks along
these lines will be familiar to those Anglophone teachers and students of philosophy who lament the
tendency of “analytic” philosophers to exclude other kinds of thinkers from the charmed circle of
“real” philosophy. This is known colloquially in the United States as “circling the wagons,” which
suggests the territoriality of these border conflicts and some typical defense strategies.15 Nietzsche’s
frequent denunciations of anarchism should be read in the light of his diagnosis of the decline and death
of the state. The nineteenth-century anarchist movement that Nietzsche rejected took two main forms.
From his perspective, utopian anarchists like Kropotkin were naively deluded in thinking that there could
be a quick and relatively painless transition to a world of mutual cooperation free of the state.
Revolutionary anarchists like those inspired by Bakunin (Wagner’s ally in 1848) were nihilists whose
violence and terrorism were fueled by a powerful, raging ressentiment; their destructive activities could
only encourage the state to declare a state of exception. Like Marx, Nietzsche saw the future of the state
and its “withering away” as embedded in a complex historical movement, although they had quite
different takes on what that process is.
Freedom begins where the State ends. State-based politics is all smoke and mirrors, a
piñata of fall starts, a cornucopia of empty promises. We must leave the metaphysics
and politics of the State and embrace the body of the Earth. The Earth is a smooth
space, deterritorialized, open. Only on Earth is politics possible.

We might be surprised to find Nietzsche apparently defending the integrity of traditional values of
good and evil against their confusion by the state. This must be understood within the context of his
denunciation of the state for destroying peoples. In “On the Thousand and One Goals,” Zarathustra
maintains that such tables of good and evil are essential to the life of a people. Yet the speech on the
state does not encourage a return to the traditional life of a people, a people already devitalized and
rendered superfluous population. No, Zarathustra enjoins his listeners to “shatter the windows and
leap into the open air!” because “free for great souls the earth still stands even now.” Don’t walk
through the doors, we might say, because there we have to pay tolls and have our documents
stamped by the Leviathan’s functionaries. Freedom, as Foucault says in another context, lies in a
more radical escape that breaks through the windows.27 What lies beyond the walls of the state is
not the world, a term too closely associated with Hegel’s claim that the world is the totality of states, but
the earth, the self-renewing site of mobile, experimental human habitation. On the earth are rainbows
and bridges that may lead to the Übermensch. In Zarathustra’s rhetorical and poetic discourse, we should
not expect specific directives as to whether escaping from the state requires leaving its territory or
is compatible with internal exile, modest poverty, and solitary or coupled life (Zarathustra speaks of
the places that await Einsame und Zweisame). After his series of town speeches, Zarathustra leaves his
disciples and returns to his cave. From this point on, landscape, sea, and sky become more insistent
dimensions of the story, both as setting and as subject of thematic exploration. We learn in Part II that
Zarathustra’s “wild wisdom became pregnant on lonely mountains; on rough stones she gave birth to her
young . . . Now she runs foolishly through the harsh desert and seeks gentle turf ” (Z II.1). This “wild”
wisdom, outside the striated space of the state, inspires a journey of sea voyages and island hopping.
These range from sightings of the isle of the dead to a volcanic atoll, and include sojourns on the “isles of
the blessed”— adapting a classical motif, which might lead us to think of “bubbles” for the affluent and
sophisticated. Geographically, the setting is an archipelago, a series of islands with distinctive attractions
and problems. They are the singularities of the earth. Seas, deserts, caves, and mountainous terrain
all become forms of Deleuzian smooth space, fields of unconstrained movement of bodies and
thought. In “On the Land of Culture (Bildung),” Zarathustra presents himself as a wanderer against his
will, driven out of cities, fatherlands, and motherlands. He thus rejects the nation-state, a place that
would claim its inhabitants by a parental model of natality, for the sake of a new people and new
earth, called his “children’s land, yet undiscovered in the most distant sea” (KSA 4.155). “On Great
Events” deploys the figure of a volcanic island in addressing the politics of the earth.28 The title alludes
to Hegel, who defined great events as those decisive for the world-historical development or
transformation of the state; it is also a rewrite of Nietzsche’s first stab at formulating his own version of
the great event in UO IV. Commentators typically read the chapter as directed against state-oriented
propagandists and politicians, especially Rousseauian enthusiasts of revolution.29 These are allegorized
as the “fire-hound,” who is one of earth’s “skin diseases.” The “figure” of Zarathustra was seen to arrive
at this Stromboli-like island by flying over the sea. The volcano (literally a “firemountain”) that his
simulacrum entered is said to be the gate of hell in local legend. Once he reassures his disciples that he is
safe (only his shadow descended into volcanic hell), Zarathustra relates his dialogue with the fire-hound,
an ego puffed up with a desire to expand its power, a rebel or revolutionary.30 Such fiery demagogues
are said to be at most “ventriloquists of the earth,” producing the illusion of a politics that speaks
from the ground of being. They give the impression that the earth, as reterritorialized by the state,
constitutes a nation’s true identity. In effect, they buy into Hegel’s conception of world-history as
the story of states. The secret unknown by the fire-hound (and the state-philosophy he represents) is
that “the heart of the earth is of gold.” This explicitly geographical and geological chapter insists that
the resources of the Menschen-Erde are rich in possibility. It is constituted by passionate human bodies,
their combinations, and their transformations on, by, and through the earth. Zarathustra speaks to his
disciples, who anxiously worried whether it was indeed he who plunged into the “fire-mountain.” While
they voice doubts about the old wives’ tale that it is the gate of hell, “in the ground of their souls they
were all of them filled with concern and yearning.” Zarathustra takes their disturbance as a teachable
moment. Those who saw the figure’s descent or heard the news may think they have witnessed a
spectacular event, a “great event.” Zarathustra’s lesson to the disciples is that such spectacles are not
great events, just as he explains to the fire-hound that neither are they constituted by rebellions and
revolutions. His implicit message is something like this: “You thought that was a great event? Let me
explain what a great event is and is not.” In hearing Zarathustra correct both his disciples and the fire-dog
on their superficial idea of great events, we should recall that Nietzsche once thought that he saw a great
event of the earth in Wagner’s supposed severing of East and West. Zarathustra’s discourse to his
disciples—those who have presumably pledged their loyalty to the earth—is a story of elemental love and
strife, a geology of morals.31 As he explains: “The earth . . . has a skin, and this skin has diseases. One of
these diseases, for example, is called ‘Mensch.’ And another one of these diseases is called “fire-hound.”
The earth is a complex of strata; we tend to ignore its intricate stratigraphy because we are
deafened by the voice of the fire-hound and his kind, who see only surfaces. The earth’s interior is
mineral, sometimes molten. Humans interfere with the biosphere (the skin) in many ways,
mineralizing the surface in stone, concrete, and brick, and releasing noxious materials into its atmosphere.
Today they pave the earth with highways and parking lots for oil- driven vehicles. They turn the
earth inside out seeking fossil fuels and minerals. This surface disorder, which bites into its ground,
is like an autoimmune disease, the earth being disrupted by its own products as they war for
resources. To understand the rebellious fire-hound, Zarathustra conducts a full analysis of its elemental
dimensions: not only fire, but sea, smoke, and earth (mud ). Now he knows that the firehound’s noise is
not a “great event.” Politics as generally practiced is all smoke and mirrors. Political rebels accept an
unquestioned context of state and self, limiting their contestation of received values. Zarathustra
recounts his conversation with the fire-hound: “‘Freedom’ is what you all most like to bellow; but I have
unlearned my belief in ‘great events’ whenever they are surrounded by so much fire and smoke.” The
struggle for freedom, of course, is what Hegel sees as the prime engine of world-history, that which
brings about “great events.” But genuinely great events arise in those “stillest hours” when we become
aware of new values. In contrast, the state (or churches, those quasistates) are fire-hounds, bellowing
ventriloquists of the earth proclaiming their own absolute importance. Another fire-hound,
Zarathustra continues, “really speaks out of the heart of the earth. He exhales gold and golden rain.” This
beast is at home in elemental extremes, like “ashes and smoke and hot slime,” but Zarathustra knows that
“the heart of the earth is of gold.” Gold, Zarathustra’s disciples know, is glowing and giving, the sign of
“the gift-giving virtue (schenkende Tugend)” (Z I.22). The molten, radiant core of the earth has an
affinity to the sun. Geological flow is what the earth is about. Ordinary politics takes place among
skin diseases, the superficial flows of humans and states. On the horizon is the project of a geology of
morals, a project sketched by Deleuze and Guattari. “Who does the earth think it is?” is a question that
must be taken seriously, whenever there is a discourse of nation, national identity, and where
ownership of land and the limits of ownership are at issue. Zarathustra’s claim that the heart of the
earth is of gold is rephrased in A Thousand Plateaus, by Professor Challenger, who explained that the
Earth—the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule—is a body without organs. This body
without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free
intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles.32 “On Great Events” once more
problematizes the Hegelian claim that great or world-historical events are exclusively those having to do
with the development, transformation, or conflict of states. Humans, now a skin disease on earth’s
surface, could transform their habitat into a truly human-earth, more specifically a garden (as we
hear later). What would it mean to be loyal to the earth, to raise the question of its meaning and
direction with the passion so far channeled into state and church? Empedocles gave an enigmatic
answer when, as tradition has it, he jumped into Etna; at the end of his talk to his disciples, Zarathustra
insists it was only his shadow or specter that mimicked that act. Yet he is puzzled by the specter’s
reported exclamation: “It is time! It is high time!” Time for what? For a great event involving the earth?
The question hangs in the air although the next chapter introduces more doubt with the figure of “The
Soothsayer.” That symbol of Schopehauerian pessimism challenges any hope raised by Zarathustra’s
loyalty to the earth and its golden heart, teaching that earth is now exhausted—fruit turned rotten, soil
cracked, wells dried, wine poisonous, sea become shallow swamp. That picture of the earth then
motivates Zarathustra’s nightmare of himself as a night watchman of universal death, a dream that
makes a volte-face into a revelatory vision of revived earthly life when the glass coffins containing
the dead burst open with raucous, carnivalesque life. Part III is the story of a homecoming by walking,
sailing, and mountainclimbing. As Zarathustra ascends a mountain ridge, a new perspective opens on a
fresh sea, and he reflects on the alternation of perspectives, which turns things upside down, and the need
to discern grounds and backgrounds, not merely the foregrounds that appear to overly obtrusive eyes. He
disorients the framework of the picturesque poem or landscape painting with its single fixed angle on the
earth. Zarathustra invokes geological time and space to suggest a general pattern of analysis:
Whence come the highest mountains? I once asked. Then I learned that they came out of the sea.
The evidence is written ( geschrieben) in their rocks and in the walls of their peaks. It is out of the deepest
depth that the highest must come to its height (KSA 4.195). These strata are forms of writing, codings
of the earth; this provides a model for understanding how human singularities emerge from their
own depths and from reading the inscriptions of their movements and speeds. The earth is a text
that we must learn to read.
The nomad cares not for the State, for State-thinking. The nomad needs no passport,
no visa, no ID card. For nomads knows that in obstructing movement, hybridity, and
becoming, the State negates existence itself. Against the indeterminate and
homogeneous mass of citizens, primed for tyranny, nomadism points toward toward a
politics of difference.

This analysis of music throws some light on the figure of the “good European” that Nietzsche develops
here by reading national and supra-national modes of thought and feeling through musical styles. The
good European is not (certainly is not primarily) the citizen of a single new European state. The
good European is the goal of Beyond Good and Evil, holding the same place in that work that the
posthuman occupies in Zarathustra. If Zarathustra is a fantastic figure, deriving from a specifically non-
European landscape (Persia), the good European is something of tomorrow or the day after. We do
not have to wait for the “great noon” for the emergence of the good European; this is the name of the
future that is arriving. In the second aphorism of “Peoples,” Nietzsche speaks of “dull and sluggish
races who would require half a century even in our rapidly moving Europe to overcome . . .
atavistic attacks of fatherlandishness and gluing themselves to the soil (Schollenkleberei)” (BGE
241). This is a reactive reterritorialization that cannot acknowledge itself. This dogged geographical
essentialism obstructs movement and stands in the way of the “dull races’ ” expansion or
development from other “races,” such as the possibility that Nietzsche (the supposed proto-Nazi)
projected of Germans and Jews forming a new hybrid. (BGE 251). Cloudy indeterminacy is a strength,
if it enables receptivity to the exterior, but in gluing the nation to the soil, sticking it in the mud,
unnamed statesmen (Bismarck and his like) narrow the spirit and degrade taste. Unspoken here is
the tension between “people” and “fatherland.” A people is fundamentally mobile and active,
although “dull and sluggish” by turns. It handicaps itself by assuming a national identity through
hypostatizing its geographical situation into a “fatherland.” Peoples are experiments with a future,
not essences to be preserved. Here we might think for a moment of a suppressed or implicit contrast
between fatherland and motherland. “Fatherland” suggests singular and patriarchal authority, the
daddy state that tends to claim emergency authority, declares a state of exception, and maintains its
position by a propaganda of fear. Only at one point does Nietzsche speak of motherlands, and it is
simply to equate them with fatherlands. Zarathustra says that he has searched for father- and
motherlands, but has failed to find a homeland: “unsettled am I in all settlements (unstät bin ich in alle
Städten) and a departure at all gates.” He declares that he has “been driven out from all father- and
motherlands” and loves only his “children’s land, undiscovered, in the farthest sea” (Z II.14). Like the
contemporary nomad, he is unsettled, but his wandering has a goal; Deleuze understands this as the
search to reterritorialize philosophy on a “new people, new earth.” In the third aphorism, Nietzsche
further contextualizes the question of nationality (BGE 242). What can be called “Europe’s democratic
movement” is a “physiological” process that is producing “a supra-national and nomadic type of
human being,” one distinguished by its high power of adaptation, fit to become an “industrious
worker” and “multi-purpose herd animal.” Nietzsche carefully notes that he says this “without praise
or blame.” What is the “nomadic type of human being”? The nomad should not be construed as a
hermit, a solitary “existential” figure (associations that students typically make). Speaking here of
contemporary nomads, Nietzsche emphasizes not their isolation and difference, but their tendency, in
these circumstances, to homogeneity, to become a herd of adaptable workers (Hartmann, implicitly
following Hegel, had neglected emigration and immigration in his globalization scenario). If “peoples
and fatherlands” are mobile, experimental constructions, the nomads intensify this mobility,
detaching themselves from states and their nationalisms. Nietzsche’s trans-European eye sees
mobility as primary in human habitation. He apparently sharpened this view through his reading of
Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropo-Geographie (1882)—a book that he underlined and annotated. (Ratzel
became a problematic figure in later German geopolitics, contributing to the formation of the concept of
Lebensraum). Ratzel attempted to articulate the basic parameters of a truly global human geography, one
not limited by the perspectives of states, therefore not by written history, itself linked to the state form. In
the concluding chapter of his treatise, Ratzel highlights his signature thesis: the movement of peoples,
their inevitable mixing and tendency to homogenization is the most constant feature of human life
on the earth. He writes: The human being is restless, he strives for the greatest possible overall
expansion, wherever natural boundaries do not sharply hem him in, and any anthropological
conceptualization that does not take this restlessness into account, rests on a false foundation.
Humanity must be seen as a mass (Masse) that finds itself in constant effervescent or fermenting
motion (gährender Bewegung), and through this Gährung a great inner manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit) is
united. This fermentation obtains in varying degrees, but is absent in no people or stage of culture.
It has the tendency to make human beings ever more uniform, because mixing is inseparably bound
up with this movement.45 Nietzsche adds to Ratzel’s analysis that this mixing gives rise to hybrids and
monsters, “exceptional types,” not merely more uniform populations. This is not merely because of his
high valuation of individual genius, but also follows from what he adapts from Darwin and Darwinism
regarding the properties of a population. For example, Nietzsche begins Gay Science by saying that the
faulty mathematics of the solemn, tragic “teachers of the purpose of existence” leads them to substitute
one for the multiple; he looks forward to the time when we will have realized that “the species is
everything, one is always none”; the teachers of the purpose of existence fail to understand the logic of
the multiple: “for [them] there are no species, sums, or zeros” (GS 1). Here we should note Nietzsche’s
exclamation that this is “the century of the multitude (Menge)” (BGE 256). We should not be misled by
translations that read “Menge” as “masses.” “Masses” suggests only homogeneity; while Nietzsche does
see the drive toward homogeneity in the emerging Europe, he also emphasizes the exceptional, the
inventive, and the hybrid.46 (Note that set theory, being developed at precisely this time by Georg
Cantor to deal with the absolutely multiple or infinite, is Mengenlehre. I have no reason, however, to
think that Nietzsche knew Cantor’s work.) Again in this spirit, Nietzsche challenges the natal or
autochthonous dimension implicit in the national, the root of fatherlandishness. What gets called a
“nation” in Europe today (and is really more a res facta [something made] than nata [born]—every once
in a while a res ficta et picta [something fictitious and painted] will look exactly the same) is, in any case,
something young, easily changed, and in a state of becoming, not yet a race let alone the sort of aere
perennius [more enduring than bronze] that the Jewish type is (BGE 251). It seems at first that Nietzsche
depicts the Jews as an exception to the mobility and fictitiousness of the nations; but as the aphorism
continues, it becomes clear that they are to be distinguished from other groups only by the relative speed
of their movement, not by any essential characteristic. They represent a countermovement to the nomadic,
since they are seeking a place to settle down and assimilate to some degree. Yet this very movement,
Nietzsche opines, “perhaps already reveals a slackening of the Jewish instincts.” So even this group,
whom he had just described as “without a doubt the strongest, purest, most tenacious race living in
Europe today,” are subject to the general principle of mobility. Nietzsche emphasizes the agonistic
relation between nomads and the state (with its valorization of identity and its insane “state of
exception” nationalism) even more than Ratzel. Deleuze suggests (from a reading of Genealogy II 16–
17) that the nomads arise at the state’s periphery and exist in constant tension with it. The nomads
resist not only the existing empire or “despotic machine”; they resist the formation of states among
themselves. Official history largely neglects the nomads or finds them incomprehensible. Deleuze offers
an explanation: If there is no history from the viewpoint of the nomads, although everything passes
through them, to the point that they are the noumena or the unknowable of history, it is because
they cannot be separated from this task of abolition which makes the nomad empires vanish as if of
their own accord, at the same time as the war-machine is either destroyed or passes into the service
of the state.47 Earlier I agreed with Deleuze that Schopenhauer as Educator is an implicitly nomadic text
and supplemented Deleuze’s reading by recalling Nietzsche’s incorporation of related themes in Emerson.
Now whatever inspiration Nietzsche indirectly received from North America’s mobile populations and
expanding frontiers has been brought back to Europe with his observation, over a decade later, of its
increasing Americanization (cf. GS 329). Nietzsche is willing to make some conjectures about the way
in which the European experiments (there is never just one) will go. He has at least two models, and
it is not immediately obvious that they can be reconciled. The first is a democratizing and
homogenizing movement leading to the adaptable worker who will allow others to organize their
lives, close to Zarathustra’s last man and Hartmann’s globalized bourgeoisie. It makes possible the rise
of tyrants, including the “most spiritual” kind. On a second model, Europe is the breeding ground
for new forms of spiritual hybridity, and Nietzsche distinguishes the roles of receptivity and
generation. He sees two possibly productive roles for Germany: as the cultural stimulus for France and as
a marital introduction service for military families and Jews (BGE 251). Such hybrids, not the
homogenized last men, are movements in the style of the good European. On the one hand
homogenization, on the other hybridity. These two movements are simultaneous, because one is
common, the other rare. Social, economic, and geographic mobility produces a multitude adapted to
globalized conditions as well as exceptional new combinations brought about by a variety of causes.
The good European might look like a French philosopher inhabited by German thought (say French
philosophy from Sartre to Derrida) or the children of German-Jewish marriages. These hybrids are not
themselves instances of a higher type, but signs of the fertility of Europe’s productive ferment. Now we
can read the concluding aphorism of the chapter with its declaration: “Europe wants to become one”
(BGE 256). Nietzsche accuses the “insanity” of all the nationalisms of a mendacious
misinterpretation of Europe’s desire. How are we to understand this desire to become one? If
Nietzsche is a confirmed anti-essentialist (recall his critique of the national state and its
Schollenkleberei), would a new political Europeanism, a “European Union,” generate a new essentialism?
What does Europe want when it wants to become one? We should be puzzled when Nietzsche speaks of
“Europe”—this diverse collection of peoples whose differences Nietzsche has been cataloging and
analyzing throughout “Peoples and Fatherlands”—wanting anything. Yet Nietzsche reads this desire “in
all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century,” providing a representative list of writers,
composers, philosophers, and emperors (Napoleon). Contrary to their own self-portraits, Nietzsche
interprets figures like Stendhal, Beethoven, Heine, Schopenhauer, and Goethe as desiring that
Europe become one. Each, he suggests, “anticipate[s] experimentally the European of the future,”
by practicing cultural combination or synthesis. They are all hybrids (or monsters). Each proceeds
differently, and there is no grand synthesis, but different adventures. They exemplify a spirit of
experimentation freed of nationalistic insanity, even if occasionally misunderstanding themselves as
patriots, in moments of “weakness or in old age.” Wagner is the main example. Despite his egregious
German nationalism, Wagner’s work, Nietzsche claims, is intimately related to the French romanticism of
his youth. So he was never an echt German as a musician. Here is further confirmation of German
multiplicity. It is experimentation outside the self-imposed limits of peoples and fatherlands that makes
these de facto cosmopolitans and hybrids exemplary. Nietzsche seems to say that we can learn what it
means for Europe to become one by studying these figures: “It is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul
surges and longs to get further and higher through their manifold and impetuous art,” but he breaks off his
sentence with a question “—where? into a new light? toward a new sun?” The question is left open
whether these geniuses aim, even unconsciously, at a new Europe with a determinate content. Nietzsche
responds to his own questions: “What is certain is that the same storm and stress tormented them and that
they sought (suchten) in the same way these last great seekers (Sucher)!” It is a new way of seeking, a
Versuch or experiment, not an end sought, that is significant. “Becoming one” means joyfully
experimenting beyond the limits of nationality. These harbingers of the future are united only insofar
as they model (often unknowingly) new forms of hybridity and cosmopolitanism. Nietzsche
describes these “great discoverers in the realm of the sublime” in terms of multiplicity and
variation: they are “born enemies of logic and straight lines, lusting after the foreign, the exotic, the
tremendous, the crooked, the self-contradictory.” Yet these excessive experimentalists “all broke and
collapsed before the Christian cross,” so their career trajectories fail as models of the good European; it is
the mad, antinomian, and rebellious aspects of what Deleuze calls their lines of flight that offer a
promise of the future. While these hybrids are all “Tantaluses of the will,” failures who are unable to
realize their (often unconscious) projects of transcending ethnicity and nationality, their experiments
serve as initial models of living in the century of the multitude. Nietzsche has some fun at the end of
the chapter’s final aphorism, summing up Wagner’s “way to Rome” as in his last music drama, Parsifal.
He ends with a rhyme that asks of Wagner, “Is this still German?” and answers, “What you hear is
Rome—Rome’s faith without the text.” So Wagner used, again all unconsciously, the cloudy, nebulous
spiritual geography of Germany, its mediating genius, to produce a hybridity contrary to his more explicit
nationalist program. Wagner began, interculturally, with a music growing out of French romanticism, and
ends with a displacement to Rome and Catholicism. He is a middle, a muddle, a cloudy milieu. If
Nietzsche is appalled by Wagner’s trajectory, he sees his transformations in the context of Europe’s
democratic movement, a movement of populations that produces new configurations of multiplicity,
homogeneity, and hybridity, in the century of the multitude. But he has also shown that his early hero, the
apparent arch-nationalist, is one more odd hybrid produced by Europe’s nomadic fermentation. Nietzsche
returns, it seems, from the perspective of his “trans-European eye” to the local, the German, the place
from which he began in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History with his wish that the Germans
could free themselves from the tyranny of history. Yet here the German essence is aufgelöst in the
shifting tides of modern and modernizing Europe. What will be the direction of the earth? How can
philosophy think the event now called globalization that Nietzsche first confronted in his attack on
Hartmann’s Weltprozess? Again, it will not be a question of either geopolitical strategies or establishing
protocols for a new order of rank. The future of the earth cannot be known, planned, or predicted.
Nietzsche’s published remarks about such things as Russia’s emerging power, the desirability of
marriages between the Prussian officer class and wealthy Jews are best read as musings prompted by
relatively immediate circumstances; they are no more important than his Nachlass note wishing that
Germany should colonize Mexico. Any attempt to extract or derive ideas like these from Nietzsche’s
writing would be a great waste of time, or possibly an amusing parlor game for initiates. What Nietzsche
does do in the final chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, after taking the vivisectionist’s knife to the virtues
of his present and diagnosing the patient’s complex ailments, is to end with a question: “What Is Noble?”
Being noble or vornehm, of course, denotes a certain priority, whether natural or legal-traditional. We
will proceed to interrogate two related aspects of Nietzsche’s way of responding to the question,
responses that don’t provide conventional answers. The first has to do with time and its deformations.
How can the vornehm live vigilantly with the challenge of a future that cannot be anticipated? How can
they prepare themselves to be ready to seize the opportune moment by the forelock? This temporal
openness must be further defended against the amortizing of the future in a system of debt, as will
be shown in the Genealog y (billed as a clarification of Beyond). Second, nobility requires not only an
understanding of the changing social structures of Europe (in Nietzsche’ expanded sense of that term)
but specifically of the ways in which the vigilant may be misled by the enthusiasms of the multitude,
in a culture where various forms of celebrity or news of the day are confusedly taken as great
events. How can we distinguish the merely spectacular flight of Zarathustra’s simulacrum (or the media
words and images commanded by a tyrant) from the true “great events” which come softly on doves’
feet?
1NC – Policy – Generic
The State is a metaphysical fiction that secures our belief in it via fear-mongering and
ideological manipulation. Think here of how the 24-hour news cycle demands more
and more of your time, how thoughts of the Donald seep further and further into the
depths of your consciousness, of how you are told from childhood about how horrible
life would be were it not for the State! Such arguments are far from objective and
neutral. They blunt the edge of critical thinking by demanding that we focus so closely
on the narrow present that we don’t think about how Nations themselves are recent
inventions, how they rise and fall out of existence. To resist the difference, mobility,
and dynamism that characterizes (social) life, the State homogenizes the population
and insists upon a particular model of thought. State-thinking deploys the logic of the
border, of the interior/exterior distinction, of metaphysical states as opposed to
nomadism, hybridity, and flux. The logic of the border does not just operate in
discourses about citizenship and immigration; it operates in spaces like this one where
we are all-too-eager to determine who’s in and who’s out; it operates in how we view
ourselves, what’s within and outside our power. To make politics possible once again
we must reject the metaphysics of the State in favor of nomadism.

loyalty.
Life is the immanent and dynamic interaction of forces. Acknowledging this requires
overcoming the traditional image of thought, predicated on the ego, in favor of moving
thought to the level of the body. The time has come to free thought from the borders of
consciousness. Everything else is a matter of indifference compared to this line of flight.
Marsden 98. Jill, a scholar of the work of German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. BA, MA and
PhD from the University of Essex. Her doctoral thesis explored Nietzsche's Doctrine of Eternal Return.
“Critical Incorporation: Nietzsche and Deleuze.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 16 (Fall 1998), pp. 33-
48. Penn State University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20717694
If it is necessary to assume beings in order to "think," then knowledge and becoming are inherently
incompatible. Nietzsche speculates that the perdurant "ego" "is the sole being, after the model of which
we fashion and understand all being"the supreme court of appeal, that which remains unaffected by becoming
and change (518). But this reign is tyrannical, enforcing its law upon a multiplicity of sensations which it
imperiously holds in check. From such a perspective, the body is mere matter, a passive resource for
the imposition of form whilst knowledge is the vehicle through which the body conserves its energies,
masters multiplicity, preserves its equilibrium. To attempt to philosophise differently, to think of
multiplicity without commuting it to identity, a different perspective is required. Hence Nietzsche's
great insight: to reject the "perspective illusion" of unity that the ego promotes and take instead the
body as "starting point" for critique (492). In taking the body as his starting point, Nietzsche perceives a
difference at the origin of thinking. In contrast to the metaphysics of identity which reduces the many
to the One, the physiology of the body exhibits tremendous multiplicity and perspectival range. From
the vantage point of consciousness, the body is something that has form and may be admitted into the
vocabulary of identitarian thinking, but from the vantage point of the body, it is a bogus unity, only ever
the aggregation of the relations of continually fluctuating forces. For this reason, Nietzsche's genealogy is
always at some level a genealogy of the body, a "diagnosis" of its varying modalities and regimes. In an
exquisite definition in The Will to Power notes, Nietzsche characterizes the human body as that in which
the most distant and most immediate past of all organic becom ing comes back to life and becomes
incarnate, through which and over and beyond which a tremendous silent current seems to flow. (WP
659) As is made clear in this passage, for Nietzsche the body is not a spatially or temporally robust
structure, still less an index of personal identity. Rather, the physiological is regarded as an economy of
immanently self-organiz ing constitutive processes. One might think of the "current" which traverses
the body in terms of the energies of desire, the material flows or "libidinal" drives which orientate the
forces of life. In contrast to the Kantian conception of desire as the manipulation of matter by the
intentionality of a repre senting subject, Nietzsche reinscribes willing as ateleological, pre-repre
sentational, and opaque. Consequently, the currents which orientate the physiological are not to be
equated with the so-called "natural appetites" attributed to a body when it is apprehended
mechanistically as a functional or rational entity. The drives of the desiring body operate independently
of transcendent control structures, are inherently plastic, and freely admit sub stitution in their "objects."
As a result, one is unable to chart their trajec tory a priori, hence the task of interpretation falls to a
genealogical diagno sis of their dynamic. It could be argued that, in theorising the body thus, Nietzsche is en
gaged in the project of determining a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria. Such a
view is intimated by Deleuze, who follows Nietzsche's cue in situating his account of the philosophy of forces in
terms of the body: Every force is related to others and it either obeys or commands. What defines a body
is this relation between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a
body as soon as they enter into a relationship. (NP 40) As Deleuze explains in Nietzsche and Philosophy, the
being of force is plural, for every force is essentially related to another force (7). Indeed, this is the
interrelation of force which Deleuze calls the differential ele ment and which Nietzsche names the "will to
power." Inasmuch as will can only operate on will, Nietzsche maintains that "in all willing it is abso lutely a
question of commanding and obeying, on the basis ... of a social structure composed of many souls" (BGE 19).
Deleuze proposes that "in a body the superior or dominant forces are known as active and the inferior
or dominated forces are known as reactive" (NP 40). Active and reactive are the qualities which express
the relation of force with force. Deleuze claims that for Nietzsche an active force affirms its difference
from an other force whereas a reactive force merely "denies all that it is not and makes this negation
its own essence and the principle of its existence" (9). The difference between a body subordinated by
the edicts of reason and an exuberant corporeality which takes itself as its "starting point" is here im
plicit. As Nietzsche expresses it, While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of
itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is 'outside,' what is 'different/ what is 'not itself;
and this No is its creative deed. This inver sion of the value-positing eye, this need to direct one's view
outward instead of back to oneselfis of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality
always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at
all?its action is fundamentally reaction. (GM I, 10) Nietzsche claims that the noble mode of evaluation "acts and
grows spontaneously," engaging its opposite only to affirm itself triumphally. However, because active forces
are nonteleological, unpredictable, and excessive, they escape apprehension by consciousness
(whereas reactive forces can be understood in relation to superior forces). Modern thought attends
almost exclusively to the reactive aspect of forces, overlooking the "essential priority of the
spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions"
(GM II, 12,79). A prime example of this is evolutionary theory, which places "adaption" in the fore
ground, defining life as "a more and more efficient inner adaption to exter nal conditions" (II, 12, 79).
However, for Nietzsche, Life is not the adaption of inner circumstances to outer ones, but will to power,
which, working from within, incorporates and subdues more and more of that which is 'outside.' (WP
681) Contrary to the Darwinists, who construe life as fundamental reactive a tactics of environmental
adaption for survival Nietzsche suggests that life is ineluctably superabundant, fervently creative and
combative: The will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; it therefore seeks out that which resists
it, this is the original tendency of the proto plasm when it sends out pseudopodia and feels about. Appropriation
and incorporation are above all a wanting-to-overwhelm, a forming and shap ing and reorganizing until finally that
which has been overwhelmed has merged completely into the power of the attacker and has increased it. (WP
656; 12/424/9[151]; translation modified) The insatiable drive to appropriate manifests itself in the riotous inunda
tion and assimilation of whatever is alien, recalcitrant, or weaker than it self. This is the most basic
tendency of life as will to power, which even in its elementary animal forms "seeks to incorporate into
itself as much as possible, not just to compensate for loss, it is acquisitive" (9/490-1/ 11 [134]). The
restorative impulse is superseded by a thirst for expansion and conquest but it is an exorbitant desire, too great
to be attributed to any perceived "goal": One cannot ascribe the most basic and primeval activities of
protoplasm to a will to self-preservation, for it takes into itself absurdly more than would be required
to preserve it; and above all, it does not thereby 'preserve it self,' it falls apart. The drive that rules here
has to explain precisely this absence of the desire for self-preservation: 'hunger' is an interpretation based on
far more complicated organisms (?hunger is a specialized and later form of the drive, an expression of a
division of labour in the service of a higher drive that rules over it). (WP 651) In this passage and in related
notes Nietzsche explicitly denies that hunger or the drive to self-preservation are "first causes" and
emphasises the point that such excessive engorgement "is by no means a matter of restoring a loss"
(13/361/14[174]; WP 652). Indeed, it is only retrospectively that the organism's "need to appropriate" is
"reduced to hunger, to the need to re place what has been lost" (13/361/14[174]; WP 652). Moreover, since
this excessive consumption obeys no compulsion to conserve, its massive potential for accumulation
does not function as a stabilizing mechanism but rather constitutes a mode of expenditure suicidally
bound to annihilation. Such ruinous excess cannot be represented within the balance sheets and
account books of the philosophy of identity. Life as active incorporation is sacrificial, fatally indifferent
to its own self-preservation. What emerges from Nietzsche's physiology of forces is a virulent cri tique
of the reactive conditions that ground the philosophy of identity. For rationalist, utilitarian thinking, the
premise is that desire has determinate objects and is initiated by experience of their lack (hence the
stabilising no tion of fulfillment or restoration of loss). Such principles are manifested in a mode of reasoning
which collapses irreducible differences into indifferen tiation or equilibrium (being and nothing are thus both seen
as equally un differentiated). By contrast, for a thought of desire liberated from the representation of
some desired thing, the drive that rules is insatiable, unassimilable within the humanist logic of self-
preservation. Here another thought of difference is possible beyond the orbit of exchange where profit
and loss are commensurated: difference as nondialectical, irreducible, active. On Deleuze's reading this
new notion of difference is yielded through a close interrogation of Nietzsche's conception of the quantity and
quality of force. Arguing that the quantity of force is inseparable from difference in quantity, Deleuze maintains
that the relation of force to force can never be reduced to equality: Quality is distinct from quantity but only
because it is that aspect of quan tity that cannot be equalised, that cannot be equalised out in the difference
between quantities. Difference in quantity is therefore, in one sense, the irreducible element of quantity
and in another sense the element which is irreducible to quantity itself. Quality is nothing but difference in
quantity and corresponds to it each time forces enter into relation. (NP 43-44) If we accept the thesis that
difference in quantity reflects a differential ele ment of related forces, this may be regarded as the genetic element
of the qualities of these forces. For example, forces are said to be dominant or dominated depending on their
difference in quantity, yet active or reactive depending on their quality. Deleuze summarises this succinctly in
terms of Nietzsche's notion of "will to power": "The will to power is the element from which derive both the
quantitative difference of related forces and the quan tity that devolves into each force in this relation" (50). The
implications of this for the argument that Nietzsche radicalizes Kantian critique are clear: because the will to power
is never separable from particular forces, it changes itself with the conditioned and "determines itself in each case
along with what it determines" (50). It is a plastic principle which is "no wider than what it conditions." As Deleuze
takes pains to explain, relations of forces remain indeterminate without will to power as the internal differential
and genetic (genealogical) element. In other words, forces in relation recipro cally reflect a difference in quantity
which is simultaneously the site of pro duction of their respective qualities. Will to power thus names the
produc tive material becoming of forces as self-differentiating and radically impersonal. It is these
processes of primary productive synthesis which function as the "condition of possibility" for thought,
without recourse to any transcendent intelligence. Deleuze suggests that with this conception Nietzsche
radically transforms Kantianism and succeeds in mobilizing a "re-invention of critique which Kant
betrayed at the same time as he conceived it, a re sumption of the critical project on a new basis and with new
concepts" (52). 2. Incorporation Whilst Kantian philosophy fails to wield the critical knife against the tran
scendental ground of knowing, Nietzschean genealogy dissolves every rem nant of transcendence into a
metamorphic economy of "insatiable desire" {WP 619). This is achieved through the will to power which as a
plastic principle presupposes no "given" yet is determinative insofar as it "inter prets" the differential collisions of
force. The importance of understanding this corporeally cannot be overestimated, for central to Nietzsche's phi
losophy of forces is the claim that values are generated physiologically, indeed, that "value is the highest quantum
of power that a man is able to incorporate" (713). In articulating this thought, it is just as imperative to
distinguish Nietzsche's position from crude materialism as it is to avoid the paralogical inference that
values are manipulated by human subjects. Such would be the perspective of the philosophy of identity
with its func tionalist, reductive view of matter (the body tyrannized by consciousness). From the
perspective of the philosophy of irreducible difference, however, matter is inherently excessive, hence
anthropocentric notions of subject object relations are no longer pertinent: The will to power interprets it
is a question of interpretation when an organ is constructed): it defines limits, determines degrees, variations of
power. Mere variations of power could not feel themselves to be such: there must be present something that
wants to grow and interprets the value of whatever else wants to grow. Equal in that, In fact, interpretation is itself
a means of becoming master of something. (The organic process constantly presupposes interpretations.) (643)
The will to power produces values as the internal differential and genetic element of forces. In the
passage cited, Nietzsche says that it is a question of interpretation when an organ is constructed, a matter of
defining bound aries and determining differentials of power. This prompts the thought that not only are values
produced physiologically but that they simultaneously express an immanent evaluation of their mode of
expenditure (growth). Nietzsche's radical claim is that values are produced in accordance with the capacity for a
life form to interpret itself (for example, as active or reactive)?an argument which relocates the agency of
critique at the level of the physiological. Two interrelated questions arise at this juncture: first, how does
Nietzsche's genealogy of the body function as critique (specifically, as a critique of the will to truth) and, second,
how is this critique materialized or embodied*! To pursue this exploration it will be useful to counterpose what
might be termed the corpus of ressentiment or rational body to Critical Incorporation 43 Nietzsche's exorbitant or
desiring body (the philosophy of forces). As we have commented, the rational body functions according to
the principles of work, conservation, and utility, calculative processes which regulate its organs and
privatise its surfaces. Consumption is controlled and organised by interior mechanisms which articulate
the hierarchical structure of the rational body-politic, the myriad minor processes subordinated to the
autocracy of consciousness (where secondary processes diligently manufacture "needs"). The exorbitant
body, however, is invertebral, intensive, and subtly inventive. Its boundaries are provisional rather than
primordial, knit ted from the scar tissue of perpetual dehiscence. To the conservative pleasures of self-
preservation it exhibits the violent pleasures of nonproductive expenditure. It is active, rapacious, a
multiplicity of subjects and perspectives. The difference between these two conceptions of the body mirrors
the difference Nietzsche identifies between slave and master morality? the difference between negation and
affirmation of difference. Employing these two models of the body it is possible to illuminate Nietzsche's unique
assertion that values are physiological. It is clear that for Nietzsche "truth" as such is no longer the salient
criterion in evaluating claims to knowledge. Truth as it has been apprehended hitherto concerns the
conservation or preservation of a particular form of life, an error with out which a certain kind of being
could not survive (WP 493). It could be argued that this is the modus of the rational body which has ceased
to ac knowledge its growth, the sterile corpus of metaphysical thinking. In sec tion 11 of The Gay Science,
Nietzsche comments that "consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence
what is also most unfinished and unstrong" (GS 11); nevertheless, the thought that consciousness is in a
process of becoming is suppressed by the rational body which tyrannically harnesses its energies and
rejects its mutability: One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate,
and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determi nate magnitude. One denies its growth
and its intermittences. One takes it for the 'unity of the organism'. (11) As a static and impotent entity,
the rational body inhibits its own agency, interpreting itself solely from the perspective of reactive
forces. For this reason, the potentiality for transmutation, for the creation of knowledge, fails to
materialize. Intriguingly, the passage ends thus: To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and making it
instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is not yet clearly discern ible; it is a task that is seen
only by those who have comprehended that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all our
consciousness relates to errors. 44 Jill Marsden Blind to its creative potential as active force,
consciousness is only able to view the body from the perspective of its reactions (needs ): it is thus un
able to perceive the task of incorporating knowledge and making it part of its materiality. Nietzsche's employment
of the specific term incorporation is of vital importance to his critical enterprise. We have already encountered its
use in his remarks on the activity of life as will to power where it designates the dynamic of engulfing or
appropriation of that which is "outside." With respect to this apparently ceaseless insurgency, it is significant that
Nietzsche should employ a noun of continuous action. Incorporation ox Einverleibung indicates a strong sense of
process, the temporally unspecified perpetuity of an activity. In the context of articulating Nietzsche's physiology
of val ues, it has special significance because Einverleibung literally means "to take something in to the body (der
Leib), to in-corporate, and especially to voraciously ingest." As an exorbitant index of positive desire, Einverleibung
always involves increase, a becoming greater or more. Since this constant inclusion is not mediated by a
pr?existent interiority, the body which incor porates is itself created by incorporation. Whatever is taken in "from
the outside" forms the "inside" as such. In this way, what the organism con sumes or incorporates becomes the
same as itself, a "oneness" exorbitantly generated from diversity. Returning to the problem of truth, Nietzsche
suggests that knowledge hitherto has consisted in the incorporation of error. It is claimed that as a creature who
first fashions the things which it identifies as "being," the human animal is like the protozoan, subduing and
imposing form on what is outer. Hence: [Man's] means of nourishing himself and of appropriating things is to bring
them into 'forms' and rhythms. Grasping is first of all only creation of 'things'. Knowledge a means of nourishment.
( 10/651/24[ 14]) However, this "creation of things" or 'forms' necessarily entails abstraction from the
incorporating process. There would be no possibility of recognising anything recurring without this initial
dissociative act. Thus Nietzsche writes, Without the transformation of the world into forms and rhythms there
would be for us nothing the 'same', therefore nothing recurring, therefore also no possibility of experience and
appropriation, of nourishment. (11/608/38[10]) Nietzsche's point is that the " logical" concept of the self-
identical "same" integral to the philosophy of identity is clearly derivative from the process of "making
the same." The epistemologicai notion of identity is abstracted from this fluid course of becoming and
is treated as an entity that has finished becoming. On the basis of this ideal notion of identity,
differences are dialectically determined and a whole conceptual edifice is constructed. As Nietzsche
remarks in The Will to Power notes, All thinking, judging, perceiving as comparison has presupposed a "posit ing as
same", earlier still a "making the same". The making the same is like the incorporation of appropriated material
into the amoeba. (WP 501 ; 12/209/5[65]; translation modified) He goes on to remark in the same passage that,
with the later advent of the faculty of recollection, the drive to equalize or make-the-same is "tamed" and
difference is preserved within the rigid taxonomies of the mind. Thus the secondary processes triumph; exclusive
disjunction is introduced into the gleichmachende Triebe and the "same" as product is abstracted from its process
of production. Safely back within the cage of consciousness, exorbitancy becomes quantified,
identifiable, useful. The ego accordingly re-cognises identity as that which recurs as the same, as that
which may be re-presented to it. Knowing stabilizes the chaotic flux of becoming, wrests unchanging
being from the heterogeneous flows. This is what Nietzsche means when he speaks about the incorporation of
error. It serves reactive life. It prevents it from inundation by a riot of contradictory pulsions. Nietzsche does not
deny how useful these errors have been. Indeed, the strictures of the philosophy of identity have been so
effectively en gulfed that they have become instinctive. The critical edge of Nietzsche's inquiry resides in the
thought that the sustenance of a body by this knowl edge denies the dynamic of incorporation as perpetual: The
most strongly believed a priori "truths" are for me provisional as sumptions; e.g. the law of causality, a very well
acquired habit of belief, so incorporated that not to believe in it would destroy the race. But are they for
that reason truths? What a conclusion! As if the preservation of man were a proof of truth! (WP 497;
translation modified) The question is whether the body is able to liberate itself from its "life preserving
errors" in order to philosophise anew, a prospect it has been suggested that Kantian critique was unable to
countenance. Nietzsche claims in The Gay Science that all the higher functions of the organism have oper ated
"with those basic errors which have been incorporated since time im memorial" becoming "the norms according to
which 'true' and 'untrue' were determined?down to the most remote regions of logic" (GS 110): Thus the
strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it
has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. (110) 46 Jill Mars??n These conditions,
inherently corporeal, present the question as to whether a life-form is able to expend itself, sacrificing its own
"ground" or whether it seeks to preserve itself, inhibited by its thirst for secure terrain: A thinker is now that
being in whom the impulse for truth and those life preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the
impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of
this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the
conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by
experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment. (110). 3.
Critical Embodiment It is now possible to add a further dimension to our account of how Nietzsche's genealogy of
the body succeeds in both radicalizing Kantian critique and in generating a nonreductive postmodern philosophy of
differ ence. As has been demonstrated, the philosophy of identity depends on physiological gleich-machende
Prozesse for its infrastructure of iterability and hence, quite literally, feeds on itself. An "eternal return of the
same," understood metaphysically as the reproduction of a forsaken identity within a closed circuit of meaning or
thought, qualifies recurrence by a notion of the "same" which has been abstracted from the process of becoming-
the same and is now regarded as being-the-same (the incorporated errors of the rational body). However, as noted
earlier, the movement of incorpora tion which makes-something-the-same has no terminus, indeed, engorges to
the point of self-ruination or disintegration. As a noun of continuous action, Einverleibung not only expresses the
exorbitant insatiability of this process, but also defies division into the subject/object structure of noun/ verb. The
grammatico-conceptual prejudice of appending a detemporalised subject to a temporalised action is here
forestalled. Consequently, for the incorporating body of desire, the "same" in no sense constitutes a substan tive
state, but rather materialises as immanent to the fluid, metamorphic movement of becoming. This entails in turn
that recurrence is no longer posited as a transcendent principle which modifies a given set of entities but is itself to
be thought of as internal to becoming-the-same. In the absence of a fixed being which would order,
organize, and control the disper sion of identities across a delimited terrain, becoming-the-
same/incorpora tion unfolds as anarcho-logic, a rampant phagomania which reaches a limit only at the
point beyond which it encounters resistance or disintegrates. In each case it "overcomes" what it has
"become" since it is unable to stabi lize (and hence unable to function as a ground). Thus incorporation by
passes the exigencies of the functional body (hunger and its satisfaction), for it cannot be contained or completed
within itself: every "becoming" is perpetually "thrown over" as drives return upon themselves to
commence the process anew. It is thus apparent that for Nietzsche's genealogy incorporation eter nally
generates sameness from the chaotic upsurge and release of forces, from the pulses of creation and destruction in
the ongoing flow of ecstatic becoming. In this respect, it is possible to see how will to power functions as a
principle of Nietzsche's own philosophy of eternal return?as the dif ferential element where all forces will be
played out. It is now plausible to assert that the will to power is a derivative transcendental, derivative be cause it
is the plane generated by forces yet transcendental because it is where forces synthesize. Diversity thus emerges
as something that is pro duced by incorporation as irreducible quantitative difference. The differ ential element
expresses that which is shared in a multiplicity, a sameness which materializes in the process of incorporation.
Incorporation describes the in-bodying/embodying of knowledge that overthrows the organism and as such
threatens the stability of the rational body. To phrase this in a Kantian idiom, one could say that it is a matter of
critique confronting its own con dition of possibility. Because incorporation is plastic, the distinction be tween
inside and outside is immanent to the movement of incorporation itself. Boundaries materialize in their
actualization or passage and thus never stabilize as constitutive or categorial. * Critical incorporation
articulates a philosophy of active differentiation which engenders its concepts from nonparalogized synthesis.
Herein, the Deleuzian "differential element" names that which is shared in multiplicities of force, but it is a
"ground" which is both derivative and transitory. As has been shown, it is fruitless to attempt to break
quantitative difference down into an underlying unity or identity because there is no ground underlying
forces. Value as the highest quantum of power that an individual is able to incor porate expresses the standpoint
for the increase or decrease of dominating forces: "the standpoint of conditions of preservation and enhancement
for complex forms of relative life duration within the flux of becoming" (WP 715). Consequently, it is the will to
power that interprets because it deter mines the force which gives sense to a thing and affirmation and negation
are its primordial qualities. In asking which values are productive in a given phenomenon, the genealogist asks a
physiological question rather than an ontological one, judging whether a body has ceased to metabolise alterity or
whether it continues to affirm and enhance itself. For Nietzsche physi ological values bear directly upon the
Kantian notion of critique because they determine the conditions of possibility for a phenomenon?whether hunger
or plenitude has become "creative." Eerily reminiscent of Kant's insistences in the preface to The Critique of Pure
Reason, Deleuze maintains that Nietzschean critique is positive: Critique is not a re-action of re-sentiment but
the active expression of an active mode of existence; attack and not revenge, the natural aggression of
a way of being, the divine wickedness without which perfection could not be imagined. (NP 3) However,
there is a difference between the Kantian and the Nietzschean evaluations of positivity, a difference at the origin,
as it were. Whereas Kant criticises in order to secure a certain terrain for knowledge, Nietzsche
philosophises with a hammer, affirming "the eternal joy of becoming? that joy which also encompasses
joy in destruction" ( , p. 110). Unlike a critique which preserves the forces of law and order, Nietzschean
critique breaks down police cordons in contempt of the high court of reason. It is an experiment with
truth from which the thinker will not emerge unscathed. No longer joy in certainty but in uncertainty;
no longer 'cause and effect* but the continually creative; no longer will to preservation but to power;
no longer the humble expression, 'everything is merely subjective/ but 'it is also our work!?Let us be
proud of it!' (WP 1059)
[INSERT LINKS]
Nothing is worse than ressentiment. It is the proximate cause of nationalism, ideology,
genocide, hatred, and a million other scourges on the Earth. There is no joy while
ressentiment triumphs.
Blin ‘8 /Arnaud, Georgetown (BA), Fletcher School (Tufts) (MA), Harvard (PhD), coordinator forum for a
new global governance, The Institut Diplomacie et Défense, the French Institute for Strategic Analysis
and the Ecole de la paix de Grenoble. “Ressentiment: Throughout History” http://www.world-
governance.org/IMG/pdf_cahier_Ressentiment_anglais-web_1_.pdf/
History offers us an infinite array of examples of major and minor conflicts born of ressentiment.
Revolutions, the key periods marking a break from the past and generating major cycles of history, are
often the result of a sudden explosion of old ressentiments. Following the great revolutions of the 18th,
19th and 20th centuries and the eruption of major ideologies and virulent nationalist movements which
have all, in some way, instrumentalized legitimate ressentiments, the 21st century offers us the
spectacle of a worldwide political map consumed by every sort of ressentiment. To paraphrase René
Descartes, we could almost say that ressentiment is the most widely shared thing in the world. It is
indeed difficult to observe current affairs without perceiving the ressentiments that are the causes or
consequences of the major events that make up our daily lives. Let us take a recent example. What can
we make of the current financial crisis? That it will create a mountain of ressentiments, notably in
Southern hemisphere countries which could be freed from poverty with just a fraction of the hundreds
of billions of euros and dollars released with disconcerting speed by rich countries to save their banks.
The events of September 11th 2001 provide another example. The causes behind it? For many
observers, Islamic terrorism springs from the ressentiment felt by the Muslim world towards the West.
The war in Iraq? How many long-standing ressentiments has it created or exacerbated in the Middle
East? There is an endless supply of examples. Most current conflicts are primarily fed by ressentiment,
such as the conflict in the Middle East, tensions between India and Pakistan, and inter-ethnic conflicts
in Africa. The genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, the bloodiest conflict of the last fifty years, was
essentially a war of ressentiment, as were the wars in the former Yugoslavia. And aside from these
examples of open conflicts, how many countries and peoples are influenced by enduring animosity
dating from the past, recent or distant, which the collective memory keeps alive just below the surface,
ready to explode? China, for instance, has yet to forgive Japan the acts of violence it committed in the
1930s. Neither have the Armenians forgiven the Turks for the genocide of 1915, their bitterness only
exacerbated by the Turks’ refusal to recognise the event. The Spanish continue to nurture bitter
memories of Napoleon and, increasingly now that Civil War mass graves are being opened, Franco, as
well as of the Muslim colonisation, despite several centuries having passed since it took place. The
Greeks continue to hold a strong grudge against the Turks for the centuries of subjugation they inflicted
upon them. The Africans and Indians have ambivalent relationships with their former colonial nations,
France, England, Portugal and the Netherlands. Since the days of Monroe and, especially, Theodore
Roosevelt, the US has given its southern neighbours plenty of grounds for ressentiment, and still today
does nothing to overturn the feelings of animosity. Peru and Bolivia have not yet forgiven the Chileans
for having sequestered a vast territory and, for the Bolivians, access to the sea. Throughout the
Americas, from Chile to Argentina and the great Canadian north, Amerindian peoples feel the
consequences of European colonization in their daily lives, just like the Aborigines and Maoris, amongst
others, in the Pacific region. Ressentiment gnaws at people’s minds and hearts and shuts the door on
forgiveness. Collective ressentiment that establishes itself in individuals belonging to a community is
often composed of several strata. We can take Togo as an example: after French colonization and the
subsequent postindependence neo-colonization, this small country in West Africa fell prey to a power
struggle between the Kabyés northern tribes and Ewés southern tribes, the government greatly
favouring the former over the latter, and the latter fiercely defending their economic power against the
former. Throughout Africa these internal conflicts nourish a ressentiment that, combined with other
elements, is liable to blow up at any moment just like a dormant volcano. As demonstrated by the
Ivory Coast, until recently cited as a prime example of a stable and peaceful country. Political integration
could be seen as an effective remedy for collective ressentiment, as exemplified by France and
Germany, two countries that took the practice of ressentiment-driven wars to excess. Starting in the
18th century, or more precisely, since the Seven Years War (1756-63), ressentiment between the two
countries provoked a series of wars, two of which engulfed the rest of the world, as we can see by
examining the sequence of events. After Prussia’s humiliating victory over France at Rossbach in 1757,
the French were obsessed by the thought of exacting their revenge on the Prussians, leading to the
battle of Jena in 1806 with Napoleon. This humiliating defeat for the Prussians, who prided themselves
on having the best army in the world, gave birth to German nationalism and enabled Prussia and then
the reunified German nation to construct a state and a modern army. In 1870, the Germans wiped clean
the affront of 1806 by inflicting a severe punishment on France, which lost Alsace and Lorraine. Revenge
was the only thing the French could think of from 1870 to 1914, one of the main causes of the First
World War. The next stage came in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles, when Germany was collectively
humiliated by the victors of 1918, thus paving the way for the rise of Hitler and the Second World War.
Despite these events, Europe went on to rebuild itself after the war and the two former enemies
established a relationship built on real friendship, the cornerstone of the project for a united Europe.
However, European integration is not enough to drown out all existing ressentiment, far from it.
Whether you turn to Northern Ireland, Poland, the Basque Country or Corsica, to name just a few, long-
standing ressentiments foster communitarianism and tribalism that sometimes mutate into separatism.
The situation in Belgium provides a striking example. Despite being home to the European institutions,
this tiny territory contains two linguistic communities, francophone and Dutch-speaking, that are being
torn apart by old ressentiments, to the extent that the country is barely governable and seems on the
brink of imploding. So how have France and Germany succeeded in putting two centuries of war behind
them whilst other countries seem not just incapable of giving up their grudges, but actually exacerbate
them? An initial explanation may be found in the very nature of ressentiment. The conflicts and wars
between France and Germany were extremely violent and chalked up a number of fatalities yet to be
rivalled, possibly never to be rivalled. However, these were conventional wars, since they were
undertaken by states based on quarrels rooted essentially in territorial and hegemonic competition —
the desire to become the dominant power in continental Europe. The people were caught up in these
conflicts, instigated by their leaders, but they were not the driving force behind them. Ressentiment was
therefore in some way artificial, especially since everyone went home once the war was over. It is
symptomatic that regions where real popular ressentiment persists today are those that were
subjugated by the victor, Alsace and Lorraine being a case in point. And then there is the institutional
construction of the European Union which, it is worth pointing out, was built on the European Coal and
Steel Community (ECSC). But ressentiment is tenacious by nature. The Belgian situation is a stark
contrast. Walloons and Flemish people are not divided by war. Nevertheless, the humiliation the
Flemish felt when the Walloons were dominating the country’s economy produced a violent reaction
when the scales tipped in their favour. Contemporary Belgium is marked by a mutual and deep-seated
ressentiment. It is deep-seated because humiliation was, or still is, part of daily life. Because it does not
spring from a foreign state or government and its conquering armies, but from a people, the country’s
own people. We can see the same type of development in Rwanda, where deepseated ressentiment,
often felt between neighbours, sometimes even between a wife and husband, is rooted in daily
humiliation that was totally repressed before circumstances unleashed it with the most dramatic of
consequences. In contrast to other major 20th century genocides, the Rwandan tragedy had its origins
in the people rather than their political leaders. And the driving force behind it was ressentiment.
Collective ressentiment between peoples, both locally and globally, manifests itself on different levels,
which can be economic, social or ethnic. It may be rooted in a long, or even very long, history, and may
have been buried or suppressed by an autocratic government, as in the case of Tito in Yugoslavia. It may
on the other hand be more recent, without being any less virulent; the conflict between Jews and Arabs
in the Middle East is a case in point, where ressentiment that arose during the last century has blown up
to such proportions that it has become the main obstacle to a lasting peace, however much such a
peace would benefit everyone involved. Ressentiment may also undergo some sort of major shift: the
War of the Pacific was a conventional conflict, but the ressentiment born of the war, particularly in
Bolivia, marked the nation so significantly that it partially defines the Bolivian people’s collective
conscience, in the same way that the loss of access to the Pacific had an economic and social impact on
the lives of every citizen. Over a century after the Treaty of Ancón, the ressentiment born of this war
continues to define relations between Chile, Peru and Bolivia. Ressentiment rarely brings anything other
than trouble. Nevertheless, political leaders are quick to use it for nationalistic propaganda ends, either
to justify a conflict or legitimize their position of power. As demonstrated by the Argentine dictators
during the Falklands War, with ressentiment towards Great Britain playing a key role in the conflict.
Ressentiment between peoples or ethnic groups within a country is a potential source of civil war.
When it arises between states, it creates what we know as a conventional war. When it goes beyond
that level — an occurrence that happily remains within the realm of theory — collective ressentiment
traverses borders and affects civilisations. This equates to Samuel Huntington’s famous theory of “the
clash of civilisations” which to some extent takes ressentiment to its highest possible level. It also
explains radical fundamentalism as expounded by Ben Laden, its bestknown advocate. It would seem
that inter-civilisation ressentiment belongs to the past, even if a number of signs in different parts of the
world show that these kinds of ressentiment have not completely died out. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-
1648) represented a climax in conflicts of ressentiment, then known as wars of opinion, springing mainly
from intense religious rivalries between Catholics and Protestants. International relations then went on,
until 1991, to become resolutely state-oriented. In other words, states were powerful and wars were
mainly between countries. Nationalist ideology rooted in the concept of national interest had
suppressed internal ressentiment but failed to reabsorb it. The wave of decolonisation that came in the
wake of the Second World War consumed ressentiment nourished by several decades of Western
domination. The West thought that independence would put an end to animosity – wrongly. Fifty
years on, and the ressentiment felt by the former colonies continues to grow as their inhabitants
become aware of the full scope of colonial policies, a feeling corroborated by the collective guilt that
has overcome their former colonisers. Two examples are the persistently tense relations between
Algerians and the French, and between Indians and the British. At the same time, the movement to
defend the rights of minorities fosters a new understanding of indigenous peoples ground down by the
machine of History, a phenomenon that also applies to the entire American continent and Australia. As
we have already mentioned, ressentiment is the most widely shared sentiment in the world. But that
does not make it universal. Colonists do not feel it, or do not feel it in the same way. Or maybe we
should say that they are not aware of, or do not want to face up to, the ressentiment felt by colonised
peoples. The geopolitical thaw that resulted from the end of the Cold War gave birth to a multitude of
ressentiments around the world, sparking a number of civil wars throughout the planet. The arrogance
exhibited by the USA, especially during George W. Bush’s presidency, only exacerbated the old
ressentiments caused by decades of provocation and blunders committed by the “White” House in the
name of American moral superiority. All these elements and others besides combine to paint a
geopolitical portrait of the planet where ressentiment could be considered as one of the fundamental
factors of disruption in the modern world. In the light of the European tensions that spread throughout
the rest of the world in the 19th and early 20th century and the ideological warfare between the Soviet
and capitalist blocks, we could almost say that ressentiment has replaced the nationalist feelings and
ideologies in all their different shades that caused the cataclysms of previous centuries. We could even
go further and say that a sort of deep-seated ressentiment has replaced the instrumentalization of
ressentiment that formed the basis of 20th century ideologies, beginning with nationalist dogma. Was
not Nazism in some senses an ideology of ressentiment of the “other”, the Jew, the Slav, the non-Aryan?
Modern day ressentiment tends to be shorn of this kind of ideological instrumentalization, which in
some way makes it purer, but just as dangerous, since its roots go deeper. How can ressentiment be
tackled? This is possibly one of the key questions we need to find an answer to in the 21st century,
especially since new sources of animosity such as protecting the environment, competition for common
goods such as water and energy, and equity between peoples will create another layer of ressentiment
if not resolved. One thing is sure: lasting peace is impossible whilst all these ressentiments are not
reabsorbed, or at least contained and channelled.
**Link**
Link – Borders
All boundaries are predicated on the violent assimilation of alterity. The existence of
citizenship necessarily lends itself to a demarcation of what forms of communication
are acceptable.
Kramer 16 [Eric Mark Kramer, “Social Inquiry into Well-Being,” 2016, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 12-23, Mykolas
Romeris University, https://repository.mruni.eu/bitstream/handle/007/14582/4442-9847-1-
SM.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y]
Volunteerism is less the case with refugee identity. But in the case of both the refugee and the immigrant, we notice that the sojourner often
seeks refuge among their “own kind” in conversations of “their” language and may seek to physically and psychologically withdraw from time-
to-time to essentially rest and make sense in their own fashion of all the new experiences they are being exposed to. This involves personal
time and space, in a word territoriality. All animals need a sense of territory where they feel safe and in control (Hall, 1966; Morris, 1969).
Humans are the same. When a person cannot retreat into a time and space they control then we see a breakdown in their psychology and their
patterns of behavior (Calhoun, 1983; Morris, 1969). The
enclave is an essential and common aspect of immigrant
identity. Enclave implies membership; belonging. An enclave is a place of cooperation where behavior
can run more on subconscious scripted patterns. The world is more implicit than explicit, less
problematical. Enclaving is not an economic process but rather a psychocultural process that can have
economic consequences as when Chinese open a Chinese language bank in China town. Whether one is
speaking of the relatively poor Latino barrios of Los Angeles or the enclave of Chinese immigrants in
wealthy Flushing, New York, the felt need to retreat into the familiar is the same. The enclave is not
merely space. It is a place inscribed with signification. It is in the simplest terms a territorial
phenomenon and like all territoriality, such places often seem to outsiders insular and aggressively
defended. The irony here is that the immigrant may well feel that the local folk aggressively defend the
larger society from difference. It has to do with a sense of belonging. This in essence means identity and co-ownership. This is my
neighborhood and I belong to it. This is my “mother tongue” and I belong to it. Enclaving may take the form of refuge and retreat into a familiar
cuisine, a familiar style of music, movies and television from the home culture, spending time visiting Internet websites created and maintained
by people from the Social Inquiry into Well-Being, 2016, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 12-23 17 home culture, and so forth. For isolated individuals such as
many foreign students, their dorm room may be their enclave and their favorite Internet web sites their destinations of escape from a strange
world. Because life for the immigrant is complicated and stressful, enclaving is an attempt to retreat from time to time into a comfort zone of
The relative certainty
the familiar where one can relax from being constantly vigilant and also feel reconnected with their home world.
of the familiar helps to alleviate anxiety (Berger and Calabresse, 1975). As Nietzsche (1882 Ger./1974 Eng.) noted, to be
familiar with something means to “know” it. Otherness implies uncertainty, mystery, and this can lead
to a feeling of anxiety about “the stranger” on both sides of the relationship. The best way to reduce that anxiety is
to become familiar with each other. When Otherness as a function of differentiation occurs, communication
patterns shift making issues like trust, confidence, and self-efficacy salient. When one crosses a
boundary one becomes either a minority or a majority as such. One becomes a “member,” either of an
“in-group” or “out-group” as such, and this sense of differentiation depends on the context. In fact a
person is a member of both an in-group and an out-group at the same time depending on perspective.
As soon as one identifies with an in-group, outgroups are implied. Identity is given through difference
(Saussure, 1916 Fr./1977 Eng.; Heidegger, 1957 Ger./1969 Eng.). Identity is a co-constituted phenomenon (Kramer, 1993). Identity is thus, at
least in part, a social construct (Schutz, 1953; Schutz and Luckmann, 1959 Ger./1973 Eng.; Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Goffman, 1959;
Garfinkel, 1964/1972). This shifting aspect of identity increases with mobility. It is co-evolutionary, co-constitutive in nature. The shifting quality
of identity occurs as both a mundane aspect of human reality and sometimes as an extra-ordinary occurrence. It is rooted in the temporal
nature of our being. Time, as Husserl (1917 Ger./1964 Eng.) pointed out in his study Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, which
Heidegger was editing and borrowing from as he wrote his own magnum opus, Being and Time, which in turn has had a profound influence on
the work of Jacques Derrida (1967 Fr./1980 Eng.; 1972 Fr./1981 Eng.) with his emphasis on difference, time is of the essence of human
awareness including self-awareness and identity. Changes in identity are constant but are most pronounced in threshold experiences. It occurs,
for instance, when someone “middle aged” comes upon a group of teenagers and becomes “middle-aged” and “inappropriate” as such, or
when one enters a strange temple, or when one finds herself in the “wrong” neighborhood,” or when a foreigner joins one’s work team, or
when an authority such as a high level boss sits down to have lunch with a crew of laborers. What
happens is that difference and
therefore identity suddenly comes into focus and this alters the mood, the pattern of communication,
and the sense of self as inclusive or exclusive, as belonging or as intruding, as being appropriate or
inappropriate. With cognitive uncertainty comes anxiety about the unfamiliar. For instance, when a high level
authority suddenly appears in a factory cafeteria where he rarely ventures and sits down with a work crew to “mingle” and “connect,” often the
discourse that constitutes the crew as a group suddenly stops due to intimidation and suspicion. The manager may not get the sort of candid
feedback he hoped for due to his very presence. So the anonymous “suggestion box” often works better at facilitating communication. At
the
social level, integration is really co-integration. Communication is not a one-way process. While what
Gudykunst and Kim (2003) call “conformity pressure” is exerted one-way on to minority immigrants by the
numerical majority of the host population is real, it is not, and cannot completely overwhelm the
immigrant’s mind. If it did they would be like an erased computer memory, having no operating system
left with which to translate and interpret (make sense of) their new world even if and even though that
interpretation must be accented. Like the co-constitution of identity and the co-evolutionary process
whereby a society both changes and is changed by immigrants who move in joining the living process of
society as a system, a semantic field (Kramer, 1997; 2000b), integration is also a communicative process.
Integration is co-integration. In short “both sides” influence each other. Conformity pressure exists on
“both sides” or in both directions. And the intensity of the pressure cannot, as Gudykunst and Kim (2003)
argue, be reduced to simple quantification. A single missionary entering a village can have tremendous
influence. The immigrant is always already a part of the psychosocial system into which they move. But
according to the theoretical construct of Gudykunst and Kim’s intercultural adaptation theory, the
immigrant adds nothing to the system but must “progress” in and “upward-forward” direction toward
the “mainstream” host culture or fail. It is a neoSpencerian social Darwinian theory that justifies forced
conformity applied by an official national culture to all newcomers (Kramer, 2000b; 2000c). The immigrant
Other is always already a part of the social system into which they move. Integration presumes
differences, perspectives that persist even as they influence each other and change. The perspectives that are
manifest hermeneutic horizons do the integrating. Accent in ways of talking, walking, dancing, arguing, doing friendship and so forth are
inevitable. Diversity is the antidote to routinized and simplified cognition -- boredom. Boredom is a natural state for human beings and they
tend to seek to avoid it. Too much boredom due to a lack of diversity in experience, can easily lead to depression. Multicultural boarder zones
such as ports are very dynamic places to live and tend to attract large populations of people in part because they are stimulating environments
that offer not just economic opportunity but stimulus opportunity. In short, Otherness is stimulating. This
is not to say that the
presence of Otherness does not sometimes lead to conflict. But the theory of cultural fusion, unlike
Gudykunst and Kim’s theory of intercultural adaptation does not make value judgments about which
kinds of behavior and interaction are good and bad. While they present a plan of social and
psychological engineering calling it a social scientific theory, the theory of cultural fusion does not posit
a utopian goal such as the elimination of all conflict or misunderstanding.
Link - National Identity/Nationalism
Nietzsche doesn’t just call for the abolition of national identity; he also provides
powerful means of creating new global identities.
Morgan 2009 (Diane, lecturer of cultural studies at the University of Leeds, “Nietzsche and National
Identity,” A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. By Keith Ansell Pearson, Wiley-Blackwell, 455)
Trade and industry, the post and book-trade, the possession in common of all higher culture, rapid
changing of home and scene, the nomadic life now lived by all who do not own land – these
circumstances are necessarily bringing with them a weakening and finally an abolition of nations, at least
the European: so that as a consequence of continual crossing a mixed race, that of European man, must
come into being out of them. (HH 475) At first sight Nietzsche’s opinion of national identity might seem
to be crystal clear: it is an artificial construction, an old-fashioned concept, which is rapidly
becoming anachronistic. The affirmation of national identity in Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century world –
particularly, as far as he was concerned, in the guise of Prussian nationalism – was to be considered a
regression to earlier times. The powerfully transformative technological, economic, and cultural
tendencies driving the evolution of the modern world were to be seen as forcing nationalism from the
forefront of political agendas probably all over the globe, but at the very least within Europe. Nietzsche
scholars have been eager to insist on such a reading of the philosopher’s standpoint on national identity.1
Understandably they have wanted to distance his works from the attempts of sympathizers with National
Socialism to pressgang them into the service of the Third Reich.2 However, in this essay I want to
suggest that Nietzsche’s analysis of national identity was far more complex, nuanced, and ambivalent
than is generally recognized. It does not suffice to present Nietzsche merely as a “good European” who
espoused the adoption of the “supranational” and nomadic “homelessness.”3 Rather than simply
jettisoning the concept of national identity in favor of that which supersedes its boundaries, he instead
combined his interrogation of the relevance of the nation-state in a changing context with an appreciative
analysis of cultural specificity and nascent independence movements. That is to say, Nietzsche can be
seen not only as engaging with most topical issues relating to “transnationalism,” but also as contributing
towards thinking on emerging national identities within an interrelated global community. These two
movements of his thought give us some insight into the major political and social turbulences of
Nietzsche’s own age, as well as providing us with a means to analyze more recent political and social
shifts, such as those that have taken place in Europe since 1989.
Nation states create tensions among one another to reinforce their control over their
communities. While this might successfully homogenize the population, such
nationalist militarism is ultimately self-defeating, as it depletes the cultural energy of
a people and undermines their unity as a result.
Identity,” A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. By Keith Ansell Pearson, Wiley-Blackwell, 456-7)
In the passage on “European Man and the Abolition of Nations” in Human, All Too Human cited above,
Nietzsche certainly associates “national states” with negative attributes. For example, they are seen as
producing noxious hostilities both without and within themselves. Between nations tensions arise
precisely because such belligerent friction is useful for keeping the artificial construct, which is the
nation, mobilized and thereby intact. Its precious borders, which mark out the difference between
the “us” and the “them,” also create inner ethnic conflicts by attempting to enforce a specific,
homogenized identity on the population. As Nietzsche says: “the entire problem of the Jews exists only
within national states” (HH 475). With a more fluid conception of belongingness, one that does not try to
bind nationality together with a particular cultural and biological “identity,” one that could countenance
the prospect of unspecified people in transit, or those with multiple identities and allegiances, such
constitutive “problems” might not arise. The eruption of divisive “national hostilities” in Nietzsche’s late
nineteenth-century world was nevertheless deemed by him to be a mere “temporary counter-current” to
the modern “mixing” process which inexorably works towards the eventual “amalgamation of nations.”
Later on in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche considers how the enthusiastic feeling of possessing a
national identity expresses itself more often than not as nationalism. This by-product, which leads
to the mass slaughter of young men on battlefields, is considered to be a wasteful depletion of
natural energy reserves that could otherwise be put to good cultural use. When the body politic is
mobilized around the “lusting after political laurels,” each individual’s attention is likewise
absorbed; energy which could be directed in a concentrated fashion towards more focused cultural
preoccupations is dissipated in the general “inflorescence and pomp of the whole” (HH 481). The
continuous flag-waving, the breathtaking blowing of trumpets and chanting of patriotic songs, as
well as the monotonous marching and the bloody fighting itself, all expend vast quantities of
valuable physical, psychic, and nervous energy, with little left over for other intellectual, artistic,
and spiritual undertakings, which demand “great concentration and application.” Hence, the result
of such a “political blooming of a people” must inevitably be an overall “spiritual impoverishment
and enfeeblement.” Here too, national identity – at least one motivated by an expansionist, empire
building drive, the wish to become a daunting political “colossus” – is considered to be a collective
manifestation which is uninteresting, superficial, and tacky (Nietzsche refers to “the coarse and
gaudy flower of the nation”). Its militaristically fueled search for geopolitical recognition is
ultimately counterproductive inasmuch as, far from strengthening the nation, the body politic is
spiritually depleted and thereby rendered vulnerable.4
Nietzsche does not call for a simple rejection of national identity, but a more
ambivalent relation. National identity is the result of a process of cultural
development – and maintaining an untimely relationship to one’s nation is the
condition for helping it grow.
What has emerged from the above analysis is a more intricate understanding of national identity at
work in Nietzsche’s writing, which precludes a straightforward rejection of the issue. Hence we now
turn back to Human, All Too Human and to a passage therein which gives a more elaborate account of
national identity than the others analyzed above from this same book. Counteracting the simplistically
negative remarks initially extrapolated from this text, Nietzsche elliptically gives the title “To be a good
German means to degermanize oneself ” (“Gut deutsch sein heisst sich entdeutschen”: AOM 323). This
phrase suggests that a good German, such as Goethe, moves gracefully away from his embarrassing
national roots into the freer air of, for instance, European culture, but in so doing he remains typically
German.19 The folkloric dress and customs of a nation can all too easily become a straitjacket
hampering growth and stultifying expression. He who breaks through this imprisoning “girdle”
thereby helps to further the aims of the despised tradition whose shackles he was supposed to have
discarded. The Volk need a demolition man to smash down the otherwise petrifying and
debilitating crust that accrues on their cultural forms of self-representation: in repudiating his
origins, he thereby liberates them, obliging them to outgrow the stereotypical modes of behavior
that determine them and to imitate his new model. Nietzsche insists that national identity should
not be seen as something permanent. It is not a natural, immutable given, but is instead a reflection
of “varying stages of culture.” Nietzsche concludes: He therefore who has the interests of the Germans
at heart should for his part see how he can grow more and beyond what is German. That is why a change
into the ungermanic [Die Wendung zum Undeutschen] has always been the mark of the most able of our
people. (AOM 323) Far from offering a straightforward dismissal of national culture, Nietzsche is
here reformulating its nature and scope. He suggests that great men like Goethe are able to tap the
potential for dynamic change that national culture contains. Instead of remaining locked into the
senseless repetition of redundant customs, an evolving national identity can become a rich source of
energy for a “forward-moving people.”
Cultivating an untimely relationship to one’s culture opens up future oriented and
utopian possibilities for self-transformation.
Another passage from Human, All Too Human, deliberately left unexamined earlier on, also introduces
material for a more positive stance on national identity than one might imagine to be the case. In
“Whither We Have To Travel,” Nietzsche gives a very different account of cultural traditions than, for
example, in the section “Fashion and Modernity” (WS 215) previously discussed. Instead of espousing
the liberating influence of modern city life, he here gives a sensitive account of the richness of
regionalism. Nietzsche begins by insisting on the importance of time-traveling: this can either take
the form of physically moving between cultures – as each one evolves at a different speed and in a
different way from the others – or by absorbing the various historical “strata” which pulsate
through a locality that has preserved its cultural past: The last three centuries very probably still
continue to live on, in all their cultural colours and cultural refractions, close beside us: they only want to
be discovered. In many families, indeed in individual men, the strata still lie neatly and clearly one on top
of the other: elsewhere there are dislocations and faults which make understanding more difficult. A
venerable specimen of very much older sensibility could certainly have been more easily preserved in
remoter regions, in less travelled mountain valleys, in self-enclosed communities. (WS 223) The
exploration of the “savage” ages which still resonate within isolated cultures unspoilt by the
hardening processes of the modern world, is seen to open up not to shut down the ego – for
Nietzsche considers that it is the “ego” which goes adventurously traveling through these latent past
eras.20 This analysis of the historically informed self is most positive, even utopian: the “processes
of becoming and transformation” which are activated by such adventures through time, if not
necessarily across space, are regarded as leading in turn to an eventual overcoming of the self
towards a higher plane. Nietzsche writes: Thus self-knowledge will become universal knowledge with
regard to all that is past: just as, merely to allude to another chain of reflections, self-determination and
self-education could in the freest and most far-sighted spirits, one day become universal determination
with regard to all future humanity. (WS 223) A trip into the mind of the narrowest of circumscribed
individuals, provided that that person relates symbiotically to his environment, will open up varied worlds
which might stretch back to ancient Greece and beyond, encompassing hereditary tales of intrepid
seafarers or dignified Venetian merchants. A reawakening of past cultural forms, songs no longer sung,
dances no longer danced, though remembered deep down, might tap into drives searching for expression
which span temporal and spatial divides. Interestingly, such an exploration is not of mere antiquarian
interest (the wish to preserve a common past); it is future-oriented, working towards the ultimate
conflation of boundaries between the self, the particular culture, and the rest of humanity. Nietzsche
begins this section by evoking Heraclitus’ conundrum, “Does time flow through us or do we flow through
time?” He then asserts that “we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we
experience of this continued flowing [of the past]” (WS 223). Regions where the past still resonates are
regarded as extending to full span the nature of the human, whereas the past is regarded as sterilely
fossilized in urban museological mausoleums. Hence one’s quest for self-knowledge might well find
fertile sustenance among “savage and semi-savage” peoples who live modestly and traditionally in a
remote rural locations, far from the disenchanted, dehistoricized urban centres.
Nietzsche calls us to pursue a ‘higher patriotism’ where we interrogate the historical and cultural
processes that shape national identity and simultaneously pursue trans-national politics.
Indeed Nietzsche’s virulent anti-Germanness became for east Europeans a model of, to use Alice
Freifeld’s term, “higher patriotism.” That is to say, a patriotism willing and able to judge the nation
that was in the process of being constructed, rather than just following in its trail. “Higher
patriotism” is capable of interrogating the very idea of national identity, while being willing to
exploit the most productive reserves that the cultural tradition contains. The idea of a “higher
patriotism” also necessitates a refusal to isolate the nation from outside influence, to lock culture up
within an insulated, discrete identity. It asserts itself in and through an evolving articulation with a
more inclusive and complex (cosmopolitan) supra-identity – in this case “European.” Nietzsche’s
sustained fascination with the figure of Goethe contributes to this new formulation of national identity: as
we saw, Goethe is praised as a European event and yet as one of the last great Germans, a de-Germanized
German. In this manner, national identity is informed and reworked by a trans-national idea of
belongingness. A similar sophisticated negotiation faces many newly emerged nation-states today in the
new Europe. While feeling disoriented by what has been called their “postcolonial syndrome,” they are
inventing or rediscovering their own particular cultural heritage and national identity while thinking and
feeling European, while rediscovering what they see as their European past, within a global (economic,
political, cultural) context.26 This nurturing of national and cultural singularity, within both a
European and a global framework, is a delicate, critical and self-critical, future-oriented process
which differs radically from any reclaiming of some pre-given, retrievable past identity. Nietzsche’s
meditations on questions of national identity and its relationship to a trans-national culture can be
perceived as timely and pertinent to such a context.
Link – Moral Character Requirements
Moral character requirements in US immigration define a “deserving immigrant” as a
shining light to follow, while ineligible immigrants are contrasted against this specter,
effectively painting them as the threatening brown bodies which are particularly
vulnerable to racialized surveillance and enforcement
Valdez 2016 Valdez, Inés. Assistant Professor at Ohio State University. “Punishment, Race, and
the Organization of U.S. Immigration Exclusion.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, 2016,
pp. 640–654., www.jstor.org/stable/44018046.
The immigration regime produces multiple subjugation effects that differentiate sub-populations
of migrants along an axis of inclusion/exclusion related to their contribution to economic
profitability and national security. Racialized subjects who nurture the wellbeing of the
privileged may be included, as in the case of young migrants who arrived as minors and are
college-bound or willing to serve in the army.
As Ali Behdad, notes, narratives about migrants track the inherent ambivalence of the U.S.’s
identification with and against migrants (1997, 2005): migrants may renew the consensual basis
of citizenship or remind the polity of the value of community and family or be rejected because
their traditional values threaten “our” way of life (Honig 2001; Brendese 2014). I
complement these accounts by arguing that, first, even migrants deemed indispensable to the
polity are incorporated through punishment, given the temporary, conditional and protracted
paths to legal status available to them; second, forms of incorporation rely on processes of
subjectification attached to regulatory projects of entrepreneurial and/or militarized
citizenship and third, such processes of subjectification are not, however, always successful.
Regarding the first point, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act
(DREAM Act) would have provided a path to legal status for children of undocumented
migrants who arrived as minors. It gave conditional residency to high school graduates with
“good moral character,” who had been in the country continuously for at least five years prior
to the bill. Further requirements included serving for at least two years in the military or
completing two years at a four-year college. “Conditional residency” lasted five years, renewable
for another conditional five (U.S. Congress 2010). During this time applicants would pay
regularization fees and taxes but not qualify for federal financial aid or social benefits. Given
these conditions, it was estimated that only about 38 percent of qualifying migrants would attain
citizenship status after 10 years (Chishti et al. 2010).
The 2012 DREAM Act passed the House and was filibustered in the Senate. It was the most
restrictive version of a bill introduced repeatedly since 2001 and its limited success was indebted
to the military track, added when the Democratic leadership saw no hopes of passing
comprehensive immigration reform (Herszenhorn 2010). After the victory in the House, Speaker
Nancy Pelosi claimed:
[DREAMers’] identity is all American, some of them don’t even speak the language of the
country of origin of their parents, many ... come here with this great patriotism .... serve in the
military, and so they strengthen our national security. Secretary Gates has said: the DREAM Act
represents an opportunity to expand the recruitment and readiness of our armed services. (Pelosi
2010, emphasis mine)
The bill recognizes the immigration regime as just by claiming that only those brought in
without consent are innocent. Second, it defines a “deserving migrant” that holds a high
school diploma which—given the unequal quality of, and access to, education, higher dropout
rates among Latina/os, and higher poverty rates among undocumented migrants—is hardly
easily obtainable and selects an academically “faulty” group out and—given the requirement
of a high school diploma and the limited options for financial aid—leaves even some of those
who qualify out of the college track and channels them into a stressful (and potentially
lethal) path to citizenship through military service.
The DREAM Act offers a regulatory inclusion; it marks the included in contrasts to the excluded
and produces a variety of subjects: patriotic and/or overachieving individuals who did not
willingly break immigration law are deserving, the rest are outlaws not to be trusted or not hard-
working enough to be granted status, and must be disciplined and surveilled (Foucault 2003, 45-
6).
While no group is exempt from the toughness of immigration rules, their capacity to obtain legal
status is differentiated biopolitically. The undocumented parents who brought the DREAM Act
beneficiaries into the country are particularly undeserving. They—unlike their children—
knowingly broke immigration laws and will stay undocumented and remain surveillance
targets, which is functional to their status of replaceable labor that cares for the privileged. A
second group, the undocumented children and young people ineligible for the DREAM Act
(or DACA, see below) or who will lose eligibility during the conditional period, is identified in
contrast to the achieving or patriotic young migrants as dropouts, teenage mothers,
potentially criminal or gang members who lack work ethic. They personify the threatening
brown bodies that imperil the wellbeing of the privileged and will be particularly
vulnerable to the racialized surveillance of immigration and law enforcement.
While discipline is the dominant way to manage those excluded, the subjects who qualify for
relief remain governed subjects, with their identities shaped by and/or strategically negotiated in
response to changes in the system of governmentality (Rose 1999, 65-6; Mountz et al. 2002).
The practices of socialization and self-improvement that structure DREAMers’ subjectivities are
ultimately indebted to projects of entrepreneurial selves (Winnubst 2012, 83-5; Pallares 2014,
103), reflected in the practice of wearing graduation gowns or publicizing their academic
successes to signal the benefits that their inclusion brings to the privileged. By adopting this
particular subjectivity they make possible “to govern without governing” (Rose 1999, 88).
The centrality of youth activism within the immigration movement and the model minority status
of this group explain that, in 2012, after the DREAM Act failed, President Barack Obama passed
deportation for the would-be beneficiaries of the DREAM Act. Two years later, another
executive action expanded DACA eligibility and deferred deportation for parents of citizens and
permanent reside, DACA and DAPA merely de-prioritize migrants’ deportation cases. These
measures were accompanied by other executive actions that both expanded relief and created
new vulnerabilities, continuing to differentiate sub-groups among migrants according to their
contribution to economic growth and national security and/or their family connections, and
intensifying the vulnerability to deportation for some (Johnson 2014b, 2014c, 2014e, 2014d,
2014f; Valdez 2015). DACA-eligible migrants confirm the fairness myth and the legitimacy of
an increasingly unequal and racialized US society. Instead of offering an egalitarian
incorporation, these measures reinforce the Neoliberal myth of autonomy—even
undocumented immigrants, if they are tough, can make it!—that mutes opposition to the
dispossession that fuels migration and the informal sector that demands exploitable labor
(Sassen 1988, 1998).
Link – Security - Generic
Disorder and unpredictability are inevitable. In response to this security crisis, national
interest has evolved into a nuclear charge stand off based on a suicide pact. We must
learn to live with the world as it is—Admitting that everything is dangerous will allow
us to break out of the death cycle.
Der Derian 8 Der, Derian, James. Critical Practices in International Theory : Selected Essays,
Routledge, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=401831. Created from purdue on
2018-06-25 13:17:59.
The rapidity of change in the international system, as well as the inability of international theory to make sense of that change, raises this question: Of
what
value is security? More specifically, just how secure is this preeminent concept of international relations? This evaluation of security
invokes interpretive strategies to ask epistemological, ontological, and political questions – questions
that all too often are ignored, subordinated, or displaced by the technically biased, narrowly framed
question of what it takes to achieve security. The goal, then, of this inquiry is to make philosophically
problematic that which has been practically axiomatic in international relations. The first step is to ask
whether the paramount value of security lies in its abnegation of the insecurity of all values. No other
concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary power
of “security.” In its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods, emperors, and
most recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of nature – as well as
from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its name, weapons of mass destruction have been
developed which have transfigured national interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact. And,
less often noted in international relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific
knowledge has been furthered and intellectual dissent muted. We have inherited an ontotheology of
security, that is, an a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of
security because there currently happens to be a widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept
of security lurks the entire history of western metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida “as a series of substitutions of center for center” in a perpetual
search for the “transcendental signified.”1 From God to Rational Man, from Empire to Republic, from King to the People – and on occasion in the reverse direction
as well, for history is never so linear, never so neat as we would write it – the security of the center has been the shifting site from which the forces of authority,
order, and identity philosophically defined and physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos, and difference. Yet the center, as modern poets and postmodern critics tell us,
no longer holds. The
demise of a bipolar system, the diffusion of power into new political, national, and
economic constellations, the decline of civil society and the rise of the shopping mall, the acceleration of
everything – transportation, capital and information flows, change itself–have induced a new anxiety. As
George Bush repeatedly said – that is, until the 1992 Presidential election went into full swing – “The
enemy is unpredictability. The enemy is instability.”2 One immediate response, the unthinking reaction,
is to master this anxiety and to resecure the center by remapping the peripheral threats. In this vein, the
Pentagon prepares seven military scenarios for future conflict, ranging from latino small-fry to an
IdentiKit super-enemy that goes by the generic acronym of REGT (“Reemergent Global Threat”). In the
heartlands of America, Toyota sledge-hammering returns as a popular know-nothing distraction. And within the Washington beltway, rogue powers such as North
Korea, Iraq, and Libya take on the status of pariah-state and potential video bomb-site for a permanently electioneering elite. There are also prodromal efforts to
shore up the center of the International Relations discipline. In a newly instituted series in the International Studies Quarterly, the state of security studies is
surveyed so as to refortify its borders.3 After acknowledging that “the boundaries of intellectual disciplines are permeable,” the author proceeds not only to raise
the drawbridge but also to caulk every chink in the moat.4 Recent
attempts to broaden the concept of “security” to include
such issues as global environmental dangers, disease, and economic and natural disasters endanger the
field by threatening “to destroy its intellectual coherence and make it more difficult to devise solutions
to any of these important problems.”5 The field is surveyed in the most narrow and parochial way: out of 200-plus works cited, esteemed
Third World scholars of strategic studies receive no mention, British and French scholars receive short shrift, and Soviet writers do not make it into the Pantheon at
all. The author of the essay, Stephen Walt, has written one of the better books on alliance systems;6 here he seems intent on constructing a new alliance within the
discipline against “foreign” others, with the “postmodernist” as arch-alien. The tactic is familiar: like many of the neoconservatives who have launched the recent
attacks on “political correctness,” the “liberals” of international relations make it a habit to base their criticisms on secondary accounts of a category of thinking
rather than on a primary engagement with the specific (and often differing) views of the thinkers themselves.7 In this case, Walt cites IR scholar Robert Keohane on
the hazards of “reflectivism,” to warn off anyone who by inclination or error might wander into the foreign camp: “As Robert Keohane has noted, until 151 writers
‘have delineated … a research program and shown … that it can illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field.’ ”8 By the
end of the essay, one
is left with the suspicion that the rapid changes in world politics have triggered a
“security crisis” in security studies that requires extensive theoretical damage control. What if we leave
the desire for mastery to the insecure and instead imagine a new dialogue of security, not in the pursuit
of a utopian end but in recognition of the world as it is, other than us? What might such a dialogue
sound like? Any attempt at an answer requires a genealogy: to understand the discursive power of the
concept, to remember its forgotten meanings, to assess its economy of use in the present, to reinterpret
– and possibly construct through the reinterpretation – a late modern security comfortable with a
plurality of centers, multiple meanings, and fluid identities. The steps I take here in this direction are tentative and preliminary. I
first undertake a brief history of the concept itself. Second, I present the “originary” form of security that has so dominated our conception of international
relations, the Hobbesian episteme of realism. Third, I consider the impact of two major challenges to the Hobbesian episteme, that of Marx and Nietzsche. And
finally, I suggest that Baudrillard provides the best, if most nullifying, analysis of security in late modernity. In short, I retell
the story of realism as
an historic encounter of fear and danger with power and order that produced four realist forms of
security: epistemic, social, interpretive, and hyperreal. To preempt a predictable criticism, I wish to
make it clear that I am not in search of an “alternative security.” An easy defense is to invoke Heidegger, who declared that
“questioning is the piety of thought.”9 Foucault, however, gives the more powerful reason for a genealogy of security:
I am not looking for an alternative; you can’t find the solution of a problem in the solution of another
problem raised at another moment by other people. You see, what I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that’s the reason
why I don’t accept the word alternative. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, then
we always have something to do.10 The hope is that in the interpretation of the most pressing dangers
of late modernity we might be able to construct a form of security based on the appreciation and
articulation rather than the normalization or extirpation of difference
Where national security concerns begs the question of sovereignty and social security
concerns begs the question of the populus, the affirmative is a far more insidious
combination of the two, fed by the pure nihilism of the self-other dialectic.
Doty 7 (Roxanne Lynn, “Immigration and the Politics of Security” p. 77-82) NFleming
Despite the dominance of the national security mode of securitization, a rethinking of security has recently taken place among a small group of
international relations scholars who have suggested that security
concerns increasingly center on society rather than
on the state. Ole Waever attempts to capture this new phenomenon with the concept of societal security. Societal security refers
to the ability of a society to persist in its essential character under changing conditions and possible or
actual threats. Societal security is inextricably linked with the notion of identity. Societal security represents a
fundamental rethinking of security and is an important shift in the concerns traditionally expressed in the security studies subfield of
international relations. It provides an opening, indeed an opportunity, to address issues heretofore ignored. It moves us into the realm of
society and all its various aspects that are relevant to the processes whereby identities are constructed and societies come to perceive their
identities as being threatened. Importantly this concept has the potential to move us away from a purely statist understanding of security.
Waever carefully stresses that earlier understandings of societal security which retained the state as the referent object are untenable. Instead,
Waever suggests a fundamental reconceptualization of the security field as one with two organizing centers: a duality of state security and
societal security. The
referent for societal security is not the state, but society. While survival for a state is a
question of sovereignty, survival for society is a question of identity, and while societal security can be relevant for
state security, it is also relevant in its own right.19 In an important sense societal security is even more fundamental than state security.
Whenever state security is invoked in response to various perceived threats, an implicit presumption is
made that society is already in place. Sovereignty, which is what is at stake when it comes to questions of state security,
implicitly invokes the notion that the state represents an identifiable presence, a political community, a
society. As many contemporary events suggest, this presumption is becoming increasingly problematic as it becomes
obvious that in many cases it is society itself that is insecure. Herein lies the tremendous value of the concept of societal security. As
Waever points out, the logic that has been associated with national security can be operative in areas not traditionally associated with the
security of the state. This can take the form of realpolitik as discussed above, but it can also take the form of identity politics. "Society
is
about identity, the self-conception of communities, and those individuals who identify themselves as
members of a particular community."21 Identity politics involves attempts to reassert the identity of those who belong to a
particular society and simultaneously to define those who will be excluded. In this respect, identity politics resembles realpolitik carried on in a
different arena. Identity
politics, however, can also take the form of a politics of assimilation, which is not
solely an exclusionary politics and moves away from realpolitik and the classical security logic. Great
Britain's post-Second World War immigration policiee ths, for example, have been both exclusionary and analogous to realpolitik, but also
inclusionary in terms of efforts toward assimilation and improved "race relations." I should stress here that using a societal security framework
should not be taken as implying that one must assume that a stable, homogeneous, and coherent societal identity always exists in the
particular society that feels threatened. During times when there is no perceived threat, homogeneity, however illusory, is
often
taken for granted. It is during times of crisis, such as movements of people who are seen as "different"
(ethnically, racially, culturally, and so on), that the problematic nature of this taken for granted homogeneity
becomes apparent. While the concept of societal security, in terms of the openings it creates for addressing contemporary issues such as
immigration, is a vast improvement over the more conventional understandings of security discussed above, the two understandings share
some important features which create significant constraints in both a theoretical and practical sense. This is especially evident in Waever, who
is torn between broadening the concept of security and thus the focus of security studies on the one hand, and on the other hand maintaining a
legitimate position within the traditional security discourse. It is significant that he suggests the possibility of simultaneously having two centers
in the study of security, that of the state and society. This arguably creates openings for even more centers and a move toward a decentering of
security studies. Waever, however, seems to fear this and retreats to a security studies agenda that is compatible with the traditional one. This
fear is evident in his efforts to distinguish societal security from that of individual security. "Whenever
security is defined via
individual security there is a high risk that the core of the classical security problematique, which one is
allegedly trying to redefine not forget, will be missed." In presenting the concept of societal security, Waever cautions
against moving too far away from the core of the classical security problematique. Better to get at the specific dynamics of the classical security
field and "show how these old elements operate in new ways and new places." The argument that Waever offers to support his suggestion is
that, while security itself has no essential meaning, but rather is socially constructed, it has been socially
constructed through speech acts in a particular way and within a particular community, that is, a
community that revolves around discussions of security in a classical sense consistent with the national
security mode of securitization outlined above. Waever wants to rethink the concept of security "in a way that is true to the
classical discussion." The problem with this is that it implicitly assumes that the logic captured by the classical security
field regarding state security is the logic that is operative in the realm of societal security and is, indeed,
the only logic worth considering if one is to contribute to existing conversations on security. This precludes consideration of the
possibility that important and relevant logics that cannot be placed entirely within the classical security logic may be operative.25 Like Walt,
Waever simultaneously points to the overdetermined nature of security and then attempts to harness it by assigning a foundational logic to it.
This results in merely replacing an essentialization of the object of security (that is, the state) with another
essentialization (that is, the logic of security). Societal security may be an important reconceptualization of security, but it does
not problematize security itself or its underlying logic. Security reconceptualized to include a duality of
state and societal security is essentialist not in terms of its object, but in terms of its logic. The result is
that it becomes impossible within this framework to imagine a kind of security that does not depend
upon a particular understanding of danger, and a particular understanding of self and other, that is,
danger stemming from another that is disruptive or at least potentially
disruptive of the self's state or the self's society, thus evoking a certain kind of
policy that is consistent with the logic of security. Waever sees this logic as
deriving from the logic of war and consisting of a sequence of stimuli and
responses. This logic of challenge-resistance/defense-escalationrecognition/defeat can be replayed metaphorically and extended to
other than military sectors. Framed
by this logic, though, it simply becomes impossible to imagine a security logic
which departs from the classical security logic. It becomes impossible to imagine a different "structure
of the game," or to imagine security in terms of a metaphor other than a game. Things which threaten the presumed
fixedness of the inside versus the outside of states and societies are sources of insecurity and this
gives rise to the logic of the classical security problematique. The logic is one of exclusion which
depends upon an understanding of self and other that is inextricably linked with territory.
Solutions/policy prescriptions for addressing security threats will rely upon an
exclusionary logic that seeks to determine the criteria for differentiation
between self and other. There are two related problems with remaining wedded to this classical security logic that preclude
adequately addressing the issue of immigration and the politics of security that are associated with it. The first problem with remaining
wedded to the classical security logic is that societal security, even as conceptualized by Waever, cannot be confined to
this kind of logic. I am not suggesting that this logic is totally absent, but rather that it is not the only logic that is operative. Societal
insecurity, for example, can take multiple forms. As noted above, efforts to deal with societal insecurity can focus on
assimilatory policies, which follow a quite different logic. The whole notion of the United States as a "melting
pot" presumes the success of assimilatory policies. Historically, this has been a significant way of preventing societal
insecurity. I am not suggesting that assimilation is either a positive or a negative thing or that it has actually been successful. Recent concerns,
such as those expressed by Schlesinger, suggesting that the "historic idea of a unifying American identity" which
resulted from assimilation is being replaced by fragmentation and separation illustrate the fear that the logic of
assimilation is increasingly less operative than in the past.27 The point is that assimilation is driven by a logic of inclusion,
albeit one that is coupled with exclusion in that the "other" is seen as an imperfect version of one's self
which needs to be assimilated. Still, this logic is quite different from the classical security logic. The second problem with
remaining within a classical security logic is that one of the issues that can give rise to societal insecurity and arguably
even national insecurity, as traditionally understood, in the first place is driven by a logic that cannot be accounted for by classical
security or societal security frameworks and which policy responses must deal with. This is the logic of human security which
focuses on the security of people as human beings. Their link with national territory is not a defining or necessary feature.
Human security attempts to get at some of the same issues as those who suggest that redefinitions of security are in order, for example, the
environment, AIDS, drugs. These issues, however, are not of concern primarily because they potentially pose a threat to the security of nation-
states. The normative commitment is not to states but to human dignity and welfare of individuals, it essentially
has to do with the well-being of collectives along various dimensions not included in traditional understandings of national security or societal
security as discussed above. It most emphatically cannot be reduced to the individual level. Human
security has received virtually no consideration in classical security discourses
and very little in discussions of societal security. It is, however, increasingly difficult to ignore. Human
security is arguably global and indivisible. It cannot be contained within national borders. While the first two modes of
securitization require a radical separation of self and other, inside and outside,
human security calls for a reconceptualization of self and other. It requires a rethinking of the
very notion of identity. Human security allows for a security that would not be guided by the idea of a fully
constituted nation-state or society or a fully constituted exemplary self. It implies a type of politics that
can be called radical pluralism. By radical pluralism I mean something like that to which Connolly refers
as an ethos of critical responsiveness that goes beyond conventional state-centered pluralism. An ethos of
critical responsiveness "does not reduce the other to what some 'we' already is." It rather redefines the relationship between
self and other and in the process modifies the very identity of self and other. It opens up cultural space
through which the other may consolidate itself into something which is unaffected by negative cultural
markings. It implies a deterritorialization of identity, security, justice, and human rights. The nation-state and
the society that is presumably embodied by it are just two of many possible sites of security and insecurity. Bruce Cronin suggests much the
same with the term transnational identities whereby the definition of self transcends state boundaries. The shared identities to which Kahl and
Hampton refer also create openings that are consistent with human security.
Any movement toward security is part and parcel of a process that culminates in
violent scapegoating and xenophobia
Glezos 14 Simon Glezos, Brown’s Paradox: Speed, ressentiment and global politics, Journal of
International Political Theory 2014, Vol. 10(2) 148–168
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1755088214533042?journalCode=iptb
The story of the MV Sun Sea could be repeated ad nauseam, both within Canada, and around the world. Anti-immigration
movements, xenophobic panics, and the scapegoating of migrants have become the norm. There are, of
course, countless specific reasons that these movements pop up—particular histories of racism,
nationalism, colonialism; particular economic, cultural, political, social, and personal assemblages which
allow these movements to gain ground. But at least one of the factors driving these reactionary
movements is an increasing anxiety over acceleration, and a sense of insecurity that comes with the
seeming dissolution of borders which provided stability for narratives of identity, morality, community,
and so forth. As Brown (2010) puts it, in the current political context, “xenophobia is … overdetermined by the
economic and political insecurities generated by globalization” (p. 69). What is more, anti-immigration
movements are not the only manifestation of this fear and anxiety over acceleration. Everywhere in
contemporary political culture, we see reactionary calls for “security” and “stability” in the face of
acceleration. This frequently manifests itself as a move away from democratic deliberation and toward
centralized authoritarian power. We have seen this in the rightward turn in Canadian politics over the last decade.10 The current
Conservative party government’s undemocratic policies and behavior while in government have been well documented (see Martin, 2011).
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been notorious for legislating through the Prime Minister’s office, avoiding bringing key issues to a vote in
parliament. The
Conservative party has muzzled government scientists, preventing them from discussing
their work with the media (Burgman, 2012); attempted to control the flow of information to the press; and
used an unelected senate to veto legislations passed by the elected House of Commons. All of this led to the
Harper government being held in contempt of parliament, something that has never happened in the history of Canadian politics (indeed,
something which has never happened in any Commonwealth country). For all this, in 2011, the Conservatives were
rewarded with a majority government for the first time since 1993. This of course had to do with the unique
institutional and regional composition of Canadian politics. However, the Conservative party, like many reactionary
movements, gained at least some success by preying on anxieties and insecurities over acceleration. I
have discussed above the way in which they deployed xenophobic rhetoric regarding accelerating
migrant flows as a way of garnering support. But this discourse had a resonance broader than just this
one issue. The Globe and Mail, the major national Canadian daily, in their endorsement of Harper and the Conservatives before the
election, said, “[O]nly Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have shown the leadership, the bullheadedness (let’s call it what it is) and the
discipline this country needs.” What is curious is that the endorsement then goes on to criticize his antidemocratic behavior: Mr. Harper could
achieve a great deal more if he would relax his grip on Parliament, its independent officers and the flow of information, and instead bring his
disciplined approach to bear on the great challenges at hand. That is the great strike against the Conservatives: a disrespect for Parliament, the
abuse of prorogation, the repeated attempts (including during this campaign) to stanch debate and free expression. (The Globe and Mail, 2011)
That last paragraph would seem like a damning indictment. And yet clearly it did not stop The Globe and Mail from giving Harper their
endorsement. Indeed, given their appreciation for his “bullheadedness,” it is unclear what that could mean other than his willingness to ignore
traditional constraints and democratic checks. The
tone of the Globe’s endorsement is clear: democracy is good, but
in a time of uncertainty, it is more important that we have “leadership” and “discipline.” Thus, where the
neoliberal approach seeks to “wish” Brown’s Paradox out of existence, the reactionary approach seeks to force it out through sheer
“bullheadedness.”
Link – Cyber
Congratulations! For only $19.99 can participate in the war on terror in the comfort of
your very own home!
Alt 5 (Viral Load: The Fantastic Rhetorical Power of the Computer Virus Masters in History & Philosophy
of Science from Stanford University, former professor in Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
at Duke University) NFleming
In many ways, the

war on cyberterrorism has become the most seductive component of the President’s larger
War on Terror in that it actively enlists all patriotic Americans to serve in the effort. »The National Strategy to Secure
Cyberspace« splits its »problem« of »threat and vulnerability« into five different levels: (1) the Home User/Small Business, (2) Large Enterprises,
(3) Critical Sectors/Infrastructures, (4) National Issues and Vulnerabilities, and (5) Global.36 Within such a hierarchy, the »increasing awareness
about cybersecurity« among home and small business users is of vital importance, considering that »home users and small business owners of
cyber systems often start with the greatest knowledge gap about cybersecurity«.37 In fact, the issue of home user cybersecurity is of such
importance to the defense of the Nation that its responsibility must not be limited only to adults. With this in mind, the Department of
Homeland Security has pledged to »partner with the Department of Education and state and local governments to elevate the exposure of
cybersecurity issues in primary and secondary schools«.38 As Sarah D. Scalet warned in the title of her October 11, 2001, edition of her
biweekly column on computer security, »cyberterrorism is Everyone’s War«.39 Thus, cybersecurity has become the War on
Terror’s equivalent to the Cold War proscription that every American family constructs a nuclear fallout
shelter in its backyard. Thanks to cybersecurity, the War on Terror has become a war that we can all
actively engage in from the comfort of our own homes. From an expanded perspective, the Bush administration’s
seemingly unjustifiable »war« on computer viruses and cyberterrorism is completely consistent with its
larger crusade against all things ontologically challenging, including cloning, stem cell research, abortion, and same-sex
marriage. Even more so than President Nixon’s War on Cancer of over thirty years ago, these more recent battles prey on
Americans’ numerous fears of the unfamiliar, the uncontrollable, and the uncertain. They are all
intangible »moral« struggles, which inspire jingoistic rhetoric without any possibility for accountability,
particularly in the case of computer viruses since there currently is no reliable procedure by which to measure relative success or failure. Not
that ability to ascertain progress matters. As long as new computer viruses occasionally get released
on the Internet (as they inevitably will) and regardless of whether they originate from a terrorist source (as they
most likely will not), the Administration will point to them as evidence of the continued need for the larger
War on Terror. Whenever there is a lull in online attacks, the Administration can tout the effectiveness of their current security solutions.
Either way, the political result is the same. No other outcome is possible, as they have sealed the issue within a completely closed,
infinitely replicating, binary loop – one that is completely identical to the kind of inescapable logical trap a virus
would use to bring down a computer system.
Link – Democracy
Modern democracy has created a system of absolute privatization
Ansell-Pearson 94 (Keith Ansell-Pearson is Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University, “An
Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker”, P. 87-89) MRS
The result of this decline in the importance of religion in the cultural life of a community or a state is that the ethical basis of the individual's
obligation to society is gradually eroded as egoistical sentiments come to dominate its sense of political obligation. Nietzsche
regards
the fundamental consequence of the rise of modern democracy to be the 'decline and death of the
state'. One of the points he wishes to emphasise is that the modern secular state represents only the
'liberation of the private person', not of the 'individual'. This is a significant remark on Nietzsche's part because it
shows that the widely held view of him as an extreme individualist, or an existentialist, solely preoccupied with the
nature of an asocial, isolated individual, is profoundly misleading. As this remark shows, Nietzsche's commitment is to
culture and to the citizen, not to the abstract private individual of modern liberal democracy. Like the
political thinking of Rousseau and Hegel, Nietzsche's political thought is characterised from beginning to end by a
desire to transcend the atomistic basis of modern societies and its narrow, 'bourgeois', individualism.
The privatisation of society for Nietzsche means the end of society. Consider the following in which Nietzsche is
exposing the effects of the decline of any ethical basis to political obligation, bearing in mind that he is addressing
an audience of European readers in the late 1870s, not the 1980s or 1990s: Henceforth the individual will see only the side of it
[the state] that promises to be useful or threatens to be harmful to him... None of the measures effected
by a government will be guaranteed continuity; everybody will draw back from undertakings that
require quiet tending for decades or centuries if their fruits are to mature. No one will feel towards a
law any greater obligation than that bowing for the moment to the force which backs up the law: one
will then at once set to work to subvert it with a new force, the creation of a new majority. Finally - one can
say this with certainty - distrust of all government, insight into the uselessness and destructiveness of these
short-winded struggles will impel men to a quite novel resolve: the resolve to do away with the concept
of the state, to the abolition of the distinction between private and public. Private companies will step
by step absorb the business of the state: even the most resistant remainder of what was formerly the
work of government (for example its activities designed to protect the private person from the private person) will in the long
run be taken care of by private contractors. (HAH 472) In its 'historical form', Nietzsche contends, modern democracy
represents the 'decay of the state' (ibid.). Since the belief in a divine order in the realm of politics is of religious origin, with the
decline in religion, a loss of reverence, which threatens to undermine civil peace and harmony, accompanies the emergence of modern states.
Nietzsche is close to Hobbes on this point. With
the decline in political absolutism sanctioned by divine law, there
arises the possibility of society being split apart as it becomes 'governed' by a state of anarchy, or in
Hobbes' famous 2 words by a ' Warre of every man against every man'. in conceiving what should be the
appropriate response to the new realities of political life, Nietzsche is closer to a thinker like Locke than
he is to someone like Hobbes. He hopes that the growth of the secular state will bring about a new
period of toleration, pluralism, and wisdom. He invites the moderate and enlightened to take advantage of the opportunities
which exist for social change and place their efforts in the service of a tolerant and pluralistic society in order to 'repulse the destructive
experiments of the precipitate and over-zealous' (ibid.). Nietzsche's
optimism is reflected in his belief that when the
modern state has performed its task, and 'when every relapse into the old sickness has been overcome,
a new page in the storybook of humanity will be turned in which there will be many strange tales to
read and perhaps some of them good ones' (ibid.). He believes that if the prudence and self-interest of
modern human beings have become their strongest and most active instincts, and 'if the state is no
longer equal to the demands of these forces', then what should follow is not chaos and anarchy, but the
gradual and enlightened struggle for 'an invention more suited to their purpose than the state' (ibid.).
Link – Job Market
The modern immigration apparatus which accepts workers for seemingly benevolent
projects of economic expansion like the aff is the continuance of a long history of
cultural hierarchy which places the job market at the heart of the American goal of
assimilating all those who may contaminate the purity of American herd-morality
Shapiro 97 (Michael, Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, “Narrating the
Nation, Unwelcoming the Stranger: Anti-Immigration Policy in Contemporary ‘America’ p. 1-3) NFleming
In 1994, as part of
an intensifying “war on immigrants,” ”House Republicans pledged, in their Contract with America,
to cut off virtually all welfare benefits for legal immigrants who are under 75 years old. Recently, the war was
extended to foreign tongues; a House committee approved a bill ”making English the official language of the United States.”2 Throughout US
history, “strangers in the land” have been subjected to a variety of anxiety-driven forms of hostile scrutiny
and policy initiative.3 During the period of the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts at the end of the eighteenth century, for example,
the Federalists whipped up an anti-alien hysteria, arguing that “the root of all evil in the United States was
the large foreign-born population,” which, among other things, would “contaminate the purity and simplicity
of the American character.”4 The contemporary political climate, which encourages attacks from various
segments of the social and political order (right-wing journalists, nativist groups, regional labor organizations, state governors,
national leaders, and legislative bodies) is part of a venerable US tradition. If there is a consistent impetus to the various episodes
of an anti-alien initiative in the history of US politics, it is to be found in the cultural anxieties that the actions and articulations reflect. Alien
“others,” who, in various periods, have been “Indians,“ French speakers, Roman Catholics, Irish, southern
European, eastern European, Asian, and Third World immigrants, and, most recently, “illegal aliens”
crossing the US border with Mexico, have been constructed as threats to valued models of
personhood and to images of a unified national society and culture. These images, moreover, have
historical and ontological depth. They are continuously recycled in the narratives that constitute the
"American" nation. Although immigrants are seen from a rationalistic standpoint as competitors for jobs,
more significantly they constitute an ontological disturbance in the stories that people seek to
appropriate. Immigrants both disrupt national stories and, some would claim, warrant attention from an
authority (the state) that many want to appropriate for purposes of individual and collective identity
affirmation. We can achieve some historical distance, and thereby effectively situate the predicates and modalities of expression of the
relevant current anxieties, by examining an earlier articulation. In a widely read book about the threat of immigration to the US national
culture, in 1914 the then eminent sociologist E. A. Ross equated policies that allowed a rapid influx of immigrant aliens into the United States
with "race suicide."5 Certainly, the use of the world race is jarring in the context of what is now acceptable academic and journalistic discourse
about the effects of immigration; today's
"meta-racists"6 explicity deny that they are racists and refer instead to
"national suicide'' (Lawrence Auster)' and "cultural suicide" (Peter Brimelow).* But I want to focus first on the remarkable
evidence of the senses that Ross invokes for his argument. We seems to have felt that he required no epistemic authority for his views beyond
what he (as a trained sociologist) could see: To the practised eye, the physiognomy of certain groups unmistakably proclaims inferiority of type.
I have seen gatherings of the foreign-born in which narrow and sloping foreheads were the rule. . . . There were so many sugar-loaf heads,
moon-faces, lantern jaws, and goose-bill noses that one might imagine a malicious jinn had amused himself by casting human beings in a set of
skew-moulds discarded by the Creator.9 And Ross got around; he performed his eye-witness ethnography in a variety of venues: "That the new
immigrants are inferior in looks to the old immigrants may be seen by comparing, in a labor day parade, the faces of the cigar-makers and the
garment workers with those of the teamsters, piano-movers and steam-fitters."lo Doubtless, Ross saw himself and his "practised eye" as self-
made. But however Ross might have wanted to imagine himself as a "self-made man,'' reliant only on systematic methods rather than a
traditional form of bigotry, his "practised eye" represents a historically produced assemblage of perspectives: among others, epistemological
models of the subject, geographic imaginaries, ethnographic "knowledges," spatial and Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV
LIBRARY on June 4, 2016 Michael I. Shapiro 3 economic histories, and national narratives. A summoning here of the various ideational contexts
within which Ross’s gaze was trained will help frame a historically sensitive approach to the threat of the alien “other.” Ross’s confidence in his
gaze owes much to a historical transition that took place in the nineteenth century. Whereas subjective vision was suspect during the preceding
two centuries, the situation of the observer during the nineteenth “depended on the priority of models of subjective vision.”ll Most
significantly, the observer that had been created in that century was throughly implicated in the variety of social and economic forces. As an
“ambulatory observer” taking in the sights within the “new urban spaces,” Ross’s directing of his gaze was more than a mere mode of
representation’*; it was nan effect of a heterogeneous network of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations.”ls More
specifically, in addition to a prevailing discourse on race and nationality, we can find, implicated in Ross’s reports about what he saw, a history
of US industrial growth and the migratory effects it encouraged: various industries drawing immigrants from this or that part of the globe; the
variety of immigrant groups at different times displaying different vulnerabilities to exploitation and confronting different levels of exclusion.
Ross’s complaints about unassimilable races functioned within a domain of “knowledge” and a spatially
predicated story. What he saw reflected a convergence in the twentieth century of racial science and racial nationalism.14 He wholly
accepted and recycled an already scientifically questioned typology of racial characteristics and his model of global space privileged a nation-
state, geopolitical cartography. By contrast, today’s
immigration alarmists argue on cultural rather than
race/biological grounds. They invoke an amalgam of undigested sociologisms, anthropologisms, and political
theories (from Tocqueville onward) to question the ability of US society to assimilate culturally the current influx
of people to (what they construct as) an “American” cultural core. And they posit this cultural core as a
foundation that makes possible the US democratic ethos and the functioning of the US economy.15
Moreover, in keeping with their shift from the science of race to the social science of cultural assimilation, they evince none of Ross’s
confidence in subjective perception. They still construct
peoples within a state-oriented cartography, but what was for
Ross a very specific,
bodily threat has become for today’s alarmists a demographic one. The strange bodies have
become abstracted and assembled; the threat is to the US demographic entity, a “population,” not to an
exemplary and sightly citizen body.16
Link – Liberalism
Liberal Inclusivity hides the reality of politics behind a feel-good smoke screen
Foucault's re-thinking of power leads him to claim that the tradition of modern political thought is
implicated in the dominant' disciplinary' forms of power. He argues that we need to understand the exercise
of power not in terms of 'right', but in terms of technique, not in terms of 'law' but in terms of
normalisation, and not in terms of 'abuse' but in terms of punishment and control. Our modern political
rationality has developed alongside a new political technology of power which has produced the 'individual' as a subject of the state enjoying
rights and owing obligations. Modern political thought, Foucault contends, is inadequate to the task of thinking
critically about the new forms of power, since it bases its understanding of power on a belief in the
existence of a rational, ahistorical subject. Modern political thought poses the questions of political
philosophy as a question of right/law, such as: What are the limits of power? How can power be given
limits to restrict its use and abuse? But these questions simply take for granted the existence of a
rational human subject which is deemed to exist in some pre-power or pre-political realm and which is
then ' exploited' or ' oppressed' by power and in need of' rights' to protect it. The radical, and challenging, point
Foucault wishes to make, is that forms of power constitute, through disciplinary pracdces, types of human subjects. In constructing a
discourse of legitimacy, which centres on notions of law and sovereignty, Foucault contends that
political theory conceals or effaces the 18 domination which is intrinsic to power. By speaking of the '
rights' of the sovereign and the obligations of' subjects' as if these were neutral descriptions of the
properties of fully constituted rational individuals, modern political thought has concealed from our
view the fact that discourses of right and legitimacy are not simply ways of protecting individuals from
the existence of power, but also disciplinary practices which constitute human subjects in new
relationships of power. It is these claims about power which inform Foucault's critique of liberalism as a political ideology. For
Foucault, liberalism is flawed in that it posits an abstract and ahistorical notion of the human individual or
subject. Any critique of society which liberalism can offer is, according to Foucault, of limited value, since it
singularly fails to appreciate that modern institutions are based on disciplinary practices of power and
forms of knowledge whose prime objective is not simply to grant individuals private spaces of freedom,
but to 'normalise' them. In rejecting toutcourta notion of the autonomous subject, Foucault runs the risk of depriving himself of any
substantive basis from which to criticise the present system of power, which would enable him to envisage a positive overcoming of forms of 19
domination. William Connolly follows Foucault in holding that the entire modern project of freedom and
emancipation (reflected in different ways in the ideologies of liberalism and socialism) is caught up in an imperialistic
discourse of mastery and domination which is blind to its own uncritical assumptions about the self and
the world. Inspired by Foucault's analysis of the major discourses of modernity (on madness, on discipline and
punishment, on sexuality, etc.), Connolly argues that any set of norms or standards that becomes endowed with
authority and legitimacy represents an ambiguous achievement, since it will establish its hegemony by
excluding and denigrating forms of otherness which do not fit into its confines. In place of tolerating ambiguity,
modernity prefers the discipline of social harmony and the ideal of a self-inclusive community. Connolly
states the dilemma in the following terms: Human life is paradoxical at its core, while modern reason, penetrating
into new corners of life, strives to eliminate every paradox it encounters. This is a dangerous
combination, with repressive potentialities. It is dangerous to deny the paradox, either by ignoring the
urge to unity or by pretending that it can be realized in life. The denial, often expressed in liberal
theories of the 'open society', overlooks ways in which the urge finds expression in the life of the
present, and the pretense, expressed in communitarian protests against the anomie of liberal life, hides
the political character of actual or ideal settlements behind a smokescreen of transcendental
imperatives. Both responses go well with a sublimated politics of inclusivity, a politics in which the world
is treated as a place susceptible to human mastery or communal realization and everyone is organized
to fit into these complimentary 20 projects.
Link – Rights
Basing political demands on moralizing claims for human rights is herd mentality and
creates irrational, dangerous political ground
Auster 90 (Lawrence, member of the American Immigration Control Foundation, “The Path to National Suicide:
An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism p. 78-79) NFleming
A similar moralistic blindness now informs our public attitudes toward immigration and
multiculturalism. As I have said earlier, the idea of our equality and responsibility, not just to our fellow
citizens, but to every person and culture in the world, has become a kind of absolute. In the light of
that absolute, all other values become irrelevant. The global conception of morality results, I would
argue, in a distortion of morality rather than its fulfillment. Ethics could be defined as a sense of
responsibility toward other human beings and the consequent willingness to put restraints on one’s own
behavior. As a personal development, a sense of ethics normally originates in the family and among
those we are close to and then is extended outward in widening circles to other human beings. The
distortion of this natural basis of morality is brought about when it is applied in the abstract to
collectivities of human beings, or even to the human race as a whole. Even thoughtful liberals are
beginning to realize the impossible burden such an obligation places on human nature. As Christopher
Lasch has written: My study of the family suggested . . . that the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin
when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race. It needs to attach
itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular
men and women, not humanity in general. The dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the
sentimental fiction that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that they
differ.85 This sentimental fiction arises, I think, when we take our own personal experience of love or
ethical responsibility and say: “Because I feel this for one or a few people, and because this feeling is
good, I must feel the same way toward everyone, I must act on the same basis toward the entire human
race as a collective whole.” Once people have taken this stand, and especially if they try to convert it
into public policy, all rational limits of common sense or self-interest are thrown out the window.
Ultimately, this obligation must be imposed by political force, since no one can actually love the whole
human race. What starts, then, as a personal sense of compassion and responsibility for individuals
ends as a collectivized ethics which compels men to love the foreigner (not just the individual
foreigner, but all foreigners) more than their own
Link – Equality
Equality, democracy, and freedom are all values founded in slave morality
Newman 2k (Saul, author and political theorist, “Anarchism and the politics of ressentiment”
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/saul-newman-anarchism-and-the-politics-of-ressentiment)
NFleming
In this way the slave

revolt in morality inverted the noble system of values and began to equate good with
the lowly, the powerless — the slave. This inversion introduced the pernicious spirit of revenge and
hatred into the creation of values. Therefore morality, as we understand it, had its roots in this vengeful will to
power of the powerless over the powerful — the revolt of the slave against the master. It was from this
imperceptible, subterranean hatred that grew the values subsequently associated with the good — pity,
altruism, meekness, etc. Political values also grew from this poisonous root. For Nietzsche, values of
equality and democracy, which form the cornerstone of radical political theory, arose out of the slave
revolt in morality. They are generated by the same spirit of revenge and hatred of the powerful. Nietzsche
therefore condemns political movements like liberal democracy, socialism, and indeed anarchism. He
sees the democratic movement as an expression of the herd-animal morality
derived from the Judeo-Christian revaluation of values.[6] Anarchism is for Nietzsche the most
extreme heir to democratic values —
the most rabid expression of the herd instinct. It seeks to level the
differences between individuals, to abolish class distinctions, to raze hierarchies to the ground, and to
equalize the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the master and the slave. To Nietzsche
this is bringing everything down to level of the lowest common denominator — to erase the pathos of
distance between the master and slave, the sense of difference and superiority through which great
values are created. Nietzsche sees this as the worst excess of European nihilism — the death of values and creativity.
Slave morality is characterized by the attitude of ressentiment — the resentment and hatred of the
powerless for the powerful. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as an entirely negative sentiment — the attitude of denying
what is life-affirming, saying ‘no’ to what is different, what is ‘outside’ or ‘other’. Ressentiment is
characterized by an orientation to the outside, rather than the focus of noble morality, which is on the self.[7] While the
master says ‘I am good’ and adds as an afterthought, ‘therefore he is bad’; the slave says the opposite — ‘He (the master) is bad, therefore I am
good’. Thus the invention of values comes from a comparison or opposition to that which is outside, other,
different. Nietzsche says: “... in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it
needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act all, — its action is basically a reaction.”[8] This reactive
stance, this inability to define anything except in opposition to something else, is the attitude of
ressentiment. It is the reactive stance of the weak who define themselves in opposition to the strong. The weak need
the existence of this external enemy to identify themselves as ‘good’. Thus the slave takes ‘imaginary
revenge’ upon the master, as he cannot act without the existence of the master to oppose. The man of
ressentiment hates the noble with an intense spite, a deep-seated, seething hatred and jealousy. It is this ressentiment, according to
Nietzsche, that has poisoned the modern consciousness, and finds its expression in ideas of equality and
democracy, and in radical political philosophies, like anarchism, that advocate it.
Link – Language
Language is inherently narcissistic- it comes from the implicit idea that this speaking
position is the best position
Sloterdijk 7 (Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist. He is a professor of philosophy and
media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe, “Nietzsche Apostle”, 8-11) MRS
I would like to describe the Nietzsche-event as a catastrophe in the history of language and put the argument that his intervention as a literary
new- evangelist constitutes an incision in old Europe's conditions of understanding. With Marshall McLuhan, I presuppose that understanding
between people in societies-above all, what they are and achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning. These
conditions of
communication provide groups with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such
groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves and by which they
repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal
return of the same in the form of a spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played
so as to tune and retune the player; they make their speakers ring in singular tonalities of self-excitation.
They are systems of melodies for recognition, which nearly always delineate the whole program as well.
Languages are not primarily used for what is today called the passing on of information but serve to
form communicating group-bodies. People possess language so that they can speak of their own merits
[Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable merit of being able to talk up these merits in their own language. First, and for the most part,
people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs but aim instead to
incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups of history-all the various tribes
and peoples-are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a
psychosocial contest played to gain advantage for themselves. In this sense, before it becomes technical,
all speaking serves to enhance and venerate the speaker; and even technical discourses are committed,
albeit indirectly, to glorifying technicians. Languages of self-criticism are also borne by a function of self
enhancement. And even masochism works to announce the distinctiveness of the tortured individual. When used in accordance with its
constitutive function of primary narcissism, language says one and the same thing over and again: that nothing
better could have happened to the speaker than, precisely, to have been who he is, to have been who
he is at this place and in this language, and to bear witness to the merit of his being in his own skin. The
fact that primary narcissism first became observable with ethnic groups and kingdoms before going on to become a feature of nations, bristling
with weapons and classics at the dawn of modern times, is something I will consider from a historical viewpoint. As for the individual, the wait
would be lengthier before self-affirmation could step out of the shadows of sin. It did this in the form of amour-propre in the 18th century, that
of holy self-interest [Selbstsucht] in the 19th, that of narcissism in the 20th, and that of self-design in the 21st. Nietzsche
was probably
the only theoretician of language of modern times to have had this fundamental relation in mind. For, in
deriving prayer from a people's exhilaration at its own self-assertion, he states: "it projects the pleasure
it takes in itself (...) into a being that it can thank for all of this. Man is grateful for himself: and this is
why one needs a god."1 And, in a more general way, we can read in an earlier text: "It is a beautiful folly,
speaking: with it humans dance over all things."2 In the reconstruction of religious affects from self-
referential gratitude, language comes to be determined as a medium enabling those that speak to say
out loud the reasons why they are on top. This is why the profession of faith in one's own modus vivendi is the most
distinguished speech-act. It is the eulogistic gesture par excellence. With this derivation of distinction, speech and silence are defined as modes
of exhilaration, which confess to themselves. In both what is advanced is a voluntary declaration of success in the pursuit of Being: in speech as
manifestation of right and power; and in silence as an authorized quiet whose presuppositions require no defending.
Language is a form of self-praise- one that can be extended to others
This can scarcely be more legibly studied than in Christian Evangelization and its encroachment on European societies' conditions of
understanding in the early Middle Ages. Shown
with particular clarity here is the way in which Evangelist speech-
acts-the preaching of salvation by God's son, and the swearing-in of an ethnic commune for a
participation in this sphere that is as unequivocal as possible-put speakers and listeners alike into an
oscillating circuit which was about nothing other than celebrating a shared privilege. In his book of the Gospels,
Otfrid von WeiGenburg, Rhine Franconian poet-priest of the 9th century, justified his vernacular adaptation of the
New Testament by arguing that the Franks, too, ought at last to be allowed access, via a poeticized bible,
to the sweetness of the Good News, dulcedo evangeliorum. As many persons undertake to write in their language and as many
strive with fervour to praise what they hold dear- why should the Franks be the only ones to shrink from the attempt to proclaim the praise of
God in the Franconian language... ...let the praise of God be sweet to you, then Franconian will also be determined by metrical feet, quantity
and metrical rules; better, then God himself will speak through you. (Liber evangelorium I, 1, V 31-34; 41-42) The
sense of these
reflections, unique for their time, lies in an ethno-narcissistic operation by means of which the Franks were to
be formed, at the level of the linguistic techniques of the time, as a collective with higher feelings-with
the claim to being equal or even superior to those great historical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans.
Gospel verse in the German language is presented as an offensive, the aim of which is to establish a
politico-religious system of boasting that, by virtue of a catch-up lesson in rhyme and rhythm, plugs into the art of the
poetically possible. The point thus being that, in future, in the image of the gloria Francorum, an effective link would no longer be
missing between the veneration of God and the poetics of Empire. In the same spirit, Otfried attributes to Ludwig den Deutschen, in his
dedication to him, a rank equal to King David. Moreover, in this speech act two eulogistic functions-praise of the King and glorification of the
people-come together to form a single enhancement-effect. Otfrid was convinced he thus complied with the essence of language, inasmuch as
language is per se an instrument of eulogy. This
may be most convincingly proven in the case of praising God: "He, in
effect (God), has given them (the people) the instrument of language (plectrum linguae) so that they
cause him to sound in their praise" (Dedication to Luitberg). One who praises becomes worthy of praise
insofar as he or she also participates in the glory of the object of eulogy. The poet expresses the same
idea in his introductory prayer to the Gospel epic. You alone are the master of all the languages that
exist. Your power has conferred language to all and they have come-o salvation! -to form words in their
languages to recall Your memory for always, to praise You for eternity, recognize You and serve You.
(Liber evangeliorum, I, 2, V33-38)1
High culture speaks the language of taking advantage of life
The height-or better:the operating theater- of this independence is the result of an insight that Nietzsche, ever
since the days of Human, All too Human, had made during an aggressive spiritual exercise that he carried out on
himself The author of The Gay Science was convinced that resentment is a mode of production of world, indeed one that is to date the most
powerful and most harmful. The more keenly this discerning author contemplated the matter of this fact, the more comprehensively and
monstrously it came into profile: in
everything that had borne the name of high culture, religion, and morality,
the resentment mode of world-building had prevailed. Everything that for an epoch had been able to
present itself as the moral world order bore its handwriting. All that had in his era claimed to be making
a contribution to world improvement had drunk of its poison. Whence the catastrophic conclusion, which hit its thinker
as a millenary insight: that all
languages formed by metaphysics gravitate around a misological core. The classic
teachings of wisdom, together with their modern connector-theories, are systems for maligning beings in their
entirety. They serve those who have yet become fed up with defaming the world, power, and human beings, and have as their goal the
abasement of the happy and powerful, and of self-praising attitudes. When all is said and done, all high cultures between Asia and
Europe have consistently spoken the language of people who are out to take advantage of life itself
What has hitherto been called morality is the universalism of vengeance. And whatever metaphysical
discourse might carry by way of valid wisdom, science, and worldly sophistication: it is the first impulse
toward maligning reality in the name of an over- world or an anti-world, which has been specifically
approved for the sake of humiliating its contrary. Along with this, it is simultaneously to talk up the need
for vengeance, with which the weak and the foolish vaunt their weakness and their foolishness. In
metaphysical-religious discourse, contemptuousness becomes an insidiously twisted self-praising force.
Link – Pity
Pity is bad – it is a squandering of human emotion, and, frankly, we expected
better from you fine debaters. Pity transmits pain, strips both the pitier and the
pitied of autonomy, and is a means of control. We find this terrifying.
Cartwright 84 (David, professor in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater, “Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the Morality of Pity p. 84-90)
To appreciate the influence of Kant's conception of pity on Nietzsche's thought, one has only to read a note penned sometime between the end
of 1886 and the spring of 1887, in which Nietzsche's debt to Kant is obvious. Pity is a squadering of feeling, a parasite
harmful to moral health, "it cannot possibly be our duty to increase the evil in the world. " If one does good
merely out of pity, it is really oneself one really does good to, and not the other. Pity does not depend upon maxims but upon
affects; it is pathological [fpathologisch]. The suffering of others infects us, pity is an infection [Ansteckung]. 3 In
his translation of The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann notes the obviously Kantian terminology employed by Nietzsche, e.g., "maxims, "
"pathological." What Kaufmann fails to note is the source of the utilitarian argument Nietzsche puts in quotation marks. Nietzsche is quoting
with approval part of an argument Kant advanced against pity. In the second part of his Methaphysics of Morals, Kant argues that we
cannot have a duty to feel pity because ... if another person suffers and I let myself (through my
imagination) also become infected [anstecken lasse] by his pain, which I still cannot remedy, then two people
suffer, although the evil (in nature) affects only the one. But it cannot possibly be a duty to increase the
evils of the world or, therefore to do good from pity [Mitleid] .... 4 Like Kant, Nietzsche objects to pity because it is not
dianoetic, i.e., it is pathological. He even goes so far as to adopt a model of pity suggested by Kant. 5 Pity is conceived as a
contagious and unwelcomed transmission of pain from the recipient of pity to the agent. Nietzsche also
echos the Kantian observation that acting from pity is indulging one's inclinations, viz., it is oneself that one really benefits. Pity, seen as an
imposed transmission of suffering, becomes the basis for several of Nietzsche's criticisms of this emotion. In various points in his writings he
raises this model of pity as an intuitive objection against the value of pity, e.g., ". . . [pity] increases suffering throughout the world,"6 " ••• pity
makes suffering contagious [ansteckend]."1 Nietzsche's point, of course, is that anything which increases unnecessary
suffering is undesirable. Nietzsche uses this view of pity as the basis for one of his most interesting observations concerning this
passion. Observe children who whine and scream so that they are pitied and, hence, wait for the moment
when their condition is noticed; live with the sick and mentally oppressed, and ask yourself if the
eloquent laments and whimperings, which display their misfortunes, basically have as their aim the
harm of those present. Pity . . . is a consolation for the weak and suffering because through it they
recognize that they still have one power, despite all their weakness, the power of hurting others. The
unfortunate gains a type of pleasure in this feeling of superiority, of which the expression of pity makes him conscious; his imagination is
exalted. He is still important enough to cause pain in the world. 8 Nietzsche's
notion that certain seekers after pity employ
their misery to hurt, and thus to feel their power over others is predicated on Kant's analysis of pity. They feel superior
to the pitiers because they exercise their power or control over them by simply being pitied.9 The neurotics
feel their power by causing anyone who pities them to suffer. Hence we find that Nietzsche adopts and scores some critical points by employing
the Kantian line. There is a danger for the pitier, Nietzsche claims, not simply because of the suffering involved in this emotion, but also because
of the susceptibility of the pitier to the manipulation and control by those pitied. This susceptibility to the control and manipulation by others
suggests two other important Kantian themes, the loss of one's self-control vs. autonomy and the irrational and. involuntary nature of
emotions such as pity. Both Nietzsche and Kant maintain that one of the problems with pity is that it usurps
the agent's autonomy.
Nietzsche argues that in being manipulated and controlled by the recipient of pity, an agent may lose
autonomy in two ways. The agent is made to suffer, and this is something that most people find
undesirable, and, since pity for someone is usually conative, the agent may act to help the recipient
escape his or her suffering, and this may be something the agent would usually not want to do. While the
agent is not exactly out of control, Nietzsche's point is that in pity the agent loses self-control by being controlled by
someone else. We have seen that pity can usurp agents' autonomy by placing them under the control
of the persons pitied. This was one of the dangers Nietzsche saw in pity. He also detailed a parallel problem for the recipients of pity.
Pity can become a surreptitous way through which agents gain control over recipients whose
autonomy is threatened by pitiers: When we see someone suffer, we like to exploit this opportunity
to take possession of him; those who become his benefactors and pity him, for example, do this and call the lust for a new possession
"love." 12 The autonomy of sufferers is in an especially vulnerable position. People usually suffer because
they are unable to relieve their own misery. Suffering is typically a sufficient reason for the agent to do something to relieve it.
When we lament our woes, vocalize our misery, often we are announcing our inability to care for
ourselves. We seek the assistance of others. Pitiers are more than happy to give this assistance. Some pitiers, Nietzsche argued, may
actively seek individuals to pity in order to heighten their own feelings of superiority and/or to gain
control of the sufferer. The pitiers increase their feelings of superiority by doing for others things that they cannot do for themselves,
and then by conceiving of their actions as virtuous. They gain control over others by benefiting them. The recipients
become indebted to their benefactors and being in their debt is also being subject to their control. The pitier can even accentuate this sense of
debt by not allowing recipients to satisfy their desire to repay it, e.g., "you do not owe me a thing. " The control can become less
subtle, however. The pitiers can even make the recipients completely dependent on their help by engendering within them the idea that they
are helpless and need the help of others to live a minimally normal life.13 By augmenting some Kantian themes, Nietzsche has revealed
some of the insidious aspects of a reputedly benevolent passion. Kant, however, was also familiar with the darker side
of pity. In addition to the utilitarian argument against pity, Kant has the following to say about pity: ... but it cannot possibly be a
duty to increase the evils of the world or, therefore, to do good from pity; for this would be an
insulting kind of beneficence, expressing the sort of benevolence one has for an unworthy person.
Such benevolence is called soft-heartedness and should not occur at all among human beings, who are
not to boast of their worthiness to be happy. 14 Kant maintains that the recipients of pity are insulted by
being humiliated. Their suffering announces their inability to overcome their own problems; for
individuals usually only tolerate misery when they cannot relieve it. By seeing that others suffer, pitiers realize that the
sufferers cannot help themselves. This is one of the reasons that pitiers feel compelled to help. When pitiers offer help, the
recipients may be embarrassed by the pitier's knowledge of their inability to help themselves. They feel as if
an inadequacy or character flaw is exposed which may be a blow to their pride and self-respect. This offer of help may be viewed as an even
greater insult, if the recipients believe that they can take care of their own problems, or they may be humiliated by realizing that their welfare is
contingent upon another's generosity. Because of the great potential of pity for insulting and/or humiliating the
recipient, Kant advocates that we conceal such motives. We acknowledge ourselves obligated to be
beneficient to a poor man. But this kindness also involves a dependence of his welfare upon my generosity, which humiliates
[erniedrigt] him. Therefore, it is a duty to spare the recipient such humiliation and to preserve his self-respect
by treating this beneficence either as a mere debt that is owed him, or a small favor. 15 As we have seen, Kant
also had something to say about those who indulge their pity. He claimed that the benevolence associated with pity reveals
softheartedness, and that it is unworthy of human beings, who should not brag about their
worthiness to be happy. Although what Kant means by these claims is far from perspicuous, it seems he had something like the
following in mind. The German noun Barmherzigkeit, "softheartedness," also means "charity" or "mercy." Kant considers the help
given from pity to be I} form of charity-something sufferers have no right to, and something pitiers are
not obligated to provide. The help given out of pity, then, is something which is not owned, and, thus,
depends on the pitiers' generosity. Pitiers boast or brag about their war thiness to be happy by indulging their pity. They do not
conceal their motives, even if it humiliates sufferers. They flaunt their pity with the excuse that they deserve to do
whatever makes them happy, and they become happy by satisfying their inclinations to help out of
pity. Help is given even if it does humiliate or insult the sufferers; for, in these cases, the agents' happiness becomes more important than the
recipients' dignity. Nietzsche develops similar themes. In Morgenrothe he writes that "Pitying is equivalent to despising [Verachten],"16 and " ...
[there is] something humiliating [Erniedrigendes] in suffering and in pity something elevating and giving of superiority .... "17 These dynamics of
pity are amplified in the famous section "On Pitying" in the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Zarathustra announces that God died
out of his pity for human beings. 18 Zarathustra speaks thus: "Having seen the sufferer suffer, I was ashamed for the sake
of his shame; and when I helped him, I transgressed grievously against his pride."19 Zarathustra's shame has two
sources. By observing another's misery, and displaying pity, he has shamed the other. The other is humiliated: Zarathustra is ashamed at that.
His sense of shame, then, is intensified by actually helping the sufferer; for this is a blow to the recipient's pride. Nietzsche
does not
consider Zarathustra's sensitivity to the misfortune of others to be the correct response, although it is
clear that he views Zarathustra's shame as preferable to the behavior of the merciful (Barmherzig),
who " ... feel blessed in their pity."2 0
Link – Security Preditions
Their formulated catastrophism is not “realism” or “security politics” – it is a project of
predictive nihilism which subdues entropy within the terms of absolute economic
rationality and completes the convergence of modern security apparatuses and
financial markets – that organized hatred is the zenith of modern violence
Aitken 11 [Rob Aitken, University of Alberta, Canada, “Financializing security: Political prediction
markets and the commodification of uncertainty,” Security Dialogue April 2011 vol. 42 no. 2 123-141]
NFleming
It is perhaps most baldly articulated by Abramowicz, who, as we noted above, was not too bothered about the
superiority of
information markets' predictions, so long, it transpires, as they could still “help discipline” those who
would seek to exercise freedom, either in their own name or that of others, since “the predictions of
well‐functioning information markets are objective” (2003, Executive Summary). The objective here has a
curious relation to the real, a revealing problematic which perhaps indicates much of what is
fundamentally at stake here. For the objective is not so much the actually existing, rather it is that which
can be ascertained without objection. Consider as particular exemplification of this point the following. Abramowizc, in
suggesting ever more arcane ways to ensure that only fundamental traders hold sway in the final analysis of a market's arbitration, posits the
possibility of a two stage information market. In the first players
effectively bet on the outcome of a second, with the
second open only briefly, after the close of the first, with only the payouts of the second dependent
upon the verification (or not) of some future event. For Abramowizc one virtue of such a device is that “there will no
longer be risk associated with real world randomness”(note 156)! It is thus not reality itself ‐ and the
randomness it entails ‐ that concerns those that seek solace in prediction markets but rather certainty
and reduction; a reality perhaps, but like the freedom we encountered above, only that reality which has been
suitably reformulated. Made single, indisputable, and dead; not manifold,
contestable and lived.¶ Such a singular representation of reality can only be a
simulation, in the most pejorative of senses, that which will “always be by‐
passed, confounded and exceeded by practical experience” (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 155). For there
is always “irruption of that minimum of reversibility which exists in every irreversible process” (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 161), requiring
our
endless human intervention to secure it, to keep its mask in place and to maintain the illusion that it is
outside of us and that we are not required for its maintenance. Indeed, one could go further. Our endless
defence, our securing of our simulated worlds, against the ceaseless encroachment of the entropy from which they
are formed is, according to Baudrillard, that which gives them their purchase upon us. They are only made
interesting by this interminable maintenance requirement. The attractiveness of ordered production and prediction (see
also, Cooper, 2005) is thus ironically provided by its potential to fall back into disorder, which “secretly”
ruins and dismantles it “while simultaneously ensuring that a minimal continuity of pleasure traverses
it, without which it would be nothing” (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 161). And for Baudrillard this means that the seduction through
which all our attempts to stabilize the real world are undone “doesn't belong to the order of the real” but
rather surrounds it, providing the background against which our small victories over chaos are able to shine, just
as derivatives markets surround those in their underlying assets. “[S]eduction envelops the whole real process of
power, as well as the whole real order of production, with endless reversibility and disaccumulation – without which neither power nor
production [nor indeed prediction] would exist” (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 159, original emphases). This
continual disintegration of
order and manufactured form is the very ground that production, prediction and power require for
their perpetuation. It is what makes these latter processes seductive.¶ The lack of real prediction associated with PAM and similar
systems is made abundantly clear by Mason Richey (2005). Here PAM is indicted not for the reasons we have encountered above in the media
furore surrounding its announcement but rather on more philosophical terms, entirely consonant with the line of argument we have been
developing. Richey follows the logic of PAM to its self‐defeating terminal conclusion. Traders
purchase a contract on PAM if
they think its underlying event is more likely than its current price would suggest. En masse such trading will raise
the price of that contract. But PAM is an information and prediction market. Its raison d'être is to provide a signal to those who are interested
in the occurrence, or rather the prevention, of the events that underlie traded contracts. Thus a
rise in prices is likely to instigate a
response from those for whom the market was created as signalling mechanism. In turn this thus
reduces the likelihood of the occurrence of the event. I bet, you see I bet, you act, I lose. Or as Richey (2005,
p. 10) puts it: “The idea that government authorities employ the market to foresee events that they will
prevent would, a priori, mute the signal”. But this is not the most fundamental of the flaws. It merely reflects one of a deeper
level. And it is precisely why Hanson seems so misguided in his rendering of existing instruments as being in need of supplementation if they
are to deliver prediction of a precise enough nature. For in the act of specification of the possible future, the job that the signalling
market of derivatives is intended to achieve is already done. In the case of PAM, again in Richey's (2005, p. 10) words:¶
[T]he derivatives of maximal predictive interest, the impetus for the system's design, terrorism
derivatives, must be explicitly articulated in order to be offered. But if the market designers can list a
specific terrorist event, then they have already defined, determined, and predicted the very event
that the market is designed to identify. If the market designers know which terrorist derivatives to offer, then they have already
done the work of the market.¶ For Richey (2005, p. 10) then: “The system does both too little and too much”. This combination of
inadequacy and excess is intimately tied to PAM's curious relation to a simulated future of an ordered, pre‐
dicted, singular real. Our reading of Dillon (2004, 2006, forthcoming) suggests that such fetishization of fixation is
increasingly anathema to key strands of, themselves increasingly dominant,
thinking within the strategic centres of our Western security apparatus. As he pithily
puts it, “‘the contingent’ has become a new order of the real”[17]. This contingent is the
strategic thinking that both we, and any securing agency, actually need to engender in a world in
which “human being is increasingly relativised in space and time through technologies of
communication and information” (Cooper, 2005, p. 10); a world exemplified by PAM and its derivatives. What we, and they,
certainly do not need to engage in is ever‐greater emplacement. For in a world ever more clearly revealed by the congenitally failing securing
action of such technologies as “an inexhaustible informational remainder which, strangely, appears only to
disappear” (Cooper, 2005, p. 22), such yearning for the objective, for a singular real in which
to find and found ourselves is futile in the extreme. Indeed, one could go further – it is in the
desire for and the violent imposition of a singular truth that most contemporary
conflict is rooted. It is only a manifold real that has sufficient play of space and space of play to prevent the horrors attendant
upon crusades for the truth.¶ So where do we end up? We began by invoking the range of different readings of PAM's demise and worked
through the differences and similarities between them. At the same time we considered the differences and similarities between PAM and
other markets. What was revealed by both of these comparisons was the
tension between instrumental representation
and the prior simulation upon which it depends, a tension embodied perhaps most quintessentially by
markets themselves. Markets are able to reconcile the reversible imminence of simulation through endless deferral – both between
different markets and their derivatives and indeed between the present and the future, so long as the latter always remains deferred and can
never definitively be reached. In doing so they encompass both effect‐cause and cause‐effect. Assuch they are able to sustain
manifold reality so long as the world keeps turning and money keeps making it go round. But what they
cannot do, except in naïve and impoverished accounts, such as those of many of the protagonists we considered, is be
simply resolved to one, singular reality that would arbitrate the truth, particularly the truth of a
prediction. PAM's attempt to capture effect in order to enable intervention at the level of cause is forever undone by the ways in which
such effect is both overly pre‐figured and by the ways in which such prefiguring, when coupled with the informative
role the market is intended to perform for interventionists, acts to ensure that
its signals are suppressed. Despite their myriad other disagreements, the extraction of a singular reality
from the manifold is what most of our commentators seem desperate to achieve. However the divergence in
their views does not thus reveal some underlying neutral core of truth from which each raps out a different line. Rather, we witness the
opposite. A
manifold, polyphonous world that endlessly resists and undoes any singular articulation of its
nature or trajectory. Such a world allows each to tell a different story of its benefits and costs. We thus happily join in celebrating the
cessation of PAM's singular call. But we would equally revel in the silencing, or rather the drowning out via cacophony, of those other
monologues that brought about its end.
Link – Socialism
Socialism is an inherently reactionary political position rooted in ressentiment
Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker”, P. 89) MRS
This is the liberal and enlightened task Nietzsche sets modern humanity in his middle period, confident in the belief that it has the power and
capacity to overcome itself in this way. But Nietzsche's optimism was short-lived. The problem he faced in a few years’ time,
the time of the Gay Science (1882), is one which Hegel recognised as the major problem of modern societies: how a new ethical life
(what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit) is possible, given that modernity is characterised by an individualism that is deeply
ambiguous. On the one hand, the attainment of individual liberty for all represents a progressive
achievement. But, on the other hand, it is potentially destructive and despotic (the throne of bourgeois egoism which
interprets values and 3 beliefs solely from its own narrow perspective). In section 356 of The Gay Science Nietzsche argues that we
moderns are no longer political animals in the Greek sense that we know ourselves, and are able to
organise ourselves, as 'material for society' (compare BGE 262). It is this insight which lies behind his caustic
attack on socialism and what he sees as the naivete of socialists who believe that it is possible simply to
transform the individualism of modern societies and turn it in the direction of the creation of new
communal individuals. In truth, what Nietzsche has identified here is a problem which afflicts all attempts to
conceive a revitalisation of the political realm in which individuals transcend a narrowly conceived
individualism. It is, for example, precisely this problem which bedevilled Rousseau in his strenuous attempts to formulate a notion of the
general will on the basis of the enlightened self-interest of the ' possessive individual' of modern liberal democratic societies. Rousseau
recognised that, in order to achieve the self-overcoming of bourgeois man into post-bourgeois man, 'we would have to be before the law
what we should become by means of it'
Link – Suffering
Thesis claim – suffering inevitable, cannot be eliminated – instead we should make it meaningful
Kain 7 (Philip, University of Santa Clara, “Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrance, and the Horror of Existence” p.
50-53) NFleming
The third vision takes the cosmos to be alien. It was not designed for human beings at all; nor were they
designed for it. We just do not fit. We do not belong. And we never will. The cosmos is horrible, terrifying,
and we will never surmount this fact. It is a place where human beings suffer for no reason at all. It is best never
to have been born. Let us call this the horrific cosmos. This is Nietzsche's view. Nietzsche simply dismisses the designed cosmos, which few
believe in anymore anyway (WP 12a). On the other hand, Nietzsche takes the perfectible cosmos very seriously. He
resists it with every fiber of his being. 5 For Nietzsche, we must stop wasting time and energy hoping to
change things, improve them, make progress ( see, e.g., WP 40, 90, 684 )-the outlook ofliberals, socialists, and
even Christians, all of whom Nietzsche tends to lump together and excoriate. If we look deeply into the
essence of things, into the horror of existence, Nietzsche thinks we will be overwhelmed-paralyzed. Like Hamlet we
will not be able to act, because we will see that action cannot change the eternal nature of things (BT7). We must see, Nietzsche says,
that "a profound illusion ... first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakeable
faith that thought ... can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of
knowing being but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct ... " (BT 15). In
Nietzsche's view, we cannot change things. Instead, with Hamlet we should "feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating
that [we] should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint" (BT 7; cf. TI "Anti-Nature," 6). Knowledge of the
horror of existence kills action-which requires distance and illusion. The horror and meaninglessness of existence must be veiled if we are to live
and act. What we must do, Nietzsche thinks, is construct a meaning for suffering. Suffering we can handle. Meaningless
suffering, suffering for no reason at all, we cannot handle. So we give suffering a meaning. We invent a meaning. We
create an illusion. The Greeks constructed gods for whom wars and other forms of suffering were festival plays and thus an occasion to
be celebrated by the poets. Christians imagine a God for whom suffering is punishment for sin (GMII:7; cf. D
78). One might find all this unacceptable. After all, isn't it just obvious that we can change things,
reduce suffering, improve existence, and make progress? Isn't it just obvious that modem science and
technology have done so? Isn't it just absurd for Nietzsche to reject the possibility of significant change?
Hasn't such change already occurred? Well, perhaps not. Even modem environmentalists might resist all this obviousness.
They might respond in a rather Nietzschean vein that technology may have caused as many problems as it has solved. The advocate of the
perfectible cosmos, on the other hand, would no doubt counter such Nietzschean pessimism by arguing that even if technology does cause
some problems, the solution to those problems can only come from better technology. Honesty requires us to admit, however, that this
is
merely a hope, not something for which we already have evidence, not something that it is absurd to
doubt-not at all something obvious. Further technology may or may not improve things. The
widespread use of antibiotics seems to have done a miraculous job of improving our health and
reducing suffering, but we are also discovering that such antibiotics give rise to even more powerful
bacteria that are immune to those 52 PHILIP J. KAIN antibiotics. We have largely eliminated diseases like
cholera, smallpox, malaria, and tuberculosis, but we have produced cancer and heart disease. We can cure
syphilis and gonorrhea, but we now have AIDS. Even if we could show that it will be possible to continuously reduce
suffering, it is very unlikely that we will ever eliminate it. If that is so, then it remains a real question
whether it is not better to face suffering, use it as a discipline, perhaps even increase it, so as to
toughen ourselves, rather than let it weaken us, allow it to dominate us, by continually hoping to
overcome it. But whatever we think about the possibility of reducing suffering, the question may well
become moot. Nietzsche tells a story: "Once upon a time, in some out of the way comer of that universe which is dispersed into
numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious
minute of 'world history,' but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the
clever beasts had to die" (TL 1, 79). Whatever progress we might think we are making in reducing suffering, whatever
change we think we are bringing about, it may all amount to nothing more than a brief and accidental moment in
biological time, whose imminent disappearance will finally confirm the horror and meaninglessness of
existence. The disagreement here is not so much about the quantity of suffering that we can expect to
find in the world but, rather, its nature. For proponents of the designed cosmos, suffering is basically accidental. It is not
fundamental or central to life. It is not a necessary part of the nature of things. It does not make up the essence of existence. We must develop
virtue, and then we can basically expect to fit and be at home in the cosmos. For the proponents of a perfectible cosmos, suffering is neither
essential nor unessential. The cosmos is neutral. We must work on it to reduce suffering. We must bring about our own fit. For Nietzsche,
even if we can change this or that, even if we can reduce suffering here and there, what cannot be
changed for human beings is that suffering is fundamental and central to life. The very nature of things, the
very essence of existence, means suffering. Moreover, it means meaningless suffering-suffering for no reason at all. That
cannot be changed-it can only be concealed. Nietzsche does not reject all forms of change. What he rejects is the
sort of change necessary for a perfectible cosmos. He rejects the notion that science and technology can transform the
essence of things-he rejects the notion that human effort can significantly reduce physical suffering. Instead, he only thinks it possible to build
up the power necessary to construct meaning in a meaningless world and thus to conceal the horror of existence, which cannot be eliminated.
We cannot prove the opposite view, and I do not think we can dismiss Nietzsche's view simply because it goes counter to the assumptions of
NIeTZSCHE. ETERNAL RECURRENCI AND Tm. HORROR OF EXISTENCE 53 Christianity, science, liberalism, socialism, and so forth. And we certainly
cannot dismiss this view if we hope to understand Nietzsche. At any rate, for Nietzsche, we cannot eliminate suffering; we
can only seek to mask it. Nietzsche embraces the doctrine of eternal recurrence for the first time in The Gay Science 341: 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? (GS 341)6
Link – Utopia
The desire to achieve utopia in the face of the impossibility of flux and suffering gives
birth to ressentiment-driven forms of politics which fail to actuate meaningful change.
Saurette 96 (Paul | PhD in political theory at John Hopkins U, in 96 "I mistrust all systematizers and
avoid them': Nietzshce, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in INternational Relations Theory."
Millenium Journal of International Studies. Vol. 25 no. 1 The Will to Order and Politics-as-Making The
Philosophical Foundation of the Will to Truth/Order." )
According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of ideas which give meaning to the phenomenon of human existence within a given
cultural framework. As one manifestation of the Will to Power, this will to , meaning fundamentally influences the social and political organisation of a particular
community.5 Anything less than a profound historical interrogation of the most basic philosophical
foundations of our civilization, then, misconceives the origins of values which we take to be intrinsic and
natural. Nietzsche suggests, therefore, that to understand the development of our modem conception
of society and politics, we must reconsider the crucial influence of the Platonic formulation of Socratic
thought. Nietzsche claims that pre-Socratic Greece based its philosophical justification of life on heroic
myths which honoured tragedy and k competition. Life was understood as a contest in which both the
joyful and ordered (Apollonian) and chaotic and suffering (Dionysian) aspects of life were accepted and
affirmed as inescapable aspects of human existence.6 However, this incarnation of the will to power as
tragedy weakened, and became unable to sustain meaning in Greek life. Greek myths no longer instilled
the self-respect and self-control that had upheld the pre-Socratic social order. -Everywhere the :
instincts were in anarchy; everywhere people were.but five steps from excess: the monstrum-in-animo
was a universal danger’. No longer willing to accept the tragic hardness and self-mastery of pre-Socratic
myth, Greek thought yielded to decadence, a search for a new social foundation which would soften the
tragedy of life, while still giving meaning to existence. In this context, Socrates' thought became
paramount. In the words of Nietzsche, Socrates saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that
his case, the idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was
everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was coming to an end—And Socrates understood
that the world had need of him —his expedient, his cure and his personal art of self-preservation.
Socrates realised that his search for an ultimate and eternal intellectual standard paralleled the
widespread yearning for assurance and stability within society. His expedient, his cure? An alternative
will to power. An alternate foundation that promised mastery and control not through acceptance of the
tragic life, but through the disavowal of the instinctual, the contingent, and the problematic. In response
to the failing power of its foundational myths, Greece tried to renounce the very experience that had
given rise to tragedy by retreating/escaping into the Apollonian world promised by Socratic reason. In
Nietzsche's words, '[rationality was divined as a saviour...it was their last expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at
rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational....'9 Thus, Socrates codified the wider
fear of instability into an intellectual framework. The
Socratic Will to Truth is characterised by the attempt to understand
and order life rationally by renouncing the Dionysian elements of existence and privileging an idealised
Apollonian order. As life is inescapably comprised of both order and disorder however, the promise of
control through Socratic reason is only possible by creating a 'Real World* of eternal and meaningful
forms, in opposition to an 'Apparent World of transitory physical existence. Suffering and contingency is
contained within the Apparent World, disparaged, devalued, and^ ignored in relation to the ideal order
of the Real World. Essential to the Socratic Will to Truth, then, is the fundamental contradiction between
the experience of Dionysian suffering in the Apparent World and the idealised order of the Real World.
According to Nietzsche, this dichotomised model led to the emergence of a uniquely 'modern'10
understanding of life which could only view suffering as the result of the imperfection of the Apparent
World. This outlook created a modern notion of responsibility in which the Dionysian elements of life
could be understood only as a phenomenon for which someone, or something is to blame. Nietzsche
terms this philosophically-induced condition ressentiment. and argues that it signalled a potential crisis of the Will to Truth by
exposing the central contradiction of the Socratic resolution. This contradiction, however, was resolved historically through the aggressive universalisation of the
Socratic ideal by Christianity. According to Nietzsche,' ascetic
Christianity exacerbated the Socratic dichotomisation by
employing the Apparent World as the responsible agent against which the ressentiment of life could be
turned. Blame for suffering fell on individuals within the Apparent World, precisely because they did not live up to God, the Truth, and the Real World, As
Nietzsche wrote, ‘I suffer: someone must be to blame for it’ thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest tells him: ‘Quite so my sheep! Someone
must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for yourself,-you alone are to blame for yourself '-This is brazen and.false
enough: but one thing, is achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is altered." Faced, with the collapse of the Socratic resolution and the prospect of
meaninglessness, once again, 'one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational.... '12 The genius of the ascetic ideal was that it
preserved the meaning of the Socratic Will to Power as Will to Truth by extrapolating ad absurdiuin the Socratic division through the redirection of ressentiment
against the Apparent World! Through
this redirection, the Real World was transformed from a transcendental
world of philosophical escape into a model towards which the Apparent World actively aspired, always
blaming its contradictory experiences on its own imperfect knowledge and action. This subtle
transformation of the relationship between the dichotomised worlds creates the .Will to Order as the
defining characteristic of the modern Will to Truth. Unable to accept the Dionysian suffering inherent in
the Apparent World, the ascetic ressentiment desperately searches for 'the hypnotic sense of
nothingness, the repose of deepest. sleep, in short absence of suffering According to the ascetic model,
however, this escape is possible only when the Apparent World perfectly duplicates the Real World. The
Will to Order, then, is the aggressive need increasingly to order the Apparent World in line with the
precepts of the moral-Truth of the Real World. The ressentiment of the Will to Order, therefore,
generates two interrelated reactions. First, ressentiment engenders a need actively to mould the
Apparent World in accordance with the dictates of the ideal Apollonian Real World. In order to achieve
this," however, the ascetic ideal also asserts that a 'truer', more complete knowledge of the Real World
must be established creating an ever-increasing Will-to Truth. This self-perpetuating movement creates
an interpretative structure within which everything must be understood and ordered in relation to the
ascetic Truth of the Real World. As Nietzsche suggests, [t]he ascetic ideal has a goal—this goal is so
universal that all other interests of human existence seem, when compared with it, petty and narrow; it
interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a view to this one goal; it permits no other
interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms and sanctions solely from the point of view of its
interpretation.''1 The very structure of the Will to Truth ensures that theoretical investigation must be
increasingly ordered, comprehensive, more True, and closer to the perfection of the ideal. At the same
time, this understanding of intellectual theory ensures that it creates practices which attempt to impose
increasing order in the Apparent World. With this critical transformation, the Will to Order becomes .the
fundamental philosophical principle of modernity.
Link - USFG
Jefferson’s bible
This episode in the history of the German language played out about 1010 years before Nietzsche's own self-declaration, while the next
example from the history of self-praise relations in western tradition refers to a case that is separated by a mere seventy or eighty years from
the intervention of the teacher of the eternal return. The issue here still has to do with improving the Gospel-but this time the mode is
considerably more complicated, since what now enters the foreground, at the same time as collective self-praise, are concerns about individual
self-enhancement. The scene of the experiment is the United States of America around 1810, and the Gospel
redactor is none other than the redactor of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas
Jefferson, who at this time was able to look back on several terms of office as minister to France and as vice president of the USA, as well as
on two mandates as president. After his years of service in Washington, he returned home to his manor in Monticello, Virginia, and devoted
himself to rounding out the image of himself he intended to leave to posterity. These
indications are enough to support the
notion that what we bear witness to here is an eminent case of national-religious linguistic pragmatism,
especially as we know that to this day the United States represents the most fertile collective of self-
celebration of all the current political entities in the "concert of nations"; it could also be said that it is
the society whose founding conditions included dismantling as far as possible all cultural inhibitions
against the use of enhancing superlatives in a democratic self-- reference. What is the USA if not the
product of a Declaration of Independence-from humility (and doubtless not only from the British Crown)? There can be
little wonder, then, about the efficacy with which, as we shall see, the Christian message is adapted to the needs of
American glory. Already during his first presidential mandate in Washington, Jefferson would busy himself on his spare nights, using
scissors to cut out extracts from a series of editions of the New Testament in Greek, Latin, French, and English,
which he then pasted together into a scrap book to make a new arrangement of the Gospels. The aim was
one he'd held for some time, and first emerged during his correspondence with Unitarian theologian and writer Joseph Priestly, in 1795. In all
likelihood, however, the task was not completed until around 1820, after many years of interruption. The product of this cut-and-paste
work, which Jefferson completed twice-over, was given the title The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth and has
become known as The Jefferson Bible. In his scissor- work, the redactor must have been convinced that
he possessed the criteria by which to distinguish the utilizable from the non-utilizable in the bequeathed
text. As a representative of the American Enlightenment thinkers, with their decorative monotheism and Philadelphian exuberance,
Jefferson testifies to the state of the Gospel problem at the apex of this current of thought. With this
Christian-humanist gentleman, it becomes clear that the need for a self-enhancement using the classic
reservoirs of meaning was as alive as ever but could only be satisfied by expunging vast passages of the
historical Gospels. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, anyone wanting still to play the
language game of the Gospels to advantage had above all to be able to omit. This is the meaning of neo-
humanism: to be able to eliminate in the old Gospel that which has become incompatible with one's
own glorification as a humanist and citizen. For this operation, no image is more impressive than that of an
American head of state in his office at night, who, with scissors, cuts out pages from six copies of the
New Testament in four different languages and pastes the extracts into a private copy of the Good News
that is designed to conform to the demands of contemporary rationality and sentimentality for a citable,
excerpted version of the Bible. It is characteristic of Jefferson's philosophical ambitions that he did not
feel that this redaction of the Gospel-or as he put it, this formulation of an abstract or syllabus-was a heresy in the
original meaning of the term, insofar as hairesis refers to a choosy insolence applied to a totality of
dogmas and traditions. Rather, he presented himself as the curator of the writings' true content, as re-
establishing a pure text against the fudging performed by later additions. With energetic naivety, the enlightened redactor went
about separating Jesus' unacceptable words from those that Jesus must have said, had he wanted to be
approvingly cited by Jefferson; even better, from those that Jesus would have said had he foreseen the
transformation of believers into sympathizers. In fact, the modern sympathizer of Jesus can be defined as
the bearer of Euro-American Enlightenment, as one who places value, despite all the connections to the
Christian tradition, on remaining within the continuum of worldly possibilities of self-- enhancement
that were developed since the Renaissance. And this is precisely what Jefferson had in mind when he endeavored to cut out
the valid residue, that which is citable even among humanists, from the embarrassing mass of New Testament phrases. As such, in October
1813, Jefferson felt he could send to John Adams the following report of success: There will be found
remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have
performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and
arranging, the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a
dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines . . . 5 In a letter addressed to the
erudite religious and Dutch Unitarian, Francis Adrian van der Kemp, Jefferson explained himself in a
more detailed manner about his relationship with Jesus the man: It is the innocence of His character, the
purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the eloquence of His inculcations, the beauty of the
apologues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing indulgence to
eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings and
discourses imputed to Him by His biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the loveliest benevolence; and
others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such
contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and
leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples.6 In view of this declaration it makes little sense to maintain,
along with The Jefferson Bible's editor Forrester Church, that the wise man of Monticello merely sought the intelligible Jesus and necessarily
missed the historical one. Jefferson was after neither an historical nor an intelligible Jesus but rather an object of eulogy, which, by giving praise
to it and thus having recourse to shared moral values, would enable the speaker to come out a sure-fire winner. Jefferson was
after a
spiritual master who could be cited to guarantee advantage, and who would permit the laudator to
become a prestige shareholder by drawing on the holy source of values. After the mental caesura of the
Enlightenment, an unabridged version of the New Testament could deliver no such expectations of
symbolic profits, and for this reason any rational redactor had to expunge from the corpus of stories and
words of evangelical authority all that would compromise him in front of other rational beings and land
him in the mire of sectarianism, or, what amounts to the same thing, of cognitive loserdom. For absolutely
similar motives, and with similar means, Leo Tolstoy would later put together a private version of the New
Testament and present it as a sort of "Fifth Gospel": the Russian path toward the coexistence of
evangelism and the Enlightenment.7 The Moderns no longer know of evangelists; they know only of the classics. Citing a
classic guarantees a sure, albeit modest, return; on the contrary, if, in society, you invoke the Redeemer,
your credit will shrink. The Enlightenment is really a language game for cognitive winners, who
continually deposit the premiums of knowledge and critique in their accounts, and exhibit their cultural
funds, while faith gets increasingly hidden behind a barrier of embarrassment, to be crossed only when
one is among like-minded others, and, moreover, is ready to give up the advanced boasting potential of
the Enlightenment. But Jefferson was not a man to burden himself with embarrassment or with
language games for losers. As a result, in his redaction of the Holy Scriptures for Enlightenment winners, all
the threatening and apocalyptic discourses of Jesus are forcibly absent, as are most of the stories about
miraculous cures and resurrection-his purged Gospel ends when a few of Jesus's friends roll away the
stone in front of the tomb and go off on their way. As text-composer, Jefferson performs the literary
imperative of Modernity: Where legend existed, the news must come! At stake now is to swap all sacred
agents for terrestrial heroes. Jesus can only be the hero of a novel or a participant in discourse. In a general
way, the modern tribute to heroes necessarily faces a complicating factor, namely that eulogistic functions are increasingly dependent on
scientific premises and must satisfy the dictates of political correctness. Nowadays you always have to have in view the side-
effects of each tribute and to calculate the angle of refraction of indirect self-enhancement. But the
main rule is that all eulogistic remarks have to be ontologically correct, and that no claims are made of
actual interventions from transcendence into immanence. The leeway for boasting shrinks; the strategy of indirect self--
celebration in high culture hits the investor with ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic returns. Summing up this state of
affairs is the term humanism, such as ethicists use it today: to all speakers, it suggests the return to a
carefully considered sort of self-affirmation that is only barely distinguishable from medium-level
depression. Twentieth-century mass culture would first designate a way out of this quandary by
disconnecting self-praise from remarkable performance and other things, admiration of which was
based on superior criteria. This disconnection thus enabled primitive feelings of exhilaration to step onto the forestage where a public
of accomplices in disinhibition awaited, intent on cheering. For Jefferson, these kinds of relief were not yet in sight. He had to
continue to tie his eulogistic brio to the holy texts, and, by means of redemptive abstracts, to revert to
elevated examples of the tradition in order to satisfy cultural demands for discourses about higher
feelings. He could thus write to one of his correspondents: "I am a Christian, in the only sense He wished
any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every
human excellence...."8 What speaks for Jefferson is that his hypocrisy is spontaneous and coherent. His
grasping at the diamonds in the dunghill of tradition illustrates a growing American selectiveness as
regards the heritage of old Europe. The importation of meaning from Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, and Wittenberg also had to clear
American customs. Jefferson's redaction of the Gospels teaches us that the preconditions for winning avowable positions of privilege stemming
from Christian tradition already became problematic nearly a century prior to Nietzsche's own intervention. What, in
western culture
for over one and a half millennia, had been the pure and simple, and often also profitable, Good News-
the creed for admitting people into the other-worldly God's system of likeness- increasingly proved to
be a losing game for the messenger: the conditions of transmission for messages of this type had been
transformed; the speaker of such news appeared too clearly as someone who had not yet properly
learned the procedures of modernity to be able to take up the word to advantage.
Link – War
The extermination of that which is radically Other is inextricably linked to the security
imperative. War is no longer about resources, ideology, or territory, but the result of
an all-consuming paranoia cycle—which feeds the structures that dehumanize life
through biopolitical dependence on the state.
Der Derian 8 Der, Derian, James. Critical Practices in International Theory : Selected Essays,
Routledge, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=401831. Created from purdue on
2018-06-25 13:17:59.
In the last analysis, “love of the neighbor” is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary – illusory in relation to fear of the
neighbor. After the structure of society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it
is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. –Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbes’s and Marx’s interpretations of security through a
genealogy of modes of being. His method is not to uncover some deep meaning or value for security,
but to destabilize the intolerable fictional identities of the past which have been created out of fear, and
to affirm the creative differences which might yield new values for the future.33 Originating in the paradoxical
relationship of a contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a
resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In brief, the history is one of individuals
seeking an impossible security from the most radical “other” of life, the terror of death which, once
generalized and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien
others–who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the
otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness. Since Nietzsche has suffered the greatest neglect
in international theory, his reinterpretation of security will receive a more extensive treatment here. One must begin with
Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and generative of all
considerations of security. In Beyond Good and Evil, he emphatically establishes the primacy of the will
to power: “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 most frequent results.”34 The will to power, then, should not be
confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power,
leading, in Nietzsche’s view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and
effective force of becoming, from which values and meanings – including self-preservation – are
produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears
endemic to life, for “… 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
slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages.”35 Elsewhere
Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in
life: “life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war.”36 But the denial of this permanent
condition, the effort to disguise it with a consensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional
sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective
resentment of difference– that which is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative
will to power is the fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to
power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated
life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of
the reader: “Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover
everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the
instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain knowledge not the
jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?” 157 The fear of the unknown and the desire for
certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in which causality and rationality become the highest
sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief
that everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative
produces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the
nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols: The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited
by, the feeling of fear. The “why?” shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause–a
cause that is comforting, liberating and relieving. … That which is new and strange and has not been experienced
before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a
cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation–that which most quickly and
frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual
explanations.38 A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown
becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility–recycling the desire for security. The “influence of
timidity,” as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the
“necessities” of security: “they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil
experiences.”39 The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world. “Trust,” the “good,”
and other common values come to rely upon an “artificial strength”: “the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in
being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected by a god.”40 For Nietzsche, of
course, only a false sense of security can come from false gods: “Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error: in every
single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is
confused with its causes.”41 Nietzsche’s interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and
transvaluation of security. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense of fear and indebtedness to one’s ancestors:
The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists–and that one has to pay
them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in
their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength. Sacrifices, honors, obedience are given but
it is never enough, for the ancestors of the most powerful tribes are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the
imagination of growing fear and to recede into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily
be transfigured into a god. 43 As the ancestor’s debt becomes embedded in institutions, the community takes on the role of creditor.
Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian moment: to rely upon an “artificial strength”: “the feeling one
lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes underrate them
today), one dwells protected, cared for, in peace and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries and
hostile acts to which the man outside, the “man without peace,” is exposed … since one has bound and
pledged oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts.44 The establishment of
the community is dependent upon, indeed it feeds upon, this fear of being left outside. As the castle wall is
replaced by written treaty, however, and distant gods by temporal sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are
slowly debased and dissimulated. The subject of the individual will to power becomes the object of a collective
resentment. The result? The fear of the external other is transvalued into the “love of the neighbor” quoted in the opening of this section,
and the perpetuation of community is assured through the internalization and legitimation of a fear that
lost its original source long ago. This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal otherness,
generates the values which uphold the security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of
even individual rights, such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security: My rights are that part of
my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve. How do these
others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution: whether in that they expect
something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us
would be perilous or to no purpose; or in that they see in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to
themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an alliance with them in opposition to a hostile
third power. Then: by donation and cession.45 The point of Nietzsche’s critical genealogy is to show that the
perilous conditions that created the security imperative – and the western metaphysics that perpetuate
it – have diminished if not disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: “Our century denies this perilousness, and does so
with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment, recreation and
evaluation.”46 Nietzsche’s
worry is that the collective reaction against older, more primal fears has created
an even worse danger: the tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last man which
controls 159 conformity and rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state
comes at the cost of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox – all that makes a free life worthwhile. Nietzsche’s
lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical questions: Of future virtues – How comes it that the more
comprehensible the world has grown the more solemnities of every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic element of that
reverence which overcame us in the presence of everything unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the incomprehensible
and plead for mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because we have grown less fearful? With the diminution of our
fearfulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fearsomeness, not also diminished?47 It
is of course in Nietzsche’s
lament, in his deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds the celebration of the overman as both
symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet fearsome age. Dismissive of utopian engineering,
Nietzsche never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward only so far as to sight the
emergence of “new philosophers” (such as himself?) who would restore a reverence for fear and reevaluate
the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-Christian, pre-Socratic era to find the exemplars for a new kind of
security. In The Genealogy of Morals, he holds up Pericles as an example, for lauding the Athenians for their “rhathymia” – a term that
incorporates the notion of “indifference to and contempt for security.”48 It
is perhaps too much to expect Nietzsche’s
message to resonate in late modern times, to expect, at the very time when conditions seem most
uncertain and unpredictable, that people would treat fear as a stimulus for improvement rather than
cause for retrenchment. Yet Nietzsche would clearly see these as opportune times, when fear could be
willfully asserted as a force for the affirmation of difference, rather than canalized into a cautious
identity constructed from the calculation of risks and benefits.
Link – The Other
tag
I would also like to contend that Nietzsche's "narcissism" is less pertinent a phenomenon from the point of individual psychology than the marker of a cut in the linguistic history of old Europe.
, . The discursive event which bears the name Nietzsche is

At bottom it signifies the disclosure of the nature of authorship and literary discourse
characterized by the infringement, within him, of the high- culture separation between the Good News
and self-celebration-which in addition unveils what it is that a modern author does: he posits the text for himself the economy
of eulogistic and misological discourse and its foundation in the taboo weighing on self-praise are
simultaneously opened up to debate. The legitimization of this turn can be gleaned from Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics and morality. In it the
order of lies, that in which indirect eulogy is grounded, becomes altogether transparent, laying bare the mechanisms of contortion
that have materialized in phrases such as "One who is humble will be elevated," or servir et dis- paraitre. If it is true
that this separation of praise from self is nothing other than a deferment effected through resentment,
an everlasting adjournment of the moment in which an orator could say to his own existence, "linger a while so that I can praise you," one may thus understand Nietzsche's
attacks against discretion as acts of revision that contradict the traditional morality of self-dispossession
in an almost furious way. We must go back to late middle-age mysticism to be able, at least from afar, to encounter
comparable phenomena. Spectacular and embarrassing as they are, they serve to restore the possibility of forging the most
direct link between self and praise. What Nietzsche has in mind is not indistinctly to rejoice over oneself as bare
existence: he deaves with all his might to the idea that existence must earn its exultation, or better: that
it has to grow into its exultation. As no other modern thinker, Nietzsche espouses the adaequatio iubilationis et intellectus. If there is any
correspondence between its existence and good reputation, an existence must become enhanced to such
an extent that the best may be said about it. Existence may well be an a priori chance for self-praise; however, self-eulogistic
discourse can only become legitimate a posteriori at the level of culture. Between the chance and its
realization, the bridge is created by "egocentrism"-this long-maligned dimension in which the best
possibilities of humankind were arrested incognito. It is the selfish impulses, insofar as they are also work-obsessed, upon
which Nietzsche bestows with a philosophical consecration. Belated self-praise condenses the premonition
of one's own becoming and the consummation of egocentrism together in the image of self: how it is
that one becomes what one is, grasping the randomness of being "me." The "full" self-image is
"realized," perhaps, in a moment, when the most ambitious anticipations of one's own ability to become are
confirmed with a review of life lived. This is the type of moment spoken of on the single page inserted at the start of
Ecce Homo: On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the
eye of the sun just fell upon my life; I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such
good things at once. (. . .) How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?8 If a life's elevated possibilities
increase, self-praise can unfold in analogue fashion: once again the work praises the master, who is
poised to disappear into the work. And it is precisely this correspondence that creates the scandal-this
limitless talking up of manifest and squandered wealth, this jubilatory self-review after the deed done, this complete dissolution of life in luminous
positings, which remain as works of language: they form the counter-offence to the offence of the cross,
exclaimed by St Paul, with which the blockade against the connection between self and praise was solidified. That
Nietzsche fittingly assessed the implications for the politics of language of his belated embarrassment and
interpreted them on a grand historical scale can in fact be seen in the vocabulary of his late texts, in which the
expression "cynicism" comes conspicuously to the surface. Nietzsche, the philologist, was attentive to the fact that his
philosophical battle-cry, the "re-evaluation of all values," harked back to a kynical fragment that
describes the protest strategy of Diogenes of Sinope: "recoin the money''; he was cognizant of the fact
that the appearance he emitted in the texts of 1888 could necessarily seem to be a reemergence of "Socrates
gone mad." But this is exactly what mattered to him: he pursued the reevaluation of all the source value
of embarrassment, the revision of misological manners, the abolition of borders, which, for a whole age, had been
drawn between creative life and its self-eulogizing force. So, on the 20th of November, 1888, Nietzsche felt able to write to
the Danish critic Brandes that: I have talked about myself with a cynicism that will become world historical. The book is called
Ecce Homo. . . In the section of this book called Why I write such good books Nietzsche makes the following remarks about his works: they
sometimes reach the highest elevation you will find anywhere on earth, cynicism.9 The expression "cynicism"
used in these passages indicates two directions: the first is the elevation of questions of diet and health to a level
that is quasi- evangelical-a turn which sums up a good part of the 1 9th and 20th centuries and already
sketches the direction of the 21st in its generality; and the second is the merging of the Good News with
self-eulogizing energies. That's why the meaning of the words "cynical" and "evangelical" is henceforth in
this specific case the same. At the point where their meanings intersect they signify exactly what it is that a modern author does: exhibit
oneself, transform oneself in writing, render oneself "infeasible." Nietzsche: "I have never taken a step-in public that did
not compromise me: that is my criterion for acting right."10 Singing-one's-own praise of a life which
affirms and realizes itself as artistic composition is rightly seen as the only authentic discursive form still
able to merit the qualification evangelical. As message this form is simply good, when and if it comprises the self-communication of the successful-and a
sympathizing with it. It speaks the language of a life that not only has the right to make a promise but can also
endorse it-and the bigger the resistance provoked by the affirmation, the more authentic its occurrence.
One might call the language-traces of such a life Spinozist since they are "expressions" in the sense that they serve to announce a force of being. They breach the
constraints of traditional bivalent logic, which had required for the speaker always to choose between
one of two things-either vouch for god, which was unavoidably connected with the refusal of the hateful
ego, or vouch for the Ego, which traditionally could be understood only as the satanic renunciation of
god.
**Impact**
Impact/Alt – Shapiro
There is a tension between all peoples and fatherlands. The people cease being
mobile, become locked into fatherlands where patriarchal authority can be used to
enforce states of exception and a politics of fear. Against such fatherlands, Nietzsche
calls for a nomadic and de-territorialized mode of thought that celebrates difference.
This requires a reconfiguration of our relationship to national politics and to ourselves.
Without this, the state of exception will continue to be used as a justification for
escalatory wars of nationalism and it will be used as a justification of closing ourselves
off from the exterior.
Shapiro 2008 (Gary, Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at
the University of Richmond, Beyond Peoples and Fatherlands: Nietzsche's Geophilosophy and
the Direction of the Earth, in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 35/36, 20-4)
This analysis of music throws some light on the figure of the "good which is developed here by reading
national and supranational modes and feeling through musical styles. The good European is not
(certainly primarily) the citizen of a single new European state. The good goal of BGE, holding the
same place in that work that the posthuman Z. If Zarathustra is a fantastic figure, deriving from a
specifically landscape (Persia), then the good European is something of tomorrow day after. We do not
have to wait for the "great noon" for the emergence good European; this is the name of the future that is
arriving. In the second aphorism Nietzsche speaks of "dull and sluggish races who would require half a
century even in our rapidly moving Europe come ... atavistic attacks of fatherlandishness and gluing
themselves [Schollenkleberei]" (BGE 241). This is a reactive reterritorialization acknowledge itself.
This dogged geographic essentialism obstructs and stands in the way of the "dull races" expansion
or development "races," such as the possibility that Nietzsche (the supposed proto-Nazi) of
Germans and Jews forming a new hybrid (BGE 251). Cloudy indeterminacy a strength, if it enables
receptivity to the exterior, but in gluing the soil, sticking it in the mud, unnamed statesmen
(Bismarck and his like) narrow the spirit and degrade taste. Unspoken here is the tension between
“people” and "fatherland." A people is fundamentally mobile and active, although “dull and
sluggish" by turns. It handicaps itself by assuming a national identity hypostatizing its geographic
situation into a "fatherland." Peoples are experiments with a future, not essences to be preserved.
Here we might think for moment of a suppressed or implicit contrast between fatherland and
motherland. Fatherland suggests singular and patriarchal authority, the daddy claims emergency
authority, declares a state of exception, and position by a propaganda of fear. (Only at one point
does Nietzsche motherlands, and it is simply to equate them with fatherlands. Zarathustra that he has
searched for father- and motherlands but has failed to find "unsettled am I in all settlements at all gates."
He declares that he has "been driven out from all father- erlands" and loves only his "children's land,
undiscovered, in the [ZII "On the Land of Culture"]. Like the contemporary nomad, he is unsettled,
but his wandering has a goal; Deleuze and Guattari have translated this into the search to reterritorialize
philosophy on a "new people, new earth”) In the third aphorism Nietzsche further contextualizes the
question of nationality (BGE 242). What can be called "Europe's democratic movement" is a
"physiological" process that is producing "a supra-national and nomadic type of human being," one
distinguished by its high power of adaptation, fit to become an "industrious worker" and "multi-purpose
herd animal." Nietzsche carefully notes that he says this "without praise or blame." What is the "nomadic
type of human being"? The nomad should not be construed as a hermit, a solitary "existential"
figure (associations that students typically make). Speaking here of contemporary nomads, Nietzsche
emphasizes not their isolation and difference but their tendency, in these circumstances, to
homogeneity, to become a herd of adaptable workers (Hartmann had neglected emigration and
immigration in his globalization scenario). If peoples and fatherlands are mobile, experimental
constructions, the nomads intensify this mobility, detaching themselves from states and their
nationalisms. Nietzsche's trans-European eye sees mobility as primary in human habitation. He
apparently sharpened this view through his reading of Friedrich Ratzel's Anthropo-Geographie (1882)?a
book that he underlined and annotated.15 (Ratzel became a problematic figure in later German
geopolitics, contributing to the formation of the concept of Lebensraum.) Ratzel attempted to articulate
the basic parameters of a truly global human geography, one not limited by the perspectives of states and
therefore not by written history, itself linked to the state form. In the concluding chapter of his treatise
Ratzel highlights his signature thesis: the movement of peoples, their inevitable mixing and tendency to
homogenization, is the most constant feature of human life on the earth. He writes: The human being is
restless, he strives for the greatest possible overall expansion, wherever natural boundaries do not sharply
hem him in, and any anthropological wherever natural boundaries do not sharply hem him in, and any
anthropological conceptualization that does not take this restlessness into account, rests on a false
foundation. Humanity must be seen as a mass [Masse] that finds itself in constant effervescent or
fermenting motion [g?hrender Bewegung], and through this G?hrung a great inner manifold
[Mannigfaltigkeit] is united. This fermenta tion obtains in varying degrees, but is absent in no people or
stage of culture. It has the tendency to make human beings ever more uniform, because mixing is
inseparably bound up with this movement.16 Nietzsche adds to Ratzel's analysis that this mixing gives
rise to hybrids and monsters, "exceptional types," not merely more uniform populations. This is not
merely because of his high valuation of individual genius but also follows from what he adapts from
Darwin and Darwinism regarding the properties of a popula tion. For example, Nietzsche begins GS by
saying that the faulty mathematics of the solemn, tragic "teachers of the purpose of existence" leads them
to substitute one for the multiple. He looks forward to the time when we will have realized that "the
species is everything, one is always none"; the teachers of the purpose of existence fail to understand the
logic of the multiple: "For [them] there are no species, sums, or zeros" (GS 1). Here we should note
Nietzsche's exclamation that this is "the century of the multitude [Menge]\" (BGE 256). We should
not be misled by translations that read Menge as "masses." Masses suggests only homogeneity; while
Nietzsche does see the drive toward homogeneity in the emerging Europe, he also emphasizes the
exceptional, the inventive, and the hybrid.17 (Note that set theory, being developed at precisely this time
by Georg Cantor to deal with the absolutely multiple or infinite, is Mengenlehre. I have no reason,
however, to think that Nietzsche knew Cantor's work.) Again in this spirit, Nietzsche challenges the
natal or autochthonous that is implicit in the national, the root of fatherlandishness: "What gets
called a 'nation' in Europe today (and is really more a res facta [something made] than nata [born]?every
once in a while a res ficta etpicta [something fictitious and painted] will look exactly the same) is, in any
case, something young, easily changed, and in a state of becoming, not yet a race let alone the sort of aere
perennius [more enduring than bronze] that the Jewish type is" (BGE 251). It seems at first that Nietzsche
continues it becomes clear that they are to be distinguished from other groups only by the relative
speed of their movement, not by any essential characteristic. They represent a countermovement to the
nomadic, since they are seeking a place to settle down and assimilate to some degree. Yet this very
movement, Nietzsche opines, "perhaps already reveals a slackening of the Jewish instincts." So even this
group whom he had just described as "without a doubt the strongest, purest, most tenacious race
living in Europe today" is subject to the general principle of mobility. Nietzsche emphasizes the
agonistic relation between nomads and the state (with its valorization of identity and its insane
"state of exception" nationalism) even more than Ratzel. Deleuze suggests (from a reading of GM II:
16-17) that nomads arise at the state's periphery and exist in constant tension with it. The nomads
resist not only the existing empire or "despotic machine"; they resist the formation of states among
themselves. Official history largely neglects nomads or finds them incomprehensible. Deleuze offers
an explanation: "If there is no history from the viewpoint of the nomads, although everything passes
through them, to the point that they are the noumena or the unknowable of history, it is because they
cannot be separated from this task of abolition which makes the nomad empires vanish as if of their own
accord, at the same time as the war-machine is either destroyed or passes into the service of the state."18
The thought of the state privileges inferiority and the maintenance of its borders. In 1874 Nietzsche
wrote that philosophy "is gradually turning into nothing but the guarding of borders."19 In fact,
Nietzsche had earlier, in Human, All Too Human, described the political and the personal as being
subject to the same kind of self-imposed misunderstanding; in each case he speaks of how an
artificial unity is imposed by a state of emergency or martial law, what Carl Schmitt, Walter
Benjamin, and most recently Giorgio Agamben have called a "state of exception." Nietzsche anticipates
this later discussion in HHA15. There he speaks of a coming "abolition of nations, at least the
European," and the emergence of a "mixed race, that of the European human." Contemporary
nationalism, Nietzsche argues, "is a forcibly imposed state of exception and siege [Not- und
Belagerungszustand] inflicted on the many by the few and requires cunning, force and falsehood to
maintain a front of respectability," words that are all too relevant today.20 Politically, the state of
exception is the assumption by a sovereign power of the right to suspend laws and constitutions, its
current version being the concept of the "unitary executive." The state of exception is imposed by a
single executive or executive group that declares itself to be the sole "decider," and its signature
decisions are those geared to the fomenting of national hostilities. The claimed justification for such
a state of exception, Nietzsche says later in HH, commenting on the Inquisition, is the claim of
exclusive truth and virtue, which must be preserved for the sake of all mankind (HH633). Nietzsche
follows his chapter "A Glance at the State" with one called "Man Alone with Himself" where he employs
the same political concept. This is comparable to Plato reading justice or injustice in the state as man writ
large. The aphorism reads: "Self-observation.?The human [Mensch] is very well defended against
himself, against being reconnoitered and placed under siege [Belagerung] by himself, he is usually able to
perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless
his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path" (HH 491). The human being
is in a state of exception with regard to him- or herself, a strange doubling logic but no stranger
than the explicitly political state of exception. We do not know our inner fortress, which serves as
wall and defense. We resist self-knowledge by declaring a state of exception that makes our core as
uncanny as the sovereign imposition of a law that suspends law. Both in the case of the individual
and in that of the state, friends and enemies, forces of the outside, are necessary to break the
defenses and the martial law that claim justification to resist the siege. The tightly constructed
individual identity (think of Freud's superego) and the nationalistic political state are powerful yet
fragile, and the struggles to dissolve both of these artificial unities have a common structure.
Alternatively, Deleuze describes Nietzsche's nomadic "counter-philosophy" "Its statements can be
conceived as the products of a mobile war-machine and not the utterances of a rational,
administrative machinery, whose philosophers would be bureaucrats of pure reason" and says that
perhaps it is here that Nietzsche announces a "new politics."21 If the state codifies through law and
contract, nomads decodify without recodifying. Deleuze charges that Marx and Freud are ultimately
conservative thinkers insofar as they recodify on the basis of a new and perfected socialist state or on a
reconstituted story of the family. Kant testifies to the strength of the figure when he dismisses skeptics as
nomads; they play a salutary but temporary role in their rebellion against the despotism of the dogmatists
but are fundamentally anarchistic enemies of civilization.22 Nietzsche, on the other hand, copied into his
notebooks a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "History" in praise of "spiritual nomadism": "A
man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon and
sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite. And associates as happily as besides his own chimneys. Or
him points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes" (KSA 9, 667).23 History and the history of
philosophy belong to the state; geography and geophilosophy, to the nomads. Nietzsche is willing to
make some conjectures about the way in which the European experiments (there is never just one) will
go. He has at least two models, and it is not immediately obvious that they can be reconciled. The first is
a democratizing and homogenizing movement leading to the adaptable worker who will allow
others to organize their lives, close to Zarathustra's last man and Hartmann's globalized bourgeoisie. It
makes possible the rise of tyrants, including the most spiritual kind. On a second model Europe is the
breeding ground for new forms of spiritual hybridity, and Nietzsche distinguishes the roles of
receptivity and generation. He sees two possibly productive roles for Germany: as the cultural stimulus
for France and as a marital introduction service for military families and Jews (BGE 251). Such hybrids,
not the homogenized last men, are movements in the style of the good European: on the one hand
common and the other is rare. Social, economic, and geographic mobility produces a multitude
(Menge) adapted to globalized conditions as well as exceptional new combinations brought about by
a variety of causes. The good European might look like a French philosopher inhabited by German
thought (say, French philosophy from Sartre to Derrida) or the children of German-Jewish marriages.
These hybrids are not themselves instances of a higher type but, rather, signs of the fertility of Europe's
productive ferment.
Impact – State of Exception
To cover up its inherently unstable character of its composition, the nation state attempts to
homogenize and contain its differential and dynamic population. As a last-ditch effort to secure its
unity, the state employs scare-tactics, using states of exception to secure its sovereign unity.
University of Richmond, States and Nomads: Hegel’s World and Nietzsche’s Earth, in Nietzsche and the
Becoming of Life, ed. Vanessa Lemm, Fordham university press, 310-11)
For Nietzsche, since the nation state conceives itself as a population of common ethnic origins and
culture, it finds itself in an intrinsically unstable position, as mobility and mingling contribute to
forming a “mixed race” (Mischrasse). Nietzsche welcomes the process and sees no point in resisting
the inevitable. While some mobility has to do with individuals seeking employment, opportunity, or
freedom from old, restrictive traditions, Nietzsche is also thinking about the movements of families, sub-
cultures, and groups. In his vocabulary, the nomadic generally designates a collective rather than an
individual mode of inhabiting the earth. Nietzsche notes that the main factor retarding the
transformation or abolition of the national state is its scare tactics, its exaggeration or fabrication of
external or internal threats to the population’s security; these furnish the excuse to declare a state
of exception, in which constitutional or traditional liberties are overridden and the sovereign unity
of the state is affirmed. Hegelian monarchy, with its theological affiliation, is being replaced by the
national security state. Nietzsche speaks of a “Not- und Belagerungszustand,” the equivalent of Carl
Schmitt’s Ausnahmezustand (HH 475). Fifty years later Schmitt was to define sovereignty in these terms:
the sovereign is the one who declares the exception. Appropriately, from a Nietzschean perspective,
Schmitt offered this definition in his book Political Theology, which argues for a fairly strict parallel
between the sovereignty of God and the state. Nietzsche could have taken the equation in a different
sense: just as the famous passage on the death of God tells us that this news is still on the way, and
scarcely comprehended, so the state is in a long-term process of dissolution. It is a shadow of God
that still lingers after his disappearance (GS 125, 108).
AT: STATE GOOD – STATE IS DEAD
Your offense is terminally non-unique. There is no such thing as the state. Like God, it is a
metaphysical fiction without any grounding independent of the people that believe in it. There is no
god. There is no state. There are just people and the earth.
Nietzsche foresees a long period of “transitional struggles,” during which “the attitude of
veneration and piety” toward the state will be undermined, and it will increasingly be seen in a
pragmatic and utilitarian perspective (HH 472). Much of the work of government will be reassigned
to “private contractors”—“outsourcing” is the current word—another sign of the gradual “decline
and death of the state” (HH 472). This would surely entail the collapse of Hegel’s state-centered world-
historical narrative; on the post-state earth, “a new page will be turned in the storybook of humanity in
which there will be many strange tales to read and perhaps some of them good ones” (HH 472). Just
as the domination of the organizing principle of the racial clan gave way to the family and then to
that of the state, so humanity will eventually hit upon “an invention more suited to their purpose
than the state” (HH 472). (Again Nietzsche eschews the vocabulary of “world” and “so-called world-
history,” and speaks of the earth as the sphere of human activity, suggesting that “a later generation will
see the state shrink to insignificance in various parts of the earth” [HH 472].) In Thus Spoke Zarathustra
the alternative proposed to life in the shrinking, globalized “world” of modernity is called loyalty to the
earth. Earth is best understood in contrast to the world of Hegel’s world-history. The earth of
Nietzsche’s phantasmatic landscape poem offers a rich variation of mountain, sea, islands, towns,
and cities. It is there to be traversed and inhabited, rather than reterritorialized by states.
Zarathustra teaches both himself and others not only by speaking, but by his travels and wandering
on the earth, a meaningful itinerary that is too complex to be explored here in any depth. Consider the
chapter “On Great Events” whose title apparently alludes to Hegel. Hegel expressly confines “great
events” to the state-centered and centering realm of world-history, and the Hegelian writers of
Nietzsche’s day, as he emphasized throughout his Untimely Meditations, persisted in this association.
Nietzsche’s struggles with the idea of the “great event” are evident in his unmodern essay on Wagner.
There, the “last great event” is said to be Alexander’s joining of Europe and Asia, and Wagner is hailed as
ushering in the next great event, which will be the definitive cultural expression and realization of Europe
(UM IV:4). The chapter “On Great Events” questions the credibility of all so-called great events, and
the so-called world history that they are thought to constitute. To his disciples—those who have
sworn fidelity to the earth— Zarathustra recounts his dialogue with the fire-hound, an ego puffed up
with an expansive desire for crude power, a rebel or revolutionary. Such fiery demagogues are at most
“ventriloquists [Bauchredner] of the earth,” producing the illusion of a politics that speaks from the
ground of being. They give the impression that it is the earth as reterritorialized by the state which
constitutes a nation’s true identity. The secret unknown by the fire- hound (and the state-philosophy he
represents) is that “the heart of the earth is gold” (Z II “On Great Events”). This explicitly geographical
and geological chapter insists that the resources of the Menschen-Erde are rich in possibility. It is
constituted by passionate, mobile human bodies, their combinations, and transformations in, by,
and through the earth.
AT: Nietzsche is Eurocentric
The contemporary, European nation state is in crisis. It will be eclipsed by a nomadic
and hybrid movement
Becoming of Life, ed. Vanessa Lemm, Fordham university press, 313)
Unlike Hegel, Nietzsche does not define Europe in terms of its supposed destiny to establish a
certain kind of political state. Europe is in crisis—whether it knows it or not—as it struggles with
the collapse of Christianity, the emergence of democratic attitudes and practices, the threat of
nihilism, and the possible rule of the herd and the last man. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche
descries the emergence in Europe of “an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of person who
physiologically speaking, is typified by a maximal degree of the art and force of adaptation” (BGE
242). While this tendency may lead to homogeneity and the production of a type prepared for “slavery in
the most subtle sense,” other aspects of the development may point in different directions (BGE 242).
Mixing, wandering, and migration also produce a variety of singular hybrids, higher humans like
Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer, and Wagner (BGE 256). These
experimental anticipations of the European Zu-kunft embody diverse mixtures of traditions and lineages.
Although Europe “wants to become one,” the “truth” of this desire is, at least for now, the proliferation of
singularities (BGE 256). Accordingly, in the concluding aphorism of “Peoples and Fatherlands,”
Nietzsche emphatically declares that “this is the century of the multitude [Menge]!” (BGE 256). It is
ironic that Nietzsche’s translators have not always been attentive to the pointers in On the Genealogy of
Morals (GM I) that ask us to be careful in discriminating the terms that designate nuanced distinctions of
human types, and have often rendered Menge as “masses.” The Genealogy, which Nietzsche advertised as
a text meant to be helpful in understanding Beyond Good and Evil, insists on an acutely sensitive philo-
logical and differential reading of terms for social and political categories. The multitude is diverse,
masses are relatively uniform. The multitude is formed by a mixing of races, cultures, ethnicities, and
so on. This might result eventually in the formation of herds and masses, but it need not. Ex- emplary
here is Nietzsche’s discussion of the emergence of what we think of as the Greeks from a mixing of
Mongols, Semites, and others (KSA 8:5[198]). Mixing was the necessary precondition for creating the
Greeks.
Failure to attend to the multitude that constitutes the population results in the
collapse of nation states.
Becoming of Life, ed. Vanessa Lemm, Fordham university press, 314)
The chapter on “Peoples and Fatherlands” (BGE) should be read as a thorough critique of Hegel’s
Weltgeschichte in which Nietzsche challenges Hegel on the state, human mobility on the earth, the
persistence of national types, and even the supposed east to west movement of the Weltgeist, that
ghost or phantom, which is dispersed by the rise of the multitude who will not stay put to observe
its passage. We need look no further than the United States-Mexican border to see the pertinence of
this reconfiguration of the Hegelian story in terms of a north/south axis which does not coincide
with the rise of states. For Hegel, the decisive event of the German world after its Christianization is the
Reformation, seen as a necessary step in human freedom. Nietzsche despises the Reformation, and argues
that it was possible in Germany only because the masses there could be given a direction from above,
although he suggests this required the contingent fact of Luther’s intransigent temperament (GS 149;
AOM 226). Yet no reformation was possible in Greece because the Greek Menge consisted of diverse
groups who were impervious to the best efforts of Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Plato to effect one. In
The Gay Science (GS 149) Nietzsche repeatedly draws contrasts between the uniform Masse and the
heterogeneous Menge, or multitude, a distinction that must be kept in mind in reading his declaration in
Beyond Good and Evil that “this is the century of the Menge!” (BGE 256). We might speculate that
certain modern states like the Soviet Union collapsed because they were unsuccessful in
transforming their population into masses, and could not resist the entropy of the multitude, which
was the unintended consequence of their policies.
AT: PERM
Nietzsche’s theory of the multitude, the nomad, and the hybrid is optimistic – but it’s also fragile.
The multitude is susceptible to tyranny and manipulation of various forms. Err toward the
alternative on the question of the link.
Nietzsche then emerges as a theorist of nomadism, migration, immigration, diaspora,

cosmopolitanism, and hybridity. He is better equipped than Hegel to understand the demise or
evisceration of the monarchical state with a state (Christian) religion. Nietzsche could see a self-
described hybrid like Barack Obama as a paradigmatic voice of and for the multitude. We should
also note that the Menge is not a universal class, but is conceived as an audience, which is not coextensive
with the population at large (BGE 263, 269). In Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 256), which announces the
century of the multitude, it is introduced as the audience of the higher humans (Napoleon to Wagner)
listed there. Goethe constructs a dialogue about such a multitude in Faust’s “Prelude in the Theater,”
where the Menge is described as relatively educated, widely read, yet mixed in mood and background.
The century of the nomadic multitude, then, as it frees itself from peoples, fatherlands, and states, is
not so far from the society of the spectacle, making allowances for technological innovations in its
promulgation and marketing. The bad news is that the multitude can be an audience for “tyrants of
all sorts, including the most spiritual” (BGE 242), and the good news may be that, at present, they
are still sufficiently diverse to resist a powerful religious reformation like the German one that
brought Europe such disaster, including religious wars and the modern state system (AOM 226).
However shifting and unstable the earth’s multitude may be, its very diversity may be sufficient—if
we are lucky—to resist the more monolithic forces of assassins and crusaders with their unitary
visions of the world. Much recent political thought focuses on questions having to do with the
movement and mixing of peoples, the rise of new cultural configurations, and the constitution of a
diverse population. Nietzsche saw that by marginalizing human mobility, Hegel made it difficult to
think these phenomena to which he then gave names like nomadism, hybridity, and multitude. We
may be wary about where Nietzsche is going with these analytical tools, but we may also find other uses
for them as we struggle with coccepts such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism.
Impact – Extinction
If we do not adopt Nietzsche’s politics of the earth, we risk the fate of the end of
history – the closure of the future and the impossibility of any great events as a result
of global colonialization and complete calculability. This is the death of politics
All too many of those who have written about Nietzsche’s political thought have easily assimilated it
to patterns and concepts with which they were already familiar. They took sides on questions
having to do with the state, race, democracy, and other themes, asking just where Nietzsche could
be placed within a spectrum of possible positions that, they assumed, had already been mapped out.
In some cases (as I’ll document later) the assumptions of Anglophone scholars as to what Nietzsche was
talking about were so deeply embedded as to lead to mistranslations of some crucial terms in his political
vocabulary; albeit unconsciously they created misreadings which were structurally similar, if differing in
content, to the notorious distortions by Nazi or proto-Nazi enthusiasts like those promoted by Nietzsche’s
sister Elizabeth and her associates. Too much time has been spent attacking or praising Nietzsche’s
political thought for its supposed affinities with a specific form of polity or regime. In contrast, I
argue that we should be attending to his struggle to keep the political future open. We need to
understand the prominence of earth in his political thought and its relation to his analysis of the
state, temporality, and the residues of political theology. Whether commentators see Nietzsche as
attempting to renew the ancient Greek polis or the Roman imperium, delineating a new form of
aristocracy, or providing grounds for anarchism, democracy, or even revolutionary socialism, these
efforts, I believe, miss the most radical dimension of the “philosophy of the future” that he preludes in
Beyond Good and Evil. 3 While some of these Nietzsche readings are important antidotes to
reactionary or nostalgic ones that see him simply as spokesman for a revived form of slavery and
tyranny, they show, more importantly, that he was capable of thinking of something new and
different. This is so even if he sometimes expressed this fancifully, as in his notebook suggestions that
Germany should conquer and colonize Mexico or his published wish for intermarriage between the
Prussian officer class and wealthy Jews (KSA 9.546; BGE 251). I mean to concentrate on his thought of
futurity in a broadly political context, futurity in the sense of that which has yet to be, of the
unknown and unknowable which may arise, the “great event” or “great politics” of the earth that
become insistent themes of his later work. Those attuned to futurity are open to seizing the gift of
fortune, the moment of opportunity, the fleeting moment of great possibilities that the ancients call
kairos (Machiavelli’s occasione). What gives Zarathustra the horrors in the specter of the last human
is the foreclosure of futurity. These last humans no longer remember what nobility and distinction
are. History has come to an end for them in a regulated alternation of work that is not too onerous
and play that never touches the danger zone, their little pleasures for the day and the night.
Responses to Nietzsche’s political thinking have been strangely silent or vague about what he consistently
describes as the site of the political, the earth. Fidelity to the earth, being true to the earth, willingness to
sacrifice oneself for the earth, vigilantly dedicating oneself to the earth’s direction or meaning (Sinn)—
these are the repeated refrains of Zarathustra. The true danger of the last humans who securitize
themselves against all danger is that they will further shrink the earth, obliterating its opportunities
and chances. When Nietzsche has Zarathustra speak of the shrinking earth of the last humans, he
thinks not only of the unifying effects of world commerce and communication that Marx and others
had already seen and that we now call globalization. More emphatically he voices his fear of the
disappearance of open seas and horizons. These promising future horizons, promises one might say
of futurity itself, were paradoxically necessary to the very enterprises whose development made the
last humans possible, enterprises such as the maritime explorations by Genoese and Venetians that he
admired. Hopping about like fleas on the contracted earth, the last humans are oblivious of
opportunities for decisive and innovative action that could contribute to the “great event.” For
these risk-averse creatures all is calculable. They take their measured pleasures and distractions in
regular doses, failing to look beyond the amusements and intoxicants of consumer culture in the
stabilized state. Nietzsche’s worry is that both the future and futurity of the earth are at stake. From
Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou, philosophers since Nietzsche
have attempted to think related questions. They struggle, as philosophers must, against the conservatism
of any given language by articulating and explicating, unfolding the pli or fold, in terms such as Er-eignis
or l’a-venir in order to evoke a sense of the futural or evental. These thinkers agree with Nietzsche that
the idea of the event in a strong sense is now typically suppressed by ideologies and practices that
render fundamental change almost unthinkable. Impulses that cannot otherwise be contained are
channeled economically into thirst for the latest device, fascination with the newest sport or singing
sensation. They can be diverted “politically” into electoral charades that, whatever their rhetoric,
finally offer nothing more than continued stasis, in both the ancient sense of irresolvable conflict
and the modern one of an immovable status quo (or gridlock). This last is typically the effect of a
struggle in which both sides have vested interests in keeping things within fairly narrow bounds, as
in parliamentary democracies’ circular dance of center-right and center-left parties. I propose that a
more productive reading of Nietzsche will attend both to his thought of futurity and his call to be true to
the earth, as in his lapidary but still little-understood declaration that only from his work on will there be a
great politics on and of the earth. As I’ve hinted, talk about the futurity of the earth involves what may
seem like unnecessary excursions into questions of linguistics and etymology. Some would say that the
first issues on the agenda concerning a politics of the earth should be climate change, energy needs,
globalization, and geopolitical conflicts still inflected and infected by religious and ethnic hostilities.
While Nietzsche does have things to say that could help to open up our thinking about such questions, as
in his notion of the human earth as a garden, I propose that we follow the “old philologist’s” advice to
begin by attending carefully to his words and discourse. So I forewarn the reader that a good deal of this
book is concerned with explicating terms crucial for Nietzsche’s multilayered thought concerning the
Sinn der Erde. That phrase itself, one Zarathustra introduces in his first public discourse, requires to be
heard with care. It is usually translated as “the meaning of the earth.” Yet Sinn, as Günter Figal reminds
us, also signifies direction.4 Where is the earth going? In what direction will you deploy your energies for
earth’s sake? To be loyal to the earth, to give it your Treue (or troth), means to accept discipline, to be
ready to sacrifice. And how should we understand Nietzsche’s concept of the earth? I will argue that
above and beyond what we might call its phenomenological sense as our immanent lifeworld (the
limit of most scholarly readings), the earth in Nietzsche’s writings has a political sense as the
counterconcept to what Hegel and Hegelianizing philosophers call the world. Hegel’s concept of
world, we will see, is a unitary notion. It cannot be decoupled from those of the state, world history,
and God. It is ultimately a concept of political theology, which finally provoked Nietzsche to articulate
a philosophy of the Antichrist. When Nietzsche speaks of the earth (sometimes more specifically of the
Menschen-Erde), he is at least implicitly formulating a political atheology, an understanding of the
sphere or territory of human habitation; Nietzsche’s war for the sake of the earth must involve an
attack, parody, and inversion of political theology. The earth in this perspective is radically plural.
It is neither intrinsically defined by the nation-state (like Hegel’s world), nor, as in the Weltprozess of
Eduard von Hartmann (the largely forgotten target of Nietzsche’s Unmodern Observation on history) the
site of an inexorable teleology. Such a contrast of earth and world is very close to Deleuze and
Guattari’s methodological protocol of subordinating history to geography.
Impact – Ressentiment
The man of ressentiment hides his hatred in even the most tender or loving memories,
with frightening modesty he turns misfortune into something mediocre—always
recriminating and distributing blame, it hides an extraordinary hatred for life and all
that is active.
Deleuze 83 Deleuze, Gilles. French Philosopher – 1983(Gilles, “Nietzsche and Philosophy”, Page
111-119)
In the normal or healthy state the role of reactive forces is always to limit action. They divide,
delay or hinder it by means of another action whose effects we feel. But, conversely, active
forces produce a burst of creativity: they set it off at a chosen instant, at a favourable moment,
in a given direction, in order to carry out a quick and precise piece of adjustment. In this way a
riposte is formed. This is why Nietzsche can say: "The true reaction is that of action" (GM I 10).
The active type, in this sense, is not a type that only contains active forces, it expresses the
"normal" relation between a reaction that delays action and an action that precipitates
reaction. The master is said to react precisely because he acts1* his reactions. The active type
therefore includes reactive forces but ones that are defined by a capacity for obeying or being
acted. The active type expresses a relation between active and reactive forces such that the
latter are themselves acted.
We can see, therefore, that a reaction alone cannot constitute ressentiment. Ressentiment
designates a type in which reactive forces prevail over active forces. But they can only prevail in
one way: by ceasing to be acted . Above all we must not define ressentiment in terms of the
strength of a reaction. If we ask what the man of ressentiment is, we must not forget this
principle: he does not re-act. And the word ressentiment gives a definite clue: reaction ceases
to be acted in order to become something felt (senti). Reactive forces prevail over active forces
because they escape their action. But at this point two questions arise:
1) How do they prevail, how do they escape? What is the mechanism of this "sickness"? 2) And,
conversely, how are reactive forces normally acted? "Normal" here does not mean "frequent"
but on the contrary, "normative" and "rare". What is the definition of this norm, of this
"health"?
2. Principle of Ressentiment
Freud often expounds a schema of life that he calls the "topical hypothesis". The system which
receives an excitation is not the system which retains a lasting trace ofit: the same system could
not at one and the same time faithfully record the transformations which it undergoes and
offer an ever fresh receptivity. "We will therefore suppose that an external system of the
apparatus receives the perceptible excitations but retains nothing of them, and thus has no
memory; and that, lying behind this system there is another which transforms the momentary
excitation of the first into lasting traces." These two systems or recordings correspond to the
distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. "Our memories are by nature
unconscious"; and conversely, "Consciousness is born at the point where the mnemonic trace
stops". We must therefore see the formation of the conscious system as the result of a process
of evolution: at the boundary between the outside and the inside, between the internal world
and the external world, we could say that "a skin has been formed which has been made so
supple by the excitations it constantly receives, that it has acquired properties making it
uniquely suited to receive new excitations", retaining only a direct and changeable image
ofobjects completely distinct from the lasting or even changeless trace in the unconscious
system.2
Freud is far from accepting this topical hypothesis without reserva- tions. The fact is that we
find all the elements of this hypothesis in Nietzsche. Nietzsche distinguishes two systems within
the reactive apparatus: the conscious and the unconscious.3 The reactive unconscious is
defined by mnemonic traces, by lasting imprints. It is a digestive, vegetative and ruminative
system, which expresses "the purely passive impossibility of escaping from the impression once
it is received" . Of course, even in this endless digestion, reactive forces have a job to do,
attaching themselves to the indelible imprint, investing the trace. But the inadequacy of this
first kind of reactive force is obvious . Adaptation would never be possible if the reactive
apparatus did not have another system of forces at its disposal. Another system is necessary, a
system in which reaction is not a reaction to traces but becomes a reaction to the present
excitation or to the direct image of the object. This second kind of reactive forces is
inseparable from consciousness: that constantly renewed skin surrounding an ever fresh
receptivity, a milieu "where there is always room for new things" . It will be remembered that
Nietzsche wished to remind consciousness of its need for modesty: its origin, nature and
function are wholly reactive. But consciousness can nevertheless claim a relative nobility . The
second kind of reactive forces show us in what form and under what conditions reaction can
be acted: when reactive forces take conscious excitation as their object, then the
corresponding reaction is itself acted.
But the two systems or the two kinds of reactive forces must still be separated. The traces must
not invade consciousness. A specific active force must be given the job of supporting
consciousness and renewing its freshness, fluidity and mobile, agile chemistry at every
moment. This active super-conscious faculty is the faculty of forgetting. Psychology's mistake
was to treat forgetting as a negative determination, not to discover its active and positive
character. Nietzsche defines the faculty of forgetting as "no mere vis inertiae as the superficial
imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression", "an
apparatus of absorption", "a plastic, regenerative and curative force."4 Thus, there are two
simultaneous processes: reaction becomes something acted because it takes conscious
excitation as its object and reaction to traces remains in the unconscious, imperceptible. "What
we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it . . . as
does the thousandfold process involved in physical nourishment . . . so that it will be
immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerful- ness, no hope, no pride, no
present, without forgetfulness" (GM II 1 pp. 57-58). But this faculty is in a very special situation:
although it is an active force it is delegated by activity to work with reactive forces. It serves as
"guard" or "supervisor", preventing the two systems of the reactive apparatus from becoming
confused. Although it is an active force its only activity is functional. It comes from activity but is
abstracted from it. And in order to renew consciousness it constantly has to borrow the energy
of the second kind of reactive forces, making this energy its own in order to give it to
consciousness. This is why it is more prone than any other active force to variations, failures
and functional disturbances. "The man in whom this apparatus of repression is damaged and
ceases to function properly, may be compared (and more than merely compared) with a
dyspeptic - he cannot 'have done' with anything" (GM II 1 p. 58). Let us suppose that there is a
lapse in the faculty of forgetting: it is as if the wax of consciousness were hardened, excitation
tends to get confused with its trace in the unconscious and conversely, reaction to traces rises
into consciousness and overruns it. Thus at the same time as reaction to traces becomes
perceptible, reaction ceases to be acted. The consequences of this are immense: no longer
being able to act a reaction, active force are deprived of the material conditions of their
functioning, they no longer have the opportunity to do their job, they are separated from what
they can do . We can thus finally see in what way reactive forces prevail over active forces:
when the trace takes the place of the excitation in the reactive apparatus , reaction itself takes
the place of action, reaction prevails over action. Now it is striking that, when victory is won in
this way, the real struggles are only between reactive forces; reactive forces do not triumph by
forming a force greater than that of active forces. Even the functional decay of the faculty of
forgetting derives from the fact that it no longer finds in one kind of reactive forces the energy
necessary to repress the other kind and to renew consciousness. Everything takes place
between reactive forces: some prevent others from being acted, some destroy others. This is a
strange subterranean struggle which takes place entirely inside the reactive apparatus, but
which nevertheless has consequences for the whole of activity . We rediscover the definition of
ressentiment: ressentiment is a reaction which simultaneously becomes perceptible and ceases
to be acted: a formula which defines sickness in general . Nietzsche is not simply saying that
ressentiment is a sickness, but rather that sickness as such is a form of ressentiment (EH I 6).
3. Typology of Ressentiment
The first aspect of ressentiment is therfore topological. There is a topology of reactive forces: it
is their change of place, their displacement which constitutes ressentiment . The man of
ressentiment is characterised by the invasion of consciousness by mnemonic traces, the
ascent of memory into consciousness itself. Of course, this is not all there is to say about
memory: we will have to ask how consciousness is capable of constructing a memory suitable
for itself, an acted and almost active memory that no longer rests on traces. In Nietzsche, as in
Freud, the theory of the memory becomes a theory of two memories.6 But insofar as we
remain at the level of the first memory we remain within the limits of the pure principle of
ressentiment; the man of ressentiment is like a dog, a kind of dog which only reacts to traces (a
bloodhound). He only invests traces: for him excitation is locally confused with the trace, the
man ofressentiment can no longer act his reaction. - But this topological definition must
introduce us to a "typology" ofressentiment. For, when reactive forces prevail over active
forces in this way they themselves form a type. We can see that the principal symptom ofthis
type is a prodigious memory. Nietzsche stresses this incapacity to forget anything, this faculty
of forgetting nothing and its profoundly reactive nature - which must be considered from all
points of view (GM I 10 and II 1). A type is a reality which is simultaneously biological, psychical,
historical, social and political .
Why is ressentiment the spirit ofrevenge ? It might be thought that the man of ressentiment comes into
being by accident: having experienced too strong an excitation (a pain), he would have had to abandon
the attempt to react, not being strong enough to form a riposte . He would therefore experience a
desire for revenge and, by a process of general- isation, would want to take this out on the whole world.
Such an interpretation is mistaken; it only takes quantities into account, the quantity ofexcitation
received, "objectively" compared to the quantity of force of a receptive subject. But, for Nietzsche,
what counts is not the quantity of force considered abstractly but a determinate relation in the subject
itself between the different forces of which it is made up this is what he means by a type. Whatever the
force of the excitation which is received, whatever the total force of the subject itself, the man of
ressentiment only uses the latter to invest the trace of the former, so that he is incapable of acting
and even of reacting to the excitation. There is therefore no need for him to have experienced an
excessive excitation. This may happen, but it is not necessary. He does not need to generalise in order to
see the whole world as the object of his ressentiment. As a result of his type the man of ressentiment
does not "react" : his reaction is endless, it is felt instead of being acted. This reaction therefore
blames its object, whatever it is, as an object on which revenge must be taken, which must be made to
pay for this infinite delay. Excitation can be beautiful and good and the man of ressentiment can
experience it as such ; it can be less than the force of the man ofressentiment and he can possess an
abstract quantity of force as great as that of anyone else. He will none the less feel the corresponding
object as a personal offence and affront because he makes the object responsible for his own
powerlessness to invest anything but the trace - a qualitative or typical powerlessness. The man
ofressentiment experiences every being and object as an offence in exact proportion to its effect on
him . Beauty and goodness are , for him , necesarily as outrageous as any pain or misfortune that he
experiences. "One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything -
everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply; memory
becomes a festering wound" (EH I 6 p. 320). The man of ressentiment in himself is a being full of pain:
the sclerosis or hardening of his consciousness, the rapidity with which every excitation sets and
freezes within him, the weight of the traces that invade him are so many cruel sufferings. And, more
deeply, the memory of traces is full of hatred in itself and by itself. It is venomous and depreciative
because it blames the object in order to compensate for its own inability to escape from the traces of
the corresponding excitation . This is why ressentiment's revenge , even when it is realised, remains
"spiritual", imaginary and symbolic in principle. This essential link between revenge and memory
resembles the Freudian anal-sadistic complex. Nietzsche himself presents memeory as an unfinished
digestion and the type of ressentiment as an anal type.7 This intestinal and venomous memory is what
Nietzsche calls the spider, the tarantula, the spirit of revenge . . . We can see what Nietzsche's intention
is: to produce a psychology that is really a typology, to put psychology "on the plane of the subject" ."
Even the possibilities of a cure will be subordinated to the transformation of types (reversal and
transmutation).
4. Characteristics of Ressentiment
We must not be deceived by the expression "spirit of revenge" . Spirit does not make revenge an
intention, an unrealised end but, on the contrary, gives revenge a means. We have not understood
ressentiment if we only see it as a desire for revenge, a desire to rebel and triumph. The topological
principle of ressentiment entails a state of real forces: the state ofreactive forces that no longer let
themselves act, that evade the action of active forces. It gives revenge a means: a means of reversing
thenormal relation ofactive and reactive forces. This is why ressentiment itself is always a revolt and
always the triumph of this revolt. Ressentiment is the triumph of the weak as weak, the revolt of the
slaves and their victory as slaves. It is in their victory that the slaves form a type. The type of the
master (the active type) is defined in terms of the faculty of forgetting and the power of acting
reactions. The type of slave (the reactive type) is defined by a prodigious memory, by the power of
ressentiment; several characteristics which determine this second type follow from this.
Inability to admire, respect or love (BGE 260, GM I 10). The memory of traces is itself full of hatred .
Hatred or revenge is hidden even in the most tender and most loving memories. The ruminants of
memory disguise this hatred by a subtle operation which consists in reproaching themselves with
everything with which, in fact, they reproach the being whose memory they pretend to cherish. For this
reason we must beware of those who condemn themselves before that which is good or beautiful,
claiming not to understand, not to be worthy: their modesty is frightening. What hatred ofbeauty is
hidden in their declarations of inferiority. Hating all that is experienced as lovable or admirable,
diminishing by buffoonery or base interpretations, seeing traps to be avoided in all things: always
saying, "please don't engage me in a battle of wits" . What is most striking in the man of ressentiment
is not his nastiness but his disgusting malevolence, his capacity for disparagement. Nothing can resist
it. He does not even respect his friends or even his enemies. He does not even respect misfortune or its
causes.9 Think of the Trojans who, in Helen, respected and admired the cause of their own misfortune .
But the man of ressentiment must turn misfortune into something mediocre, he must recriminate and
distribute blame: look at his inclination to play down the value of causes, to make misfortune
"someone's fault" . By contrast, the aristocrat's respect for the causes of misfortune goes together with
an ability to take his own misfortunes seriously. The way in which the slave takes his misfortunes
seriously shows a difficult digestion and a base way of thinking which is incapable of feeling respect .
"Passivity " . In ressentiment happiness "appears essentially as a narcotic drug, rest, peace, 'sabbath' ,
slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs, in short passively" (GM I 10 p. 38). In Nietzsche "passive"
does not mean "non-active"; "non-active" means "reactive"; but "passive" means "non-acted". The only
thing that is passive is reaction insofar as it is not acted. The term "passive" stands for the triumph of
reaction, the moment when, ceasing to be acted, it becomes a ressentiment. The man of ressentiment
does not know how to and does not want to love, but wants to be loved. He wants to be loved, fed,
watered, caressed and put to sleep. He is the impotent, the dyspeptic, the frigid, the insomniac, the
slave. Furthermore the man of ressentiment is extremely touchy: faced with all the activities he cannot
undertake he considers that, at the very least, he ought to be compensated by benefiting from them. He
therefore considers it a proof of obvious malice that he is not loved, that he is not fed. The man of
ressentiment is the man of profit and gain. Moreover, ressentiment could only be imposed on the world
through the triumph of the principle of gain, by making profit not only a desire and a way of thinking but
an economic, social and theological system, a complete system, a divine mechanism. A failure to
recognise profit - this is the theological crime and the only crime against the spirit. It is in this sense that
slaves have a morality , and that this morality is that of utility (BGE 260). We asked: who considers
action from the standpoint of its utility or harmfulness? And even: who considers action from the
standpoint of good and evil, of praiseworthiness and blameworthi- ness? If we review all the qualities
that morality calls "praiseworthy" or "good" in themselves, for example, the incredible notion of
disin- terestedness, we realise that they conceal the demands and recrimina- tions of a passive third
party: it is he who claims an interest in actions that he does not perform; he praises the disinterested
character of precisely the actions from which he benefits.'0 Morality in itself conceals the utilitarian
standpoint; but utilitarianism conceals the standpoint of the passive third party, the triumphant
standpoint of a slave who intervenes between masters.
The imputation of wrongs, the distribution of responsibilities, perpetual accusation. All this replaces
aggression. "The aggressive pathos belongs just as necessarily to strength as vengefulness and rancour
belong to weakness" (EH I 7 p. 232). Considering gain as a right, considering it a right to profit from
actions that he does not perform, the man of ressentiment breaks out in bitter reproaches as soon as his
expectations are disappointed. And how could they not be disappointed, since frustration and revenge
are the a prioris of ressentiment? "It is your fault if no one loves me, it is your fault if I've failed in life
and also your fault if you fail in yours, your misfortunes and mine are equally your fault . " Here we
rediscover the dreadful feminine power of ressentiment: it is not content to denounce crimes and
criminals, it wants sinners, people who are responsible. We can guess what the creature of
ressentiment wants: he wants others to be evil, he needs others to be evil in order to be able to
consider himself good. You are evil, therefore I am good; this is the slave's fundamental formula, it
expresses the main point ofressentiment from the typological point of view, it summarises and brings
together all the preceding characteristics. This formula must be compared with that of the master: I am
good, therefore you are evil . The difference between the two measures the revolt of the slave and his
triumph: "This inversion of the value- positingeye. . .is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist,
slave morality always first needs a hostile world" (GM I 10 pp. 36-37). The slave needs, to set the other
up as evil from the outset.
5. Is he Good? Is he Evil?
Here are the two formulae: "I am good, therefore you are evil" - "You are evil therefore I am good" . We
can use the method of dramatisation. Who utters the first of these formulae, who utters the second?
And what does each one want? The same person cannot utter both because the good of the one is
precisely the evil of the other. "There is no single concept of good"(GMI 11);the words "good", "evil" and
even "therefore" have several senses. We find, once again, that the method of dramatisation, which is
essentially pluralist and immanent, governs the inquiry. Nowhere else can this investigation find the
scientific rule that constitutes it as a semeiology and an axiology, enabling it to determine the sense and
value of a word. We ask: who is it that begins by saying: "I am good"? It is certainly not the one who
compares himself to others, nor the one who compares his actions and his works to superior and
transcendent values: such a one would not begin . . . The one who says: "I am good", does not wait to be
called good. He refers to himself in this way, he names himself and decribes himself thus to the extent
that he acts, affirms and enjoys. "Good" qualifies activity, affirmation and the enjoyment which is
experienced in their exercise: a certain quality of the soul, "some fundamental certainty which a noble
soul possesses in regard to itself, something which may not be sought or found and perhaps may not be
lost either" (BGE 287 p. 196). What Nietzsche often calls distinction is the eternal character of what is
affirmed (it does not have to be looked for), of what is put into action (it is not found), of what is
enjoyed (it cannot be lost). He who affirms and acts is at the same time the one who is: "The root of the
word coined for this, esthlos signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true" (GM
I 5 p. 29). "He knows himself to be that which in general first accords honour to things, he creates
values. Everything he knows to be part of himself, he honours: such a morality is self-glorification. In the
foreground stands the feeling of plenitude, of power which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high
tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would like to give away and bestow".11 " 'The good'
themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and
established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the
low, low-minded, common and plebeian" (GM I 2 pp 25-6). But no comparison interferes with the
principle. It is only a secondary consequence, a negative conclusion that others are evil insofar as they
do not affirm, do not act, do not enjoy. "Good" primarily designates the master. "Evil" means the
consequence and designates the slave. What is "evil" is negative, passive, bad, unhappy. Nietzsche
outlines a commentary on Theognis' admirable poem based entirely on the fundamental lyrical
affirmation: we are good, they are evil, bad. We search in vain for the least nuance of morality in this
aristocratic appreciation: it is a question of an ethic and a typology - a typology of forces, an ethic of the
corresponding ways of being.
"I am good, therefore you are evil": in the mouths of the masters the word therefore merely introduces
a negative conclusion. And this latter is merely advanced as the consequence of a full affirmation: "we
the aristocrats, the beautiful, the happy" (GM I 10). In the master everything positive is in the premises.
He must have premises of action and affirmation, and the enjoyment of these premises in order to
conclude with something negative which is not the main point and has scarcely any importance. It is
only an "accessory, a complementary nuance" (GM I 1 1 ) . Its only importance is to augment the tenor
of the action and the affirmation, to content their alliance and to redouble the corresponding
enjoyment: the good "only looks for its antithesis in order to affirm itself with more joy" (GM I 10). This
is the status of aggression: it is the negative, but the negative as the conclusion of positive premises, the
negative as the product of activity, the negative as the consequence of the power of affirming. The
master acknowledges himself in a syllogism where two positive propositions are necessary to make a
negation, the final negation being only a means of reinforcing the premises - "You are evil therefore I am
good." Everything has changed: the negative passes into the premises, the positive is conceived as a
conclusion, a conclusion from negative premises . The negative contains the essential and the positive
only exists through negation. The negative becomes "the original idea, the beginning, the act par
excellence" (GM I 1 1). The slave must have premises of reaction and negation, ofressentiment and
nihilism, in order to obtain an apparently positive conclusion. Even so, it only appears to be positive. This
is why Nietzsche insists on distinguishing ressentiment and aggression: they differ in nature. The man of
ressentiment needs to conceive of a non-ego, then to oppose himself to this non-ego in order finally to
posit himself as self. This is the strange syllogism of the slave: he needs two negations in order to
produce an appearance of affirmation. We already sense the form in which the syllogism of the slave
has been so successful in philosophy: the dialectic. The dialectic, as the ideology of ressentiment. "You
are evil, therefore I am good." In this formula it is the slave who speaks. It cannot be denied that values
are still being created. But what bizarre values! They begin by positing the other as evil. He who called
himself good is the one who is now called evil. This evil one is the one who acts, who does not hold
himself back from acting, who does not therefore consider action from the point of view of the
consequences that it will have for third parties. And the one who is good is now the one who holds
himself back from acting: he is good j ust because he refers all actions to the standpoint of the one who
does not act, to the standpoint of the one who experiences the consequences, or better still to the
more subtle standpoint of a divine third party who scrutinises the intentions of the one who acts. "And
he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite,
who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little
from life, like us, the patient, humble and just" (GM I 13 p. 46). This is how good and evil are born:
ethical determination, that ofgood and bad, gives way to moral judgment. The good of ethics has
become the evil of morality, the bad has become the good of morality . Good and evil are not the good
and the bad but, on the contrary, the exchange, the inversion, the reversal of their determination .
Nietzsche stresses the following point: "Beyond good and evil" does not mean: "Beyond the good and
the bad", on the contrary . . . (GM I 17). Good and evil are new values, but how strangely these values
are created! They are created by reversing good and bad. They are not created by acting but by holding
back from acting, not by affirming, but by beginning with denial. This is why they are called un-created,
divine, transcendent, superior to life . But think of what these values hide, of their mode of creation .
They hide an extraordinary hatred , a hatred for life , a hatred for all that is active and affirmative in
life. No moral values would survive for a single instant if they were separated from the premises of
which they are the conclusion. And, more profoundly, no religious values are separable from this hatred
and revenge from which they draw the consequences. The positivity of religion is only apparent: they
conclude that the wretched, the poor, the weak, the slaves, are the good since the strong are "evil" and
"damned". They have invented the good wretch, the good weakling: there is no better revenge against
the strong and happy. What would Christian love be without the Judaic power ofressentiment which
inspires and directs it? Christian love is not the opposite of Judaic ressentiment but its consequence, its
conclusion and its crowning glory (GM I 8). Religion conceals the principles from which it is directly
descended to a greater or lesser extent (and often, in periods of crisis, it no longer conceals anything at
all); the weight ofnegative premises, the spirit ofrevenge, the power of ressentiment .
Impact - Herd
The herd instinct is based in a desire to be led, a dream of a tranquilized and conflict-
free existence—an overriding group superego which leads us to state that the other is
evil, and hence ourselves are good—this self-righteous rationalization produces a
politics that can only squint at life, an obsession with self-preservation that results in a
fascistic orientation towards difference.
Seem 83. Mark Seem, translator of Anti-Oedipus, famous American intellectual, “Introduction” in Anti-
Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, Trans. 1983, xvi-xvii
"Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides, and try to think up something different. The analyst has endless time and patience; every minute you detain him means money in
his pocket. . .. Whether you whine, howl, beg, weep, cajole, pray or curse-he listens. He is just a big ear minus a sympathetic nervous system. He is impervious to everything but truth. If you
think it pays to fool him then fool him. Who will be the loser? If you think he can help you, and not yourself, then stick to him until you rot."!" So concludes Henry Miller in Sexus, and Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari are quick to agree in their attack on psychoanalysis' own Oedipus complex (the holy family: daddy-mommy-me), an attack that is at times brutal and without pity, at
other times sympathetic and full of a profound love of
life, and often enormously amusing. An attack on the ego, on what is all-too-human in mankind, on oedipalized and oedipalizing analyses and neurotic modes of living.
In confronting and finally overturning the Oedipal rock on which Man has chosen to take his
stand, Anti-Oedipus comes as a kind of sequel to another similar venture, the attack on Christ,
Christianity, and the herd in Nietzsche's The AntiChrist. For who would deny, Anti- Oedipus
begins, that psychoanalysis was from the start, still is, and perhaps always will be a well-
constituted church and a form of treatment based on a set of beliefs that only the very faithful
could adhere to, ie., those who believe in a security that amounts to being lost in the herd and
defined in terms of common and external goals? But where do such beliefs originate? What are
they based on? For it is absolutely hopeless to think in terms of security, as Miller states in
Sexus; "there is none. The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who
would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble"
(page 428). No pain, no trouble-this is the neurotic's dream of a tranquilized and conflict-free
existence.
Such a set of beliefs, Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate, such a herd instinct, is based on the
desire to be led, the desire to have someone else legislate life. The very desire that was brought
so glaringly into focus in Europe with Hitler, Mussolini, and fascism; the desire that is still at
work, making us all sick, today. Anti-Oedipus starts by reviving Reich's completely serious
question with respect to the rise of fascism: 'How could the masses be made to desire their own
repression?' This is a question which the English and Americans are reluctant to deal with
directly, tending too often to respond: "Fascism is a phenomenon that took place elsewhere,
something that could only happen to others, but not to us; it's their problem." Is it though? Is
fascism really a problem for others to deal with? Even revolutionary groups deal gingerly with
the fascisizing elements we all carry deep within us, and yet they often possess a rarely
analyzed but overriding group 'superego' that leads them to state, much like Nietzsche's
man of ressentiment, that the other is evil (the Fascist! the Capitalist! the Communist!), and
hence that they themselves are good. This conclusion is reached as an afterthought and a
justification, a supremely self-righteous rationalization for a politics that can only "squint"
at life, through the thick clouds of foul-smelling air that permeates secret meeting places and
"security" councils. The man of ressentiment, as Nietzsche explains, "loves hiding places, secret
paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment;
he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-
deprecating and humble." Such a man, Nietzsche concludes, needs very much to believe in
some neutral, independent "subject"-the ego-for he is prompted by an instinct of self-
affirmation and self-preservation that cares little about preserving or affirming life, an
instinct "in which every lie is sanctified.?" This is the realm of the silent majority. And it is
into these back rooms, behind the closed doors of the analyst's office, in the wings of the Oedipal
theater, that Deleuze and Guattari weave their way, exclaiming as does Nietzsche that it smells
bad there, and that what is needed is "a breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world."
Impact – Laundry List /Security Link
Their fear-centric politics of absolute order are premised on a nihilistic fantasy of
control which destroys the possibility of effective political engagement and makes
ecological destruction, war, and conservative takeover inevitable.
Lacy 14 (Mark, Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Lancaster University,
and author or editor of three books. Security, Technology, and Global Politics p. 8-10) NFleming
For Virilio, attempts to contain the insecurity of geopolitics through improved global governance, ‘free markets’ and the liberal peace might
transform security and war around the world, creating a world of perpetual peace and prosperity. The global economy – coupled with the
acceleration of technology – might generate harmonious and creative societies where the unpleasant jobs have been replaced by machines and
where the is a growing consensus that we need to accelerate and intensify distributive justice around the planet. Technology will not only
improve our health and security – it will foster a cosmopolitan society built on the information technologies that expand the possibilities for
dialogue. The war game will become the peace game that aids the improvement of the human condition. Virilio isn’t so sure about the
optimistic liberal view of history. For Virilio, we are surrounded by the ‘propaganda of an endless
progress’, the promise of a world where technology and capitalism will overcome the problems and
suffering that have blighted the human condition; the ‘propaganda of progress’ is the vision of the future
one often finds in corporate depictions of the future that illustrate how new products will transform life,
creating an existence where a multitude of technologies are effortlessly integrated into everyday life to
create more rewarding and efficient work and relationships. 27 Virilio is less certain that technology and capitalism will
improve the human condition, asking us to pay attention to what lies underneath this propaganda of progress
in the world around us – in the stress, suffering, paranoia, control, exhaustion and inequality that he
thinks might intensify in coming decades. Progress (and the peace game), on this view, is a progress in the
arts and technologies of control designed to manage the growing numbers of
the ‘living dead’ that are excluded from the ‘legitimate’ economy, to control
those that seek to exploit vulnerabilities in ‘network’ society. As we see later, for Virilio the
peace game is the war game turned inward, toward what he calls the endo-colonization of society, the
attempt to control the constantly mutating terrains of security in the post-Cold War world. The other side of
the ‘propaganda of an endless progress’ is the ‘administration of fear’: Virilio suggests that we need to pay attention to the way
fear (usually fear of otherness and difference) is used to distort debate over the problems we confront (so,
fear of immigrants is presented as the cause of our economic woes

for example, when
and societal implosion – and the route to further disorder). For Virilio, we need to negotiate our
way through both the propaganda of progress and the administration of fear, to pay attention to the way we can be captured by these ‘easy’
modes of responding to the world around us, to be constantly aware of these two very different traps. Introduction 9 Our world might be
heading toward the realization of the liberal dream of progress but Virilio looks around and sees
a world of accelerating
ecological, economic and social degradation; politics becomes an increasingly narrow attempt to
manage the insecurity and messiness in societies intent on realizing the dream of a fast and efficient
consumer lifestyle. On this view, the politics of security that promises to control the messiness has a
tendency to get out of control, nourishing the ‘war-machine’ and the ‘military scientific complex’,
producing misguided security projects that generate chaos in the realization of
policies that are often driven by fear, technological optimism about what
technology and war can achieve, and a sense of cultural and racial superiority. 28
We might believe that we will learn from our mistakes (such as the wars that have dominated the first decade of the twenty-first century after
9/11) but that is to become caught up with the ‘propaganda of endless progress’. There is an excess to security that results in
‘unnecessary wars’ that become experimental zones for new technologies – and there is desire to
control all aspects of life in increasingly intensive and extensive ways that risks to undermine civil
liberties, tipping the balance of liberty and security toward the endo-colonization of society; an
excessive focus on the problems of ‘otherness’ to the exclusion of the insecurity that comes from
inside, from our financial systems or modes of consumption. Military and political elites get caught up
in the seductive possibilities offered by new technologies, the god-like ability to control the world. Virilio comments that: the
nature of absolute speed is also to be absolute power, absolute and instantaneous control, in other words an almost divine power. Today, we
have achieved the three attributes of the divine: ubiquity, instantaneity, immediacy; omnivoyance and omnipotence. 29 We can see an
example of this excess of security and the desire to obtain these attributes of the divine in the discovery in June 2013 that the National Security
Agency obtained direct access to the digital infrastructures of Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies, allowing the PRISM program to
access the emails, file transfers, search histories and live chats of all citizens, the metadata of the world. While this desire to become
an omnipotent machine of surveillance might confront ethical and limits – or might confront the limits of what is
possible, the excess of information – the intention is clearly to know everything. 30 Or we can see this desire to control the
world from a distance in the development of drone technology: machines of vision and death that make possible control-at-adistance. In his
preface to The Administration of Fear, Betrand Richard notes that ‘this son of an Italian communist and a catholic from Brittany traces the rules
of the game in which we are caught. And that we must escape’. 31 We are trapped in a perverse situation where our
societies are
obsessed with security – but are governed with a security politics and economic policy that appears to
be making the societies we live in more fragile (and thus requiring more ‘security’ and 10 Introduction ‘protection sciences’).
The question that Virilio leaves us with is – after we negotiate through the propaganda of progress and the administration of fear – how do we
escape the dangers of our accelerating reality, the darker possibilities made possible by the modern world? There is a sense in Virilio’s work
that past attempts to re-design how we live were not up to the task, producing new ‘traps’, new types of
control. So the optimistic ‘liberal’ student of international politics won’t find much to agree with in
Virilio’s vision of politics and security. For the liberal optimist, the modern age has made it possible for
our ‘rationality’ to overcome the irrational and dangerous aspects of the human condition; while there is
much more to ‘overcome’ we are heading in the right direction and progress in this overcoming will be aided by new ‘tools’ and technologies;
human existence is more civilized and secure than at any point in our history. 32 The liberal will reply that information technologies are creating
the foundation for a global public sphere that generates a ‘transparent society’ that makes it harder for states to hide what they do; Virilio
replies that information technologies create new types of control and incarceration. Freedom and
progress in this world order are illusions that mask the stress, control and inequality created by the
system. The liberal will suggest that the continued growth in a interconnected global economy – where crisis is simply a glitch on the way to
a world of progress for everybody around the planet – is a sign of the liberal capitalist world’s resilience, its superiority to other ways of
organizing human life. 33 Virilio would reply that we should be careful not to mistake this resilience as proof of the universal or ‘timeless’
vitality or appeal of a capitalist (and not necessarily liberal) world order. The liberal sees global mobility as a symbol of the emerging
cosmopolitan world order that overcomes the limits of locality and nationalism. Virilio sees
global mobility in terms of forced
migration, of border camps, of climate refugees, of habitats that can no longer support human life.
Writing about Michel Foucault’s studies of prisons and asylums Virilio comments: ‘I think that the real imprisonment is just ahead. ’34 For
Virilio, the
problems on the horizon will expose the fragility of the ways of organizing life that were
enjoyed in the West through the second half of the twentieth century: rapid technological, ecological
and geopolitical transformation will force us to confront a reality where it becomes difficult to hold on
to the values and ideas that shaped political imaginations in the West during much of the previous
century.
Impact - VTL
The impact is ressentiment. Their undirected hatred toward the self and the world
eliminates the possibility for political change and kills value to life.
Reginster 97 Bernard Reginster: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Jun.,
1997), Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation, Brown University
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953719
1’. Masters and Slaves Nietzsche starts his analysis of ressentiment by refining a distinction between the types
of the "master," or "noble," and the "slave" which he introduced and developed in works prior to the Genealogy (HTH, 45; BGE,
260). We know from these early descriptions that the good life as the noble masters conceive of it
includes "political superiority": "the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank" (GM, I, 5; cf. also 6; BGE,
257-58). Nietzsche's use of the notions of "(noble) master" and "slave" is ambiguous. They are now
sociopolitical categories, and now character types. The noble masters value political supremacy qua
noble in the socio-political sense, but we will see that their valuing political power is not essential to
their possessing a noble character. Nietzsche makes clear that nobility as a type of character is "the case
that concerns us here" (GM, I, 5; cf. 6).7 Accordingly, I will consider the categories of "noble" and "slave" in their socio-political sense as
elements in the illustration of an essentially psychological view which makes use of the same notions to denote specific character types. To
the fundamental distinction between noble and slaves, the Genealogy adds a new crucial refinement: it
suggests that, within the noble class, two subgroups compete for political superiority, namely the
"knights" and the "priests." Leaving aside the question of the historical plausibility of this example (Nietzsche alludes to the war
between the Romans ("knights") and the Jewish ("priestly") people [GM, I, 16]), I want to draw out some of its psychological lessons. The
important fact is that the priests, who are physically "weak" and "unhealthy," are defeated by the "powerful physicality" and "overflowing
health" of the knights, and consequently develop a pervasive sense of "impotence" (GM, I, 6-7). Some features of the example
need to be emphasized. First, the salience of physical strength and weakness is a purely contingent
aspect of Nietzsche's example. The weakness of the priests creates their feeling of impotence only
because they hold it responsible for the loss of their political supremacy. The noble knights seem to be
generally intellectually deficient, in any case inferior in that respect to their rivals, the priests (GM, I, 7).
But this does not spawn a feeling of impotence because they do not see this deficiency as the incapacity
to realize their values-indeed they do not seem to regard it as a weakness at all. But there is no reason
to think that, in different circumstances, the feeling of impotence would not be created by intellectual,
rather than physical, weakness.8 Second, the feeling of impotence is not a temporary state of mind
caused by an accidental reversal of fortune. It must rather have become an essential feature of one's
self-assessment: the agent sees himself as irremediably weak, instead of temporarily lacking the
strength he customarily has. Though Nietzsche is unclear on this issue, his analysis of ressentiment (as I
understand it here) presupposes that the priest believes he has tried everything he could think of to
regain power and failed. Accordingly, he does not see his defeat as a fluke, but as evidence of his
constitutional impotence (GM, I, 6), which appears to be, for that very reason, "incurable" (see GS, 359).
It therefore inhibits any further attempt to recover political power. Finally, the priest evidently refuses
to accept, or resign himself to, his impotence. The priest's sickliness does not eradicate his "lust to rule,"
but only makes it "more dangerous" (GM, I, 6). Furthermore, rather than subsiding, as it would in the case of resignation, the
hatred the priest harbors towards his victorious rivals, the knights, "grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions" (GM, I, 7). From this
overview of Nietzsche' s example, we can derive the fundamental features of ressentiment. It is a state
of "repressed vengefulness" (GM, ibid.) which arises out of the combination of the following elements.
First, the "man of ressentiment" desires to lead a certain kind of life, which he deems valuable: thus the
priest, a member of the nobility, values a life that includes political supremacy. Second, he comes to
recognize his 8 complete inability to fulfill this aspiration: he becomes "inhibited" by his "weakness" or
"impotence." Yet, and this is the third element, his retains his "arrogance" or his "lust to rule" (GM, I, 6),
and his "will to power" remains "intact" (GM, III, 15; cf. GS, 359), whereby Nietzsche suggests that he maintains
his commitment to his original values, or retains his original pretensions, and refuses to accept his
inability to realize them. It is this third feature which distinguishes ressentiment from other related
attitudes. The soul of the "man of ressentiment" is torn by a tremendous tension between his desire to
live the life he values and his belief that he is unable to satisfy it. But this tension may spawn a variety of
different attitudes. At first blush, I can think of two obvious ways of alleviating such a tension, neither of which is chosen by the "man of
ressentiment."
**Alternatives/Aff Solvency**
Alt - Generic
Nietzsche replaces the linear development of history with a nomadic focus on
geography. Against the State’s monopoly on time, with the teleological justification it
uses to reduce politics to mass slaughter, we should turn to Nietzsche’s geophilosophy
to consider contemporary issues of cosmopolitianism, nomadism, diasporas and
difference.
Another important strand in this thought complex should be explored more thoroughly—one involving
Nietzsche’s sustained and critical dialogue with Hegel’s idea of world-history and sensitive, as Nietzsche
was, to emerging trends in human geography. Nietzsche read Hegel’s lectures on Weltgeschichte as early
as 1865.To read Nietzsche as the anti-Hegel is not unusual; it is one of the main themes of Deleuze’s
Nietzsche book, which brilliantly explicates the differences between the negations involved in Hegel’s
dialectic of recognition and Nietzsche’s discrimination of sovereign affirmation and the other-directed
ressentiment of the base. Here I focus on another contrast, one Deleuze developed in part from his
engagement with Nietzsche: that between states and nomads considered as forms of human
organization and inhabitation associated with distinctive ways of thinking. It is Nietzsche’s attention
to such themes that leads Deleuze and Guattari to credit him as the inventor of geophilosophy. History
and the history of philosophy belong to the state, geography and geophilosophy to the nomads.
Nietzsche, rather than Hegel, can help us think more perspicuously about themes on the
contemporary philosophical agenda, which go by names like globalization, multiculturalism,
diaspora, hybridity, and cosmopolitanism. (The Hegel whom Nietzsche confronts will strike some
readers as a caricature, based on a selective reading of incomplete and questionable versions of his
lectures. While more recent scholarship has given us a more subtle Hegel—actually, a choice among
several versions of a more subtle Hegel—Nietzsche’s Hegel is firmly based in the text of The Philosophy
of World History that was available to him. The popular Hegelians of Nietzsche’s day—for example
Strauss and Hartmann—reinforced the caricature, if such it is, and made it a forceful presence in the
1870s and 1880s. Finally—but this is a point that I can suggest only briefly in what follows—I believe
that much recent scholarship has been overly zealous in its attempt to provide a Hegel who would be
more acceptable to a democratic, pluralistic era, even to the point of producing somewhat misleading
translations of key titles and passages).
Recall a few features of Hegelian Weltgeschichte that led Nietzsche to sneer repeatedly at “so-called
world-history” and to exclaim with disgust at Eduard von Hartmann’s grotesque version of Hegel:
“world, world, world!” (D 307; UM I: 9). Why does he challenge the implicit political ontology and
ideology of this mantra? The short answer is that he rejects Hegel’s understanding of world-history as
the story of freedom and as the history of states which embody and develop it. Nietzsche sees that
story of freedom as vain narcissism, masking the animal nature and millennia of custom that shape
human beings. He denies that the state is the realization of freedom, the eternal or highest
attainable form of human organization (WS 12, D 18). Nietzsche contrasts “major history”
(Hauptgeschichte) with world-history; Hauptgeschichte includes the many millennia of animal and
customary life—the Sittlichkeit der Sitte—in addition to the recent history of states that feeds our vanity
(BGE 32; GM III: 9; D 18).In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche considers the possibility that the role left
for us critical thinkers in the carnivalesque atmosphere of modernity, swimming in our knowledge of the
past and trying on one costume or mask after another, is to be “parodists of world history” (BGE 223).
Hegel’s claim that history is the story of freedom is well known; I will not elaborate it at length here.
World-history, in Hegel’s system, is the highest development of objective spirit, a realm in which the
state is the final realization of human freedom. Only with states is world-history possible, and world-
history is exclusively concerned with states. Hegel’s restrictive conception of world-history has been
obscured by many commentators and translators; some of the latter blur the issues by translating
Weltgeschichte as “universal history.” But Hegel is clear: The state is the divine Idea as it exists on
earth. In this sense the state is the precise object of world-history in general . In world-history,
however, we are concerned with “individuals” that are nations, with wholes that are states. For Hegel the
concepts “world” and “world-history” are highly singular, unifying, and exclusive. In his most
systematic account of the place of world-history in the Encyclopedia he describes the movement of spirit
as demonstrating the realization of “the absolute final aim of the world” where spirit “becomes to the
outward eye a universal spirit—a world-spirit.” World-history is the totality of states, and the succession
of world-historical states is the home ground of Absolute Spirit—art, religion, and philosophy. Hegel
famously compares the Oriental, Classical, and Germanic worlds in which one, some, or all are free—
varying realizations of freedom all achieved through states. The life of states is contrasted with the
existence of a “people” or “folk [Volk],” or, speaking more precisely, the state is the telos of a people,
one sometimes achieved and sometimes not. Hegel insists that the mere Volk is not a subject of history:
“A Volk with no state formation [a mere nation/Nation] has, strictly speaking, no history—like the
Völker which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist as wild nations [als wilde
Nationen].” A word concerning Hegel’s reference to “mere nations” and “wild nations” is in order.
Nation is an adaptation of a Latin term, whose verbal root is nascere, to give birth. Nations as such, then,
are nothing but human beings of common ancestry, linked by “natality,” that is genealogical affiliation.
Hegel’s terminology suggests that a nation may be more than this; it may become a people, and a people,
with some degree of cultural coherence, is on the way to focusing itself in the form of a state. Why are
migrations and wanderings specifically excluded from world- history, and why do migrants and
wanderers tend to remain in the status of mere or wild nations? The root intuition seems to be that a
world- historical people must stay in its place. The state must have sovereignty over a given territory,
which is the prerequisite for its crystallization of the spiritual meaning of its people. Without the
state, there are simply wild nations living on the earth; there is as yet no world. Hegel could say of
the “wild nations” what Heidegger said of animals, that they are weltarm, world-poor. “World-historical
peoples” are those that form and live in states. When English translations render Weltgeschichte as
“universal history,” I assume that the aim, as in Carl Friedrich’s introduction to the Sibree translation of
the Philosophy of History, is to downplay Hegel’s political theology, his idea that “the state is God’s
march [Gang] through the world.” Historical existence requires a state that has settled in a territory.
There- fore, it initially seems strange that Hegel emphasizes that the Germanic world, which will see the
full flowering of Spirit and state, begins with barbarous, wandering, predatory peoples—Goths, Visigoths,
and so on. Yet Hegel implies that these groups are no different than any others; no Volk enters history
until engaged in the process of state formation. Hegel makes German barbarism a virtue, claiming that it
was the Germans’ strength to begin by absorbing and appropriating, unlike earlier historical peoples who
begin with an internal development: The Greeks and Romans had reached maturity within, before they
directed their energies outwards. The Germans, on the contrary, began with self-diffusion—deluging the
world, and overpowering in their course the inwardly rotten, hollow political fabrics of the civilized
nations. Only then did their development begin, kindled by a foreign religion, polity, and legislation. The
very being of the German people is their transformation through encounters with the other, so they are
uniquely suited to confirm Hegel’s concept of the true identity as the identity of identity and non-identity.
They seize Rome and appropriate Christianity almost thoughtlessly, but— such is the cunning of
history—they are transformed in the end by what they have captured. They are predatory subjects who
will be transformed by their object. On Hegel’s account, it is this heritage that allows the Germans,
through the Reformation and the development of the modern state, to spiritualize the secular. Their
wandering, migration, and nomadism become subordinated to the process of state formation in
which religion is essential. Now consider some of Nietzsche’s encounters with those he saw as the
reigning Hegelian thinkers of his time. The first of Nietzsche’s “assassination attempts” (as he called
them in Ecce Homo) was directed at David F. Strauss in the first Untimely Meditations. He pilloried
Strauss as a representative of the “cultural philistinism” of the emerging Bismarck era. From our post-
Kojèvian perspective, we can read Strauss as an “end of history” thinker, a predecessor of Kojève and
Francis Fukuyama, who believed that the German state was consolidating a final realization of human
potential. While Strauss sought to distinguish himself from Hegel, embracing Dar- winism and rejecting
Hegel’s insistence on religion as a necessary legitimizing and unifying component of the state, Nietzsche
sees that this old “young Hegelian” has deeper ties to the master he ostensibly repudiates. Strauss’s
criticism of republics and democracy, and his insistence on the necessity of monarchy to provide a
principle of national unity are close to Hegel’s views. When Hegel famously describes world-history as
a “slaughter-bench,” he is not speaking about the violence of some (pre- historical) state of nature,
but about the destruction of republics, whether aristocratic or democratic (these include Greece,
Rome, Italian city-states, the first French republic). Hegel’s examples of world-historical figures— like
Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon—are men whose mission was to transform republics into empires.
Hegel’s “world” is not only the world of states but, in its highest and final development,
monarchical states with official forms of Protestant Christianity.
Nietzsche moves away from the politics of nation states and world history toward a nomadic politics
of the earth.
Nietzsche, I am arguing, turned away from the prevalent Hegelian concept of world, entangled as it
is with that of the state, and toward a notion of the earth as the most general site of human life. For
a politics of the earth, the state will not be an essential constituent or ultimate goal, but one among a
number of social and political forms whose genealogy can be traced and whose dissolution can be
envisioned. Beginning in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche explicitly moves toward such an analysis
by arguing that the contemporary state is intrinsically unstable and introducing the contrast of
state and nomad. Despite the noisy nationalism of the early Bismarck era, he argues that there is a
real counter-movement to statism, with Europeans becoming increasingly mobile or “nomadic,”
leading to a loosening of traditional ties and identities. Nietzsche effectively repudiates Hegel’s “so-
called world-history,” beginning as it does with the exclusion of wanderings and migrations.
Nietzsche takes nomadism to be an indisputable facet of European modernity: Trade and industry,
the post and the book-trade, the possession in common of all higher culture, rapid changing of home and
scene, the nomadic life now lived by all who do not own land—these circumstances are bringing with
them a weakening and finally an abolition of nations . . . (HH 475) In contrast, Hegel marginalizes two
significant geopolitical phenomena, involving human mobility: the contemporary rise of the United States
and the seven or so centuries of the spread of Islam. He sets up a logical contrast between two roughly
contemporaneous developments, the wanderings of the Germanic Völker and the spread of Islam. The
Völker are merely particular in origin, tied to arbitrary, contingent events and traditions; in opposition,
Islam is the rule of abstract universality and is especially suited to Arabs roaming the wide expanses of
the desert, compared in a stock metaphor to the boundless sea. Here Hegel sees nothing but an episodic
succession of wars, caliphates, and kingdoms where “nothing firm abides.” The moment of individuality
comes with Charlemagne’s empire, uniting various Germanic tribes, drawing a firm line with Islam, and
instituting the outlines of a state. While Hegel did not claim to predict specific futures, he did exclude
certain possibilities. He denies that the United States in its democratic, secular form, and Islam as a
religious-political phenomenon, can be genuine players in the field of world-history. In this respect Hegel
and his heirs are still in thrall to the principles of national sovereignty, territory, and religion laid out in
the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.
Alt – Geophilosophy
Nietzsche interrogates the way philosophy inscribes itself within territories. His
untimely method invites us to practice geophilosophy wherein we analyze how
thought itself de and re territorializes. This invites us to think beyond the static
categories of nationhood and citizenship, to become a nomadic multitude.
Nietzsche attempts to construct a cartography of philosophy - past, present, and future - in

terms of how it describes, redescribes, and inscribes itself within territories and spaces. It is
this project, rather than Nietzsche's accounts of his travels, his love or hate of specific sites, or
the meticulously recorded responses of this human barometer and seismograph to landscapes,
climates, and microclimates, that led Deleuze and Guattari to call Nietzsche the inventor of
geophilosophy.1 They take as exemplary Nietzsche's inquiries into the national characters
of English, French, and German philosophy and his analysis of how the Greek milieu
provided a ground in which philosophy could flourish. Deleuze and Guattari see
Nietzsche's notion of the "untimely" (unzeitm?ssig)? as in Untimely Meditations - to involve
the opening of a geographic rather than a historical perspective. Nietzsche anticipated these
issues and questions. His hero Zarathustra challenges his listeners and readers to ask: "What shall
be the direction [or 'meaning' Sinn] of the earth?" urges them to "remain true to the earth," to
think with an "earthly head" (Erden-Kopf[Z I "On Believers in a World Beyond"]), and to create
a truly human earth (Menschen-Erde [ZI "On the Bestowing Virtue" 2, III "The Convalescent"
2]). Robert Gooding Williams writes that "earth" here is a metaphor for the human body and its
passions.2 Certainly Nietzsche is concerned with what it means for human life to flourish in a
thoroughly immanent world. But this, I suggest, involves more than individuated human bodies;
Nietzsche could have agreed with Marx, who called the earth the human's inorganic body. There
is still some reluctance to give Nietzsche's question about the Sinn der Erde the importance that
he attached to it and to acknowledge its more ordinary senses. I suspect that this stems less from
a deconstructive suspicion of surface meanings than from the fear that such questioning cannot
avoid the vexed issue of fascist and Nazi appropriations of Nietzsche or anxiety about placing
Nietzsche within Heidegger's metanarrative of technological mastery. Nevertheless, in a time
that is wrestling with issues of globalization, environmental crisis, and multiculturalism, we
should read Nietzsche with an eye to see what resources he can offer us for thinking our
situation on the earth. In the course of his work, work, Nietzsche's horizon expands from a
focus on Greece and Germany to a European perspective, and he eventually says that even
an understanding of Europe requires a "trans-European eye" (KSB 8:222). I suspect that
reading Nietzsche through the prism of Holderlin's Greek and German earth, in a Heideggerian
mode, risks what Foucault called the return and retreat of the origin and the nostalgia and site
fetishism that mark Heidegger's thought. In contrast, a feminist phenomenological and
psychological critique of Nietzsche, such as Luce Irigaray's in Marine Lover, challenges us to
ask what is involved in Nietzsche's complex play of elemental and geographic tropes.3 Irigaray
charges that Nietzsche valorizes the air, mountain heights, and flight, consequently obscuring
and marginalizing the fluidity and depths of the sea. While freeing him from the burden of
history, Irigaray makes Nietzsche's language of the earth into one more expression of patriarchal
essentialism, missing the fluidity that he sees in the "elements" of the earth and implicitly
rejecting his experimentalism. Both approaches are oddly reminiscent of Ernst Bertram's once
widely read Nietzsche: Essay at a Mythology of 1918.4 Bertram's World War I-era book
attempts the construction of a new Germanic mythology, extracted diagonally from Nietzsche's
texts, concentrating on historical figures and geographic sites, such as Venice and Portofino.
Bertram mines Nietzsche's writings to construct an escape from modernity and all but ignores his
theme of the emergence of the "good European" in a globalizing world endangered by the
"insanity of nation alism," maintained by the proclamation of states of exception that are
enforced by deception and fearmongering (HH 472-75). A different perspective emerges when
we look into Nietzsche's reading of works such as Friedrich RatzeVs Anthropo-Geographie
(1882). Ratzel argues that philosophers and geographers since Kant have subordinated
geography to history, while in order to take the broadest view of human life on the earth we
require a global perspective recognizing that written history provides only a small sliver of
relevant data about the earth as humanly inhabited. Ratzel emphasizes the limits of a
perspective that takes the recorded history of states as the center of our understanding of
human habitation and movement, marginalizing as it does migrations, wanderings, and
climate and environmental changes. One distinctive note in the geophilosophical Nietzsche
is the alternative it provides to an overly interiorized, subjectivist, and "existential"
reading. Moreover, it allows us to focus on Nietzsche's critical geophilosophical analysis of
Germany and of Europe. Geophilosophy, say Deleuze and Guattari, recognizes that thinking
goes on not between subject and object but, rather, "takes place in the relationship of
territory and the earth."5 Thought, whether philosophical or pre-philosophical, involves a
process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorializa tion through which it
takes up a variety of positions in relationship to the plane of immanence, understood in its
most immediate and familiar manifestation as the earth, the ground of life and thought. To
give a necessarily skeletal summary, we (and all living things) territorialize by staking out a
space, a place: we settle down, we cultivate a field, we mark the borders of our situation,
whether in the areas traced by the Australian aborigines in song lines or in the homeless person's
little stretch of sidewalk or space under a bridge. Deterritorialization consists in an idealizing
movement by which actual physical space becomes sub sumed within some structure
requiring a more conceptual definition. A political state, an empire, declares that the
meaning of a certain assemblage of people, land, and resources consists in a unified
structure. Ancient Athens, as it showed in the Battle of Salamis, was able to conceive of itself in
deterritorialized fashion by configuring itself as a mobile political structure, not absolutely tied to
a fixed place. Think of reterritorialization as a "back to the land" movement, the
reclaiming of a territory that had previously been absorbed by a deterritorialized entity.
Although Deleuze and Guattari do not limit the use of these notions to their most literal
applications to earth and the land, this is surely one of their primary senses, and I will follow it
here. Deleuze proposes that the philosophical project is one of absolute deterritorialization
(which we could read as the way in which they take Plato's ambition to be a "spectator of all time
and existence" [Republic 486a] as applicable to a world of immanence). Yet philosophy
reterritorializes itself, three times, they say: first on the Greek maritime world of commerce and
city-state, whose figure is the friend; second, on modern capitalism and the institution of the
national state; and, proleptically, on the "new people and new earth" that Deleuze and Guattari
claim are emerging and which current thought is, sometimes unconsciously, attempting to evoke.
I will focus selectively on two of many aspects, strata, or as Deleuze and Guattari would say, plateaus of
Nietzsche's geophilosophy. I first situate Nietzsche's geophilosophy within the incipient globalization of
his time, noting the contrast between a phenomenology of the earth and the scientistic, positivistic, and
imperialist subjection of the earth's time and space to mathematical and technological measure. I will then
look at one part of Beyond Good and Evil as the "no-saying" contemporary counterpart of the affirmative,
mythicizing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Here I will explore Nietzsche's analysis of national modes of
thought and art and his projection of the "good European" as an experimentalist of the human
earth, freeing him- or herself from the constraints of national ism and "soil addiction." What will
emerge from this reading is that "peoples and fatherlands" are not essential identities but relatively
flexible formations. If we see exclusively through the grid of ethnicity and the nation-state, we will
miss the present fact, that "this is the century of the multitude [Menge]" (BGE 256). While Europe
may wish to "become one," its effective tendency is the emergence of the multitude, which is to be
distinguished from the stronger homogeneity of the masses or herd: Nietzsche's talk of the earth, as
in Z, should be contextualized in terms of the globalization of space and time, the consolidation of a
striated perspective on the earth through an apparatus of measurement, transportation, and
control of speeds and flows. In Zarathustra's first speech in the marketplace he proclaims. "Let your will
say: the ?bermensch12 Beyond Peoples and Fatherlands shall be the Sinn of the earth! I beseech you, my
brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!"
(ZI "Zarathustra's Prologue" 3). Sinn can be taken as meaning, sense, or direction. What Nietzsche has in
mind is that which is to arrive (Zu-kunft), not the already established. It is the earth to come, the
transformed Menschen-Erde. In his speech in the marketplace Zarathustra denounces the overly measured
world of the last man: “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 who makes everything small. His race is as
ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest" (ZI "Zarathustra's Prologue" 5). In the late
nineteenth century the world was becoming markedly smaller through a market-driven excess of
measurement. We should look more attentively at the space and time of industrial capitalism in
which Nietzsche was fashioning his crucial ideas. Nietzsche was perhaps the first railway
philosopher; not only did he live an itinerant, nomadic life traversing the European continent and
corresponding through the bureaucra tized postal system, but his thought also responds to the
globalization that the railways, telegraph, and telephone were spearheading during his lifetime. In
his working notes for Daybreak Nietzsche strategizes how to present aphorisms to the modern, mobile,
traveling reader (KSA 8:473-74; cf. D 454). "Who will be the lords of the earth?" is a question whose
resonances must be heard in terms of those captains of industry, their strategists, and theorists,
who were providing their own answers to this question through a global technology of time, space,
and measurement.
Nietzsche criticizes modernity’s sense of historical time and instead emphasizes geography
as taking precedence over history. Unlike history, geography has no telos or meaning.
the University of Richmond,, Beyond Peoples and Fatherlands: Nietzsche's Geophilosophy and
the Direction of the Earth, in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 35/36, 13)
Nietzsche took this early theory of globalization, however shallow, to be symptomatic of the last
man's possible hegemony over the earth, a specter that haunts him throughout his work and which
Zarathustra cites as the greatest obstacle to incorporating his own thought of eternal recurrence (Z III
"The Convalescent" 2). He also began to develop his own account of geographic and historical time
and space. Nietzsche not only is "untimely" in his critique of the idols of his time but is concerned
above all to challenge modernity's sense of historical time. Modernism in this sense is the attempt to
construct a metanarrative issuing in a Utopia projecting the hegemony of technology, technocracy,
and Western imperialism. The program of Nietzsche's post-periodization (the only significance I can
find for the concept of postmodernism) consists in elaborating alternative notions of time and
futurity.7 Nietzsche argues that geography takes precedence over history in contextual izing human
action and puts in perspective the Eurocentrism of globalization theory. History, unlike geography,
leaves an opening for transcendence in a supposed final meaning. In response to Hartmann's
imperialist, capitalist, racist, Christian apocalyptic globalization scenario, with its figure of the last
man and its promised end of history, Nietzsche questioned both its underlying historicism and the
metaphysics that could construct a world-process by which we are being inexorably led to these
ends.
Alt – Wanderer
Wanderer alt. – I/L to Nomadism
Identity,” A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. By Keith Ansell Pearson, Wiley-Blackwell, 457)
Nietzsche implicitly continues his critique of national identity and the symbolically charged and
sentimentalized value it places on a specific territory in his celebration of the “The Wanderer” (HH 638).
This section in effect reminds us that humans are not born with roots but with feet to walk with.5 “The
Wanderer” enjoys this capacity for mobility to the full. He actively expresses his freedom from ties
of all sorts (personal, local, regional, cultural, national), as he takes to the road, his bold stride
challenging the fixity of national borders, geographical boundaries, city limits. Thriving on “change
and transience,” as well as stoically living through the difficulties which all adventurous travelers
have to face, he epitomizes a person whose identity is not defined by where he comes from, or
indeed by where he is heading to. Nietzsche makes it clear he is not “a traveller to a final
destination,” doggedly pursuing some predetermined goal. He is, rather, someone whose identity is
composite, hybrid, always in the process of being constructed by his various experiences and encounters.
He may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing, so if he does decide to settle in one
particular place, his putting down of roots is an active choice, the culmination of the “radical selections
we make for ourselves” (Rushdie 1999: 414; my emphasis). Some vague biologically determined
hankering after a long-lost “homeland” does not prompt his sedentarization. Additionally, even when
nominally settled in one place, he is not at rest; there is still “something wandering” growing within
him which delights in the unusual, the new, and the transitory and that is not solely gratified with
what is perceived as homely and familiar. In his resistance to conventional codes which strive to
bind people to fixed identities, identifying their belongingness with a particular nationality,
associated with a precisely defined territory, the Wanderer embodies what Deleuze calls “nomad
thought” (Deleuze 2002: 351–64).
Nietzsche’s earth is a geopolitical and geophilosophical concept that opposes all
transcendence in favor of an immanent openness.
What is Nietz sche’s concept of the earth? While “earth” is often taken in a general way to refer to
embodied life, to this world rather than to an imaginary and disastrous other world, I propose that the
term and concept also have a significant political dimension— a geophilosophical dimension— which
is closely related to the radical immanence so central to Nietz sche’s thought. I shall argue that he
often and pointedly replaces the very term “world” (Welt) with “earth” (Erde) because “world” is tied
too closely to ideas of unity, eternity, and transcendence. “World” is a concept with theological
affiliations, as Nietz sche indicates in Beyond Good and Evil: Around a hero everything becomes a
tragedy, around a demigod everything becomes a satyr play; and around God everything becomes—
what do you think? perhaps the “world”? (BGE 150) This can be amplifi ed when we recall Nietzsche’s
declaration that he was afraid we haven’t gotten rid of God yet, because we still have faith in grammar,
his speaking of the lingering shadow of God, and his thesis that with the disappearance of the “true
world” the apparent one disappears as well. The trinity of God, man, and world is a common
philosopheme and set of philosophemes. Perhaps one of the late arriving insights that follow in the
slow mourning process that accompanies God’s death has to do with the disappearance of that
which we call “world.” Like all metaphysical and theological concepts, world has a political import,
one evident to Nietzsche in Hegel and those he considered Hegelians (for example, Strauss and Eduard
von Hartmann); in Th e Birth of Tragedy he speaks contemptuously of “so- called world- history” and in
his second Unmodern Observations he ridicules the fashionable notion of the Weltprozess— do we hear
an antici-pation of such notions as globalization there?— and exclaims “world, world, world!” in high
exasperation (UM II:9). When Nietzsche comes to write of “great events,” they are not exclusively tied to
the state and world-history, as they are for the Hegelians, but (as the chapter “On Great Events” in
Zarathustra makes clear) events of the earth. If for Hegel “the state is the march (Gang) of God
through the world,” for Nietzsche the earth is a human- earth of mobile multitudes that can
prepare a way for the overhuman. In order to grasp Nietzsche’s “great politics” of the earth more
perspicuously, it is useful to see how in rhetoric and substance it constitutes a response to the theologico-
political treatise that is Hegel’s Philosophy of World History and to those Nietz sche saw as Hegelian
epigones. Since Nietzsche claimed that Thus Spoke Zarathustra was his most important work, let us
begin by listening to some of Zarathustra’s striking invocations of the earth there. He calls on his listeners
to sacrifice themselves for the Sinn der Erde; though this phrase is typically translated as “meaning” or
“sense,” it could also be rendered as “direction.” Where is the earth going? Where do we want it to go?
Zarathustra requires his disciples ( Jünger) to give their loyalty (Treue) to the earth, addresses the con-
dition of the human earth (Menschen-Erde), and encourages his listeners to think with “an earthly head
that creates a direction for the earth [einen Erden-Kopf, der der Erde Sinn schafft! ]” (Z “Prologue” 3; Z I
“On the Gift- Giving Virtue”; Z III “The Convalescent”; Z I “The Afterworldly”). The earth must be
rescued from the threatened domination of the last human: “For the earth has now become small,
and upon it hops the last human, who makes everything small” (Z “Prologue” 5). After Thus Spoke
Zarathus- tra, Nietzsche’s later works typically refer to a project of evaluating moralities, religions, and
cultures as ways of being “on the earth”: I hope to show that this is more than a conventional phrase.
Most critical engagements with Nietzsche’s idea of earth take one of several forms, which tend to
ignore or minimize the political, geographical, and geological relevance of the concept. One
approach sees earth as designating the immanent, bodily, or this-worldly, as opposed to imaginary
afterworlds of religious and transcendental traditions; while not inaccurate, this characterization
remains somewhat vague. A phenomenological interpretation emphasizes Nietzsche’s poetics and
metaphorics of the earth, sometimes enriched by recalling his experience as traveler, walker, and poet
receptive to the beautiful, sublime, and picturesque in natural and artificial landscapes. This approach
includes Bachelard’s celebration of Nietzsche’s virtual flight (air as an earthly element) and Irigaray’s
disappointed love letter, lamenting his avoidance of the feminine, maternal sea. Some readers focus on
Nietzsche’s adaptation of poetic and philosophical topoi from early Greek thinkers and poets, especially
Empedocles, for whom Gaia retained features of the divine. Inspired by Nietzsche’s reading of Hölderlin
and Heidegger’s reading of both, this approach tends to stop short of articulating the way in which,
thinking with his Erden-Kopf, Nietzsche conceives the Sinn der Erde against the background of Hegel’s
philosophy of history and doctrine of the state, or his noting the new paths developing in human
geography, which highlighted human mobility: nomadism, migrations, and wanderings of peoples.
Alt – Return to the Earth
The end of history comes in many forms – ranging from Marx’s dialectical materialism
to liberal democratic ideals of progress, from the pax Americana to the technological
mastery of nature. In general, world history is a teleological system populated only by
nation-states and the citizens they lead to the slaughter. Against such closed
metanarrative, Nietzsche proclaims the return to the earth – an immanent and open
stage of politics where great events are again possible.
Consider, for example, the contours of Nietzsche’s conception of the earth— sometimes called with
emphasis the human-earth. These emerge more clearly when we see it developing as a running critique of
the Hegelian idea of world history. The nineteenth century was the era of world-history, with philosophy
morphing into journalism as both professors and popular writers competed to provide the most up-to-date,
modern accounts (zeitmässig is Nietzsche’s term) of the meaning of history. Nietzsche himself, in his
later preface to The Birth of Tragedy, confessed that he too had given in to such world-historical
temptations when he foresaw a Wagnerian cultural renaissance. Whether the meaning of history is
thought to lie in democracy, socialism, or technological “progress,” it seems important to bolster
the sense of inevitability with a persuasive and seductive metanarrative. It is not only Marxist
socialism that has followed this path. The brand of American exceptionalism that from Woodrow
Wilson on heralds the United States as the avant-garde of a globally irresistible democratic freedom
has a similar (if non-dialectical) deep structure, as do the many technocratic fantasies of total
mastery of nature. “Earth,” I want to suggest, is not so much the telos of Nietzsche’s own
metanarrative as the signature of his alternative to metanarrative, a genre he sees as essentially
Christian (and thus vulnerable to being undermined through his inversion of the Antichrist topos). In
writings of his last productive years, Nietzsche regularly associates earth and the political. “Only after
me will there be great politics on the earth,” Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, as he explains, “Why I Am a
Destiny (1).” Much thought has been expended in attempts to make sense of the content of “great
politics.” Is it a politics of race, nations, class, or ideology? Is it a politics aiming at helping Europe to
become one, perhaps under the sway of a new ruling caste? Where does great politics lie on a spectrum
that includes tyranny, mass democracy, and anarchism? Are these the right questions to be asking? As
Bruno Bosteels observes, there is a great disproportion between Nietzsche’s few brief references to great
politics and the many lengthy commentaries on this theme.8 Since many of Nietzsche’s dramatic claims
of this sort were made in the last year before his mental collapse, in writings marked by a hyperbolic
sense of his self-ascribed importance, it is tempting to discount them as symptoms of the coming personal
catastrophe. We might read Nietzsche’s rhetoric of political catastrophe, involving new kinds of wars and
the total trembling of old orders, likened to earthquakes, as transcriptions of his individual mania onto a
larger canvas. I resist such premature psycho-biographical reductionism, while noting that current fears
of earth’s ruination through climate change, pandemic, overpopulation, and new forms of war have
overtones of the apocalyptic motif that Nietzsche evokes in deploying the Antichrist theme. For now I
propose to minimize two forms of speculation that either ascribe a specific political program to Nietzsche
or that focus on his personal medical and psychological condition. Rather, I return to what may seem like
a narrow philological observation. What is typically neglected in Nietzsche’s cluster of assertions about
great politics are the frequent references to the ultimate subject of such politics, the earth. In the Ecce
Homo passage quoted above, it is the earth that will know great politics for the first time, and in the
section leading up to that declaration he says that his name will be associated with a crisis “like no other
on earth.” As if to emphasize the earthiness at stake here, he says, “We shall have convulsions, an
earthquake spasm, a transposition of valley and mountain such as has never been dreamed of.” So what,
goes the simple response, Nietzsche obviously means to emphasize the global scope of this politics, its
implications for the entire world. Yet in fact Nietzsche is often suspicious of talk about the world
(Welt), especially when it is associated with world-history (Weltgeschichte) or the supposed world-
process (Weltprozess), the mushy concept of Eduard von Hartmann that he subjects to withering sarcasm
in the second Unmodern Observation. Very frequently, and increasingly in his later writings, Nietzsche
chooses to speak of earth rather than world when the topic has political implications. And of course
the earth, sometimes named as the human-earth (Menschen-Erde), is the initial concept of Zarathustra’s
first public address, when he implores the crowd to swear their fidelity (Treue) to the earth. World is tied
up with the idea of world- history, involving the notion of a teleological development realizing an
inevitable end. For Hegel himself, the world is composed of a system of states, ordered in an evolving
system. However much this world-history is a “slaughter bench,” as Hegel famously said, it is also
true for him that world-history is “God’s march through the world.” Less well known is that Hegel says
that those people without a true state are also lacking a world. Nietzsche’s idea of earth, I’ll be
arguing, is formed as a political alternative to the Hegelian conception of the world that was taken for
granted by so many of his contemporaries, although often in diluted form. Many of Nietzsche’s readers
emphasize what might be called the phenomenological aspect of his idea of the earth as a dimension of
radical immanence and bodily life; as he says in Zarathustra, earth must be defended from those who
preach imaginary worlds behind the scenes, beyond all possible experience. In the book he called the
greatest gift ever made to humanity, this is evident at the most superficial level. As a phantasmagoric
landscape poem, Zarathustra draws on several rich traditions of writing about the earth, showing its hero
climbing up and down mountains, responding to changing seasons, climates, times of day from dawn to
dusk and noon to midnight, wandering through towns, sailing the seas, exploring islands, possibly
descending into a volcano, and celebrating the thought of eternal recurrence with a song (“The Seven
Seals”) that finds him identifying with a bird’s freedom and flight in an unbounded cosmos. Of course
this earth of experiential immanence provides the indispensable condition of grosse Politik as well as its
theater. For Nietzsche, the human-earth is an inexhaustible source of nourishment and stimulation
on all levels, from bodily sustenance to adventurous challenges. It is the resource of all resources
and so should become the subject of great politics. The earth then is the prime object of the political
economy implied by the concept of an Umwertung aller Werte. The earth is the ultimate focus of all
orientation. Even if the madman is right in saying that without God, and with the post-Copernican
decentering of the earth, we are adrift in measureless space, we are still adrift on the earth. As
Husserl says in a late essay, the earth by which we orient ourselves does not move. Even if we should
leave the earth, we will still orient ourselves in relation to it.9 The earth is not simply that which
supports us and by which we orient ourselves. It is also that with which we ceaselessly interact. We
are constantly moving on its surface, cultivating it, tunneling and mining it, and extracting its
resources. Nietzsche has Zarathustra describe humans as a skin disease on the earth, but he also imagines
the earth transformed into a gigantic health resort and tree of life (Z II.19; WS 188–89). His Menschen-
Erde could be a translation of the recently named geological era of the anthropocene, roughly the time
since the last Ice Age, during which the earth begins to undergo transformation through human activity
such as the agricultural and urban revolutions.10 Surely this conception of the anthropocene was
anticipated and known to Nietzsche through the famous choral ode of Sophocles’s Antigone. 11 The
human race is uncanny, terrible, and wonderful (deinon) in traveling the seas, plowing and
transforming the earth, capturing and taming birds, fish, and beasts, and building cities. The
chorus’s attitude is not only triumphal, for humans engage in these enormous seizures, dislocations,
and alterations for both good and ill. Nietzsche’s directive to be loyal to the earth and vigilantly
mindful of its direction must be read in this tragic perspective. When he writes in his last lucid
months of a great politics of the earth, involving a trembling and shaking so far unknown, Nietzsche
restates and condenses a major theme of his thought, one he has been developing for years, into a handy
formula. A great politics of the earth certainly contrasts with a small politics, one focused on the
petty and confused doings of states, national rivalries, and crude demagoguery such as the anti-
Semitism he came to despise. Nietzsche can amuse himself with such small politics by reading the
“news of the [German] Reich” while lounging in Venice’s Piazza di San Marco (GM III.8) or dismiss it
as mere “contemporary chatter (Zeitgeschwätz)” (AC, P) as he declares himself the Antichrist in what
turned out to be his final politico-atheological treatise. Nietzsche’s challenge to his age involves a
rejection of world-history and its claim to have understood the structure of time. Being true to the earth
necessarily involves abandoning the conception of time that subordinates earthly life to a
metanarrative in which that life is merely the frame for the eventual manifestation of the Idea or
the Christian end of days (an identification made explicitly by Hegel). Now if the most significant name
for the world’s time is world-history, what is the time of the earth? This, I think, is the question
motivating the diptych of Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. The first, a “yessaying” prophetic
manifesto for the earth affirms earth’s eternal recurrence, envisions its transformation into a garden, and
introduces the idea of a great event, while the second “no-saying” critical analysis insists on the
ineluctability of futurity and offers advice on the vigilance necessary to seize the kairos. World-history,
by the way, is a pleonasm and tautology, something that becomes clear and explicit in Hegel. A world, so
far as it consists in peoples organized into states, sharing a culture, practicing and professing a
religion, can and must have a history until that history is fulfilled and completed. Conversely, the
only thing that can have a history (as opposed to a logical development) is a world composed of such
politico-theological-cultural units. World-history proceeds through a series of contradictions that must
be resolved or accommodated, typically by the production of new arrangements with their own tensions.
For Hegel, the Greek contradiction is set out dramatically in the tragic confrontation of the state’s public
law and the family’s private religious law; he famously reads this structure in Sophocles’s Antigone. That
conflict yields to the Roman state, with its emphasis on private persons and property on the one hand and
public rule on the other, finally expressing itself fully in the contradiction of the many individuals and the
supreme imperial embodiment of authority. This sets the stage for Christianity, in which the divine
emperor is seen as merely a stand-in for God, and his connection with the many equal individuals is
mediated by his son. Nietzsche highlighted this step in Christianity in his 1886 preface to Dawn (five
years after its initial publication). The book’s title can be read as the antithesis of the Hegelian twilight at
the end of history when the owl of Minerva spreads its wings. Following its epigraph from the Rig
Veda—“there are so many dawns that have not yet broken”—it would mark the possibility of new
beginnings and futurity in opposition to any thought that history is complete and reason has pronounced
its last word. Nietzsche (perhaps abusively) traces “German” dialectical logic to the version of
Christianity whose principle is “credo quia absurdum est”—“I believe because it is absurd”—announced
by Tertullian and others.12 This saying now makes us think of Kierkegaard, perhaps an even more
ferociously anti-Hegelian thinker than Nietzsche; as an advocate of this profession of faith, he sees it as
wholly contrary to Hegelian reason. Kierkegaard sought to undermine Hegel’s claim that his logic and
system were thoroughly Christian. Yet here Nietzsche first ascribes an extreme antirational fideism to
(authentic) Christianity and then identifies it with Hegel’s logic, as if he were collapsing a merely
apparent distinction between Hegel and Kierkegaard.13
Earth is Open and Immanent – Multitudes and Nomads
Nietzsche’s earth is an immanent and open concept that invites nobility, nomadism,
and the wandering of multitudes.
Rather than asking about the degree of Nietzsche’s authoritarian or tyrannical tendencies, or the question
of who would assume rule or hegemony over the earth, I propose to explore what he means by earth; in
other words, what is the theme or subject of his political thought? It should not be surprising to hear that
earth is a fundamental political concept for Nietzsche; after all, his hero Zarathustra begins his descent (or
reentrance) into human communities by seizing the opportunity to speak in the public forum of the
marketplace, challenging the assembled multitude to dedicate themselves to the direction or meaning of
the earth (Sinn der Erde). Yet surprisingly little attention has been given to clarifying Nietzsche’s concept
of the earth. While “earth” is often taken in a general way to refer to embodied life, to this world
rather than to an imaginary and disastrous other world, I propose that the term and concept also
have a significant political dimension—a geophilosophical dimension— which is closely related to
the radical immanence so central to Nietzsche’s thought. I shall argue that he often and pointedly
replaces the very term “world (Welt)” with “earth (Erde)” because “world” is tied too closely to ideas
of unity, eternity, and transcendence. “World” is a concept with theological affiliations, as Nietzsche
indicates in Beyond Good and Evil: “Around a hero everything becomes a tragedy, around a demigod
everything becomes a satyr play; and around God everything becomes—what do you think? perhaps the
‘world?’” (BGE 150). This can be amplified when we recall Nietzsche’s declaration that he is afraid we
haven’t gotten rid of God yet, because we still have faith in grammar, or his thesis that with the
disappearance of the “true world” the apparent one disappears as well, and in his speaking of the lingering
shadow of God (T “World,” GS 108). The trinity of God, human, and world is a common, traditional
complex of philosophemes. Perhaps one of the late-arriving insights that follow in the slow
mourning process that accompanies God’s death has to do with the disappearance of that which we
call world. Like all metaphysical and theological concepts, world has a political import, one evident
to Nietzsche in Hegel and those he considered Hegelians (e. g., D. F. Strauss and Eduard von Hartmann,
targets of his first two Unmodern Observations); in The Birth of Tragedyhe speaks contemptuously of
“so-called world-history” (BT 15) and in The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life he
ridicules the fashionable notion of the Weltprozess (an anticipation of the notion of globalization) and
exclaims “world, world, world!” in high dudgeon (UO II.9). When Nietzsche comes to write of “great
events,” they are not tied exclusively to the state and world-history, as they are for the Hegelians, but
(as “On Great Events” makes clear) events of the earth. If for Hegel “the state is the march (Gang) of
God through the world,” for Nietzsche the earth is a human-earth of mobile multitudes that can
prepare a way for the overhuman. In order to grasp Nietzsche’s “great politics” of the earth more
perspicuously, it is useful to see how both its rhetoric and substance constitute a response to the
theologico-political treatise that is Hegel’s Philosophy of World History and to those Nietzsche saw as
Hegelian epigones.24 Since Nietzsche claimed that Thus Spoke Zarathustra was his most important work,
we must keep in mind the intensity of Zarathustra’s striking invocations of the earth there. He calls on his
listeners to sacrifice themselves for the Sinn der Erde. While this phrase is typically translated as
“meaning” or “sense,” it could also be rendered as “direction.” Where is the earth going? Where do we
want it to go? Zarathustra requires his disciples ( Jünger) to give their loyalty (Treue) to the earth,
addresses the condition of the human-earth (Menschen-Erde), and encourages his listeners to think with
“an earthly head that creates a direction for the earth! (einen Erden-Kopf, der der Erde Sinn schafft!)” (Z
P 3; I.22; III.13.2; I.3). The earth—not the world—must be rescued from the threatened domination
of the last human: “For the earth has now become small, and upon it hops the last human, who
makes everything small” (Z P 5). After Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s later works typically refer to a project
of evaluating moralities, religions, and cultures as ways of being “on the earth”: I will show that this is
typically more than a conventional phrase. Nietzsche evaluates the forms of human life by asking
whether they are worthy of loyalty and sacrifice, whether they have a worthy future direction, and
whether they can ward off the reduction of spirit and adventure that rationally securitized
technopolitics is now threatening. Many critical engagements with Nietzsche’s idea of earth tend to
ignore or minimize the political, geographical, and geological relevance of the concept. One
approach sees earth as designating the immanent, bodily, or this-side, as opposed to the imaginary
beyond of religious and transcendental traditions; while not inaccurate, this characterization remains
rather indeterminate.25 A phenomenological interpretation emphasizes Nietzsche’s poetics and
metaphorics of the earth, sometimes enriched by recalling his experience as traveler, walker, and poet
receptive to the beautiful, sublime, and picturesque in natural and artificial landscapes.26 Such readings
include Gaston Bachelard’s celebration of Nietzsche’s virtual flight (air as an earthly element) and Luce
Irigaray’s disappointed love letter, lamenting his avoidance of the feminine, maternal sea.27 Some
hermeneuts focus on Nietzsche’s adaptation of poetic and philosophical topoi from early Greek thinkers
and poets, especially Empedocles, for whom Gaia retained features of the divine.28 Inspired by
Nietzsche’s reading of Hölderlin, and Heidegger’s reading of both, this approach tends to stop short of
articulating the way in which, thinking with his Erden-Kopf, Nietzsche conceives the Sinn der Erde
against the background of Hegelian philosophy of history, the nineteenth-century state, nationalism
and its complicity with romanticism, and the tradition of political theology. Nor does it take note of
his recognition of new paths developing in human geography that highlight human mobility:
nomadism, migrations, and wanderings of peoples.29 These classicizing and romanticizing readings
also obscure the ways in which Nietzsche offers a very specifically earth-centered reversal of the Biblical
themes from the innocent garden to the terror of apocalypse and Antichrist. The political dimension of
Nietzsche’s concept of earth comes more clearly into focus if we ask what ideas, concepts, and theories it
opposes and which it means to undermine. Otherwise said, I propose to hear Nietzsche when he writes of
the earth not only as designating the Diesseits rather than the Jenseits, or expressing a poetic sense of
the textures of immanent life, but as also (at least frequently) referring to a fundamental dimension
of human political life, conceived differently than the world of the nineteenth-century’s world-history.
This involves understanding Nietzsche as engaging critically in a contemporary set of discussions
about issues that have more recently been named by terms like the end of history, globalization,
states of exception, the multitude, and political theology. While this is the language of philosophers
and political theorists like Alexander Kojève, Francis Fukuyama, Giorgio Agamben, and Carl Schmitt,
not the vocabulary of the 1870s and 80s, I will be arguing that the concepts, if not the names, are crucial
to understanding Nietzsche’s political thought. Further, I will show that Nietzsche’s conception of earth’s
direction depends upon a complex set of ideas about events, time, and temporality that constitutes an
alternative to the way in which the theorists of world-history construe these ideas.
GLOBALIZATION, LAST MAN, HISTORY
Globalization is a symptom of the last man – of the advent of nihilism in which all
possibilities are closed off as we await the end of days. The allegedly objective
account of history given in modernity is really ideology – a theological view of the
purpose and nature of history that culminates in things like the global war on terror,
imperialist projects of extermination, and so on. Against this, Nietzsche invites us to
reject modernist history by turning to geography.
An important aspect of the globalization theorized by von Hartmann and others is the fusion of space
and time, which minimizes earthly differences and diversity. A recent book on the global
standardization of time in the later nineteenth century calls the years from 1875–85 “the decade of
time.”18 It was then that the local time that had hitherto prevailed everywhere throughout the earth
came to be seen as an obstacle to the requirements of speed, transportation, and communication. In
local time, as marked by a sundial, for example, noon is fixed by the daily high point of the sun, the time
of “the smallest shadow,” as Nietzsche says. But since every twelve miles of the earth’s circumference
marks a difference of a solar minute in local time, each city would have its clocks set differently. Britain
was the first nation to adopt a standardized time in 1850, due largely to the internal expansion and
intensity of its rail system. In 1869 the United States completed the transcontinental railway when the
Golden Spike was driven in a remote area of Utah. But the cities linked by rail were separated by an
anarchic time system, so that a traveler, in making plans, might have to calculate with five or six
different local times. In the following years, as Nietzsche was writing and publishing the successive
parts of Zarathustra, there were a series of international meetings that sought to resolve the dilemmas
caused by the collision between the new technologies of speed and communication and the
continued plurality of local times. The final result was the establishment of the twenty-four global
time zones that we have now, keyed with some variation, to lines of longitude. The standardization of
time involved the striation of space associated with the state form, and then with an emerging
global system; if the railroads offered Nietzsche some of the nomadic possibilities of smooth space,
they also demonstrated to him the ominous power of number, weight, and measure, which as
William Blake says, should be brought out only in years of dearth. If the human completes a certain
trajectory in a total measuremnt of the earth, then the posthuman (Übermensch) could be the agent
whose excess (Übermass) involves abandoning such limited forms of measure. From this perspective,
Hartmann’s construction of the Weltprozess (a term Nietzsche finds endlessly amusing) is an abuse even
more antithetical to life than any of the defective modes of monumental, antiquarian, and critical history,
for it claims that the lesson to be learned from the past, what history is teaching to the contemporary
world, is the futility of life itself. When the historical sense dominates “without restraint,” Nietzsche says,
it “uproots the future,” that is, it forecloses any openness to futurity or advent (UO II.7). Heidegger and
Derrida have attempted to highlight this sense of futurity by emphasizing the sheer unknowability of the
Zu-kunft or a-venir, hyphenating the words to bring out this dimension of meaning in what is to come or
arrive. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Zukunft) should also
be read in these terms; it is not prediction or prophecy but an attempt to open thinking to futurity.
Nietzsche speaks disparagingly of the hochmodern life, which we might translate as “postmodern,”
urging his contemporaries to think “not of carrying their generation to the grave but of founding a new
generation” (UO II.8). While Hartmann professes atheism (like the later Strauss), he is not above
invoking God metaphorically, apparently referring to the unconscious Weltprozess (internalizing the
conflict between “left” and “right” Hegelians, who differed on whether Hegel’s theology ought to be read
metaphorically). Yet Nietzsche argues with some force that Hartmann’s Hegeloid conception of the ages
of humanity is simply inherited from Christian medieval narrative, with its apocalyptic scheme of first
and last things, culminating in a “fearfully expected judgment” and so infected by a memento mori (UO
II.8). As such, Hegel’s and Hartmann’s histories are “disguised theology.” In this instance Nietzsche
suggests that history must be used to dissolve the problem of history and “knowledge must turn its
sting against itself ”; that is, by unearthing Hartmann’s implicit Christian historical scheme, we can
realize how bizarrely tendentious these metanarratives are. Hegel, on this view, is responsible for
seriously endangering German education and culture (Bildung) by assembling a complex of interrelated
themes: the notion that we are all latecomers, that there is indeed a world-process, and that the history of
the world that it unfolds is the judgment of the world. Hartmann is then a nihilistic version of end-of-
history thinking, one pointing to the possibility of Kojève’s and Fukuyama’s thought being easily
given the same twist in variations of what Zarathustra will call “the last human.” Already in the
Unmodern Observations Nietzsche is aware of the problematic of political theology, which becomes more
explicit in the Antichrist theme emerging in his last works. From the standpoint of a certain strain of
Christian apocalyptic (revived in the twentieth century by Carl Schmitt), Hartmann’s end-time vision of
the coming of Antichrist depends on his historical claim that there is no longer a restraining force or
katechon capable of delaying this destined end. As we shall see, Nietzsche welcomes the weakness or
corruption of potential katechontes, while transvaluing the unleashed powers that have gone under the
name Antichrist, and might be better designated as Dionysus (BT, 1886 Preface). In a delicious
Kierkegaardian moment, Nietzsche describes Hartmann’s work as a jest, a parody of gigantic proportions,
meant to reduce Hegelian philosophy of history to the absurd (UO II.9).19 Surely, he claims with tongue
in cheek, this book is a parodic demonstration of the foolishness of contemporary historicism. It thus
expresses the ironic consciousness of itself that the age has been developing under Hegel’s aegis; the
irony becomes cynicism when it construes all of past history as nothing but a “preparation for the
everyday use of modern man.” Today we should be struck by Hartmann’s notion of inevitable
globalization and racial extermination—he favors missionary work and commerce as more effective
means of eliminating “inferior races” than outright warfare—and by his belief that North America’s
“republican pyramid” or oligarchy of egoists represents the ultimate form of political organization.
Hartmann wants to speed humankind on to its self-consciously Schopenhauerian old age; and he
underlines the coincidence of his notion of the direction of the “world-process” with Christian
apocalyptics and its notion that we are living in “the last days.”20 Reading Nietzsche on Hartmann in this
time of wars that are often cast as religious wars, Crusades or jihads, we note his theological analysis of
Hartmann as an end-time thinker inspired by Christian tradition. He detects the “apocalyptic light” that
pervades the account of how history comes to an end, an end that is really a philosophical
transformation of the apocalyptic “judgment day” (UO II.9). Nietzsche’s critique of Strauss and
Hartmann prefigures the extraordinary convergence of neoliberal capitalist globalization theory and
practice with renewed end-time thinking, which came together in the George W. Bush
administration, as cynical advocates of US military and economic hegemony played upon Bush’s
born-again theology to package the “global war on terror,” specifically the Iraq invasion, as an
irresistible progress of “God’s gift of freedom.” That some of Bush’s advisors (and Fukuyama) were
educated by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago casts an interesting light on this theologico-political
complex. Leo Strauss has been interpreted as holding a nuanced and cynical view of the relationship of
the religious and the political. In this perspective, the enlightened philosopher is quite aware of the
illusory character of traditional religious belief. Nevertheless, the philosopher understands that the
population is incapable of this insight and would turn against the wise man if they became aware of the
latter’s skeptical leanings. Accordingly, the wise man instructs and encourages political leaders in the
shrewd use of religion for practical ends. In some cases (like that of Bush 43), the Straussian advisor will
see the prudent course to be steering leaders by making use of the illusions they share with a critical
component of the voters so as to get on with the business of economic and military expansion. Hartmann
has a robust theory of globalization. First, he sees the direction of history in the expansion of global
commerce, transportation, and communication, all with a decidedly imperialistic cast. Second, his
very emphasis on “world” and “world-process” incorporates a notion of global totality and
inevitability that anticipates more recent accounts. In calling for the “total surrender of the
personality to the world-process,” Hartmann obscures what Nietzsche thinks are better terms of
analysis, namely the human and the earth. “If only one did not eternally have to hear the hyperbole of
all hyperboles, the word world, world, world, since after all, if we remain honest, everyone ought to speak
of human, human, human!” To call for total surrender to the world-process is to give humans the
personality of the earth-flea (Erdfloh), a metaphor that appears again when Zarathustra describes the last
human: “For the earth has now become small, and upon it hops the last human, who makes
everything small. Its race is as inexterminable as the earth-flea; the last human lives the longest” (Z
P5). Nietzsche took this early theory of globalization, however shallow, to be symptomatic of the last
human’s possible hegemony over the earth, a specter that haunts him throughout his work and that
Zarathustra cites as the greatest obstacle to fully incorporating his own thought of eternal recurrence (Z
III.13. 2). He also began to develop his own account of geographical and historical time and space.
Nietzsche is not only “untimely” in his critique of the idols of his time but is concerned above all to
challenge modernity’s sense of historical time. Modernism in this sense is the attempt to construct a
metanarrative issuing in a utopia projecting the hegemony of technology, technocracy, and Western
imperialism. The program of Nietzsche’s postperiodization (the only significance I can find for the
concept of postmodernism21) consists in elaborating alternative notions of time and futurity. Nietzsche
argues that geography takes precedence over history in contextualizing human action; from this
perspective, the Eurocentric limits of globalization theory become apparent. The ultimate object of
political and historical analysis, site of life, and field of contest is best understood as earth rather
than world. History, unlike geography, leaves an opening for transcendence in a supposed final
meaning. In response to Hartmann’s imperialist, capitalist, racist, apocalyptic globalization scenario
(pandering to Christianity), with its figure of the last human and its promised end of history,
Nietzsche questions both his underlying historicism and his metaphysics, that could construct a
“worldprocess” leading us inexorably to these ends. His alternative account of human action
explains the contrast between the tendencies produced by the exaggerated historicism he has been
criticizing and the life of people inhabiting an earthly horizon. Nietzsche claims that a certain kind of
historical thinking is being put to ideological uses to promote an egoism that we might now call
narcissism: the aberrations of the historical sense from which the present time suffers are
intentionally furthered, encouraged and—used. And they are used against youth in order to train them
to that manhood of egoism which is everywhere aspired to . . . A certain excess of history is capable of all
of this, we have seen it: through a continuous displacement of horizon perspectives, through the
elimination of an enveloping atmosphere, it no longer permits humans to feel and act unhistorically
(UO II.9). Nietzsche’s terms “horizon” and “enveloping atmosphere” suggest an alternative way of
construing human action, one in which the totalizing concept of “world” has been put out of
commission and replaced by the conjunction of human and earth. “World,” as used by Hartmann
introduces a conception of total meaning or totality. Weltprozess can be read as a modification of
Hegel’s Weltgeist. “Process” substitutes for “spirit” because Hartmann’s is a philosophy of the
unconscious, an attempt to meld a Darwinian account of evolution with a Schopenhauerian theory of
impossible desire. This combination is then forced into a Hegelian frame, retaining the sense of unity that
is associated with “world.” Recall too that Hegel’s world is a rather exclusive club of states, excluding
wandering and migratory peoples. Hegel regards those modern polities (like the United States) that lack
monarchy and established religion as shaky candidates for provisional admission, and he sees both
Islamic and Jewish states as long-surpassed historical curiosities because of their uncertain relations to
national territories
***PHILOSOPHY, FEAR, AND THE STATE***
(AT: FMWK)
Focus on contemporary events betrays a lack of temporal distance from the present
configuration of power. This blunts the critical edge of philosophy, allowing it to be
manipulated by the media and by the conservative ideology of the present. This
journalistic obsession with the event subordinates philosophy to the State. This State
maintains itself only through fear mongering and ideology. But the state is NOT the
highest goal and aspiration of humankind. In interrogating the relationship between
the State and Thought, Nietzsche invites us to re-think our relationship to time, to our
communities, and to ourselves. This involves moving away from an image of thought
the relies on the notion of interiority and instead opening to the outside. Nietzsche
calls for a nomad politics, nomad thought, and nomadic subjects.

loyalty.
***STATES OF EXCEPTION, WAR, GENOCIDE IMPACT***
Nation states are fictions that are constantly in risk of dissolving under the forces of the mobile and
nomadic masses. These make the disappearance of the state inevitable. But to keep themselves alive,
they resort to fear mongering and ideological manipulations. This culminates in the state of
exception, where rule of law is suspended to allow unprecedented sovereign violence.
Since the United States’ commitment to a “global war on terror” following the attacks of September
11, 2001, there has been increasing attention in Anglophone political thought to the idea of the “state
of exception,” the political mode/act by which the state, more specifically the sovereign power,
suspends some of the state’s own laws, including even parts of its constitution, in order to deal with
such emergencies as foreign or civil war. Now political thinkers are all aware of the maxim of Carl
Schmitt, the mercurial jurist notorious for his involvement with the Nazi regime: “Sovereign is he who
decides upon the exception.”1 There are echoes of the principle in George W. Bush’s self description as
“the decider,” a description that seems to have been stimulated by members of his legal staff. Nietzsche
was not only aware of this kind of move in contemporary Europe, but also attuned to the analogy
Schmitt was later to make explicit between political and theological sovereignty. For Schmitt, the
sovereign’s authority in and over the state is comparable to God’s rulership of the world; suspensions of
the constitution are parallel to divine miracles that suspend the laws of nature. Nietzsche’s most obvious
reference to the theme is in section 475 of his 1878 book Human, All-Too-Human (the date is significant,
as we’ll see, because of the contemporary practices of the German Reich). The reference has
gone unnoticed, since the aphorism is typically read in order to illustrate or explore Nietzsche’s thoughts
about Jews and anti-Semitism, with readers commenting on the complex attitudes in his observations.2
For example, from a biographical and psychological standpoint, the text has been understood as marking
Nietzsche’s turning away from Wagner’s anti-Semitism. When Cosima Wagner read the book, she said
that it was the voice of Israel that now spoke through Nietzsche, charging that “Israel had taken over”
through the malign influence of Paul Rée, his Jewish friend.3 On the one hand, Nietzsche speaks of
modern Jews as possessing “energy and higher intelligence” accumulated through a long school of
suffering. And if he allows that “perhaps the youthful stock-exchange Jew is the most repulsive invention
of the human race,” he contextualizes this by saying that “every nation, every man possesses unpleasant,
indeed dangerous qualities: it is cruel to demand that the Jew should constitute an exception.” He asks
how much must be forgiven a people who “not without us all being to blame, have had the most grief-
laden history of any people and whom we have to thank for the noblest human being (Christ), the purest
sage (Spinoza), the mightiest book and the most efficacious moral code in the world.” If the contemporary
reader wants to see the case for decoupling Nietzsche from his popular associations with Nazism and
other forms of antiSemitism, or explore the complexity of his attitude toward Jews, this aphorism is a
good place to start. Yet what is the explicit subject of this text, which bears the title “The European
human (Mensch) and the abolition of nations”? We might note that all of Nietzsche’s comments about the
Jews here are marked as consequences of his initial argument concerning the fragility of the modern state.
Like his contemporary Marx, but for rather different reasons, he imagines that the state will eventually
disappear. The second section of the aphorism is marked off from what precedes it by a dash, one of
Nietzsche’s characteristic stylistic flourishes: “—Incidentally (Beiläufig): the problem of the Jews exists
only within national states . . . .” “The Jewish question” (as Marx calls it) is something that arises only in
the nation-state, revealing the state’s conceptual incoherence and fragile stability. What then was
Nietzsche thinking about the problem of the national state? Why is the “problem” of the Jews framed as
an illustration of his analysis? Readers have not always attended to the aphorism’s title or to the fact that
it is embedded in the chapter called “A Glance at the State.” They may rush past the first section, which
develops this theme, and on to the second, which Nietzsche introduces as a consequence of its main
thesis. What is that thesis? Nietzsche rapidly sketches a case that the increasingly common cultural
and economic life of Europeans, and the growth of “nomadic life among all those who do not own
land”—mobility—“are necessarily bringing with them a weakening and finally an abolition of
nations,” which must eventually produce a mixed race of European humanity.4 Along these same
lines, he suggests (apparently for the first time) that “one should not be afraid to proclaim oneself simply
a good European and actively work for the amalgamation (Verschmelzung ) of nations.” In this context he
remarks on the Germans’ special ability to mediate among peoples. A twenty-first century reader should
be struck by Nietzsche’s analysis of the obstacle in the way of this process: “This goal is at present
being worked against, consciously or unconsciously, by the separation of nations through the
production of national hostilities . . . this artificial nationalism is in any case as perilous as artificial
Catholicism used to be, for it is in its essence a forcibly imposed state of exception and siege
(gewaltsamer Noth- und Belagerungszustand) imposed on the many by the few and requires cunning,
force, and falsehood to maintain a front of respectability.”5 The argument, then, proceeds through
several stages. First, Nietzsche claims something about Europe. Despite the time’s noisy nationalism
and chauvinism, he discerns a real counter-movement, in which Europeans are becoming increasingly
mobile or “nomadic.” This leads to a loosening of traditional national ties and identities. Here
Nietzsche is again effectively repudiating Hegel’s world-history, which dismisses the exclusion of the
wanderings and migrations of peoples as nonhistorical, and assigns a national character to each state.
Nietzsche takes nomadism to be an indisputable facet of European modernity. It is not a temporary
disruption or aberration. Here we can compare Nietzsche’s claim with Hegel’s by considering how
Hegel marginalizes two significant geopolitical phenomena, the contemporary rise of the United States
and the seven centuries or so of powerful Islamic states, empires, and caliphates. Hegel sets up a logical
contrast between two more or less contemporaneous developments, the wanderings of the Germanic
Völker and the spread of Islam. The Völker are merely particular in their origins, tied to arbitrary,
contingent events and traditions; in opposition, Islam is the rule of abstract universality and is especially
suited to the Arabs, who roam the wide expanses of the desert, which Hegel compares to the boundless
sea. In the Islamic realm, Hegel sees nothing but an episodic succession of wars, caliphates, and
kingdoms where “nothing firm abides.”6 The moment of individuality comes with the empire of
Charlemagne, uniting a number of Germanic tribes, drawing a firm line with Islam, and instituting the
outlines of a state. While Hegel did not claim to predict specific futures, he certainly intended to exclude
certain possibilities. He denies that the United States in its democratic, secular form, and Islam as a
religious-political phenomenon, can be genuine players in the field of world-history. This highlights the
importance of Nietzsche’s implicit rejection of the original exclusion of the nomadic, which generates
not only Hegel’s version of “so-called world-history,” but also all of its variants (Strauss, Hartmann,
and more recent narratives), which fail to recognize the instability and limits of the national sovereign
state. In this respect, Hegel and his heirs are still in thrall to the principles of national sovereignty laid out
in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. For Nietzsche, on the contrary, insofar as the nation-state supposes a
population of common ethnic origins and culture, it finds itself in an intrinsically problematic
position, because mobility and mingling contribute to the formation of a “mixed race,” a process he
seems to welcome (or at a minimum accepts with equanimity). The second stage of Nietzsche’s
argument, then, is that there is no point in resisting this inevitable process, which may be an
important experiment in the European form of life, perhaps with trans-European implications.
While some of the migration and mobility that Nietzsche alludes to may have to do with individuals
seeking employment, opportunity, or freedom from old, restrictive traditions, he also seems to be
thinking about the movements of families, subcultures, and groups. In his vocabulary (coinciding
generally here with that of geographers and historians), the nomadic designates a collective rather than
an individual mode of inhabiting the earth. Finally, in this first part of the aphorism, Nietzsche notes
what retards the transformation or abolition of the national state. It is the state’s scare tactics, its
exaggeration or fabrication of external or internal threats to the population’s security. The state
uses scare tactics to justify what Nietzsche calls a “Noth- und Belagerungszustand ” or state of
exception and siege. These technical terms of German law are related to other legal forms in various
nineteenth-century states. Politically, the state of exception (Ausnahmezustand is the most frequent
German term) is the assumption by a sovereign power of the right to suspend laws and constitutions,
as in the United States version, during the Bush 43 administration, of the “unitary executive.” The
state of exception is imposed by a single executive or executive group that declares itself to be the
sole “decider,” and its signature decisions, Nietzsche says here, are those geared to the fomenting of
national hostilities or fear of internal subversion in order to maintain the artificial unity of the
state. This is formalized in Schmitt’s famous definition of sovereignty: “Sovereign is the one who
decides on the exception.”7 In this view, sovereign power manifests itself in the ability to limit or
suspend the application of laws and constitution. Since any state may be beset by an emergency,
and since the time and character of the emergency are necessarily unpredictable, the state is
constantly haunted by the possible declaration of the state of exception. Even during “normal”
times, with no suspension of constitution or law, it is the sovereign who must judge that no
emergency in fact obtains. The sovereign is still the one who could or would declare a state of
exception. The sovereign, then, is the ultimate “decider” in the political sphere, a title that George W.
Bush seems to have arrogated to himself on the advice of his neo-Schmittian staff.8 The most notorious
provision for a state of exception was article 48 in the constitution of Weimar Germany, which
empowered the president to suspend law in time of emergency. Shortly after taking power, the Nazis
invoked article 48 and proceeded to do away with a series of rights and liberties, although the
constitution itself was never formally revoked. Giorgio Agamben analyzes the history and contemporary
importance of these acts on the part of the sovereign in State of Exception. 9 Since 2001, in the United
States the executive branch has both openly and secretly introduced exceptions to the Constitution
and other laws, such as those governing the surveillance of citizens and the right of habeas corpus,
in the name of the emergency that goes by the name of a “global war on terror.” As Nietzsche puts
it, and as the record of the Bush II administration confirms, this “violently ( gewaltsamer) imposed state
of exception and siege is inflicted on the many by the few and requires cunning, lies, and violence (List,
Lüge, und Gewalt) to maintain a front of respectability.” Whether cooking the intelligence on Iraq’s
supposed weapons of mass destruction or retaliating against truth-tellers and whistle-blowers (as in
the Valerie Plame scandal), the executive pays lip service to the need for a rational justification of
policy. Nietzsche notes that the state of exception does not serve “the many (the peoples [Völker])”
whom it ostensibly protects, but “the interests of certain princely dynasties and certain classes of
business and society.” Might Nietzsche help us in understanding the passions and the logic at work here?
He is writing in 1877–78, just six years after the Franco-Prussian War and Bismarck’s founding of the
German Reich. Nietzsche distanced himself from what he saw as Germany’s arrogant capitalization on its
victory almost immediately. As the aphorism on the decline of the nation shows, Nietzsche’s critique has
both political and cultural dimensions. Nietzsche would have been familiar with article 68 of Bismarck’s
constitution, the ancestor of the notorious article 48 in Weimar’s.10 Throughout the later nineteenth
century, various European and American states enforced states of exception and suspended constitutional
guarantees; Lincoln, for example, suspended the right of habeas corpus during the American Civil War.
The French Constituent Assembly declared a state of siege following the fall of the July monarchy in
1848. Italy, as Agamben says, “functioned as a true and proper juridico-political laboratory for organizing
the process” by which what initially was a disdained and exceptional instrument became a normal means
for the production of law, with Palermo, Naples, and Sicily declaring frequent states of exception.11 Of
course, it can be argued that many of these declarations were indeed necessary in the circumstances.
However, what Agamben notes is what Nietzsche claimed: the general tendency was to normalize the
state of exception itself as a way of strengthening state power. The state of exception or emergency
(Nothzustand or Ausnahmezustand) is thought of as a response to a genuine and pressing need
(Nothstand). In the same chapter on the state, Nietzsche observes that officials have a vested interest in
exaggerating emergencies; even if the knowledgeable among the population are aware of the
exaggeration, the more ignorant majority are more susceptible to being swept up in the
“investigations, punishments, undertakings, reorganizations” that follow upon the exaggerated
emergencies (HAH 448; cf. D 179). To see the contemporary parallels, think only about the fear
promoted by the second Bush administration when it frightened the US population with the specter
of Iraqi atomic weapons (the “smoking gun” that could be a “mushroom cloud”). Indeed, so powerful
were the forces of exaggeration that at the time of the US invasion of Iraq, fully 45 percent of the
US population believed that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a major force behind Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack
on their “homeland.” (The “homeland” is a term of art in the recent intensification of the security state; as
we shall see, Nietzsche’s analysis of “the new idol” and of “peoples and fatherlands” offers resources for
deconstructing this rhetorical maneuver.) The typical justification offered for such a state of exception,
Nietzsche says later in Human All-Too-Human, commenting on the Inquisition, is the claim of exclusive
truth and virtue, which must be preserved for the sake of all mankind (HAH 633). As the Catholic
Church justified the Inquisition by appeal to faith and authority, so the US suspension of liberties in
support of the “war on terror” appeals to such religious principles as “God’s gift of freedom,” even
if the war involves torture and abuse reminiscent of the horrors of the Inquisition (e.g.,
waterboarding). In a later section of HAH, Nietzsche gives a succinct account of how kings and
emperors—the “decider” figures of his day—are tempted to avoid marginalization by the growing
democratic and constitutional forces of the time. Rather than becoming “splendid ornaments,” they
“cling with their teeth to their dignity as warlords: for this they require wars, that is to say states of
exception (Ausnahmezustände) in which that slow constitutional pressure of the forces of democracy
lets up” (WS 281). From a Nietzschean perspective, Schmitt’s understanding of sovereignty as a
theological concept is not surprising. Following the principle that the exception is more important and
revelatory than the norm, Schmitt sees God and the sovereign as typologically analogous ultimate
instances of decision, power, and authority. Just as the idea of a unified world is impossible without God,
Schmitt suggests, the unified state requires a sovereign with an unhindered power of decision.
Nietzsche could very well accept this parallel, but would reject both God and the sovereign as understood
by Schmitt. In Nietzsche’s crucial aphorism on the death of God (GS 125), the “madman” who announces
this in the marketplace says that the import of the news will dawn only very slowly, as humans gradually
grasp what it means to live without an absolutely centering concept. For many centuries, he suggests, we
will still be living with God’s shadow, that is, with various substitutes for the absolute and centering
instance (GS 108). In this light, Schmitt is a shadow artist, a theorist who explicitly attempts to endow the
state with the attributes of the divinity. As Nietzsche had his madman ask why we don’t yet smell the
odors of God’s decomposition, so his analysis of the slow but inevitable decay of the national state
points to a parallel decentering in the political sphere. To sum this up: “The belief in a divine order
in the realm of politics, in a sacred mystery in the existence of the state, is of religious origin: if
religion disappears the state will unavoidably lose its ancient Isis veil and cease to excite reverence”
(HAH 472).12 Later, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche will charge Christianity with creating the very states of
emergency (Notzustände) to which it appeals to justify its parasitic tyranny (AC 62). As we will see, such
analyses are part of his program of turning the themes of Christian political theology against itself. At the
same time, Nietzsche rejects an activist anarchism that attempts to accelerate the state’s decay. In
the aphorism last cited on “Religion and government” from “A Glance at the State,” he produces a
schematic genealogy of their relationship. It is a story of the progressive and systematically linked
decay of both, culminating in the thought that “a later generation will see the state too shrink to
insignificance in various parts of the earth” (HAH 472). Note that Nietzsche speaks of the earth rather
than the world as the larger horizon here. The state or government (Regierung) has an obvious interest in
allying with religion insofar as it wishes the populace to “patiently submit to instructions from above (in
which concept divine and human government are usually fused.)” Yet this use of religion will eventually
give rise to a certain enlightenment, the beginning of “freespiritedness” among the rulers, from which,
Nietzsche leaves us to infer, only more skepticism can develop. (We might see here the roots of Leo
Strauss’s meditations on religion, state, and philosophy.) If government happens to develop in a
democratic direction, the plurality of religions will lead to the state regarding religion as a private
affair of conscience. In this atmosphere, sects will flourish freely, the more enlightened will become at
least privately irreligious, and many of those still moved by religion will become hostile to the state,
while in reaction another party will become increasingly enthusiastic supporters of the state. The
emptiness that growing secularism has left in their hearts will be filled by this new devotion. So far,
Nietzsche’s genealogy could help to explain the rise of fundamentalist and antifundamentalist
politics in an avowedly secular state like the United States. Yet after such “transitional struggles,”
which may last a long time, “the attitude of veneration and piety” toward the state will be
undermined, and it will begin to be seen in a pragmatic and utilitarian perspective. At this point
much of the work of government will be reassigned to “private contractors”— “outsourcing” is the
current word—another sign of the impending “decline and death of the state.” Although Nietzsche
does not mention Hegel here, this would surely entail the collapse of his state-centered world-
historical narrative; on the post-state earth, “a new page will be turned in the storybook of
humanity in which there will be many strange tales to read and perhaps some of them good ones.”
Just as the domination of the organizing principle of the racial clan gave way to the family and then
to the state, so humanity will eventually hit upon “an invention more suited to their purpose than
the state.” (Nietzsche continues to speak of the earth as the sphere of human activity, eschewing the
vocabulary of “world” and “so-called world-history.”) However, there is no point in working actively
for the “dissemination and realization” of the idea of the state’s dissolution, since even the most far-
sighted can have little sense of the consequences this would entail. On what may seem a surprisingly
conservative note, Nietzsche concludes: “Let us therefore put our trust in ‘the prudence and self-interest
of humans’ to preserve the existence of the state for some time yet and to repulse the destructive
experiments of the precipitate and the over-zealous!” Now it is clearer why Nietzsche calls this section of
Human, All-Too-Human “A Glance at the State.” Rather than being the basis of worldhistory and the
foundation of art, religion, and philosophy, as for Hegel, the state is simply the most recent
organizational form of human life on earth. Its hypertrophic development in the era of nationalism,
Nietzsche says, is temporary in the larger scheme of things. A glance (Blick), in Nietzsche’s
vocabulary, is a quick but comprehensive look that delineates structure, meaning, and context. Such a
glance is sufficient to put the state in its place.
**PSYCHIC STATES OF EXCEPTION**
(AT: FMWK)
The state of exception is replicated at the level of our psychic economy. We reinforce
our own borders of identity, policing ourselves while closing ourselves off from others.
Examples of such wars on different modes of thought can be found in the academy,
where the insights of others are defensively dismissed as illegitimate.
Nietzsche extends his account of the state of exception by showing how its logic is already at work in
our internal psychic economy. This picture of the self as a community is comparable to Plato’s
reading justice or injustice in the state as modes of the individual human soul writ large, and
Freud’s understanding of the self as a complex balance of id, ego, and superego. In a chapter on “The
Human Alone with Itself ” he writes: Self-observation.—The human (Mensch) is very well defended
against himself, against being reconnoitered and placed under siege (Belagerung) by himself, he is
usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even
invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path
(HAH 491). The human being is in a state of exception with regard to himself, a strange doubling
logic, but no stranger than the explicitly political state of exception. We do not know our own well-
defended inner fortress. We resist self-knowledge by declaring a state of exception that makes our
core as uncanny as the sovereign imposition of a law that suspends law. Both in the case of the
individual and in that of the state, friends and enemies, forces of the outside, are necessary to break
the defenses and the martial law that claim justification to resist the siege. The tightly constructed
individual identity (think of Freud’s superego) and the nationalistic political state are powerful yet
fragile, and the struggles to dissolve both of these artificial unities have a common structure. Many
individuals borrow the principle of the state of exception from the political realm to make their own
injustices acceptable: “There are not a few who understand the unclean art of self-duping by means
of which every unjust act they perform is reminted into an injustice done to them by others and the
law of exception for necessary defense (Ausnahmerecht der Notwehr) is reserved to what they
themselves have done” (AOM 52). Such people are in need of an “intervention,” in contemporary
therapeutic language. Perhaps most unsettling, given Nietzsche’s project of opening up possibilities for
thought that are free of state-oriented concepts (as in Schopenhauer as Educator), is the danger that
philosophers themselves may begin to think like states. Nietzsche argued this in the Schopenhauer
essay with respect to the Hegelian and journalistic state-employed philosophy professors of Bismarck’s
Germany. Yet the problem is more deeply rooted. In a long aphorism of Dawn he takes a critical look at
aging philosophers, once original and daring thinkers, who end by wanting to institutionalize their ideas.
This can stifle the creativity in others that they had enjoyed themselves. Toward the end of their careers,
thinkers like Plato and August Comte become weary, shift their concern from fresh thinking to preserving
their legacy, and seek to enshrine their ideas in a “temple of enduring stone.” Probably the “most
dangerous characteristic” of this weariness is their “belief in their own genius, which usually assails great
and semi-great men of the spirit only at this frontier of their life: the belief that they occupy an
exceptional position (Ausnahmestellung) and enjoy the law of exception (Ausnahmerecht)” (D 542).
When the aging philosopher comes to believe that the preservation of his thoughts is threatened by
misunderstanding or rivals, he appoints himself as sovereign (or “decider”) in the realm of the
spirit. Nietzsche wrote about a legend according to which Plato took pains to have all of Democritus’s
writings destroyed; more recently Comte attempted to establish a church of positivism.13 The thought of
the state privileges interiority and the maintenance of its borders. In a note of 1874, Nietzsche writes
that philosophy “is gradually turning into nothing but the guarding of borders.”14 Remarks along
these lines will be familiar to those Anglophone teachers and students of philosophy who lament the
tendency of “analytic” philosophers to exclude other kinds of thinkers from the charmed circle of
“real” philosophy. This is known colloquially in the United States as “circling the wagons,” which
suggests the territoriality of these border conflicts and some typical defense strategies.15 Nietzsche’s
frequent denunciations of anarchism should be read in the light of his diagnosis of the decline and death
of the state. The nineteenth-century anarchist movement that Nietzsche rejected took two main forms.
From his perspective, utopian anarchists like Kropotkin were naively deluded in thinking that there could
be a quick and relatively painless transition to a world of mutual cooperation free of the state.
Revolutionary anarchists like those inspired by Bakunin (Wagner’s ally in 1848) were nihilists whose
violence and terrorism were fueled by a powerful, raging ressentiment; their destructive activities could
only encourage the state to declare a state of exception. Like Marx, Nietzsche saw the future of the state
and its “withering away” as embedded in a complex historical movement, although they had quite
different takes on what that process is.
**BIOPOLITICS, GENOCIDE, DEATH IMPACT**
The state is a death-dealing bloodthirsty monster. Not only does it wage wars and
execute all of its enemies, it also eliminates anthropological and normative pluralism.
The state transforms different and nomadic peoples into a homogenized population
ready for biopolitical extermination. This is why the state is a slow suicide, the loss of
all of life.
In a talk in or near this town, Zarathustra issues a prophetic denunciation of the state, a discourse “On the
New Idol.” With its Biblical resonances and parodies, we hear echoes of Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and
Amos in this polemic. It is a jeremiad against false idols. The state is portrayed as a monster or machine
of death. Like many of the talks of the book’s first part, it is structured around the life/death binary. The
state brings death; life begins where the state ceases. Just as life/death is an absolute duality, so one is
either inside or outside the state. The boundary line is not in question. In this respect, Zarathustra
apparently agrees with the state’s self-definition, which insists on its authority within clearly
delineated territory. Is the state’s death-making too obvious to mention? Many of Nietzsche’s close
readers do not even remark on the emphatic and repeated claim that the state is a death-dealing
monster.22 What makes the state an agent of death? Zarathustra does not speak explicitly here of the
state’s power to kill in war, extending both to enemies and to subjects, who may be ordered to risk
or sacrifice their lives. The closest he comes to such a discussion is “On the Pale Criminal,” addressing
the “scarlet judges,” who cruelly enjoy sending the murderer to be executed (Z I.6). Here the
murderer not only finally admits legal guilt but, more importantly, recognizes that his conscious intention
(that of the lesser self or ego) was a self deception, for the desire of the greater self was to kill. So
Zarathustra’s listeners or disciples have already been told that the officials of the state are using the
appearance of honor it gives them (in their scarlet robes) as a conscious or more likely unconscious
device for their own bloodthirsty desires.23 “On the New Idol” is directed to those in the state. You are
either in it or outside it: “In some places there are still peoples and herds left, but not with us, my
brothers: here there are states.” So, in the largest relevant context, call it the earth, there are at least three
forms of human organization: peoples, herds, and state humans or Staatmenschen, those who live within
the world of the state. I use the word “world” advisedly, both to preserve a certain relation between world
and state, and to allow that within the world of states there are expats, immigrants, and exiles (all
defined in relation to the state), as well as state officials and even hereditary monarchs and tyrants.
Unless we see the anthropological or geophilosophical pluralism presupposed here, we will not
understand the force of Zarathustra’s definition of the state as a wielder of death, including not
only the most obvious forms just cited, but the threat of death, and the encouragement of living
death or “slow suicide.” “The state? What is that?” So Zarathustra puts the question. And here comes the
definition: Well then, now open your ears for me, for now I say to you my word about the death of
peoples. State is the name for the coldest of all cold monsters (Ungeheuer). Coldly it tells lies; and this
lie crawls (kriecht) out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” Hearing the state described as a
“cold monster,” it is difficult not to think of the Hobbesian Leviathan. Seeing what Zarathustra means by
the death of peoples requires uncovering the Leviathan’s lie as a lie. The state kills its own people
through sending them to war, committing genocide, or executing them, and through soul-murder as
it deceives a people into confusing itself with the state. If a people swallows this lie it is lost. Once a
people, it now becomes the population of a state claiming authority over their lives. The state as we
moderns know it practices biopolitics by transforming people into population. So far as they are
members of the population, no longer rooted in the life of a people, they become “many-too-many
(Viel-zu-Vielen)” or “superfluous people (Überflussige).” The point here is not to distinguish superior
and inferior classes or ranks within the state but to suggest that all those who accept their position in the
state are, as such, simply elements of population. Zarathustra had denounced the last humans for
subjecting life to measurement, which is fundamental in the state’s relation to population. Life
subjected to measurement, calculation, and control is, Zarathustra claims, a kind of death, a living
death (“slow suicide”), if you will. Biopolitics is necessarily thanatopolitics. Michel Foucault observed
that traditional political power could be characterized as letting live and making die, while modern
power is defined rather by making live and letting die.24 Whether managing the population’s
public health and education by means of discipline and surveillance or sifting billions of electronic
messages and transactions for market research or detection of political deviants, population is
analyzed, shaped, and actions channeled through quantitative reduction. This analysis, shaping, and
channeling is the modern way of making live. It is a shaping and measuring that devitalizes.25 “Far too
many are born; for the superfluous was the state invented!” All are superfluous. The greater the
numbers, the more zeroes both numerically and metaphorically. As superfluous, they are on the
way to the condition of “bare life” as conceptualized by Giorgio Agamben. The state is happy to have
surplus population. It is a monstrous apparatus for manipulating the surplus through staging a
competition for riches and power. That great cynic Hartmann had said pretty much the same thing,
although he thought this was simply the inevitable final stage of the Weltprozess. Indeed, Hartmann drew
the same conclusion as Nietzsche: a life managed by the modern state, in which all are subject to its
economy, are virtually dead. They must eventually see that this last chance for human happiness is
hopeless, so as good Schopenhaurians they will all die by choice, exhaustion, or mutual destruction.
Peter Sloterdijk elaborates the same theme when he argues that the early modern state encouraged
overpopulation. Seventeenth-century witch hunts, coinciding with the rise of the absolute state,
were directed against midwives, who frequently shared contraceptive information and helped to
terminate unwanted pregnancies. This suppression led to excess population, which could then serve
statist economic and political interests.26 With a bit of nostalgia, Zarathustra observes that once upon
a time, and perhaps still “elsewhere,” there are or were peoples who received love and faith from
the creators of the people’s values. Without such originary creative force there is no people. The
annihilators who set up states “hang a sword and a hundred desires over them all.” The sword is
the ultimate threat of death, and the desires are those promoted by the state to bind the population
to the way of life, or “slow suicide,” that feeds the monstrous apparatus (think of Hobbes’s absolute
sovereign and his idea of the “commonwealth”). The state engages in systematic linguistic confusion,
exchanging and perverting the notions of good and evil, presumably the good and evil established
by the creators. Such confusion is the sign (Zeichen) of the state. “Verily, the will to death is what this
sign signifies. Verily, it beckons to the preachers of death.” So, behind the primal lie by which the state
tries to pass itself off as the people and its confusing transvaluation of the people’s values, we can
detect a “will to death,” a will that allies the state with “the preachers of death.” Zarathustra had
already devoted a speech to these preachers. The state reveals its “will to death” by allying itself with
them. The state is imbricated from the beginning with such preachers; we might say that it relies
necessarily on an explicit or implicit political theology. Whether they preach death directly (like
Hartmann and the Buddhists) or indirectly, say, by preaching the superiority of “eternal life” to earthly,
these preachers support the state’s ideology.
**ALTERNATIVE – BwO and Nomadism**
Freedom begins where the state ends. Peoples must break through the walls of the
state to experiment on the body of the earth. The earth is a smooth space,
deterritorialized and open. It is only here where true politics is possible. State-based
politics, by contrast, is all smoke and mirrors – it’s an autoimmune disease which
destroys the earth, paving over its openness with the closure of highways and strip
malls.
We might be surprised to find Nietzsche apparently defending the integrity of traditional values of
good and evil against their confusion by the state. This must be understood within the context of his
denunciation of the state for destroying peoples. In “On the Thousand and One Goals,” Zarathustra
maintains that such tables of good and evil are essential to the life of a people. Yet the speech on the
state does not encourage a return to the traditional life of a people, a people already devitalized and
rendered superfluous population. No, Zarathustra enjoins his listeners to “shatter the windows and
leap into the open air!” because “free for great souls the earth still stands even now.” Don’t walk
through the doors, we might say, because there we have to pay tolls and have our documents
stamped by the Leviathan’s functionaries. Freedom, as Foucault says in another context, lies in a
more radical escape that breaks through the windows.27 What lies beyond the walls of the state is
not the world, a term too closely associated with Hegel’s claim that the world is the totality of states, but
the earth, the self-renewing site of mobile, experimental human habitation. On the earth are rainbows
and bridges that may lead to the Übermensch. In Zarathustra’s rhetorical and poetic discourse, we should
not expect specific directives as to whether escaping from the state requires leaving its territory or
is compatible with internal exile, modest poverty, and solitary or coupled life (Zarathustra speaks of
the places that await Einsame und Zweisame). After his series of town speeches, Zarathustra leaves his
disciples and returns to his cave. From this point on, landscape, sea, and sky become more insistent
dimensions of the story, both as setting and as subject of thematic exploration. We learn in Part II that
Zarathustra’s “wild wisdom became pregnant on lonely mountains; on rough stones she gave birth to her
young . . . Now she runs foolishly through the harsh desert and seeks gentle turf ” (Z II.1). This “wild”
wisdom, outside the striated space of the state, inspires a journey of sea voyages and island hopping.
These range from sightings of the isle of the dead to a volcanic atoll, and include sojourns on the “isles of
the blessed”— adapting a classical motif, which might lead us to think of “bubbles” for the affluent and
sophisticated. Geographically, the setting is an archipelago, a series of islands with distinctive attractions
and problems. They are the singularities of the earth. Seas, deserts, caves, and mountainous terrain
all become forms of Deleuzian smooth space, fields of unconstrained movement of bodies and
thought. In “On the Land of Culture (Bildung),” Zarathustra presents himself as a wanderer against his
will, driven out of cities, fatherlands, and motherlands. He thus rejects the nation-state, a place that
would claim its inhabitants by a parental model of natality, for the sake of a new people and new
earth, called his “children’s land, yet undiscovered in the most distant sea” (KSA 4.155). “On Great
Events” deploys the figure of a volcanic island in addressing the politics of the earth.28 The title alludes
to Hegel, who defined great events as those decisive for the world-historical development or
transformation of the state; it is also a rewrite of Nietzsche’s first stab at formulating his own version of
the great event in UO IV. Commentators typically read the chapter as directed against state-oriented
propagandists and politicians, especially Rousseauian enthusiasts of revolution.29 These are allegorized
as the “fire-hound,” who is one of earth’s “skin diseases.” The “figure” of Zarathustra was seen to arrive
at this Stromboli-like island by flying over the sea. The volcano (literally a “firemountain”) that his
simulacrum entered is said to be the gate of hell in local legend. Once he reassures his disciples that he is
safe (only his shadow descended into volcanic hell), Zarathustra relates his dialogue with the fire-hound,
an ego puffed up with a desire to expand its power, a rebel or revolutionary.30 Such fiery demagogues
are said to be at most “ventriloquists of the earth,” producing the illusion of a politics that speaks
from the ground of being. They give the impression that the earth, as reterritorialized by the state,
constitutes a nation’s true identity. In effect, they buy into Hegel’s conception of world-history as
the story of states. The secret unknown by the fire-hound (and the state-philosophy he represents) is
that “the heart of the earth is of gold.” This explicitly geographical and geological chapter insists that
the resources of the Menschen-Erde are rich in possibility. It is constituted by passionate human bodies,
their combinations, and their transformations on, by, and through the earth. Zarathustra speaks to his
disciples, who anxiously worried whether it was indeed he who plunged into the “fire-mountain.” While
they voice doubts about the old wives’ tale that it is the gate of hell, “in the ground of their souls they
were all of them filled with concern and yearning.” Zarathustra takes their disturbance as a teachable
moment. Those who saw the figure’s descent or heard the news may think they have witnessed a
spectacular event, a “great event.” Zarathustra’s lesson to the disciples is that such spectacles are not
great events, just as he explains to the fire-hound that neither are they constituted by rebellions and
revolutions. His implicit message is something like this: “You thought that was a great event? Let me
explain what a great event is and is not.” In hearing Zarathustra correct both his disciples and the fire-dog
on their superficial idea of great events, we should recall that Nietzsche once thought that he saw a great
event of the earth in Wagner’s supposed severing of East and West. Zarathustra’s discourse to his
disciples—those who have presumably pledged their loyalty to the earth—is a story of elemental love and
strife, a geology of morals.31 As he explains: “The earth . . . has a skin, and this skin has diseases. One of
these diseases, for example, is called ‘Mensch.’ And another one of these diseases is called “fire-hound.”
The earth is a complex of strata; we tend to ignore its intricate stratigraphy because we are
deafened by the voice of the fire-hound and his kind, who see only surfaces. The earth’s interior is
mineral, sometimes molten. Humans interfere with the biosphere (the skin) in many ways,
mineralizing the surface in stone, concrete, and brick, and releasing noxious materials into its atmosphere.
Today they pave the earth with highways and parking lots for oil- driven vehicles. They turn the
earth inside out seeking fossil fuels and minerals. This surface disorder, which bites into its ground,
is like an autoimmune disease, the earth being disrupted by its own products as they war for
resources. To understand the rebellious fire-hound, Zarathustra conducts a full analysis of its elemental
dimensions: not only fire, but sea, smoke, and earth (mud ). Now he knows that the firehound’s noise is
not a “great event.” Politics as generally practiced is all smoke and mirrors. Political rebels accept an
unquestioned context of state and self, limiting their contestation of received values. Zarathustra
recounts his conversation with the fire-hound: “‘Freedom’ is what you all most like to bellow; but I have
unlearned my belief in ‘great events’ whenever they are surrounded by so much fire and smoke.” The
struggle for freedom, of course, is what Hegel sees as the prime engine of world-history, that which
brings about “great events.” But genuinely great events arise in those “stillest hours” when we become
aware of new values. In contrast, the state (or churches, those quasistates) are fire-hounds, bellowing
ventriloquists of the earth proclaiming their own absolute importance. Another fire-hound,
Zarathustra continues, “really speaks out of the heart of the earth. He exhales gold and golden rain.” This
beast is at home in elemental extremes, like “ashes and smoke and hot slime,” but Zarathustra knows that
“the heart of the earth is of gold.” Gold, Zarathustra’s disciples know, is glowing and giving, the sign of
“the gift-giving virtue (schenkende Tugend)” (Z I.22). The molten, radiant core of the earth has an
affinity to the sun. Geological flow is what the earth is about. Ordinary politics takes place among
skin diseases, the superficial flows of humans and states. On the horizon is the project of a geology of
morals, a project sketched by Deleuze and Guattari. “Who does the earth think it is?” is a question that
must be taken seriously, whenever there is a discourse of nation, national identity, and where
ownership of land and the limits of ownership are at issue. Zarathustra’s claim that the heart of the
earth is of gold is rephrased in A Thousand Plateaus, by Professor Challenger, who explained that the
Earth—the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule—is a body without organs. This body
without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free
intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles.32 “On Great Events” once more
problematizes the Hegelian claim that great or world-historical events are exclusively those having to do
with the development, transformation, or conflict of states. Humans, now a skin disease on earth’s
surface, could transform their habitat into a truly human-earth, more specifically a garden (as we
hear later). What would it mean to be loyal to the earth, to raise the question of its meaning and
direction with the passion so far channeled into state and church? Empedocles gave an enigmatic
answer when, as tradition has it, he jumped into Etna; at the end of his talk to his disciples, Zarathustra
insists it was only his shadow or specter that mimicked that act. Yet he is puzzled by the specter’s
reported exclamation: “It is time! It is high time!” Time for what? For a great event involving the earth?
The question hangs in the air although the next chapter introduces more doubt with the figure of “The
Soothsayer.” That symbol of Schopehauerian pessimism challenges any hope raised by Zarathustra’s
loyalty to the earth and its golden heart, teaching that earth is now exhausted—fruit turned rotten, soil
cracked, wells dried, wine poisonous, sea become shallow swamp. That picture of the earth then
motivates Zarathustra’s nightmare of himself as a night watchman of universal death, a dream that
makes a volte-face into a revelatory vision of revived earthly life when the glass coffins containing
the dead burst open with raucous, carnivalesque life. Part III is the story of a homecoming by walking,
sailing, and mountainclimbing. As Zarathustra ascends a mountain ridge, a new perspective opens on a
fresh sea, and he reflects on the alternation of perspectives, which turns things upside down, and the need
to discern grounds and backgrounds, not merely the foregrounds that appear to overly obtrusive eyes. He
disorients the framework of the picturesque poem or landscape painting with its single fixed angle on the
earth. Zarathustra invokes geological time and space to suggest a general pattern of analysis:
Whence come the highest mountains? I once asked. Then I learned that they came out of the sea.
The evidence is written ( geschrieben) in their rocks and in the walls of their peaks. It is out of the deepest
depth that the highest must come to its height (KSA 4.195). These strata are forms of writing, codings
of the earth; this provides a model for understanding how human singularities emerge from their
own depths and from reading the inscriptions of their movements and speeds. The earth is a text
that we must learn to read.
Earth, not nations
Thought is a process of territorialization – of positing a relationship to the earth. But

this also means that all of thought is a dynamic process that changes as the earth
does. The failure to realize this is why Europe is in the midst of an unprecedented
crisis of nihilism. The only response to this crisis is to push the processes of
deterritorialization further – to think beyond the nation state by returning to the
earth. Only this will let us create new mileaus and new modes of thought.
Europe is a constant theme, perhaps the major theme of Beyond Good and Evil. Europe’s future is what is
at stake. Nietzsche is on the lookout for “good Europeans,” and he takes on the task of providing a
critical analysis of Europe’s desire to become one. Yet what is Europe? As Nietzsche explains several
times, he has in mind much more than the conventional geographical division that marks off this “little
cape of Asia” (WS 215, BGE 52, cf. BGE 208); it is necessary to understand Europe in the widest
context, with an “Asian and trans-Asian eye” (BGE 56). Europe can be understood genealogically
as including all the regions whose cultures owe a fundamental debt to Europe in this narrower
sense; so for him it includes North and South America. Unlike Hegel, Nietzsche does not define
Europe in terms of its supposed destiny to establish a certain kind of political state. Europe is in crisis—
whether it knows it or not—as it struggles with the collapse of Christianity, the emergence of
democratic attitudes and practices, the threat of nihilism, and the possible rule of the herd and the
last man. As Zarathustra challenged his auditors to take responsibility for the direction of the earth, the
Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil and subsequent works interrogates Europe in terms of its largely
unconscious response to these challenges, while advancing the possibility that “Europe” may flourish
anew in unanticipated ways. Nietzsche’s engagement with Europe’s future can be understood from
the perspective of what Deleuze and Guattari (hereafter Deleuze) call geophilosophy, a field of thought
they credit him with inventing.35 Geophilosophy, says Deleuze, recognizes that thinking goes on not
between subject and object, but “takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth.”36
Thought, whether philosophical or prephilosophical, involves a process of territorialization,
deterritorialization, and reterritorialization through which it takes up a variety of positions in
relationship to the plane of immanence, understood in its most immediate and familiar
manifestation as earth, the ground of life and thought. To give a necessarily skeletal summary: We
humans (and all living things) territorialize by staking out a space, a place: we settle down, we
cultivate a field, we mark the borders of our situation, whether in the areas traced by the Australian
aborigines in song lines, or the homeless person’s little stretch of sidewalk or space under the bridge.
Deterritorialization consists in an idealizing movement by which actual, physical space becomes
subsumed within some structure requiring a more conceptual definition. A political state, an
empire, declares that the meaning of a certain assemblage of people, land, and resources consists in
a unified structure. Ancient Athens, as it showed in the battle of Salamis, was able to conceive of itself
in deterritorialized fashion by configuring itself as a mobile political structure, not absolutely tied to a
fixed place. Think of reterritorialization as a “back to the land” movement, the reclaiming of a
territory that had previously been absorbed by a deterritorialized entity. Although Deleuze and
Guattari do not limit the use of these notions to their most literal applications to earth and the land, this is
surely one of their primary senses, and I will follow it here. Deleuze proposes that the philosophical
project is one of absolute deterritorialization (which we could read as the way in which they take
Plato’s ambition to contemplate all time and existence [Republic 486a] as applicable to a world of
immanence). Yet philosophy reterritorializes itself, three times, they say. First on the Greek maritime
world of commerce and citystate, whose figure is the friend. Second, on modern capitalism and the
institution of the national state. And, proleptically, on the “new people and new earth” that Deleuze
claims is emerging and that current thought is, sometimes unconsciously, attempting to evoke. Beyond
Good and Evil invites the reader to identify herself as a “good European” who will give a new sense to
life in Europe, which has long since deterritorialized itself from the “little cape of Asia.” Indeed, we
won’t understand Nietzsche’s project at all if we begin with a human geography that fails to see
Europe in motion. Europe then is not to be comprehended as simply a plurality of states with stable
constitutions grounded in religious and ethnic identities (Hegel’s version of the Westphalian model)
but in terms of mobility, difference, and multiplicity. It is necessary to think beyond “peoples and
fatherlands” (the title of the book’s most ostensibly political chapter), and to evoke this sense of being
on the move Nietzsche once again returns (as in announcing the death of God) to an astronomical
metaphor: “I hear with pleasure that our sun is swiftly moving toward the constellation of Hercules—and
I hope that man on this earth will in this respect follow the sun’s example? And we first of all, we good
Europeans!—” (BGE 243). The diagnoses of European philosophy and art in Beyond Good and Evil offer
a critical account of how thinking takes place in the relation between earth and territory. It is a geo-
logic, a cartography of human constructions of the Menschen-Erde and an evocation of their
futurity. The problem, we will see, that underlies Nietzsche’s interrogation of “Peoples and Fatherlands”
is that philosophy, despite its universalistic ambitions and pretensions, is unconsciously
territorialized. It aims, as Deleuze says, at absolute deterritorialization, but necessarily reterritorializes
itself, and in modernity this means that it produces itself in forms associated with the national state.
The “Preface” to BGE recalls that monstrous forms of thought like “astrology and its ‘supra-terrestrial’
claims” have had the most stupendous effects on the lived earth, as in “the grand style in architecture in
Asia and Egypt”; Nietzsche ranks these earliest monumental architectural forms among humanity’s
fruitful errors. Pre-Copernican—they see the stars as divine, taking a local capital to be the center of the
cosmos—Nietzsche nevertheless admires these prime inscriptions on the earth as grand experiments in
giving a direction to the earth. They are the architectural signature of thought still tied to transcendence,
and as such are necessarily figurative and diagrammatic. These are ancient attempts to comprehend the
meaning and direction of the earth. Both dogmatic philosophy and “the grand style of architecture”
demonstrate that “all great things first have to bestride the earth in monstrous and frightening
masks in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with eternal demands” (BGE
“Preface”). Here it is helpful to recall Deleuze’s discussion of figurative or diagrammatic philosophy in
his chapter on geophilosophy. He asks, “Can we speak of Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, or Islamic
‘philosophy’?”37 The answer is conditional: “Yes, to the extent that thinking takes place on a plane of
immanence that can be populated by figures as much as by concepts.” Ultimately, however, there is a
distinction between figure and concept, however difficult it may be to discern in specific cases. “Figures
are projections on the plane, which implies something vertical or transcendent.”38 Although Deleuze
does not mention Derrida in this connection, I read this distinction of figure and concept as an implicit
critique of the politico-aesthetic argument in Of Grammatolog y, which aims at undermining logocentrism
by demonstrating the omnipresence of writing, and so undercutting the ethnocentrism that distinguishes
peoples with and without writing, or alphabetical scripts from inscription in general. Gayatri Spivak has
criticized Deleuze for ethnocentrism on just this score.39 Whatever we might think about this claim,
however, note that Deleuze distances himself from Hegel and Heidegger, who find the beginnings of
philosophy in the original nature of the Greeks. Rather, philosophy arises as an accident of geography:
“The birth of philosophy required an encounter between the Greek milieu and the plane of immanence of
thought.” Thought proceeds even under figurative forms, but without the relative
deterritorialization of the maritime culture of distinct cities as opposed to empire, there would have
been no friend, no philos. Without the friend, there is no notion of philosophy as common activity,
but only of the radically marked individual philosopher as an idiosyncratic phenomenon. It is this
that Nietzsche has in mind in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, when he says that without a
common vibrant culture philosophers can appear only as isolated comets streaking through the sky.
It is the Greek maritime world that provides a milieu for the friendship that is necessary for
philosophia as contrasted to the isolated philosophos.
PEOPLES NOT FATHERLANDS – HUMAN NATURE IS FLUID
Attachment to the nation state obstructs movement, hybridity, and becoming. This is
unfortunate, because human beings are essentially mobile, fluid, and dynamic. There
is thus a fundamental opposition between the nomad and the state. Identification
with the nation state paves the way for tyranny, for a homogenized and static
population. Identification with the nomad, by contrast, points toward the possibility
of moving away from essentialism and toward a politics of difference.
This analysis of music throws some light on the figure of the “good European” that Nietzsche develops
here by reading national and supra-national modes of thought and feeling through musical styles. The
good European is not (certainly is not primarily) the citizen of a single new European state. The
good European is the goal of Beyond Good and Evil, holding the same place in that work that the
posthuman occupies in Zarathustra. If Zarathustra is a fantastic figure, deriving from a specifically non-
European landscape (Persia), the good European is something of tomorrow or the day after. We do
not have to wait for the “great noon” for the emergence of the good European; this is the name of the
future that is arriving. In the second aphorism of “Peoples,” Nietzsche speaks of “dull and sluggish
races who would require half a century even in our rapidly moving Europe to overcome . . .
atavistic attacks of fatherlandishness and gluing themselves to the soil (Schollenkleberei)” (BGE
241). This is a reactive reterritorialization that cannot acknowledge itself. This dogged geographical
essentialism obstructs movement and stands in the way of the “dull races’ ” expansion or
development from other “races,” such as the possibility that Nietzsche (the supposed proto-Nazi)
projected of Germans and Jews forming a new hybrid. (BGE 251). Cloudy indeterminacy is a strength,
if it enables receptivity to the exterior, but in gluing the nation to the soil, sticking it in the mud,
unnamed statesmen (Bismarck and his like) narrow the spirit and degrade taste. Unspoken here is
the tension between “people” and “fatherland.” A people is fundamentally mobile and active,
although “dull and sluggish” by turns. It handicaps itself by assuming a national identity through
hypostatizing its geographical situation into a “fatherland.” Peoples are experiments with a future,
not essences to be preserved. Here we might think for a moment of a suppressed or implicit contrast
between fatherland and motherland. “Fatherland” suggests singular and patriarchal authority, the
daddy state that tends to claim emergency authority, declares a state of exception, and maintains its
position by a propaganda of fear. Only at one point does Nietzsche speak of motherlands, and it is
simply to equate them with fatherlands. Zarathustra says that he has searched for father- and
motherlands, but has failed to find a homeland: “unsettled am I in all settlements (unstät bin ich in alle
Städten) and a departure at all gates.” He declares that he has “been driven out from all father- and
motherlands” and loves only his “children’s land, undiscovered, in the farthest sea” (Z II.14). Like the
contemporary nomad, he is unsettled, but his wandering has a goal; Deleuze understands this as the
search to reterritorialize philosophy on a “new people, new earth.” In the third aphorism, Nietzsche
further contextualizes the question of nationality (BGE 242). What can be called “Europe’s democratic
movement” is a “physiological” process that is producing “a supra-national and nomadic type of
human being,” one distinguished by its high power of adaptation, fit to become an “industrious
worker” and “multi-purpose herd animal.” Nietzsche carefully notes that he says this “without praise
or blame.” What is the “nomadic type of human being”? The nomad should not be construed as a
hermit, a solitary “existential” figure (associations that students typically make). Speaking here of
contemporary nomads, Nietzsche emphasizes not their isolation and difference, but their tendency, in
these circumstances, to homogeneity, to become a herd of adaptable workers (Hartmann, implicitly
following Hegel, had neglected emigration and immigration in his globalization scenario). If “peoples
and fatherlands” are mobile, experimental constructions, the nomads intensify this mobility,
detaching themselves from states and their nationalisms. Nietzsche’s trans-European eye sees
mobility as primary in human habitation. He apparently sharpened this view through his reading of
Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropo-Geographie (1882)—a book that he underlined and annotated. (Ratzel
became a problematic figure in later German geopolitics, contributing to the formation of the concept of
Lebensraum). Ratzel attempted to articulate the basic parameters of a truly global human geography, one
not limited by the perspectives of states, therefore not by written history, itself linked to the state form. In
the concluding chapter of his treatise, Ratzel highlights his signature thesis: the movement of peoples,
their inevitable mixing and tendency to homogenization is the most constant feature of human life
on the earth. He writes: The human being is restless, he strives for the greatest possible overall
expansion, wherever natural boundaries do not sharply hem him in, and any anthropological
conceptualization that does not take this restlessness into account, rests on a false foundation.
Humanity must be seen as a mass (Masse) that finds itself in constant effervescent or fermenting
motion (gährender Bewegung), and through this Gährung a great inner manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit) is
united. This fermentation obtains in varying degrees, but is absent in no people or stage of culture.
It has the tendency to make human beings ever more uniform, because mixing is inseparably bound
up with this movement.45 Nietzsche adds to Ratzel’s analysis that this mixing gives rise to hybrids and
monsters, “exceptional types,” not merely more uniform populations. This is not merely because of his
high valuation of individual genius, but also follows from what he adapts from Darwin and Darwinism
regarding the properties of a population. For example, Nietzsche begins Gay Science by saying that the
faulty mathematics of the solemn, tragic “teachers of the purpose of existence” leads them to substitute
one for the multiple; he looks forward to the time when we will have realized that “the species is
everything, one is always none”; the teachers of the purpose of existence fail to understand the logic of
the multiple: “for [them] there are no species, sums, or zeros” (GS 1). Here we should note Nietzsche’s
exclamation that this is “the century of the multitude (Menge)” (BGE 256). We should not be misled by
translations that read “Menge” as “masses.” “Masses” suggests only homogeneity; while Nietzsche does
see the drive toward homogeneity in the emerging Europe, he also emphasizes the exceptional, the
inventive, and the hybrid.46 (Note that set theory, being developed at precisely this time by Georg
Cantor to deal with the absolutely multiple or infinite, is Mengenlehre. I have no reason, however, to
think that Nietzsche knew Cantor’s work.) Again in this spirit, Nietzsche challenges the natal or
autochthonous dimension implicit in the national, the root of fatherlandishness. What gets called a
“nation” in Europe today (and is really more a res facta [something made] than nata [born]—every once
in a while a res ficta et picta [something fictitious and painted] will look exactly the same) is, in any case,
something young, easily changed, and in a state of becoming, not yet a race let alone the sort of aere
perennius [more enduring than bronze] that the Jewish type is (BGE 251). It seems at first that Nietzsche
continues, it becomes clear that they are to be distinguished from other groups only by the relative speed
of their movement, not by any essential characteristic. They represent a countermovement to the nomadic,
since they are seeking a place to settle down and assimilate to some degree. Yet this very movement,
Nietzsche opines, “perhaps already reveals a slackening of the Jewish instincts.” So even this group,
whom he had just described as “without a doubt the strongest, purest, most tenacious race living in
Europe today,” are subject to the general principle of mobility. Nietzsche emphasizes the agonistic
relation between nomads and the state (with its valorization of identity and its insane “state of
exception” nationalism) even more than Ratzel. Deleuze suggests (from a reading of Genealogy II 16–
17) that the nomads arise at the state’s periphery and exist in constant tension with it. The nomads
resist not only the existing empire or “despotic machine”; they resist the formation of states among
themselves. Official history largely neglects the nomads or finds them incomprehensible. Deleuze offers
an explanation: If there is no history from the viewpoint of the nomads, although everything passes
through them, to the point that they are the noumena or the unknowable of history, it is because
they cannot be separated from this task of abolition which makes the nomad empires vanish as if of
their own accord, at the same time as the war-machine is either destroyed or passes into the service
of the state.47 Earlier I agreed with Deleuze that Schopenhauer as Educator is an implicitly nomadic text
and supplemented Deleuze’s reading by recalling Nietzsche’s incorporation of related themes in Emerson.
Now whatever inspiration Nietzsche indirectly received from North America’s mobile populations and
expanding frontiers has been brought back to Europe with his observation, over a decade later, of its
increasing Americanization (cf. GS 329). Nietzsche is willing to make some conjectures about the way
in which the European experiments (there is never just one) will go. He has at least two models, and
it is not immediately obvious that they can be reconciled. The first is a democratizing and
homogenizing movement leading to the adaptable worker who will allow others to organize their
lives, close to Zarathustra’s last man and Hartmann’s globalized bourgeoisie. It makes possible the rise
of tyrants, including the “most spiritual” kind. On a second model, Europe is the breeding ground
for new forms of spiritual hybridity, and Nietzsche distinguishes the roles of receptivity and
generation. He sees two possibly productive roles for Germany: as the cultural stimulus for France and as
a marital introduction service for military families and Jews (BGE 251). Such hybrids, not the
homogenized last men, are movements in the style of the good European. On the one hand
common, the other rare. Social, economic, and geographic mobility produces a multitude adapted to
globalized conditions as well as exceptional new combinations brought about by a variety of causes.
The good European might look like a French philosopher inhabited by German thought (say French
philosophy from Sartre to Derrida) or the children of German-Jewish marriages. These hybrids are not
themselves instances of a higher type, but signs of the fertility of Europe’s productive ferment. Now we
can read the concluding aphorism of the chapter with its declaration: “Europe wants to become one”
(BGE 256). Nietzsche accuses the “insanity” of all the nationalisms of a mendacious
misinterpretation of Europe’s desire. How are we to understand this desire to become one? If
Nietzsche is a confirmed anti-essentialist (recall his critique of the national state and its
Schollenkleberei), would a new political Europeanism, a “European Union,” generate a new essentialism?
“Europe”—this diverse collection of peoples whose differences Nietzsche has been cataloging and
analyzing throughout “Peoples and Fatherlands”—wanting anything. Yet Nietzsche reads this desire “in
all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century,” providing a representative list of writers,
interprets figures like Stendhal, Beethoven, Heine, Schopenhauer, and Goethe as desiring that
Europe become one. Each, he suggests, “anticipate[s] experimentally the European of the future,”
by practicing cultural combination or synthesis. They are all hybrids (or monsters). Each proceeds
differently, and there is no grand synthesis, but different adventures. They exemplify a spirit of
patriots, in moments of “weakness or in old age.” Wagner is the main example. Despite his egregious
German nationalism, Wagner’s work, Nietzsche claims, is intimately related to the French romanticism of
multiplicity. It is experimentation outside the self-imposed limits of peoples and fatherlands that makes
these de facto cosmopolitans and hybrids exemplary. Nietzsche seems to say that we can learn what it
means for Europe to become one by studying these figures: “It is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul
surges and longs to get further and higher through their manifold and impetuous art,” but he breaks off his
sentence with a question “—where? into a new light? toward a new sun?” The question is left open
whether these geniuses aim, even unconsciously, at a new Europe with a determinate content. Nietzsche
responds to his own questions: “What is certain is that the same storm and stress tormented them and that
they sought (suchten) in the same way these last great seekers (Sucher)!” It is a new way of seeking, a
Versuch or experiment, not an end sought, that is significant. “Becoming one” means joyfully
experimenting beyond the limits of nationality. These harbingers of the future are united only insofar
as they model (often unknowingly) new forms of hybridity and cosmopolitanism. Nietzsche
describes these “great discoverers in the realm of the sublime” in terms of multiplicity and
variation: they are “born enemies of logic and straight lines, lusting after the foreign, the exotic, the
tremendous, the crooked, the self-contradictory.” Yet these excessive experimentalists “all broke and
collapsed before the Christian cross,” so their career trajectories fail as models of the good European; it is
the mad, antinomian, and rebellious aspects of what Deleuze calls their lines of flight that offer a
promise of the future. While these hybrids are all “Tantaluses of the will,” failures who are unable to
realize their (often unconscious) projects of transcending ethnicity and nationality, their experiments
serve as initial models of living in the century of the multitude. Nietzsche has some fun at the end of
the chapter’s final aphorism, summing up Wagner’s “way to Rome” as in his last music drama, Parsifal.
He ends with a rhyme that asks of Wagner, “Is this still German?” and answers, “What you hear is
Rome—Rome’s faith without the text.” So Wagner used, again all unconsciously, the cloudy, nebulous
spiritual geography of Germany, its mediating genius, to produce a hybridity contrary to his more explicit
nationalist program. Wagner began, interculturally, with a music growing out of French romanticism, and
ends with a displacement to Rome and Catholicism. He is a middle, a muddle, a cloudy milieu. If
Nietzsche is appalled by Wagner’s trajectory, he sees his transformations in the context of Europe’s
democratic movement, a movement of populations that produces new configurations of multiplicity,
homogeneity, and hybridity, in the century of the multitude. But he has also shown that his early hero, the
apparent arch-nationalist, is one more odd hybrid produced by Europe’s nomadic fermentation. Nietzsche
returns, it seems, from the perspective of his “trans-European eye” to the local, the German, the place
from which he began in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History with his wish that the Germans
could free themselves from the tyranny of history. Yet here the German essence is aufgelöst in the
shifting tides of modern and modernizing Europe. What will be the direction of the earth? How can
philosophy think the event now called globalization that Nietzsche first confronted in his attack on
Hartmann’s Weltprozess? Again, it will not be a question of either geopolitical strategies or establishing
protocols for a new order of rank. The future of the earth cannot be known, planned, or predicted.
Nietzsche’s published remarks about such things as Russia’s emerging power, the desirability of
marriages between the Prussian officer class and wealthy Jews are best read as musings prompted by
relatively immediate circumstances; they are no more important than his Nachlass note wishing that
Germany should colonize Mexico. Any attempt to extract or derive ideas like these from Nietzsche’s
writing would be a great waste of time, or possibly an amusing parlor game for initiates. What Nietzsche
does do in the final chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, after taking the vivisectionist’s knife to the virtues
of his present and diagnosing the patient’s complex ailments, is to end with a question: “What Is Noble?”
Being noble or vornehm, of course, denotes a certain priority, whether natural or legal-traditional. We
will proceed to interrogate two related aspects of Nietzsche’s way of responding to the question,
responses that don’t provide conventional answers. The first has to do with time and its deformations.
How can the vornehm live vigilantly with the challenge of a future that cannot be anticipated? How can
they prepare themselves to be ready to seize the opportune moment by the forelock? This temporal
openness must be further defended against the amortizing of the future in a system of debt, as will
be shown in the Genealog y (billed as a clarification of Beyond). Second, nobility requires not only an
understanding of the changing social structures of Europe (in Nietzsche’ expanded sense of that term)
but specifically of the ways in which the vigilant may be misled by the enthusiasms of the multitude,
in a culture where various forms of celebrity or news of the day are confusedly taken as great
events. How can we distinguish the merely spectacular flight of Zarathustra’s simulacrum (or the media
words and images commanded by a tyrant) from the true “great events” which come softly on doves’
feet?
Alt – Higher Patriotism
Nietzsche calls us to pursue a ‘higher patriotism’ where we interrogate the historical
and cultural processes that shape national identity and simultaneously pursue trans-
national politics.
Indeed Nietzsche’s virulent anti-Germanness became for east Europeans a model of, to use Alice
Freifeld’s term, “higher patriotism.” That is to say, a patriotism willing and able to judge the nation
that was in the process of being constructed, rather than just following in its trail. “Higher
patriotism” is capable of interrogating the very idea of national identity, while being willing to
exploit the most productive reserves that the cultural tradition contains. The idea of a “higher
patriotism” also necessitates a refusal to isolate the nation from outside influence, to lock culture up
within an insulated, discrete identity. It asserts itself in and through an evolving articulation with a
more inclusive and complex (cosmopolitan) supra-identity – in this case “European.” Nietzsche’s
sustained fascination with the figure of Goethe contributes to this new formulation of national identity: as
we saw, Goethe is praised as a European event and yet as one of the last great Germans, a de-Germanized
German. In this manner, national identity is informed and reworked by a trans-national idea of
belongingness. A similar sophisticated negotiation faces many newly emerged nation-states today in the
new Europe. While feeling disoriented by what has been called their “postcolonial syndrome,” they are
inventing or rediscovering their own particular cultural heritage and national identity while thinking and
feeling European, while rediscovering what they see as their European past, within a global (economic,
political, cultural) context.26 This nurturing of national and cultural singularity, within both a
European and a global framework, is a delicate, critical and self-critical, future-oriented process
which differs radically from any reclaiming of some pre-given, retrievable past identity. Nietzsche’s
meditations on questions of national identity and its relationship to a trans-national culture can be
perceived as timely and pertinent to such a context.
Alt – Nomad Thought
We must throw off the shackles of our pathetic narcissism, our terror of guilt, instead
pursuing the intensive exterior—the revolutionary joy of nomad thought. Join the
forces which give our words their liberating meaning, such that something not
encodable may get through, to mix the codes. We must leave the cult of interiority
and instead affirm the revolutionary joy of nomad thought.
Deleuze 74 Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974
If we want to know what Nietzsche is or is becoming today, we know very well whom we should ask—
the young people now reading Nietzsche, those who are just discovering Nietzsche. Those of us here
today are, for the most part, already too old. What is a young person discovering in Nietzsche that was
clearly not discovered by earlier generations? How is it that young musicians today feel some
connection with Nietzsche in their music, although they do not at all make music that is Nietzschean in
any sense that Nietzsche would understand? How is it that young painters, young film makers feel some
connection with Nietzsche? What is going on? What we want to know is how they have received
Nietzsche. On the outside, the only thing we can really explain is how Nietzsche reserved for himself and
for his readers, both contemporary and future generations, a particular right to misinterpret. Not just
any right, to be sure, because it has its own secret rules—but a particular right to misinterpret, which I
will explain in a minute, and which makes commenting on Nietzsche very unlike commenting on
Descartes or Hegel. I ask myself: who is the young Nietzschean today? Is it whoever is working on
Nietzsche? Perhaps. Or is it whoever, voluntarily or invol- untarily—it doesn't matter which, utters
things which are singularly Nietzschean in the course of an action, passion, or experience? This is also
the case. A beautiful recent text, one of the most profoundly Nietzschean to my knowledge, is Richard
Deshayes's Vivre, c'est pas survivre, which he wrote just before being 2 wounded by a grenade during a
demonstration. Perhaps the two cases are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps one can write on Nietzsche,
and then in the course of experience produce Nietzschean utterances. What is Nietzsche today? In that
question, we can feel the dangers lying in wait for us. A demagogic danger ("young people are on our
side...")- A paternal- istic danger (advice to a young reader of Nietzsche...). And above all, the danger of
an appalling synthesis. The trinity of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx is thought to be the dawn of our
modern culture. Never mind that by doing so you defuse the explosiveness of each from the start.
Perhaps Marx and Freud are the dawn of our culture, but Nietzsche is something else entirely, the dawn
of a counter- culture. It seems clear that our society does not function according to codes. Our society
has other foundations by virtue of which it functions. However, if one examines not the letter of Marx or
Freud, but the becoming of Marxism and the becoming of Freudianism, we see, paradoxically, Marxists
and Freudians engaged in an attempt to recode Marx and Freud: in the case of Marxism, you have a
recoding by the State ("the State has made you ill, the State will cure you"—this cannot be the same
State); and in the case of Freudianism, you have a recoding by the family (you fall ill from the family and
recover through the family—this is not the same family). What at the horizon of our culture in fact
constitutes Marxism and psychoanalysis as those two fundamental bureaucracies, the one public, the
other private, is their effort to recode as best they can precisely that which on the horizon ceaselessly
tends to come uncoded. This is not at all what Nietzsche is about. His problem is elsewhere. For
Nietzsche, it is about getting something through in every past, present, and future code, something
which does not and will not let itself be recoded. Getting it through on a new body, inventing a body on
which it can pass and flow: a body that would be ours, the body of Earth, the body of writing...
We are familiar with the great instruments of encoding; societies are not that different in this respect;
there are only so many means of encoding at their disposal. The three principle means are: the law, the
contract, and the institution. For example, the relationship to books which people have or have had
exhibits all three. There are books of law: here the relation of the reader to the book passes through
the law. In particular, moreover, they are called codes, canons, or sacred books. And the other sort of
book you have passes through the contract, the bourgeois contractual relation. This other book is the
basis of secular literature and book-selling: I purchase, and you give me something to read—a
contractual relation in which everyone is caught: author, publisher, reader. And there is the third sort of
book, the political book, preferably revolutionary, which is presented as a book of institutions, either
present or to come. You find every possible combination of the three: contractual or institutional books
considered sacred, etc. This is because every type of code is so present, and so underlies every other
code, that we find each in the other. Take an entirely different example: madness. The attempt to
encode madness has been carried out in three forms. First, the forms of law, i.e. the hospital, the
asylum—this is the repressive code, locking someone away, but the old style of locking someone away,
which is destined to become a last hope, when people will say: "those were the good old days when
they used to lock us away, because much worse is in store for us." And then you have this brilliant move
which was psychoanalysis: it was understood that there were people who escaped the bourgeois
contractual relation as it was manifested in medicine, and those people were the disturbed, because
they couldn't be contractual parties, they were juridically "incapable." Freud's stroke of genius was to
get at least some of the disturbed, in the largest sense of the word, the neurotics, to pass through the
contractual relation, proving that a contract with such people could be done (thus he abandons
hypnosis). This is finally the novelty of psychoanalysis: Freud was the first to introduce into psychiatry
the bourgeois contractual relation which up to that point had been excluded from psychiatry. And then
there are the still more recent attempts to encode madness, whose political implications, and at times
revolutionary ambitions, are clear; such attempts are called institutional. In this case, we find the triple
means of encoding: either it will be the law, or if it is not the law, it will be the contractual relation; if
not the contractual relation, it will be the institution. And it is thanks to these encodings that our
bureaucracies flourish.
Faced with the way in which our societies come uncoded, codes leaking away on every side, Nietzsche
does not try to perform a recoding. He says: this hasn't yet gone far enough, you're nothing but children
("the equalization of European individuals is the great irreversible process: we should accelerate it still
more.") In terms of what he writes and thinks, Nietzsche's enterprise is an attempt at uncoding, not in
the sense of a relative uncoding which would be the decoding of codes past, present, or future, but an
absolute encoding—to get something through which is not encodable, to mix up all the codes. It is not
so easy to mix up all the codes, even at the level of the simplest writing, and language. The similarity I
see here is with Kafka, what Kafka does with German, in accordance with the linguistic situation of the
Jews in Prague: he builds a war-machine in German against German; through sheer indetermination
and sobriety, he gets something through in the German code which had never been heard before.
Nietzsche, for his part, wants to be or sees himself as Polish with respect to German. He seizes on
German to build a war-machine which will get something through that will be uncodable in German.
That's what style as politics means. More generally, how do we characterize such thought, which claims
to get its flows through, underneath the laws by challenging them, and underneath contractual
relations by contradicting them, and underneath institutions by parodying them? Let me come back
quickly to the example of psychoanalysis. In what respect does a psychoanalyst as original as Melanie
Klein still remain within the psychoanalytic system? She explains it herself quite well: the partial objects
that she tells us about, with their explosions, their flows, etc., are only fantasy. The patients bring lived
experiences, intensely lived experiences, to Melanie Klein and she translates them into fantasy. There
you have a contract, specifically a contract: give me your lived experiences, and I will give you fan-
tasies. And the contract implies an exchange, an exchange of money and words. In this respect, a
psychoanalyst like Winnicott truly occupies the limit of psychoanalysis, because he feels that this
procedure is no longer appropriate after a certain point. There comes a point where it is no longer about
translating, or interpreting, translating into fantasies, interpreting into signifiers and signifieds—no, not
in the least. There comes a point where you will have to share, have to put yourself in the patient's
shoes, go all the way, and share his experience. Is it about a kind of sympathy, or empathy, or
identification? But surely it's more complicated than that. What we feel is rather the necessity of a
relation that would be neither legal, nor contractual, nor institutional. That's how it is with Nietzsche.
We read an aphorism or a poem from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But materially and formally, texts like
that cannot be understood by the establishment or the application of a law, or by the offer of a
contractual relation, or by the foundation of an institution. Perhaps the only conceivable equivalent is
something like "being in the same boat." Something of Pascal turned against Pascal. We're in the same
boat: a sort of lifeboat, bombs falling on every side, the lifeboat drifts toward subterranean rivers of
ice, or toward rivers of fire, the Orenoco, the Amazon, everyone is pulling an oar, and we're not even
supposed to like one another, we fight, we eat each other. Everyone pulling an oar is sharing, sharing
something, beyond any law, any contract, any institution. Drifting, a drifting movement or
"deterritorialization": I say all this in a vague, confused way, since this is an hypothesis or a vague
impression on the originality of Niet- zsche's texts. A new kind of book.
So what are the characteristics of a Nietzschean aphorism that give this impression? There is one in
particular that Maurice Blanchot has brought to light in The Infinite Conversation? It is the relation with
the outside. Indeed, when we open at random one of Nietzsche's texts, it is one of the first times we no
longer pass through an interior, whether it is the interior of the soul or consciousness, the interior of
essence or the concept, in other words, that which has always constituted the principle of philosophy.
What constitutes the style of philosophy is that the relation to the exterior is always mediated and
dissolved by an interior, in an interior. On the contrary, Nietzsche grounds thought, and writing, in an
immediate relation with the outside. What is this: a beautiful painting or a beautiful drawing? There is
a frame. An aphorism has a frame, too. But whatever is in the frame, at what point does it become
beautiful? At the moment one knows and feels that the movement, that the line which is framed
comes from elsewhere, that it does not begin within the limits of the frame. It began above, or next
to the frame, and the line traverses the frame. As in Godard's film, you paint the painting with the wall.
Far from being the limitation of the pictorial surface, the frame is almost the opposite, putting it into
immediate relation with the outside. However, hooking up thought to the outside is, strictly
speaking, something philosophers have never done, even when they were talking about politics, even
when they were talking about taking a walk or fresh air. It is not enough to talk about fresh air, to talk
about the exterior if you want to hook thought up directly and immediately to the outside. "...They
show up like destiny, without cause or reason, without consideration or pretext, there they are with
the speed of lightning, too terrible, too sudden, too conquering, too other even to be an object of
hatred..." This is Niet- zsche's famous text on the founders of States, "those artists with eyes of bronze"
(The Genealogy of Morals, II, 17). Or is it Kafka, writing The Great Wall of China?. "It's impossible to
understand how they made it all the way to the capital, which is nonetheless quite far from the frontier.
But there they are, and every morning seems to increase their number. [...] Impossible to converse with
them. They don't know our language. [...] Even their horses are meat-eaters!" Well then, what I am
saying is that texts like these are traversed by a movement which comes from the outside, which does
not begin in the page of the book, nor in the preceding pages, which does not fit in the frame of the
book, and which is totally different from the imaginary movement of representations or the abstract
movement of concepts as they are wont to take place through words and in the reader's head.
Something leaps from the book, making contact with a pure outside. It is this, I believe, which for
Nietzsche's work is the right to misinterpret. An aphorism is a play of forces, a state of forces which are
always exterior to one another. An aphorism doesn't mean anything, it signifies nothing, and no more
has a signifier than a signified. Those would be ways of restoring a text's interiority. An aphorism is a
state of forces, the last of which, meaning at once the most recent, the most actual, and the
provisional-ultimate, is the most external. Nietzsche posits it quite clearly: if you want to know what I
mean, find the force that gives what I say meaning, and a new meaning if need be. Hook the text up to
this force. In this way, there are no problems of interpretation for Nietzsche, there are only problems of
machining: to machine Nietzsche's text, to find out which actual external force will get something
through, like a current of energy. In this respect, we come across the problem raised by some of
Nietzsche's texts which have a fascist or anti-Semitic resonance... And since we are discussing Nietzsche
today, we must acknowledge that he has inspired and inspires still many a young fascist. There was a
time when it was important to show how Nietzsche was used, twisted, and completely distorted by the
fascists. This was done in the revue Acephale, with Jean Wahl, Bataille, and Klossowski. Today, however,
this is perhaps no longer the problem. It is not at the level of the text that we must fight. Not because
we are incapable of fighting at that level, but because such a fight is no longer useful. Rather, we must
find, assign, join those external forces which give to any particular Nietzschean phrase its liberating
meaning, its sense of exteriority. It is at the level of method that the question of Nietzsche's
revolutionary character is raised: it is the Nietzschean method that makes Nietzsche's text not
something about which we have to ask: "is this fascist, bourgeois, or revolutionary in itself?"—but a
field of exteriority where fascist, bourgeois, and revolutionary forces confront one another. And if we
pose the problem in this way, the answer that necessarily conforms with the method is: find the
revolutionary force (who is superman?) always calling on new forces which come from the exterior,
and which traverse and intersect with the Nietzschean text in the frame of the aphorism. There is your
legitimate misinterpretation: to treat the aphorism like a phenomenon awaiting new forces that will
"subjugate" it or make it work or explode.
The aphorism is not only relation with the outside. Its second characteristic is relation with the
intensive. And they're the same thing. Klossowski and Lyotard have said all there is to say on the matter.
What I said about lived experiences a moment ago, how they mustn't be translated into
representations or fantasies, how they mustn't be made to pass through the codes of law, contract, or
institution, they mustn't be cashed in—it's quite the opposite: they must be treated as flows which
carry us always farther out, ever further toward the exterior; this is precisely intensity, or intensities.
The lived experience is not subjective, or not necessarily. It is not of the individual. It is flow and the
interruption of flow, since each intensity is necessarily in relation to another intensity, in such a way
that something gets through. This is what is underneath the codes, what escapes them, and what the
codes want to translate, convert, cash in. But what Nietzsche is trying to tell us by this writing of
intensities is: don't exchange the intensity for representations. The intensity sends you back neither to
signifieds which would be like the representations of things, nor to signifiers which would be like the
representations of words. So in what does intensity consist, as both agent and object of uncoding? This
is where Nietzsche is at his most mysterious. The intensity has to do with proper names, and these are
neither representations of things (or persons), nor representations of words. Whether they are
collective or individual names, the pre-Socratics, the Romans, the Jews, Christ, the Anti-Christ, Julius
Caesar, Borgia, Zarathoustra, all the proper names which come and go in Nietzsche's texts are neither
signifiers or signifieds, but designate intensities on a body which can be the body of the Earth, the body
of the book, as well as Nietzsche's own suffering body: I am every name in history... There is a kind of
nomadism, a perpetual migration of the intensities designated by proper names, and these
interpenetrate one another as they are lived on a full body. The intensity can be lived only in relation to
its mobile inscription on a body, and to the moving exteriority of a proper name, and this is what it
means for a proper name to be always a mask, the mask of an operator.
The relation of the aphorism to humor and irony is the third point. Who- ever reads Nietzsche without
laughing, and laughing heartily and often and sometimes hysterically, is almost not reading Nietzsche at
all. This is true not only for Nietzsche, but for all the authors who comprise the same horizon of our
counter-culture. What shows us our own decadence and degeneracy is the way we feel the need to read
in them anguish, solitude, guilt, the drama of communication, the whole tragedy of interiority. Even
Max Brod tells us how the audience would laugh hysterically when Kafka used to read The Trial. And
Beckett, I mean, it is difficult not to laugh when you read him, moving from one joyful moment to the
next. Laughter, not the signifier. What springs from great books is schizo-laughter or revolutionary joy,
not the anguish of our pathetic narcissism, not the terror of our guilt. Call it the "comedy of the
superhuman," or the "clowning of God." There is always an indescribable joy that springs from great
books, even when they speak of ugly, desperate, or terrifying things. The transmutation already takes
effect with every great book, and every great book constitutes the health of tomorrow. You cannot help
but laugh when you mix up the codes. If you put thought in relation to the outside, Dionysian moments
of laughter will erupt, and this is thinking in the clear air. It often happens that Nietzsche comes face to
face with something sickening, ignoble, disgusting. Well, Nietzsche thinks it's funny, and he would add
fuel to the fire if he could. He says: keep going, it's still not disgusting enough. Or he says: excellent, how
disgusting, what a marvel, what a masterpiece, a poisonous flower, finally the "human species is getting
interesting." For example, this is how Nietzsche looks at and deals with what he calls unhappy
consciousness. Thus, there are the Hegelian commentators, those commentators of interiority, who
really have no sense of humor. They say: you see, Nietzsche takes the unhappy consciousness seriously;
he makes it one of the moments in the becoming-spirit of spirituality. They pass over quickly what
Nietzsche makes of spirituality because they sense the danger. So we see that while Nietzsche entitles
legitimate misinterpretations, there are also misinterpretations which are totally illegitimate, those
which are explained by the spirit of seriousness, by the spirit of gravity, by the monkey of
Zarathoustra, in other words, by the cult of interiority. Laughter in Nietzsche always harks back to the
external movement of humors and ironies, and this is the movement of intensities, as Klossowski and
Lyotard have made clear: the way in which there is a play of high and low intensities, the one in the
other, such that a low intensity can undermine the highest intensity and even be as high as the highest,
and vice versa. This play of levels of intensity controls the peaks of irony and the valleys of humor in
Nietzsche, and it is developed as the consistency or the quality of what is lived in relation to the
exterior. An aphorism is the pure matter of laughter and joy. If you cannot find something to make
you laugh in an aphorism, a distribution of irony and humor, a partition of intensities, then you have
found nothing.
There is one last point. Let's come back to that great text, The Genealogy of Morals, on the State and the
founders of empires: "They show up like destiny, without cause or reason...." In this we recognize the
men of that social production known as Asiatic. On the foundation of primitive rural communities, the
despot sets up his imperial machine which over-codes everything, with a bureau- cracy, an
administration that organizes major enterprises and appropriates the surplus work for itself
("wherever they appear, in no time at all you find something new, a sovereign machinery that has
come alive, in which every part, every function is defined and determined with respect to the whole...")-
But we can ask ourselves whether this text does not bring together two forces that are in other ways
distinct—which Kafka, for his part, kept separate and even opposed in The Great Wall of China. Because
when we seek to learn how primitive segmentary communities gave way to other formations of
sovereignty, a question which Niet- zsche raises in the second essay of his Genealogy, we see two
phenomena produced which are strictly correlative, but quite different. It is true that rural communities
at their center are caught and transfixed in the despot's bureaucratic machine, with its scribes, its
priests, its bureaucrats; but on the periphery, the communities embark on another kind of adventure,
display another kind of unity, a nomadic unity, and engage in a nomadic war-machine, and they tend
to come uncoded rather than being coded over. Entire groups take off on a nomadic adventure:
archeologist have taught us to consider nomadism not as an originary state, but as an adventure that
erupts in sedentary groups; it is the call of the outside, it is movement. The nomad and his war-
machine stand opposite the despot and his administrative machine, and the extrinsic nomadic unity
opposite the intrinsic despotic unity. And yet they are so interrelated or interdependent that the
despot will set himself the problem of integrating, internalizing the nomadic war-machine, while the
nomad attempts to invent an administration for his conquered empire. Their ceaseless opposition is
such that they are inextricable from one another. Imperial unity gave birth to philosophical discourse,
through many an avatar, the same avatars which lead us from imperial formations to the Greek city-
state. Even in the Greek city-state, philosophical discourse maintains an essential relation to the despot
or the shadow of a despot, to imperialism, to the administration of things and persons (you will find
ample evidence in the books by Strauss and Kojeve on tyranny). Philosophical discourse has always m-
aintained an essential relation to the law, the institution, and the contract, all of which are the
Sovereign's problem, traversing the ages of sedentary history from despotic formations to democracies.
The "signifier" is in fact the latest philosophical avatar of the despot. And if Nietzsche does not belong
in philosophy, perhaps it is because he is the first to conceive of another kind of discourse, a counter-
philosophy, in other words, a discourse that is first and foremost nomadic, whose utterances would be
produced not by a rational administrative machine—philosophers would be the bureaucrats of pure
reason—but by a mobile war-machine. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche means when he says that a new
politics begins with him (Klossowki calls it the conspiracy against his own class). We know all too well
that nomads are unhappy in our regimes: we use any means necessary to pin them down, so they lead
a troubled life. And Niet- zsche lived like a nomad, reduced to this shadow, wandering from one
furnished room to another. But also, the nomad is not necessarily someone who moves around: some
journeys take place in the same place, they'te journeys in intensity, and even historically speaking,
nomads don't move around like migrants. On the contrary, nomads are motionless, and the nomadic
adventure begins when they seek to stay in the same place by escaping the codes. As we know, the
revolutionary problem today is to find some unity in our various struggles without falling back on the
despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or State, apparatus: we want a war-machine that
would not recreate a State apparatus, a nomadic unity in relation with the Outside, that would not
recreate the despotic internal unity. This is perhaps Nietzsche at his most profound, a measure of his
break with philosophy, as it appears in the aphorism: to have made a warmachine of thought, to have
made thought a nomadic power. And even if the journey goes nowhere, even if it takes place in the
same place, imperceptible, unlooked for, underground, we must ask: who are today's nomads, who
are today's Nietzscheans?
Alt – Artistic Intervention
Artistic intervention disrupts normative fantasies of nationality – that opens up new
lines of flight for immigrants and oppressed people more globally
Nation, Unwelcoming the Stranger: Anti-Immigration Policy in Contemporary ‘America’ p. 25-27)
NFleming
Sayles is not alone in his artistic/political intervention in the border-policing mentality, At another venue of the
Mexican-US border, a group of artists who call themselves ADOBE LA (Architects, Artists and Designers Opening the Border
Edge of Los Angeles) have produced installations, performances, and documentaries about immigrant life that
intervene in the imaginative construction of who and what the immigrant is.140 They refer to themselves as
"coyotes with sketch books and video cameras" who advocate "the 'Tijuanization of LA.'"141 But I want to conclude with an account of another
public artist's more general intervention in the construction of the immigrant. I do so because this artist's work plays on the theme of the more
immediate visual reaction to immigrants of that early twentieth-century "scholar" and Jeremiah, E. A. Ross, with which my analysis began.
Recognizing that how the immigrant is seen in public space results from the imposition of alienating
imaginaries rather than the immigrants' own accounts of themselves, Krzysztof Wodiczko produces a
radical extension of the immigrant's body. He supplies selected immigrants with hi-tech prostheses that are obtrusive enough
to interrupt the ascriptions that the immigrant's unaided presence would produce. They are So eye-catching that they draw
people close enough to provoke encounters between the immigrants and earlier residents. ln effect, they
help the immigrant intervene in the process by which a contemporary Ross might typecast them
within their national and global imaginaries. One of Wodiczko's artistic inventions is a Baton d'etrcinger (alien staff).
Resembling the rod of a biblical shepherd, it is equipped with a minivideo, running a short biographical sketch of the wearer, and a loudspeaker,
powered by batteries that the wearer carries in a shoulder bag. The small image on the screen induces observers to move closer for a better
look, diminishing "the usual distance between the operator, the stranger and the passers-by."l42 The
staff gives the stranger a
"double presence"-one in life and one in media that stimulates reflection on how persons are
constructed in imagination versus as they exist. Wodiczko intends this alteration of the mode of presencing
of irnmigran ts to allow them to become more Iegitimate and real; the aim, he notes, is to provoke "an
incitement to infringe on the barrier between stranger and non-stranger."143 Another identity-disrupting piece of
equipment Wodiczko has created for immigrants to wear is a Porte-Par& (mouthpiece) that covers the wearer's mouth like a gag. It, too, has a
small video monitor and speakers, creating a "speechless strangern whom Wodiczko conceives as "a teller of prophetic stories . , . a poetic
interrupter of established life in public space and dominant culture."144 The
intent is to portray the absurdity of imposing
meanings on strangers while, at the same time, depriving them of a voice. The device restores a means of "saying"; it is an
enactment that comports well with Emmanuel Levinas's ethical commitment to an absolute respect in encounters with alterity and his corollary
that this respect
can be achieved only if the "said," the preconcieved frames within which the other is
understood, is displaced by a "saying," a speech act that disrupts the incorporation of the other's past
into a thematized, "already said."145 Significantly for my purposes here, Wodiczko's political and necessarily public art makes use
of Jeremiah's genre-the pronoucement in public space-to oppose the traditional Jeremiad. Instead of warning of the corrupting affects of the
strangers in our midst or of the perils of cultural assimilation, he
provokes encounter rather than counseling
estrangement. And, significantly, his art is not deployed to counter mere individual bigotry: what he calls art
stranger "crosses the individual-collective frontier."146 It seeks to interrupt not only the
dynamic of communication between individual stranger and
inhabitant/observer but also the circulated modes of the discourse of the state
propagated to consolidate its power.147 The state's consolidating discourse on national culture,
which imposes an alienating script on the stranger, becomes, in Wodiczko's conceits, a package of "dangerous metaphors."
His artistic enactments are meant to "disarm or deactivate" them.148
Alt – Irony
The alternative is to be a liberal ironist- We must understand the irony in pursuing
equality and self-creation, but pursue it anyway
*gender language paraphrased
Richard Rorty argues that the late-modern liberal must face head-on the challenge presented by Nietzsche's
insights into the modern nihilistic condition and respond by affirming the absolute contingency of liberal
values. In the introduction to his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty argues that it is not necessary to agonise
over Nietzsche's 1 choice between culture and politics. Liberal democracy is a form of association which
has recognised the futility of the attempt to create a social order where everyone is both a member of a
just society and engages in the labour of self- creation. At the level of theory, Rorty contends, there is simply no
way to bring self-creation and justice together, since the language of the former is private and unshared,
while that of the latter is necessarily public and shared. We thus need to treat the demands of self-
creation and human solidarity as' equally valid, yet forever incommensurable'. The product of this
toleration of the demands of both culture and politics is the 'liberal ironist'. He or she [they] is a liberal in that they
believe that cruelty is the worst thing a human being can do, and an ironist to the extent that they are ' the sort of person who faces up to the
contingency of his or her [their] own most central beliefs and desires - someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the
idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance'. To
be a liberal ironist is to
accept that we are what we are, and that we can give no transhistorical explanation of why we hold
certain views and beliefs, but we hope that our ungroundable desires and commitments will lead to a
more tolerable world in which the amount of suffering within it will significantly diminish. There can be
no question of arguing in transhistorical terms for the moral superiority of liberal democracies. Instead
Rorty legitimises liberalism in aesthetic terms. He believes that it is the best form of association
produced to date, since it maximises the opportunities for (safe) self-creation.
Alt – Radical Liberalism
The alternative is to engage in radical liberalism- a brave ethic is key to replace political
modernity
Connolly argues that we

need today a ' post-Nietzschean' political theory made up of Nietzsche's counter-
ontology of otherness and an independent reflection into the nature of late modernity. A notion of
justice will play a central role in this synthesis, where it refers not just to one virtue amongst many, but
to the structure of society itself (the organisation and distribution of society's resources and goods - including the 22 As Connolly
points out, a human being's resentment towards life comes from two main sources: from rage against a
meaningless human condition where the pain and suffering of life are without significance or purpose,
and from the arrangement of social and political institutions which impose injury and exploitation on
others for the benefit of a few. He argues that a late-modern political perspective would appreciate the reach of Nietzschean
thought as well as its sensitivity to the complex relations between resentment and the production of otherness, but it would turn the
genealogist of resentment on his head by exploring democratic politics as a medium through which to expose resentment and to encourage the
struggle 23 against it. Connolly
does not wish to completely jettison liberal political philosophy, but calls for a
'reconstituted, radicalized liberalism'. This is a liberalism which would be able to tolerate the competing
demands of individuality and community within modernity, and which could cope with the tension
between the need for a common life and the inevitable points of subjugation in any set of common
norms. A 'liberal radicalism' is sensitive ' to the rights of difference against the weight of mastery and 24
value or good of self-creation). A 'brave ethic' of 'letting be' is needed to replace the discredited
discourse of political modernity, which has sought to satisfy the need for self-realisation through the
dream of a self-inclusive community, and in which continued economic expansion is seen as a
precondition of liberty. Nietzsche's relevance to this task is that he offers a model of the self which does not resent its own mode of
organisation and the contingent conditions of temporal existence. Connolly locates this mode of a non-resentful self in Nietzsche's idea of the
self, which is able to give style to its character by transforming everything it is, including the good and the bad, the noble and the ugly, into a
controlled and dynamic whole. One could also locate it in his teaching of eternal return, which invites us to assume responsibility for who we
are, and to achieve contentment with ourselves (as Nietzsche pointed out, those who do not feel content with their lives are the ones most
likely to express resentment towards others). The Foucaultian challenge is particularly instructive in showing the
inadequacy of traditional liberal humanism for thinking about politics and power in the modern period.
Although not without its own problems, it does succeed in showing that any account of the human
subject has to take the form of a 'genealogy of morals' (a history of how the self has become what it is, which abandons
both humanist metaphysics and moralism). In addition, it shows us that it is necessary to have an attitude of suspicion
towards 'liberal' claims that modern subjects are 'free' ones, since what we might take to be 'freedom'
could, in reality, be new forms of control and discipline. As a result, any clear-cut distinction between
'private' and 'public' realms is rendered problematic. This point will be developed further in the next chapter. Since Plato,
political philosophers have envisaged the polity as a means of disciplining and controlling the self. This is
the process which Nietzsche refers to in the second essay of the Genealogy as the cultivation (£ucktung) of
an animal - the human being - which is capable of making promises. Once you can make promises, in
Nietzsche's schema, you are a 'political animal' who can exercise responsibility, relate to others in terms of a
notion of trust, and make judgements. You have become an animal with consciousness/conscience. A
Nietzschean perspective on the political shows that the attainment of autonomy by the human subject
is an ambiguous achievement. The cost of civilising the human animal, in terms of the repression and
control of the drives and energies, was also the theme of Freud's study into the discontent, or the
discomfort, (Unbehagen) which 'civilised' social and political life produces in individuals. It is necessary to
recognise the impossibility of political life, that is, the fact that social existence always produces an excess, a surplus,
and an otherness which it is unable to control and master, but which constantly threatens to undermine
its civility. The question a radical Nietzscheanism has to pose is this: is it possible to channel and
cultivate this excess and otherness in a way which leads to the creation of a new, healthy, post-
ressentiment human type? And, if so, what role would 'politics' play in this process of cultivation?
Solvency – Democracy
Nietzsche favors a particular kind of democracy- one separate from reactionary politics
In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche significantly moderates his earlier Platonic conception of the state by
conceding that if the goal of politics is to make life as endurable for as many people as possible (which
he detects as the underlying utilitarian morality of modern life), then people should be allowed the
freedom to determine what they understand by an endurable life, so long as ' everything does not
become politics in this sense' (HAH 438). This means that society must provide space for the rare, the unique,
and the noble; that is, a space for unpolitical sentiments and strivings so as to ensure that not
everything in life becomes politicised and, as a result, vulgarised. This passage shows that Nietzsche regards
modern democratic politics in a very different light from the concerns and fears he had expressed in the
essay on the Greek state. He now seems to think that democracy does not inevitably mean the death of high
culture and noble values, provided that the two - culture and politics - can come to an agreement about
the aims of each and that space is provided for the practice of both. His view is that democracy is the
political form of the modern world which is able to offer the best protection of culture. For example, in section
275 of The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880), after having remarked that 'the democratization of Europe is
irresistible', Nietzsche goes on to argue that such a process can be seen to represent a link in the chain
of those tremendous prophylactic measures which are the conception of modern times and through
which we separate ourselves from the Middle Ages. Only now is it the age of cyclopean building! We finally secure the
foundations, so that the whole future can safely build upon them! We make it henceforth possible for the fruitful fields of culture again to be
destroyed overnight by wild and senseless torrents! We erect stone dams and protective walls against barbarians, against pestilences, against
physical and spiritual enslavement! Nietzsche argues in favour of a future democracy which will overcome
polarities of wealth and power and which, he hopes, will render obsolete what he regards as the two
most dangerous ideologies of the modern period, nationalism and socialism. Democracy, he suggests,
aims ' to create and guarantee as much independence as possible: independence of opinion, of mode of
life, of employment'. To achieve this, however, it must undermine the three main enemies of the
independence it affords: political parties, the indigent propertyless, and the rich propertied class. He
says he is 'speaking of democracy as something yet to come' {WS 293). He favours a social order which
'keeps open all the paths to the accumulation of moderate wealth through work', while preventing ' the
sudden or unearned acquisition of riches' (ibid., 285). Nietzsche even endorses an enlightened labour policy
which will guarantee to workers security and protection against injustice and exploitation. In this way,
securing the contentment of the body and soul of the worker will ensure that his prosperity will be the prosperity of society too. Nietzsche
writes in a passage that will surprise many of his readers: The exploitation of the worker was, it has now been realized,
a piece of stupidity, an exhausting of the soil at the expense of the future, an imperilling of society. Now
we have already almost a state of war: and the cost of keeping the peace, of concluding treaties and
acquiring trust, will henceforth in any event be very great, because the folly of the exploiters was very
great and of long duration. (Ibid., 286) Given these sentiments, what, we might ask, are the bases of Nietzsche's
objections to socialism? Nietzsche's objections are twofold: firstly, he regards socialism as a doctrine of
political violence that is dangerous because it is based on a naive 'Rousseauian' morality of natural
goodness; and, secondly, he considers the socialist ambition of abolishing private property to represent
a serious and unnecessary attack on the liberty of the private person. He draws a connection between Plato and
socialism and argues that both attempts to get rid of the individual right to own private property would result in the destruction of the
sentiments of vanity and egoism which must be allowed to play their part in social life. He argues, that' Plato's Utopian basic tune, continued in
our own day by the socialists, rests upon a defective knowledge of man' {WS 285). If all property is to become communal, then
the individual will not bestow on it the same care and self—sacrifice as he would if he owned it himself;
instead he will treat it 'like a robber or a dissolute squanderer' (ibid.). Nietzsche does not seek a
completely politicized existence in which a private realm of existence is abolished. On the contrary, he
wishes to preserve a private/public distinction. His quarrel with modern liberal society is that, although
its ideology of the privatisation of politics allows individuals a tremendous degree of private freedom, it
does so at the cost of undermining notions of culture and citizenship. A second and more serious charge
Nietzsche makes against socialism is that in its deepest instincts and tendencies it is a reactionary
ideology. It is, he argues, 'the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants
to be' {HAH 473). The reason for this, according to Nietzsche, is that in order to bring about the transformation of society it desires, which will
require a massive extension of social control over the private life of individuals (in order to guarantee that they are 'good socialists'),
socialism must desire the kind of abundance of state power that one would normally associate with the
most fearful despotism. He writes, socialism outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as it
expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury of
nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the community... it desires a more complete
subservience of the citizen to the absolute state than has ever existed before, (ibid.) The real danger of
socialism, Nietzsche argues, lies in its extreme terrorism. Given that religion has declined and there is no
longer any ethical or divine basis to the state, socialism, considered as an impious and irreligious creed
bent on the abolition of all existing states, can only exist through the exercise of terrorism. Nietzsche
attacks socialists for cultivating an atmosphere of fear and for 'driving the word "justice" into the heads
of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good
conscience for the evil game they are to play' (ibid.).
Solvency - Inclusion
Nietzschean philosophy is key to have a positive relational understanding of the
‘foreigner’
From this point it is possible to give yet another twist to the interpretation of Nietzsche's work from within the critique of language.
If
Nietzsche's evangelical operation liberates self-praise, then a transformed light falls on the self of this
praise. In noting that Nietzsche's poetics abolishes the rules of indirect eulogy and substitutes praise of
the foreigner with self-praise, we see only the outer layer of the turmoil created. On a deeper level,
Nietzsche's affirmative language remains obliged to praise the foreigner-better, it praises the non-self-
such as it has never been celebrated before. However, it devotes itself to a foreignness that is more than
the otherness of another person. It exposes itself to a foreignness that traverses the speaker as it would
a reverberant corridor, a foreignness that penetrates him and makes him possible- it is exposed to the
foreigner's culture, language, educators, illnesses, contaminations, temptations, friends, indeed even
the self which places parentheses it ostensibly owns around phenomena. It celebrates in itself a fullness of
foreignness called the world. Whatever Nietzsche alleges about these magnitudes is transformed into praise of
the foreigner in itself: ''As my father I am already dead and as my mother I am still alive..."9 Thus
Nietzsche's selflessness must be sought beneath the level of apparent self-praise-in his opening to the
inner foreignness, in his excessive mediality, in his indulgent curiosity for everything, and in his never
totally compensated imbecility. This is why the author is no simple sun, but a resonance-body. As my mother I still speak,
as my future friends I am still to be heard. Nietzsche could be described as the discoverer of hetero-
narcissism: what he ultimately affirms in himself are the othernesses which gather in him and make him
up like a composition, which penetrate him, delight him, torture him and surprise him. Without surprise life
would be a fallacy. There must be something in the world that is faster than causes. What comes to be discussed under the title of "the will to
power" is the prelude to a composition qua theory of pure positings. The theory of the will was a detour on the way to the unwritten, complete
teaching, to that critique of eulogistic reason which describes the world as an objection and its overcoming.
Language is god
I would like to describe the Nietzsche-event as a catastrophe in the history of language and put the argument that his intervention as a literary
new- evangelist constitutes an incision in old Europe's conditions of understanding. With Marshall McLuhan, I presuppose that understanding
between people in societies-above all, what they are and achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning. These
conditions of
communication provide groups with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such
groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves and by which they
repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal
return of the same in the form of a spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played
so as to tune and retune the player; they make their speakers ring in singular tonalities of self-excitation.
They are systems of melodies for recognition, which nearly always delineate the whole program as well.
Languages are not primarily used for what is today called the passing on of information but serve to
form communicating group-bodies. People possess language so that they can speak of their own merits
[Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable merit of being able to talk up these merits in their own language. First, and for the most part,
people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs but aim instead to
incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups of history-all the various tribes
and peoples-are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a
psychosocial contest played to gain advantage for themselves. In this sense, before it becomes technical,
all speaking serves to enhance and venerate the speaker; and even technical discourses are committed,
albeit indirectly, to glorifying technicians. Languages of self-criticism are also borne by a function of self
enhancement. And even masochism works to announce the distinctiveness of the tortured individual. When used in accordance with its
constitutive function of primary narcissism, language says one and the same thing over and again: that nothing
better could have happened to the speaker than, precisely, to have been who he is, to have been who
he is at this place and in this language, and to bear witness to the merit of his being in his own skin. The
fact that primary narcissism first became observable with ethnic groups and kingdoms before going on to become a feature of nations, bristling
with weapons and classics at the dawn of modern times, is something I will consider from a historical viewpoint. As for the individual, the wait
would be lengthier before self-affirmation could step out of the shadows of sin. It did this in the form of amour-propre in the 18th century, that
of holy self-interest [Selbstsucht] in the 19th, that of narcissism in the 20th, and that of self-design in the 21st. Nietzsche
was probably
the only theoretician of language of modern times to have had this fundamental relation in mind. For, in
deriving prayer from a people's exhilaration at its own self-assertion, he states: "it projects the pleasure
it takes in itself (...) into a being that it can thank for all of this. Man is grateful for himself: and this is
why one needs a god."1 And, in a more general way, we can read in an earlier text: "It is a beautiful folly,
speaking: with it humans dance over all things."2 In the reconstruction of religious affects from self-
referential gratitude, language comes to be determined as a medium enabling those that speak to say
out loud the reasons why they are on top. This is why the profession of faith in one's own modus vivendi is the most
distinguished speech-act. It is the eulogistic gesture par excellence. With this derivation of distinction, speech and silence are defined as modes
of exhilaration, which confess to themselves. In both what is advanced is a voluntary declaration of success in the pursuit of Being: in speech as
manifestation of right and power; and in silence as an authorized quiet whose presuppositions require no defending.
Language is praise
This can scarcely be more legibly studied than in Christian Evangelization and its encroachment on European societies' conditions of
understanding in the early Middle Ages. Shown
with particular clarity here is the way in which Evangelist speech-
acts-the preaching of salvation by God's son, and the swearing-in of an ethnic commune for a
participation in this sphere that is as unequivocal as possible-put speakers and listeners alike into an
oscillating circuit which was about nothing other than celebrating a shared privilege. In his book of the Gospels,
Otfrid von WeiGenburg, Rhine Franconian poet-priest of the 9th century, justified his vernacular adaptation of the
New Testament by arguing that the Franks, too, ought at last to be allowed access, via a poeticized bible,
to the sweetness of the Good News, dulcedo evangeliorum. As many persons undertake to write in their language and as many
strive with fervour to praise what they hold dear- why should the Franks be the only ones to shrink from the attempt to proclaim the praise of
God in the Franconian language... ...let the praise of God be sweet to you, then Franconian will also be determined by metrical feet, quantity
and metrical rules; better, then God himself will speak through you. (Liber evangelorium I, 1, V 31-34; 41-42) The
sense of these
reflections, unique for their time, lies in an ethno-narcissistic operation by means of which the Franks were to
be formed, at the level of the linguistic techniques of the time, as a collective with higher feelings-with
the claim to being equal or even superior to those great historical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans.
Gospel verse in the German language is presented as an offensive, the aim of which is to establish a
politico-religious system of boasting that, by virtue of a catch-up lesson in rhyme and rhythm, plugs into the art of the
poetically possible. The point thus being that, in future, in the image of the gloria Francorum, an effective link would no longer be
missing between the veneration of God and the poetics of Empire. In the same spirit, Otfried attributes to Ludwig den Deutschen, in his
dedication to him, a rank equal to King David. Moreover, in this speech act two eulogistic functions-praise of the King and glorification of the
people-come together to form a single enhancement-effect. Otfrid was convinced he thus complied with the essence of language, inasmuch as
language is per se an instrument of eulogy. This
may be most convincingly proven in the case of praising God: "He, in
effect (God), has given them (the people) the instrument of language (plectrum linguae) so that they
cause him to sound in their praise" (Dedication to Luitberg). One who praises becomes worthy of praise
insofar as he or she also participates in the glory of the object of eulogy. The poet expresses the same
idea in his introductory prayer to the Gospel epic. You alone are the master of all the languages that
exist. Your power has conferred language to all and they have come-o salvation! -to form words in their
languages to recall Your memory for always, to praise You for eternity, recognize You and serve You.
(Liber evangeliorum, I, 2, V33-38)1
Jefferson’s bible
This episode in the history of the German language played out about 1010 years before Nietzsche's own self-declaration, while the next
example from the history of self-praise relations in western tradition refers to a case that is separated by a mere seventy or eighty years from
the intervention of the teacher of the eternal return. The issue here still has to do with improving the Gospel-but this time the mode is
considerably more complicated, since what now enters the foreground, at the same time as collective self-praise, are concerns about individual
self-enhancement. The scene of the experiment is the United States of America around 1810, and the Gospel
redactor is none other than the redactor of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas
Jefferson, who at this time was able to look back on several terms of office as minister to France and as vice president of the USA, as well as
on two mandates as president. After his years of service in Washington, he returned home to his manor in Monticello, Virginia, and devoted
himself to rounding out the image of himself he intended to leave to posterity. These
indications are enough to support the
notion that what we bear witness to here is an eminent case of national-religious linguistic pragmatism,
especially as we know that to this day the United States represents the most fertile collective of self-
celebration of all the current political entities in the "concert of nations"; it could also be said that it is
the society whose founding conditions included dismantling as far as possible all cultural inhibitions
against the use of enhancing superlatives in a democratic self-- reference. What is the USA if not the
product of a Declaration of Independence-from humility (and doubtless not only from the British Crown)? There can be
little wonder, then, about the efficacy with which, as we shall see, the Christian message is adapted to the needs of
American glory. Already during his first presidential mandate in Washington, Jefferson would busy himself on his spare nights, using
scissors to cut out extracts from a series of editions of the New Testament in Greek, Latin, French, and English,
which he then pasted together into a scrap book to make a new arrangement of the Gospels. The aim was
one he'd held for some time, and first emerged during his correspondence with Unitarian theologian and writer Joseph Priestly, in 1795. In all
likelihood, however, the task was not completed until around 1820, after many years of interruption. The
product of this cut-and-paste
work, which Jefferson completed twice-over, was given the title The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth and has
become known as The Jefferson Bible. In his scissor- work, the redactor must have been convinced that
he possessed the criteria by which to distinguish the utilizable from the non-utilizable in the bequeathed
text. As a representative of the American Enlightenment thinkers, with their decorative monotheism and Philadelphian exuberance,
Jefferson testifies to the state of the Gospel problem at the apex of this current of thought. With this
Christian-humanist gentleman, it becomes clear that the need for a self-enhancement using the classic
reservoirs of meaning was as alive as ever but could only be satisfied by expunging vast passages of the
historical Gospels. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, anyone wanting still to play the
language game of the Gospels to advantage had above all to be able to omit. This is the meaning of neo-
humanism: to be able to eliminate in the old Gospel that which has become incompatible with one's
own glorification as a humanist and citizen. For this operation, no image is more impressive than that of an
American head of state in his office at night, who, with scissors, cuts out pages from six copies of the
New Testament in four different languages and pastes the extracts into a private copy of the Good News
that is designed to conform to the demands of contemporary rationality and sentimentality for a citable,
excerpted version of the Bible. It is characteristic of Jefferson's philosophical ambitions that he did not
feel that this redaction of the Gospel-or as he put it, this formulation of an abstract or syllabus-was a heresy in the
original meaning of the term, insofar as hairesis refers to a choosy insolence applied to a totality of
dogmas and traditions. Rather, he presented himself as the curator of the writings' true content, as re-
establishing a pure text against the fudging performed by later additions. With energetic naivety, the enlightened redactor went
about separating Jesus' unacceptable words from those that Jesus must have said, had he wanted to be
approvingly cited by Jefferson; even better, from those that Jesus would have said had he foreseen the
transformation of believers into sympathizers. In fact, the modern sympathizer of Jesus can be defined as
the bearer of Euro-American Enlightenment, as one who places value, despite all the connections to the
Christian tradition, on remaining within the continuum of worldly possibilities of self-- enhancement
that were developed since the Renaissance. And this is precisely what Jefferson had in mind when he endeavored to cut out
the valid residue, that which is citable even among humanists, from the embarrassing mass of New Testament phrases. As such, in October
1813, Jefferson felt he could send to John Adams the following report of success: There will be found
remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have
performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and
arranging, the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a
dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines . . . 5 In a letter addressed to the
erudite religious and Dutch Unitarian, Francis Adrian van der Kemp, Jefferson explained himself in a
more detailed manner about his relationship with Jesus the man: It is the innocence of His character, the
purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the eloquence of His inculcations, the beauty of the
apologues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing indulgence to
eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings and
discourses imputed to Him by His biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the loveliest benevolence; and
others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such
contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and
leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples.6 In view of this declaration it makes little sense to maintain,
along with The Jefferson Bible's editor Forrester Church, that the wise man of Monticello merely sought the intelligible Jesus and necessarily
missed the historical one. Jefferson was after neither an historical nor an intelligible Jesus but rather an object of eulogy, which, by giving praise
to it and thus having recourse to shared moral values, would enable the speaker to come out a sure-fire winner. Jefferson was
after a
spiritual master who could be cited to guarantee advantage, and who would permit the laudator to
become a prestige shareholder by drawing on the holy source of values. After the mental caesura of the
Enlightenment, an unabridged version of the New Testament could deliver no such expectations of
symbolic profits, and for this reason any rational redactor had to expunge from the corpus of stories and
words of evangelical authority all that would compromise him in front of other rational beings and land
him in the mire of sectarianism, or, what amounts to the same thing, of cognitive loserdom. For absolutely
similar motives, and with similar means, Leo Tolstoy would later put together a private version of the New
Testament and present it as a sort of "Fifth Gospel": the Russian path toward the coexistence of
evangelism and the Enlightenment.7 The Moderns no longer know of evangelists; they know only of the classics. Citing a
classic guarantees a sure, albeit modest, return; on the contrary, if, in society, you invoke the Redeemer,
your credit will shrink. The Enlightenment is really a language game for cognitive winners, who
continually deposit the premiums of knowledge and critique in their accounts, and exhibit their cultural
funds, while faith gets increasingly hidden behind a barrier of embarrassment, to be crossed only when
one is among like-minded others, and, moreover, is ready to give up the advanced boasting potential of
the Enlightenment. But Jefferson was not a man to burden himself with embarrassment or with
language games for losers. As a result, in his redaction of the Holy Scriptures for Enlightenment winners, all
the threatening and apocalyptic discourses of Jesus are forcibly absent, as are most of the stories about
miraculous cures and resurrection-his purged Gospel ends when a few of Jesus's friends roll away the
stone in front of the tomb and go off on their way. As text-composer, Jefferson performs the literary
imperative of Modernity: Where legend existed, the news must come! At stake now is to swap all sacred
agents for terrestrial heroes. Jesus can only be the hero of a novel or a participant in discourse. In a general
way, the modern tribute to heroes necessarily faces a complicating factor, namely that eulogistic functions are increasingly dependent on
scientific premises and must satisfy the dictates of political correctness. Nowadays you always have to have in view the side-
effects of each tribute and to calculate the angle of refraction of indirect self-enhancement. But the
main rule is that all eulogistic remarks have to be ontologically correct, and that no claims are made of
actual interventions from transcendence into immanence. The leeway for boasting shrinks; the strategy of indirect self--
celebration in high culture hits the investor with ever greater costs and diminishing narcissistic returns. Summing up this state of
affairs is the term humanism, such as ethicists use it today: to all speakers, it suggests the return to a
carefully considered sort of self-affirmation that is only barely distinguishable from medium-level
depression. Twentieth-century mass culture would first designate a way out of this quandary by
disconnecting self-praise from remarkable performance and other things, admiration of which was
based on superior criteria. This disconnection thus enabled primitive feelings of exhilaration to step onto the forestage where a public
of accomplices in disinhibition awaited, intent on cheering. For Jefferson, these kinds of relief were not yet in sight. He had to
continue to tie his eulogistic brio to the holy texts, and, by means of redemptive abstracts, to revert to
elevated examples of the tradition in order to satisfy cultural demands for discourses about higher
feelings. He could thus write to one of his correspondents: "I am a Christian, in the only sense He wished
any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every
human excellence...."8 What speaks for Jefferson is that his hypocrisy is spontaneous and coherent. His
grasping at the diamonds in the dunghill of tradition illustrates a growing American selectiveness as
regards the heritage of old Europe. The importation of meaning from Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, and Wittenberg also had to clear
American customs. Jefferson's redaction of the Gospels teaches us that the preconditions for winning avowable positions of privilege stemming
from Christian tradition already became problematic nearly a century prior to Nietzsche's own intervention. What, in
western culture
for over one and a half millennia, had been the pure and simple, and often also profitable, Good News-
the creed for admitting people into the other-worldly God's system of likeness- increasingly proved to
be a losing game for the messenger: the conditions of transmission for messages of this type had been
transformed; the speaker of such news appeared too clearly as someone who had not yet properly
learned the procedures of modernity to be able to take up the word to advantage.
Language bad
The height-or better:the operating theater- of this independence is the result of an insight that Nietzsche, ever
since the days of Human, All too Human, had made during an aggressive spiritual exercise that he carried out on
himself The author of The Gay Science was convinced that resentment is a mode of production of world, indeed one that is to date the most
powerful and most harmful. The more keenly this discerning author contemplated the matter of this fact, the more comprehensively and
monstrously it came into profile: in everything that had borne the name of high culture, religion, and morality,
the resentment mode of world-building had prevailed. Everything that for an epoch had been able to
present itself as the moral world order bore its handwriting. All that had in his era claimed to be making
a contribution to world improvement had drunk of its poison. Whence the catastrophic conclusion, which hit its thinker
as a millenary insight: that all languages formed by metaphysics gravitate around a misological core. The classic
teachings of wisdom, together with their modern connector-theories, are systems for maligning beings in their
entirety. They serve those who have yet become fed up with defaming the world, power, and human beings, and have as their goal the
abasement of the happy and powerful, and of self-praising attitudes. When all is said and done, all high cultures between Asia and
Europe have consistently spoken the language of people who are out to take advantage of life itself
What has hitherto been called morality is the universalism of vengeance. And whatever metaphysical
discourse might carry by way of valid wisdom, science, and worldly sophistication: it is the first impulse
toward maligning reality in the name of an over- world or an anti-world, which has been specifically
approved for the sake of humiliating its contrary. Along with this, it is simultaneously to talk up the need
for vengeance, with which the weak and the foolish vaunt their weakness and their foolishness. In
metaphysical-religious discourse, contemptuousness becomes an insidiously twisted self-praising force.
I feel like this card is making a good argument, but I don’t know how to tag it
I would also like to contend that Nietzsche's "narcissism" is less pertinent a phenomenon from the point of individual psychology than the marker of a cut in the linguistic history of old Europe.
, . The discursive event which bears the name Nietzsche is

At bottom it signifies the disclosure of the nature of authorship and literary discourse
characterized by the infringement, within him, of the high- culture separation between the Good News
and self-celebration-which in addition unveils what it is that a modern author does: he posits the text for himself the economy
of eulogistic and misological discourse and its foundation in the taboo weighing on self-praise are
simultaneously opened up to debate. The legitimization of this turn can be gleaned from Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics and morality. In it the
order of lies, that in which indirect eulogy is grounded, becomes altogether transparent, laying bare the mechanisms of contortion
that have materialized in phrases such as "One who is humble will be elevated," or servir et dis- paraitre. If it is true
that this separation of praise from self is nothing other than a deferment effected through resentment,
an everlasting adjournment of the moment in which an orator could say to his own existence, "linger a while so that I can praise you," one may thus understand Nietzsche's
attacks against discretion as acts of revision that contradict the traditional morality of self-dispossession
in an almost furious way. We must go back to late middle-age mysticism to be able, at least from afar, to encounter
comparable phenomena. Spectacular and embarrassing as they are, they serve to restore the possibility of forging the most
direct link between self and praise. What Nietzsche has in mind is not indistinctly to rejoice over oneself as bare
existence: he deaves with all his might to the idea that existence must earn its exultation, or better: that
it has to grow into its exultation. As no other modern thinker, Nietzsche espouses the adaequatio iubilationis et intellectus. If there is any
correspondence between its existence and good reputation, an existence must become enhanced to such
an extent that the best may be said about it. Existence may well be an a priori chance for self-praise; however, self-eulogistic
discourse can only become legitimate a posteriori at the level of culture. Between the chance and its
realization, the bridge is created by "egocentrism"-this long-maligned dimension in which the best
possibilities of humankind were arrested incognito. It is the selfish impulses, insofar as they are also work-obsessed, upon
which Nietzsche bestows with a philosophical consecration. Belated self-praise condenses the premonition
of one's own becoming and the consummation of egocentrism together in the image of self: how it is
that one becomes what one is, grasping the randomness of being "me." The "full" self-image is
"realized," perhaps, in a moment, when the most ambitious anticipations of one's own ability to become are
confirmed with a review of life lived. This is the type of moment spoken of on the single page inserted at the start of
Ecce Homo: On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the
eye of the sun just fell upon my life; I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such
good things at once. (. . .) How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?8 If a life's elevated possibilities
increase, self-praise can unfold in analogue fashion: once again the work praises the master, who is
poised to disappear into the work. And it is precisely this correspondence that creates the scandal-this
limitless talking up of manifest and squandered wealth, this jubilatory self-review after the deed done, this complete dissolution of life in luminous
positings, which remain as works of language: they form the counter-offence to the offence of the cross,
exclaimed by St Paul, with which the blockade against the connection between self and praise was solidified. That
Nietzsche fittingly assessed the implications for the politics of language of his belated embarrassment and
interpreted them on a grand historical scale can in fact be seen in the vocabulary of his late texts, in which the
expression "cynicism" comes conspicuously to the surface. Nietzsche, the philologist, was attentive to the fact that his
philosophical battle-cry, the "re-evaluation of all values," harked back to a kynical fragment that
describes the protest strategy of Diogenes of Sinope: "recoin the money''; he was cognizant of the fact
that the appearance he emitted in the texts of 1888 could necessarily seem to be a reemergence of "Socrates
gone mad." But this is exactly what mattered to him: he pursued the reevaluation of all the source value
of embarrassment, the revision of misological manners, the abolition of borders, which, for a whole age, had been
drawn between creative life and its self-eulogizing force. So, on the 20th of November, 1888, Nietzsche felt able to write to
the Danish critic Brandes that: I have talked about myself with a cynicism that will become world historical. The book is called
Ecce Homo. . . In the section of this book called Why I write such good books Nietzsche makes the following remarks about his works: they
sometimes reach the highest elevation you will find anywhere on earth, cynicism.9 The expression "cynicism"
used in these passages indicates two directions: the first is the elevation of questions of diet and health to a level
that is quasi- evangelical-a turn which sums up a good part of the 1 9th and 20th centuries and already
sketches the direction of the 21st in its generality; and the second is the merging of the Good News with
self-eulogizing energies. That's why the meaning of the words "cynical" and "evangelical" is henceforth in
this specific case the same. At the point where their meanings intersect they signify exactly what it is that a modern author does: exhibit
oneself, transform oneself in writing, render oneself "infeasible." Nietzsche: "I have never taken a step-in public that did
not compromise me: that is my criterion for acting right."10 Singing-one's-own praise of a life which
affirms and realizes itself as artistic composition is rightly seen as the only authentic discursive form still
able to merit the qualification evangelical. As message this form is simply good, when and if it comprises the self-communication of the successful-and a
sympathizing with it. It speaks the language of a life that not only has the right to make a promise but can also
endorse it-and the bigger the resistance provoked by the affirmation, the more authentic its occurrence.
One might call the language-traces of such a life Spinozist since they are "expressions" in the sense that they serve to announce a force of being. They breach the
constraints of traditional bivalent logic, which had required for the speaker always to choose between
one of two things-either vouch for god, which was unavoidably connected with the refusal of the hateful
ego, or vouch for the Ego, which traditionally could be understood only as the satanic renunciation of
god.
Solvency – Trump
Nietzsche/the alt explains the rise of Trump better than you ever will. This card is
neat.
Papzoglou 16 (Alexis, Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, “The post-truth era of Trump is just
what Nietzsche predicted” http://theconversation.com/the-post-truth-era-of-trump-is-just-what-
nietzsche-predicted-69093) NFleming
The morning of the US presidential election, I was leading a graduate seminar on Friedrich Nietzsche’s
critique of truth. It turned out to be all too apt. Nietzsche, German counter-Enlightenment thinker of the
late 19th century, seemed to suggest that objective truth – the concept of truth that most philosophers
relied on at the time – doesn’t really exist. That idea, he wrote, is a relic of an age when God was the
guarantor of what counted as the objective view of the world, but God is dead, meaning that objective,
absolute truth is an impossibility. God’s point of view is no longer available to determine what is true.
Nietzsche fancied himself a prophet of things to come – and not long after Donald Trump won the
presidency, the Oxford Dictionaries declared the international word of the year 2016 to be “post-truth”.
Indeed, one of the characteristics of Trump’s campaign was its scorn for facts and the truth. Trump
himself unabashedly made any claim that seemed fit for his purpose of being elected: that crime levels
are sky-high, that climate change is a Chinese hoax, that he’d never called it a Chinese hoax, and so on.
But the exposure of his constant contradictions and untruths didn’t stop him. He won. Nietzsche
offers us a way of understanding how this happened. As he saw it, once we realise that
the idea of an absolute, objective truth is a philosophical hoax, the only alternative is a position called
“perspectivism” – the idea there is no one objective way the world is, only perspectives on what the
world is like. This might seem outlandish. After all, surely we all agree certain things are objectively true:
Trump’s predecessor as president is Barack Obama, the capital of France is Paris, and so on. But
according to perspectivism, we agree on those things not because these propositions are “objectively
true”, but by virtue of sharing the same perspective. When it comes to basic matters, sharing a
perspective on the truth is easy – but when it comes to issues such as morality, religion and politics,
agreement is much harder to achieve. People occupy different perspectives, seeing the world and
themselves in radically different ways. These perspectives are each shaped by the biases, the desires
and the interests of those who hold them; they can vary wildly, and therefore so can the way people
see the world. “Your truth, my truth” A core tenet of Enlightenment thought was that our shared
humanity, or a shared faculty called reason, could serve as an antidote to differences of opinion, a
common ground that can function as the arbiter of different perspectives. Of course people disagree,
but, the idea goes, through reason and argument they can come to see the truth. Nietzsche’s
philosophy, however, claims such ideals are philosophical illusions, wishful thinking, or at worst a
covert way of imposing one’s own view on everyone else under the pretence of rationality and truth.
For Nietzsche, each perspective on the world will have certain things it assumes are non-negotiable –
“facts” or “truths” if you like. Pointing to them won’t have much of an effect in changing the opinion of
someone who occupies a different perspective. Sure enough, Trump’s supporters were apparently
unperturbed by his poor performance under the scrutiny of fact-checkers associated with the
mainstream and/or liberal media. These forces they saw as irretrievably anti-Trump in their
perspective, with their own agenda and biases; their claims about the truth, therefore, could be
dismissed no matter what evidence they cited.
**A2 – Kritiks**
A2 – Identity Arguments
Wendy Brown
While posited in opposition to structural oppression, identity politics only obtains its
coherence through upholding the very structure that they critique. Their
conceptions of identity are shaped by ressentiment that necessitates the existence of
an evil, the bureaucratic paradigm of control and subjugation, to justify themselves
as “good.” Such identity politics become invested in one’s own suffering and
subjugation, that reiterates impotence and apathy, while necessitating the
dissemination of suffering through violent revenge.
Brown 93, WENDY BROWN, University of California, Santa Cr, “WOUNDED ATTACHMENTS,”
Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, August 1993, https://www-jstor-
org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/191795.pdf JZC
Contemporary politicized identity contests the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it challenges liberalism's universal
"we" as a strategic fiction of historically hegemonic groups and asserts liberalism's "I" as social-both relational and
constructed by power-rather than contingent, private, or autarkic. Yet it reiterates the terms of liberal discourse insofar as
it posits a sovereign and unified "I" that is disenfranchised by an exclusive "we." Indeed, I have suggested that politicized identity
emerges and obtains its unifying coherence through the politicization of exclusion from an ostensible
universal, as a protest against exclusion, a protest premised on the fiction of an inclusive/universal community, a
protest that reinstalls the humanist ideal- expression of and a specific white, middle-class, masculinist
this ideal-insofar as it premises itself on exclusion from it. Put the other way around, politicized identities
generated out of liberal, disciplinary societies, insofar as they are premised on exclusion from a universal ideal, require
that ideal, as well as their exclusion from it, for their own perpetuity as identities. 13 Politicized identity is
also potentially reiterative of regulatory, disciplinary society in its configuration of a disciplinary subject. It is both
produced by and potentially accelerates the production of that aspect of disciplinary society that
"ceaselessly characterizes, classifies, and specializes," that works through "surveillance, continuous
registration, perpetual assessment, and classification," through a social machinery "that is both immense and min-
ute."14 A recent example from the world of local politics makes clear politicized identity's imbrication in disciplinary power, as well as the way
in which, as Foucault reminds us, disciplinary power "infiltrates" rather than replaces liberal juridical modalities.'5 Last year, the city council of
my town reviewed an ordinance, devised and promulgated by a broad coalition of identity-based political groups, which aimed to ban
discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of"sexual orientation, transsexual- ity, age, height, weight,
personal appearance, physical characteristics, race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, marital status, sex or gender."'6
Here is a perfect instance of the universal juridical idea of liberalism and the normalizing principle of disciplinary regimes conjoined and taken up
within the discourse of politicized identity. This ordinance- variously called the "purple hair ordinance" or the "ugly ordinance" by national
news media-aims to count every difference as no difference, as part of a seamless whole, but also to count
every potentially subversive rejection of culturally enforced norms as themselves normal, as normaliz- able, and
as normativizable through law. Indeed, through the definitional, procedural, and remedies section of this ordinance (e.g., "sexual
orientation shall mean known or assumed homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexual- ity"), persons are reduced to observable
social attributes and practices; these are defined empirically, positivistically, as if their existence were intrinsic and
factual, rather than effects of discursive and institutional power; and these positivist definitions of persons
as their attributes and practices are written into law, ensuring that persons describable according to them will
now become regulated through them. Bentham couldn't have done it better. Indeed, here is a perfect instance of how
the language of unfreedom, how articulation in language, in the context of liberal and disciplinary discourse, becomes a vehicle
of subordination through individualization, normalization, and regulation, even as it strives to produce visibility and
acceptance. Here, also, is a perfect instance of the way in which differences that are the effects of social power are neutralized through their
articulation as attributes and their circulation through liberal administrative discourse: what do we make of a document that renders as juridical
equivalents the denial of employment to an African American, an obese man, and a white middle-class youth festooned with tattoos and fuschia
hair? Want I want to consider, though, is why this strikingly unemancipatory political project emerges from a potentially more radical critique of
liberal juridicial and disciplinary modalities of power. For this ordinance, I want to suggest, is not simply misguided in its complicity with the
rationalizing and disciplinary elements of late modern culture nor simply naive with regard to the regulatory apparatus within which it operates.
Rather, it
is symptomatic of a feature of politicized identity's desire within liberal-bureaucratic regimes, its
foreclosure of its own freedom, its impulse to inscribe in the law and in other political registers its
historical and present pain rather than conjure an imagined future of power to make itself. To see what this symptom
is a symptom of, we need to return once more to a schematic consideration of liberalism, this time in order to read it through Nietzsche's account
of the complex logics of ressentiment. IV Liberalism contains from its inception a generalized incitement to subjects,
conjoined with their unavowed dependence on and construction by a variety of social relations and forces,
that makes all liberal subjects, and not only markedly disenfranchised ones, vulnerable to ressentiment: it is their
situatedness within power, their production by power, and liberal discourse's denial of this situatedness and
production that casts the liberal subject into failure, the failure to make itself in the context of a discourse in which its self-making is
assumed, indeed, is its assumed nature. This failure, which Nietzsche calls suffering, must find either a reason within itself
(which redoubles the failure) or a site of external blame on which to avenge its hurt and
redistribute its pain. Here is Nietzsche's account of this moment in the production of ressentiment: For every sufferer instinctively seeks
a cause for his suffering, more exactly, an agent; still more specifically a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering-in short, some living thing
upon which he can on some pretext or other, vent his affects, actually or in effigy ... This ... constitutes
the actual physiological
cause of ressentiment, vengefulness, and the like: a desire to deaden pain by means of affects ... to deaden, by
means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unendurable, and to drive it out
of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one requires an affect, as savage an affect as possible, and, in order to excite that, any
pretext at all.18 Ressentiment in this context is a triple achievement: it produces an affect (rage, righteousness) that
overwhelms the hurt, it produces a culprit responsible for the hurt, and it produces a site of revenge to displace the hurt
(a place to inflict hurt as the sufferer has been hurt). Together these operations both ameliorate (in Nietzsche's terms, "anaesthetize") and
externalize what is otherwise "unendurable." Now, what I want to suggest is that in a culture already streaked with the pathos of ressentiment for
these reasons, there are several characteristics of late moder postindustrial societies that accelerate and expand the conditions of its production.
My listing is necessarily highly schematic. First, the phenomenon that William Connolly names "increased
global contingency"
combines with the expanding pervasiveness and complexity of domination by capital and bureaucratic
state and social networks to create an unparalleled individual powerlessness over the fate and direction of
one's own life, intensifying the experiences of impotence, dependence, and gratitude inherent in liberal
capitalist orders and consitutive of ressentiment.'9 Second, the steady desacralization of all regions of life-what Weber called
disenchant- ment, what Nietzsche called the death of God-would appear to add yet another reversal to Nietzsche's genealogy of ressentiment as
perpetually available to "alternation of direction." In Nietzsche's account, theascetic priest deployed notions of "guilt, sin,
sinfulness, depravity and damnation" to "direct the ressentiment of the less severely afflicted sternly back upon
themselves . . . and in this way [exploited] the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance, and self-
overcoming."20 However, the desacralizing tendencies of late modernity undermine the efficacy of this deployment and turn suffering's need for
exculpation back toward a site of external agency. Third, the increased fragmentation, if not disintegration,
of all forms of
association until recently not organized by the commodities market-communities, churches, families-and the ubiqui-
tousness of the classificatory, individuating schemes of disciplinary society combine to produce an utterly
unrelieved individual, one without insulation from the inevitable failure entailed in liberalism's individualistic construction. In short, the
characteristics of late modern secular society, in which individuals are buffeted and controlled by global configurations
of disciplinary and capitalist power of extraordinary proportions, and are at the same time nakedly individuated, stripped of
reprieve from relentless exposure and accountability for themselves, together add up to an incitement to ressentiment that might have stunned
even the finest philosopher of its occasions and logics. Starkly accountable, yet dramatically impotent, the late moder liberal subject quite literally
seethes with ressentiment. Enter politicized identity, now conceivable in part as both product of and "reaction" to this condition, where
"reaction" acquires the meaning that Nietzsche ascribed to it, namely, as an effect of domination that reiterates
impotence, a substitute for action, for power, for self-affirmation that reinscribes incapacity,
powerlessness, and rejection. For Nietzsche, ressentiment itself is rooted in "reaction"-the substitution of reasons, norms, and ethics
for deeds-and not only moral systems but identities themselves take their bearings in this reaction. As Tracy Strong reads this element of
Nietzsche's thought, Identity . . . does not consist of an active component, but is a reaction to something outside; action in itself, with its
inevitable self-assertive qualities, must then become something evil, since it is identified with that against which one is reacting. The will to
power of slave morality must constantly reassert that which gives definition to the slave: the pain he suffers by being in the world. Hence any
attempt to escape that pain will merely result in the reaffirmation of painful structures.21 If ressentiment's "cause" is suffering, its "creative deed"
is the reworking of this pain into a negative form of action, the "imaginary revenge" of what Nietzsche terms "natures denied the true reaction,
that of deeds."22 This revenge is achieved through the imposition of suffering "on whatever does not feel wrath and displeasure as he does"23
(accomplished especially through the production of guilt), through the establishment of suffering as the measure of social
virtue, and through casting strength and good fortune ("privilege" as we say today) as self-recriminating, as its own
indictment in a culture of suffering: "it is disgraceful to be fortunate, there is too much misery."24 But in its attempt to displace its
suffering, identity structured by ressentiment at the same time becomes invested in its own
subjection. This investment lies not only in its discovery of a site of blame for its hurt will, not only in its
acquisition of recognition through its history of subjection (a recognition predicated on injury, now
righteously revalued), but also in the satisfac- tions of revenge that ceaselessly reenact even as they redistribute the injuries of
marginalization and subordination in a liberal discursive order that alter- nately denies the very possibility of these things or blames those who
experience them for their own condition. Identity politics structured by ressentiment reverses without subverting this blaming structure: it does
not subject to critique the sovereign subject of accountability that liberal individualism presupposes nor the economy of inclusion and exclusion
that liberal universalism establishes. Thus politicized
identity that presents itself as a self-affirmation now
appears as the opposite, as predicated on and requiring its sustained rejection by a "hostile external world."25 Insofar as what
Nietzsche calls slave morality produces identity in reaction to power, insofar as identity rooted in this reaction
achieves its moral superiority by reproaching power and action themselves as evil, identity
structured by this ethos becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuage the pain of
its powerlessness through its vengeful moralizing, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such.
Politicized identity, premised on exclusion and fueled by the humiliation and suffering imposed by
its historically structured impotence in the context of a discourse of sovereign individuals, is as likely to seek
generalized political paralysis, to feast on generalized political impotence, as it is to seek its own or collective liberation. Indeed it
is more likely to punish and reproach-"punishment is what revenge calls itself; with a hypocritical lie it creates a good conscience for itself'-than
to find venues of self-affirming action.
Liberal, Marxist, and multiculturalist movements are reductive in their analysis of
Truth and goodness in opposition to power and oppression that is grounded in
moralism. Their understanding of how power is structured is both flawed and
assumes a universal political identity and progressive political aim that marks
impotence and eventually becomes reactionary.
Brown 1, Brown, Wendy, University of California, Santa Cr, “Politics out of History”. Princeton
University Press, 2001. http://pavleck.net/bookinfo/politics-out-of-history.pdf/ jzc
Neither a pure politics of morality nor of realpolitik describes the political or theoretical register in which we are primarily ensconced today. With
the exception of a relatively marginal order of religious activists, cultural feminists, and nonviolent peace workers, most leftists and liberals do
not subscribe to the opposition between Truth and Power on which both a politics of morality and a politics of realism depend. The
conventional (Platonic, Christian, Marxist, and liberal) equation of truth and goodness on one side and
power and oppression on the other has been disrupted both by the late modern decentering, multiplication,
and politicization of Truth and by critiques of modernist formulations of power as repressive, commodity-like
in form, or independent of hegemonic truth claims. Even where these critiques are either unacknowledged or explicitly rejected-where the
moralityand truth-bearing capacities of powerlessness are fiercely reasserted against all that has discredited the partnership-the
attempt of
powerlessness to claim truth is shaken by the crumbling of utopian or millennial political visions:
with little hope and no precise architecture for a radically different order, the martyred in this world have a
sharply attenuated moral-epistemological status. While martyrdom may retain an element of rhetorical force, it is moralistic rather than moral
insofar as it no longer can draw on any larger cosmology.11 But the
loss of conventional epistemological ground for a strong
moral position, and even for morality as such, does not quash the moral impulse itself. Here we return along a different path to the
question with which we began: what form does this impulse take when it has lost its lodging in an abstract principle and vision of the good ...
when moral claims reduce to moralizing complaint? It is when the
telos of the good vanishes but the yearning for it
remains that morality appears to devolve into moralism in politics. It is at this point that one finds moralizers
standing against much but for very little, adopting a voice of moral judgment in the absence of a
full-fledged moral apparatus and vision. Alternatively, the moralizer refuses the loss of the
teleological and becomes reactionary: clinging without logical ground to the last comforting frame
in the unraveling narrative-pluralism, the working class, universal values, the Movement,
standpoint epistemology, a melting pot America, woman's essential nature-whatever it was that
secured the status of the true, the status of the good, and their unbroken relationship. This, too, is a form of moralizing, but it
takes the especially peculiar shape of reproaching history by personifying and reifying its effects in particular individuals, social formations,
theories, or belief structures. Thus, for example, some
leftists have recently called for the resuscitation of universal
political identity and a universal progressive political aim, while blaming something they name
"postmodernism" or "identity politics" for the loss of these goods and for the promulgation of highly fractured (and
fractious) political claims and aims. In a similar vein, many denounce as morally or politically bankrupt those theoretical formations
that call into question the privileged ontological and epistemological status of the oppressed or that do not prescribe the nature of the’ good. "If
poststructuralist theory cannot tell us what to value and what to fight for," a colleague of mine recently queried a graduate student in a qualifying
examination, "what can possibly be its worth for political thinking?" But dubiously grounded political doctrine, rather than political thinking,
would seem to be what my Marxist colleague was really mourning. And democratically contestable, partial, provisional political judgments
appeared to be what he was moralizing against. Despite its righteous insistence on knowing what is True, Valuable, or
Important, moralism as a hegemonic form of political expression, a dominant political sensibility, actually marks
both analytic impotence and political aimlessness-a misrecognition of the political logics now
organizing the world, a concomitant failure to discern any direction for action, and the loss of a clear
object of political desire. In particular, the moralizing injunction to act, the contemporary academic formulation of political
action as an imperative, might be read as a symptom of political paralysis in the face of radical political
disorientation and as a kind of hysterical mask for the despair that attends such paralysis. This is the very
dynamic Nietzsche denoted as is issuing from the "instinct for freedom forcibly made latent." However tendentious the
language of instinct, what remains compelling in Nietzsche's understanding of the dynamic in which a desire for freedom or the will to power is
turned back on itself is the idea that a life force flattened into a passive or paralyzed stance toward the world turns against life as it turns against
itself; it turns against that which incites the subject to overcome itself. Indeed, paralysis of this sort Ieads to far more than an experience of
mere frustration: it paradoxically
evinces precisely the nihilism, the antilife baring, that it moralize against in
its nemesis – whether that nemesis is called conservatism, the forces of reaction, postmodernism, or theory. While
moralizing discourse symptomizes impotence and aimlessness with regard to making a future, it also marks a peculiar relationship to history, one
that holds history responsible, even morally culpable, at the same time as it evinces a disbelief in history as a teleological force. When belief in
the continuity and forward movement of historical forces is shaken, even as those forces appear so powerful as to be very nearly determining, the
passionate political will is frustrated in all attempts to gain satisfaction at history's threshold: it can acquire neither an account of the present nor
any future there. The perverse triple consequence is a kind of moralizing against history in the form of condemning particular events or
utterances, personifying history in individuals, and disavowing history as a productive or transformative force. This triple effect, and the limits it
imposes on a substantive emancipatory politics, is captured in the often over - burdened significance ascribed to "subject position"-one's own and
others'-in our time. Having lost our faith in history, we reify and prosecute its effects in one another, even as we reduce our own complexity and
agency to those misnamed effects. Morality stands in an uneasy relationship to the political insofar as it is always mistrustful of
power; and it bears a slightly truncated relationship to the intellectual insofar as it is rarely willing to explore the seamy
underside of righteousness or goodness in politics. Moralism is much less ambivalent: it tends to be intensely
antagonistic toward a richly agonistic political or intellectual life. Moralism so loathes overt manifestations of
power-its ontological and epistemological premises are so endangered by signs of action and agency-that the moralist inevitably
feels antipathy toward politics as a domain of open contestation for power and hegemony. But the identity of
the moralist is also staked against intellectual questioning that might dismantle the foundations of its own premises; its survival is
imperiled by the very practice of open-ended intellectual inquiry. It is thus in a moralistic mode that the
most expansive revolutionary doctrines – liberalism, Maoism, or multiculturalism – so often
transmorgrify into their opposite, into brittle, defensive, and finally conservative institutions and
practices. Here I offer an example from within the academy.
Be skeptical of liberal acts of benevolence because democracy only obtains
coherence as an equilibrating force and in juxtaposition to the “evil” of
nondemocratic regimes. As such, democracy turns against itself with principles like
nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and imperialism that fill the vacuum left. The
institution thus overwhelms the individual, dissolved in favor of a universal code of
morality and a homogenizing procedural aim.
Brown 1, Brown, Wendy, University of California, Santa Cr, “Politics out of History” Ch 6. Princeton
University Press, 2001. http://pavleck.net/bookinfo/politics-out-of-history.pdf/ jzc
We late moderns remain bound to a modernist habit of measuring the political worth of thinkers by their
proximity to the political beliefs we are attached to; the tendency arises from an infelicitous collapse of the political and the
intellectual domains, a collapse itself resulting from the radically insecure standing of each in modernity. 1 Conventionally, the "politics" of
a given theorist is identified either with his or her explicit political views and alliances, that is, with political
biography, or with the political values articulated in the theory (democracy, socialism, individual liberty, community, and so forth), that is, with
political ideology.2 And the politics of theory itself is generally judged by measures of relevance, applicability,
or accessibility, or it is debated in terms of features that are considered valuable. To forge a different way of
thinking about the theory-politics relation, and about the political value of particular theories and theorists, I propose that we affirm
rather than deny the persistently untheoretical quality of politics-the resistance of political life to
theory; the inter-course between politics and theory might then become more productive than one
based on identity or application. If theory and politics consist of quite different, even conflicting, semiotic impulses and aims,
perhaps we can conceive a usefully agonistic dynamic between them in order to avoid the more conventional relations of mutual condemnation,
inadequacy, annoyance, or reproach. Let us take this risky hypothesis further: What if democratic politics, the m DEMO CRACY AGAINS T
ITSELF 123 This fixing or naturalizing of meanings is the necessary idiom in which politics takes place. Even
the politics of deconstructive displacement implicates such normativity, at least provisionally. Pure deconstructive critique, while of inestimable
value as a theoretical practice, is politically limited until and unless implications of the critique are developed in the political positing of new
meanings (themselves subject to theoretical deconstruction). Theory, in contrast, cannot fix meaning in this political fashion without ceasing to be
theoretical, without sacrificing the dynamic action of theory, without falling into empiricism, positivism, or doctrine. For
theory to live (the
theorist "journeys in order to see, " its Greek etymology reminds us), it
must keep moving, it must keep taking critical distance from, and
hence undoing, the terms of its objects. When theory aspires to fix meaning, then at the moment it believes itself to
have defined definitively or chronicled exhaustively, it has made an object in the world, invested itself in
that object and at that moment ceases to be theoretical. As politics does, theory undoes-but they are not necessarily
opposites. A far more interesting relation is possible. As Alexis de Tocqueville discerned, the relation of theory and politics in democracy is
especially vexed. On the one hand, democracy is more antagonistic to theory than are most other regimes because
of democracy's attachment to "common sense" and to its nervousness about elite knowledges. On the other
hand, democracy needs theory more than other regimes, because of the democratic citizen's readiness to
"trust the mass, " with the result that "public opinion becomes more and more mistress of the world. "5 Still
another paradox of democracy further complicates its relationship with theory, as a turn from Tocqueville to Spinoza reveals. According to
Etienne Balibar, it is Spinoza who portrays democracy
as unable "to find its own principle" despite functioning as an
essential stabilizing element in other regimes. Spinoza can only define democracy itself as "a perfect aristocracy ... an
intrinsically contradictory concept. "6 This paradox results from the tension Spinoza posits, at the core of all
regimes, between the state and mass (imperium and multitudo) . Since pure democracy Iacks this tension, insofar
as state and mass are one, it negates itself as a regime. 124 • CHAPTER 6 Spinoza's argument about democracy's stabilizing
function in nondemocracies issues from his conviction that the tension between state and mass must be relaxed by some accord achieved between
them, precisely the accord that a democratic element offers. Thus,
the value of democracy is its equilibrating force in
nondemocratic regimes, which cannot themselves manage the economy of energy and fear
circulating between state and mass. Balibar does not say that Spinoza denies the viability of democracy, only that he cannot
locate a singular principle that defines, animates, and binds it as a regime; democracy thus becomes literally impossible for Spinoza to theorize.
In Balibar's account of the unfinished character of the Tractatus Politicus, "we see [Spinoza] finally bogged down in a search for the 'natu" ral'
criteria of citizenship ... and, if I dare say it, we watch him die before this blank page. "8 Leaving aside the specifics of Spinoza's argument about
the statemass relationship, as well as the question of the relationship between Spinoza's terminal illness and his unfinished treatise on politics, let
us consider the thesis that Spinoza's
inability to theorize democracy is rooted in its lack of a principle of its own,
and its consequent lack of material for theory. What if democracy is in fact missing what other regimes
possess in principles such as excellence, raison d'etat, imperial right, or property? Must democracy then
be supplied a principle or purpose from outside? Must it be attached to a principle or principles other than
itself, lest it become an amorphous and aimless rather than politically purposive entity-and become as
well severely vulnerable to insurgency from within and conquest from without? Again, Tocqueville's challenge
would seem to parallel Spinoza's. Following his discussion of America's valorization of " individual understanding," Tocqueville describes the
limit of this inclination for a body politic: "without ideas in common, no common action would be possible, and without common action, men
might exist, but there could be no body social. "9 Yet since democracies do harbor social bodies, since they are
not generally
aimless, vulnerable, or even especially unstable, perhaps there is a vacuum in democracy that will
inevitably be filled with a historically available principle – nationalism, racism, xenophobia,
cultural chauvism, market values, Christianity, imperialism, individualism, rights as ends – if some
other principle is D E MOCRACY AGAINST ITSELF 125 not more deliberately developed and pursued. While the
principles to which modern democracy inadvertently attaches are not inherently dangerous and unsavory, they are likely to be so in fact if they
are not formulated reflectively and deliberatel y, given the tendency in democracies both toward popular self-aggrandizement and toward the
instrumentalist sensibility figured by rights and the market. Their
imbrication with capitalism makes late modern
liberal democracies especially prone to narcissistic decadence, bureaucratic domination, and
technocracy, which in very different ways introduce markedly undemocratic forces into their
midst. Though incapable of giving a specific name to the (capitalist) forces that would produce it, this was the condition Tocqueville forecast
as the gloomy future of democracy at the close of his study of America: ... I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly
circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost
unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends .... He exists in and for himself .... Over
this
kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment
and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, provident, and gentle .... It gladly works for their
happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it .... It covers the whole of social life with a network of
petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform .... It does not break men's will, but softens,
bends, and guides it ... it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so
much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the
government as its shepherd. 10 Theoretical self-consciousness may be deployed to interrupt democracy's relatively automatic cathexis
onto undemocratic princ 126 • C H APTER 6 paradox of democracy formulated by Spinoza and Tocqueville. If democracy inherently lacks a
principle of its own, then any principle : brought to it will necessarily be antidemocratic: if democracy and , principle are antithetical, if
democracy is innately without a principle\ of its own, then any principle democracy attaches to must be partially" at odds with it. It
thus
appears that the antidote for democracy's de- : generative tendencies is homeopathic-it requires installing
another : antidemocratic element in democracy's heart. This is the paradox that/ brings theory and politics into specific
relation in democracy, and the ' one for which Nietzsche's critique of democracy, as well as his more ' general critique
of the political, may be rendered most useful. The task of conceiving Nietzsche's value for democratic politics in this chapter,
then, will wind around two related themes: the value of , antidemocratic critique for democracy, and the value of theory for ; politics in terms
other than those of application, method, ideology, or !. critique. Through Nietzsche, a consummately anti-political and un- ' democratic thinker,
we may speculate about the value of theory for 'j' politics as a source of diagnosis, unlivable critique, and unreachable \. ideals rather than as a
source of models, positions, or explanations : of causes or origins. Again, in so doing, we must attend to a significant , distinction between the
character of politics and of theory. Recogniz- '. ing such a distinction does not imply that there are no theoretical " moments in politics and no
politics to theory. Rather, it enables us to speculate that the prospect for a relationship useful to both may depend crucially on keeping their
respective and admittedly mutable identities relatively aloof and autonomous even as they engage each other. Conventional ways of locating
Nietzsche's politics include examining the convergence of his thought with Nazi doctrine; his reduction of all demands for justice to envy; his
misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism; his heroic eth ic and hi teem for a ncient Athen ian culture; hi opprobri um towa rd th ma , I mo ra y, o
ialism, and p cially rh f m . mit , p liti I qu I i cy. Ni tz h h . b n t i·p< liti · I , . li i · I, 11 et DEMO C RACY AGAINS T ITSELF • 127 "politics
of transfiguration. " He has been cast as deadly to politics, as a "haunt" or "conscience" to political thought and political life; as providing the
ethos for a liberal ironism, for a recovery of moral-political responsibility, and for an agonistic liberal radicalism; and as a "way out" of Marxism,
phenomenology, and existentialism in the twentieth centuryY Most politically sympathetic treatments of Nietzsche try to draw a politics out of
his thought, even as they recognize that there is much in Nietzsche that cannot be redeemed for democratic practice. But what if Nietzsche's
thought is instead conceived as a knife to what covers the ideals and practices constitutive of political life? What if Nietzsche's thought does not
guide but only provokes, reveals, and challenges, functioning in this way to strengthen democratic culture? Perhaps Nietzschean critiques and
genealogies can cut into politics, productively interrupting, violating, or disturbing political formations rather than being applied to, merged with,
or identified with them. Thiswork would seem to be especially important for democratic politics, given my
suggestion that democracy inevitably attaches to undemocratic elements and is also inhospitable to
theory, including the theoretical self-consciousness required to grasp and redress the Spinozist point about democracy's hollow center. To
pursue these possibilities, we might first recall from the previous chapter Nietzsche the genealogical psychologist, the thinker who deploys
speculative genealogies to probe the historical-psychological constitution of values such as justice, equality, or Christian morality. What is the
significance of Nietzsche's diagnostic pose and genealogical approach for reconceiving the relationship of theory to politics? This question
converges with those posed in the previous chapter: How does genealogy itself refigure the relation between the intellectual and the political?
How does genealogy's crossing of philosophy and history open up the political present without itself taking the place of politics? "We are
unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge, " Nietzsche begins On the Genealogy of Morals, "and with good reason. We have never sought our
l ve . " 12 It is this ignorance that Nietzsche seeks to redres w ith hi n Jogi a! tracings of the desires (not only the unmediat d will c I Lit i s t hw rt
d form - nvy, resentment, jea l1 [ t r·i1 liz in o h n ora l and pol iti al form - 128 • CHAPTER 6 tions of equality, liberal justice, and the state.
Unlike other genres of'1( philosophical or historical criticism, including those delineated in his · own On the Advantage and Disadvantage of
By doing
History for Life, geneal.Jt ogy permits an examination of our condition that interrogates its very:1, terms and construction.
violence to their ordinary ordering·\: and situation, genealogy reveals the terms by which we live. In
this·i, way, the previous chapter argued, genealogy paradoxically aims to dislocate that which is both its
starting point and its object: the pres- � ent. And in the process, it also dislocates the conventions of
politics; � morality, and epistemology that constitute the present. The measure ' of genealogy's success is
its disruption of conventional accounts of our.•; identities, values, origins, and futures. Thus the project of
deconstruct-" ing the inevitability, the naturalness, and the intractability of a time 1 or a thing converges with the project of deconstructing the
present as �. a culmination of the progress of the past, as well as with the exposure• · of power's operation in maintaining this particular present.
None ot' these activities is equivalent to politics; it could even be argued that : they are anti-political endeavors insofar as each destabilizes
meaning' without proposing alternative codes or institutions. Yet each may also .. be essential in sustaining an existing democratic regime by
rejuvenating it. For the vertigo that genealogy aims to achieve may amount to . the very measure of how far collective or individual identity can
be dissolved in order to disrupt without destroying, to offer the possibility of resolving into another story. Why would anyone actively seek to
dissolve or destabilize identity within democracies? If, as the musings of Spinoza and Tocqueville ; suggest, democracies tend toward cathexis
onto principles antithetical to democracy, then critical scrutiny of these principles and of the political formations animated by them is crucial to
the project of refounding 1 or recovering democracy. What Machiavelli casts as the "return of a republic to its beginnings" 13 might here be
supplemented with the notion of a theoretical endeavor, genealogy, that continuously examine and reworks both the founding principles and
powers of a polity and those princi ples and powers with which it ha since become interwoven. Identity dis ol ution, a hi v d th or ti lly, i tim a
mean f I in wh th t'W ar wb r w h cw w net b , a m n of v l ua t· DEMO C RACY AGAINST ITSELF • 129 ing the principles by which we order
ourselves-in short, a means of interrupting that tendency in democracy to adhere without reflection to nondemocratic principles or practices, and
to be inhabited by nondemocratic powers. Significantly,
the challenge to identity that genealogy offers is not
equivalent to political dissolution-it questions without destroying or prohibiting a particular formation of
collective identity. Again, genealogy is not politics but a register of reflection on it; its effect is to disturb
political space and political formations rather than to claim such space or create such formations on its
own. In refiguring the relations among history, philosophy, and politics, genealogy shapes the meeting of
theory and politics as mutual experience of incitation or provocation. While Nietzsche's genealogical inquiry can be
drawn with relative ease into the project of political self-scrutiny and debate, a more familiar Nietzsche establishes philosophy and politics as
flatly rejecting one another and describes both in wholly unflattering terms. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche polemicizes against philosophers
and philosophy as antilife. The philosophical inquiries of Socrates and Plato are condemned as "symptoms of degeneration or decay" in Greek
life, since to "judge the value of life" itself constitutes a negation of life.14 Dialectics is characterized as poor manners-"the revenge of the
rabble"-and specious thought: "honest things ... do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion" (p. 31 ). More generally, Socratic philosophy is
portrayed as an expression of ressentiment that devitalizes its opponents. "As long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct"; whereas
philosophy reproaches the senses, the body, the instincts, and history as deceivers about the "true world"-they draw us into the world of
becoming, the world of appearance (pp. 33, 34 ). This reproach of life voiced by Greek philosophy, Nietzsche argues, was a pathological response
to the "anarchy of the instincts" accompanying Athens' decline: If one needs to make a tyrant of reason, as Socrates did, then there m ust exist no
little danger of something else playing the tyrant .... l he fanati i m with whi h t he whole of Greek thought throws itself at r ti n li · I " n tllt >f m
rg n y . . . . Th moralism of the 130 • CHAPTER 6 Greek philosophers from Plato downwards is pathologically condi- ' tioned .... Reason = virtue
= happiness means merely: one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing a permanent •. ! daylight-the daylight of reason.
(pp. 32-33) .·:· ' I. For Nietzsche, the decadence of the Greek philosophers, expressed a } hyperrationality, is a symptom of the decline of
Greece's greatness::' "the philosophers are the decadents of Hellenism, the counter-moveJ· ment against the old, the noble taste (against the
agonal instinct . , against the polis, against the value of the race, against the authorit� ' of tradition) " (p. 108). In
the decline of Athens,
Nietzsche discern� the more general tendency of philosophy toward revenge and ressenti: ' ment, its
assault on that before which it feels small and humiliated}' Out of its experience of impotence or injury
vis-a-vis public life Of� culture, philosophy seeks to substitute itself for them, to displace an�; replace
rather than engage them. Here, Plato is his exemplar. Though Nietzsche frequently generalizes from this depiction of phi-. losophy in
Greek culture in order to insist that philosophy as such is antilife, Nietzschean philosophy, often masquerading as allegory or. psychological
maxims, also aims to provoke the spirit of overcoming , that affirms humanity. Nietzsche's polemic against philosophy is thu at the same time a
call for a philosophy of a different sort. His critique of philosophy centers on the unself-conscious will to power in it that potentially vanquishes
its object-man-in an effort to dominate that · ! object. But this same will to power makes philosophy a potent instru· ·, ment of other values as
well; indeed, it animates Nietzsche's own phil - · osophical moves against the philosophers he criticizes. If, in the name of "life, " Nietzsche
bears some ambivalence toward philosophy, there is no such ambiguity in his open hostility toward
politics, which includes moral doctrines such as equality, institution such as the state and political
parties, career politicians, righteou position-taking, and policy making. Nietzsche's objections to moral political
doctrine, especially that of liberalism, include his notorious disdain for the rabble and for the “little men” whose envious, petty, and poisonous
nature, he believes, sap all strength from a culture. Nietzsche’s
critique of political solutions to “unfairness” and other
moralizing claims against domination is distilled in his forthright DEMO CRACY AGAINST ITSELF 131 claim: "
'Men are not equal.' ... Life wants to climb and to overcome itself climbing." 16 If liberal doctrine thus
inevitably partakes of slave morality, when this critique is compounded by Nietzsche's loathing of the
state-the "coldest of all cold monsters[,] ... where the slow suicide of all is called 'life' "17-then all modern
state-centered political formations, whether socialist, democratic, or totalitarian, appear even more
antagonistic than is philosophy to "life" and culture. "The better the state is established," Nietzsche
polemicizes, "the fainter is humanity. "1 8 Even these critiques do not plumb the depths of Nietzsche's hostility to politics, a
hostility many have termed aesthetic or cultural but that might be better understood as an intense anti-institutionalism rooted in his critique of
slave morality. " 'The will to power' is so loathed in democratic ages, " he argues, "that the whole of the psychology of these ages seems directed
towards its belittlement and slander."19 In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche
emphasizes the massified, de-individualizing
character of democratic institutions, the way in which they lose "man" in a regime putatively designed to
protect "everyman": " 'Equality' ... belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of
types, the will to be oneself, to stand out-that which I call pathos of distance-characterizes every strong age. The tension, the range between the
extremes is today growing less and less-the extremes themselves are finally obliterated to the point of similarity" (p. 91 ). This appreciation of
distance-not simply hierarchy-as culturally invigorating emerges in Nietzsche's characterization of freedom as "the will to self-responsibility" that
"preserves the distance which divides us" (p. 92). Like Foucault, Nietzsche
charges modern politics with excessively
organizing and institutionalizing human relations. This institutionalism dissolves our
distinctiveness, our separateness, even as it fabricates us as "individuals"; it throws us into
proximity in a fashion that mutes our own capacity to be active, creative, and hence free; it
sacrifices the energy of free creatures, indeed of expressivism, to a homogenizing procedural ism.
Like Rousseau, Nietzsche regards mass social interour e and th i1 .itut ion that 1 erpetuate it as enemies of discerning n ibili i n v 1 h 1 col ra n ,
on of d mocra y' proud t m t 1 f i ts b " H up with n, 1 32 • CHAPTER 6 to keep open house in one's heart-this is liberal, but no more than liberal.
One knows hearts which are capable of noble hospitality, which have curtained windows and closed
shutters: they keep their i best rooms empty ... because they await guests with whom one does '? not have
to put up" (p. 82). For Nietzsche, to regard all indifferently, : to treat everyone as if they were equally deserving
of respect, is a sign ,; less of magnanimity or of an egalitarian sensibility than of the incapac� , ity to
judge what and who are of value. ': In short, Nietzsche regards political life, especially modern political ,:
life, as harboring values and spawning institutions that displace and : discourage individual and collective
aspiration, creativity, distinction, , and cultural achievement. The state is "unmorality organized," i "huge
machinery" that "quells the individual," substituting instead a:; mechanical individualism in which all are
reduced to units.20 Political: : . parties are for unthinking followers-"he who thinks much is not: suited to
be a party member: too soon, he thinks himself through and . beyond the party. "21 And modern political doctrines
are mostly justi � fications of and for the weak against the strong, or for the rational; against the Dionysian, issuing in either
case from ressentiment.22 Nietzsche's critique of politics should also be read in relation to ! 'I his chosen signifier of human redemption,
culture. While Nietzsche 11 concedes a potentially synergistic relation between politics and culture 1 when the former itself partakes of
"greatness" (Periclean Athens is the ambivalent example that he frequently cites), politics is more often cast as a straightforward enemy of
culture. Insisting that modern justice claims are born of envy or other elements of slave morality, and that nationalism and anarchy draw on the
least admirable mobilization of desire, Nietzsche celebrates war as the only element of political life that is potentially ennobling for the collective
spirit.23 He sees the antagonism of politics to culture as arising not only from the former's cultivation of herd morality but also from its tendency
to fix or stabilize its domain via enervating i nstitutions: "Like every organ iza· tional political power, the Greek polis spurned and distrusted the i
n· crease of culture among i ts citizen ; it pow rfu l na tural im· pul was to do a l rno t noth in but ri ppl and ob t ru t it. Th p li did n t w nt · !leur
ny hi t ry or v h I w f I I 1 i1 end 11 DEMO C RACY AGAI N S T ITSELF • 133 generations and keep them at one level. ... So culture developed
in spite of the polis. "24 Nietzsche's negative view of institutions generally-like that of his twentieth-century
student, Foucault-is linked to his belief that institutions contain and constrain life, dominating through
excessive control and devitalization of their subjects. With similarities to Max Weber's account of routinized charisma and
Sheldon Wolin's critique of constitutionalized democracy,Z5 Nietzsche offers a formulation in which the very aim of institutions to
endure, secure, and routinize renders them at odds with a cultural ethos of creativity, struggle, and
overcoming. Thus, Nietzsche jokes, "the overthrow of beliefs is not immediately followed by the overthrow of institutions; rather the new
beliefs live for a long time in the now desolate and eerie house of their predecessors, which they themselves preserve, because of the housing
shortage. "26 For Nietzsche, modern
political institutions inevitably aim to fix and stabilize; they achieve a
kind of static domination indeed, a domination that is achieved through the containment of change-
as well as invest the world with the ressentiment of justice shaped by envy and a reproach of power.
Culture, by contrast, represents the prospect of innovation, aspiration, and creative effort. Like theory, culture climbs, slides, and functions to
undo meaning, conventional practices, and, above all, institutions. Culture harbors not merely the prospect of greatness but a spirit of freedom,
which, according to Nietzsche, political life can never offer. Now, what if instead of defending politics and democracy against Nietzsche's
critiques, which most democrats, radical or liberal, are understandably wont to do, we allowed these critiques the force of a partial and
provisional truth-a discomforting, undemocratic truthand attempted to discern how they might enrich democratic political p rojects? "Whatever
doesn't kill me makes me stronger," Nietzsche taunts,27 perhaps providing a clue about how criticism might invigorat rath r than d mol i h it
object. An th r w y f p It in th pr bl m: Wh t u for t hi nking ab ut tb r lat i I 11 I f >liti · i ph i lo opl r h > i, h > t i l t > 1 34 • C H APTER 6 both
in the name of something called "life" or culture ? Nietzsche's insistence on the limiting force of both theory and politics does not prevent their
productive intercourse to produce an illness-"as preg- 1 nancy is an illness, " in one of his provocative maxims.28 Although it is peripheral to his
own purposes, in Nietzsche we can find the basis ) for an agonistic interlocution between theory and politics, especially in democracies, which I
have suggested are inherently anti-theoreticaL : and lacking in any binding principle. Politics and theory can question each other without having
to answer to each other-without becom- ' ing either identical or even mutually accountable.29 I am further suggesting that politics,
which
relentlessly fixes meanings and generates their consolidation in institutions, requires theory's anti-political
rup- , ture of these meanings and institutions in order not to become the nightmare of human sociality,
power brokering, and discursive banal- ' ity that politics always threatens to become. The realm of politics
needs to be cut through by counterforces both to incite its virtues and, in a technocratic age, to derail its
slide into a historically unprecedented machinery of domination.
We access root cause – the political narrative of the US exceptionalism and the
strong nation state as well as reactionary anti-immigration are the result of a
ressentiment against speed driven by the fear of the disorder of an increasingly
globalized world.
Glezos 14, Simon Glezos, Assistant Professor in the department of political science at the University of
Victoria. He has a PhD in political theory and international relations. “Brown’s Paradox: Speed,
ressentiment and global politics,” Journal of International Political Theory Vol 10, Issue 2, pp. 148 – 168,
First Published May 22, 2014 JZC
In a previous work, The Politics of Speed, I argued that this willingness to hand over authority to a centralized executive and reject democratic
consultation is not due to the technical challenge of speed (any more than the panic over the MV Sun Sea had anything to do with the actual
scope of immigration in Canada, the 500 Tamil refugees constituting a drop in the bucket of Canada’s 250,000 annual new permanent residents),
but rather its existential challenge (Glezos, 2012: 31).11 This is to say that, in
times of acceleration, people fear democratic
consultation, and crave authoritative renderings because of the way in which stable identities and narratives
come under threat. This reactionary mindset is rooted in a phenomenon I called “ressentiment against
speed.” Ressentiment against speed is a kind of crystallized cultural dynamic which craves a stability and a certainty which the world is
incapable of providing. This disappointment becomes activated as a drive for revenge against the world which is viewed as
the source of instability; against scapegoats who are identified with this instability; and ultimately against ourselves,
through calls for authoritarian governance to control us. In this article, I wish to make a more thorough study of this concept of a ressentiment
against speed, uncovering its specifically Nietzschean roots. This investigation is important, because I think that a ressentiment against speed is,
in fact, one of the central components of Brown’s Paradox. To understand this, we must understand Nietzsche’s philosophy of ressentiment in
greater detail. Ressentiment should not be confused with resentment. Resentment, a sense of anger over pain or injury we may have suffered (of
whatever sort), is a natural response, as is the attempt to challenge or overturn the sources of these pains or injuries.12 Nietzsche (1976) does not
council a kind of ascetic rejection of judgment, simply accepting everything as it comes—in which case, we would become, in his words, the ass
which can only bray “Yeah-yuh” (p. 424)—nor is he arguing for a Christian “turning of the other cheek.” Being angry, resentful, unhappy, and so
on are all perfectly acceptable to Nietzsche so long as—and this is crucial—they serve as a spur to action. So long as your resentment or anger
becomes a vector for productive intervention in the world, then they have the potential to be good or noble. The trouble with ressentiment is
that, counter to resentment, it does not act as a spur to productive action (although it does still frequently spur reactive
behavior, a distinction I will shortly explain). Quite the contrary, ressentiment is resentment crystallized and spiritualized, and thus
focuses not on any particular agent or actor, but rather simply on the world as a whole. Ressentiment expresses itself
as a generalized resentment against a world that allows pain and suffering to occur. It frequently manifests as
a rejection of the world, and the imagining of a world of perfection in opposition to this “imperfect”
world. Nietzsche (1968a) makes clear how this drive to idealization is linked to ressentiment and the spirit of revenge. “To talk about
‘another’ world than this is quite pointless … we revenge ourselves on life by means of the phantasmagoria of
‘another,’ a ‘better’ life” (p. 49). This link between idealization and revenge is displayed quite strongly, Nietzsche (1968b) says, in many
of the major works of metaphysics in the Western canon: Psychology of Metaphysics—This world is apparent: consequently there is a true
world;—this world is conditional; consequently there is an unconditioned world;—this world is full of contradiction: consequently there is a
world free of contradiction;—this world is a world of becoming: consequently there is a world of being:—all false conclusions … It
is
suffering that inspires these conclusions: fundamentally they are desires that such a world should exist; in the same way,
to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression of hatred for a world that makes one suffer: the
ressentiment of metaphysicians against actuality is here creative. (pp. 310–311) “It is suffering that inspires these conclusions” and ressentiment
is “expression of hatred for a world that makes one suffer.” This is the danger of ressentiment and how it differs from resentment. Resentment is a
part of living in the world for Nietzsche, a world which produces suffering and which therefore must be responded to. But ressentiment
takes one out of the world. It orients one’s actions to other worlds, worlds which do not exist. In the context of a
discussion of an accelerating world, ressentiment against speed manifests as an existential resentment over the refusal of the
world to provide one with the stability—either in time or in space—that one craves. In response, we construct
idealized spaces and times, located either in the nostalgia of the past, or in an eschatological future.
Nietzsche discusses idealist philosophy and religious cosmologies, but we can just as easily see these drives expressed in political
narratives of “golden ages,” “the good old days,” “cities on the hill,” “the end of history,” or simply
the security of “strong borders.” These spaces/times become refuges, defences, and weapons against an uncertain world of flow
and becoming. Just as to live in the world is to suffer, to live in time is to be subject to contingency, and to live in space is to see that space is
always invaded, reshaped, and de/reterritorialized. To wish otherwise is to close one’s eyes and stop up one’s ears, to refuse to intervene in the
world as it is. This is exactly what ressentiment against speed produces. Nietzsche’s (1968a) discussion of the philosopher’s
disdain for
the “world of becoming” shows how ressentiment is always already a ressentiment against speed: All that
philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive. They kill, they stuff,
when they worship, these conceptual idolaters—they become a mortal danger to everything when they worship. Death,
change, age, as
well as procreation and growth, are for them objections—refutations even. What is, does not become; what becomes, is not.
(p. 45) This quote brings out another important element of Nietzsche’s thinking. Looking at Nietzsche’s critique of idealism, we might begin to
take him for a kind of vulgar realist, criticizing flights of philosophical fancy. This is to misunderstand the complexity of Nietzsche’s conception
of the world of becoming. Nietzsche never takes what the “world” is for granted and, with his focus on creativity, even were “one” to know what
the “world” is, the world—and “one”—would almost certainly change immediately. But that is exactly the point. Nietzsche
affirms that
the world is a world of change, of becoming, of uncertainty, of contingency (and therefore necessarily of
suffering and disappointment). This is the world that we live in, and the world in which we must act.
A2 – Settler Colonialism
Link Turn – Slave Morality
Colonialism has always functioned through the nationalist exportation of slave
morality around the globe – settler violence is made possible through a prior
metaphysical configuration which marks the indigenous as evil in opposition to the
goodness of the colonizer. “There is no morality without violence.”
Haro 14 (Jose, University of South Florida, “Ressentiment, Violence, and Colonialism” p. 131-34)
The interconnections between Nietzsche’s and Fanon’s thoughts on violence and its association with
morality are quite apparent. What has thus far been revealed is that Fanon and Nietzsche are talking
about the same problem but from different perspectives. While Nietzsche focuses on the history and
phenomenology of the inculcation of a morality and hopes for a possible radical revaluation of values in
the future, Fanon illuminates and describes the conditions that will allow for destruction and
suppression of the Western order of rank by a new table of values. They both have in common a calling
for a revaluation of all values with the implicit assumption that the process is violent, and that the
conditions that call for this process are rooted in violence. The maxim, “there is no morality
without violence,” seems to appropriately capture their thoughts on violence
and morality. However, this more general claim does not settle questions about the degrees, kinds,
and domains of violence. Still their consonance around violence and morality lends to an analysis of one
thinker from the other’s possible perspective. In this way, Nietzsche may offer insight into Fanon’s
thoughts on colonialism, while in a similar manner Fanon may help illuminate Nietzsche’s thoughts on
morality. With regard to what Nietzsche offers Fanon’s project, he provides the form and content of
the morality that Fanon’s project for decolonization is attempting to overcome. Colonial morality is
not created ex nihilo, but is instead a variation of the dominant morality of the colonizers. Colonial
morality, as an extension of it, implicates the dominant morality of the colonizers. Western European
The morality that is exported to
powers, accordingly, exported their morality to the colonies.
the colonies is a slave morality of ressentiment and its particular configuration
is that of bad conscience. That slave morality is the general form of the morality 132 exported to
the colonies means to say that slave morality was imposed upon the colonized subjects. Likewise,
being that ressentiment is the hallmark of slave morality, the morality imported to the colonies is
reactionary. Bad conscience, accordingly, provides the particular content of the morality and offers the
means of discharging the ressentiment of slave morality. The form of morality that was exported, while
founded in ressentiment, is not a primitive form of morality that Nietzsche discusses regarding the
morality of the mores period. The JudeoChristian Platonic morality, and its hatred of life and the body, is
a “ripe fruit” of the development over millennia.277 The Judeo-Christian Platonic morality, moreover,
comes with a patina of genteelness, level-headedness, and civility that covers over the pain and violence
that wrought the conscience and continues to plague the self-lacerating bad conscience. Considering
how the Church and Christian evangelization featured and still features prominently in the colonial
enterprise, bad conscience is part and parcel of the order of rank exported to the colonies. So the order
of rank that is brought to the colonies is not just a morality of the ressentiment of slave morality, this
morality is infected with the Western sickness called bad conscience. From a crude perspective,
however, Nietzsche’s thought could seem to be instantiated in the colonization of the European
colonies. In other words, a Master people has come to the colonies and imposed order on the formless
herd of colonized peoples. This is a re-instantiation of a previous time prior to the herd’s self-mastery.
This notion, however, overlooks two issues. The first is that the peoples of Africa and other colonies,
prior to European colonization, were, and some continue to be, a people with their own values and ways
of being. They were in no way lacking civilization and culture let alone order and law. Second, the
morality exported to the colonies is bad conscience, a slave morality. Although Nietzsche grants the
creative property 277. Nietzsche, GM, II: 3. 133 generally associated with ressentiment, he would still be
critical of the life-denying values of bad conscience that are rooted in reactive feelings. But a form and
particular configuration of morality is taken to the colonies, though it does not mean that the morality
remains a perfect replica. Colonialism irrevocably changes the cultures that it encounters. This includes
the colonizer’s ways of life as well as the colonized. As such, the exported morality is transformed in two
ways: how it is manifested and experienced for the colonizer and how it is acquired and experienced by
the colonized. So as the colonized world is bifurcated, so is its bad conscience. On the part of the
colonizer, the bad conscience that is internalized in the social context of Europe is re-externalized in the
colonies. In Europe, the drives that are pushed inward can now be expressed outwardly toward objects
that are not one’s self. It remains bad conscience, furthermore, in that it is a poor, moralized copy of the
mastery that conscience implies. However, it is toward the outside world and not toward one’s self that
the bad conscience is directed. With Fanon’s description of the Manichaean structure of the colonial
world, he reveals a repetition of the slavish valuation of evil/good in the colonies. The world that the
colonizer is attempting to subdue and civilize is valued as evil, while its opposite, the colonizer, is
good. The colonial drama from the colonizer’s perspective is that the good is coming to vanquish the
evil colonized subject and bring light to darkness. By this justification, an imaginary debt is created. It
seems that the colonized are indebted to the colonizer for the civilization that is brought to them. This
debt then appears to be for being given culture and values by the colonizer creditor. In this way, the
colonizer emerges divine because the colonized seem to owe the colonizers a debt that can in no way be
repaid as it is for the most basic values and order. Like bad conscience in the European context,
accordingly, the debt of the colonial bad conscience cannot 134 possibly be redeemed, not even
through mercy. As a consequence, there is an inconsistency between the value imposed upon the
colonized and the supposed motivation for dominating the colonized. While the colonizer claims to be
imparting light and civilization upon the colonized, within this Manichaean order of rank, the colonized
are thought of as impervious and antithetical to the values that the colonizers instantiate and are
attempting to instill. In this way, the blame that is associated with bad conscience is repeated in the
colonial context. In Europe, bad conscience finds the seat of blame for the impossibility of ever
redeeming the debt in the very conditions of values: life and the body. In the colonial context, qualities
associated with life and the body are projected onto and made essential to the character of the
colonized. The colonizer seems to be able to justify the violence against the
colonized as they lash out at the conditions giving rise to the hostility that seeks
to destroy culture and civilization.
Link Turn – Meta
Only our theory of slave morality explains the metaphysical motives of colonialism
When people are colonized, their way of life is permanently and irrevocably interrupted and
transformed. Let us not forget for one moment that it is through violence and force that colonization
occurs and progresses. Colonization, then, to appropriate Nietzsche’s phraseology
and concept, is the denigration, destruction, and replacement of the indigenous
temples with the temples of colonizers. In the context of Western colonization, it is Western
values that supplanted the indigenous culture and values of the conquered peoples. There is,
additionally, an added valuation in the colonial context: the colonized is valued as the anti-thesis of the
colonizer. “The colonial world,” Fanon states, “is a Manichean world.”230 The world is conceived of as
a battle between the darkness of evil and the light of good. The colonized represent “a kind of
quintessence of evil.”231 The colonizer’s view of the colonized peoples amounts to associating the
colonized with an inherent lack of goodness. About the colonizers’ understanding of the colonized,
Fanon states: “The ‘native’ is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of
values but also the negation of values.”232 In one fell swoop, the colonized are both the
representatives of a type of life that lacks values, and also the antitheses of the Western colonizing
power’s own self concept; i.e. the West, as such, represents the source of values. This bifurcated logic,
as has been previously noted, is reflected in how the geography and social structure of the colonial
world appears. In one’s lived experience one encounters this split. About this Fanon states: “The ‘native’
sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront each other, but not in the service
of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the dictates of mutual exclusion:
There is no conciliation possible, one of them is superfluous.”233 In the colonial world and inherent in
its Manichaean reasoning, there is no possibility of finding a resolution to the contradictory duality of
the colonizer and the colonized. In fact, the order of rank deems the colonized an inessential element.
For Fanon, Manichaean reasoning can arrive at the ultimate dehumanizing consequence: it calls on
and treats the colonized like animals. For Fanon, “when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses
zoological terms.”234 This form of dehumanization reinforces the value of the inessentiality of the
colonized as well the impossibility of arriving at the resolution to the contradiction of the colonizer and
colonized subject, as the colonized are conceived of as lacking human qualities. The world and values
that colonialism erects are enforced and inculcated through violence. These values, then, become
some of the few “I shall not’s” that the colonized people remember. “The first thing,” Fanon states, “the
colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits.”235 For all the colonized,
their literal free movement around what once had been their land is contrary to the colonial morality.
Understanding this piece of colonial knowledge means having an awareness of the colonial order of rank
and one’s station within it. Once this is the case, the person or people are now locked into reacting to
this imposed valuation. Their way of being will now be fit into this mode of being and if one decides to
transgress the colonial order one will reap the violent consequences. Across the body of his work, Fanon
outlines the variety of morbid reactions that arise out of the social conditions of colonialism.236
However, even if one is able to remain psychologically unscathed by colonialism, the ordering of one’s
life in response to the imposed values reveals the internalization of those values. The
compartmentalized structure of the geography, its repetition at the level of values and the awareness
and internalization of the colonial order of rank, leave the people confined physically and
psychologically. And, the colonized subjects are themselves in the ambiguous situation of perpetually
transgressing the colonial order of rank. Fanon states: “The colonized subject is constantly on his guard:
Confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted
with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty.”237 Thus, the
presumed guilt of the colonized leaves the subject in a constant state of tense ambivalence. Regarding
this Fanon comments: “Confronted with the colonial order the colonized subject is in a permanent state
of tension.”238 Their own existence stands against the colonial order of rank so for the colonized to live
means to be violating said order.
Permutation
Perm: do both – this ev is more explicit about the perm than any of their answers will
be
Moon 16 (Paul, Professor at Auckland University in Auckland, New Zealand. “’Blonde Beats of Prey: A
Nietzschean interpretation of the language of Britain’s colonization of New Zealand”) NCF
Most of Nietzsche’s works that are drawn on for this article were published between 1878 and 1900 – a period that coincides with the tail end
of Britain’s colonisation of New Zealand. So rather than the convention of a theoretical framework being applied to subsequent events,
circumstances, or developments as a means of viewing them through a particular conceptual lens, this article employs Nietzsche’s theories
retroactively in order to illuminate aspects of the language that accompanied the British colonisation of New Zealand in the roughly eight
decades preceding this phase of Nietzsche’s writing. The
efficacy of this retroactive application lies chiefly in a way that
gives new significance, from a theoretical perspective, to dimensions of British intervention in New
Zealand in the nineteenth century, offering interpretations of the character of this colonial activity that would be difficult to arrive
at in any other way. The resulting perspectives and insights are even more pronounced because of the manner in which Nietzsche’s theory
conflates psychology and philosophy into a unitary theoretical structure, thus producing a series of connections between the theory and, in this
case, the forms of language that the various agents of British colonisation used in New Zealand in the nineteenth century – connections which
because Nietzsche’s ideas
do not feature in this form elsewhere in the historiography of the country’s colonial period. In addition,
are applied here retrospectively, there is no chance that any of the players in New Zealand’s
colonisation were influenced (consciously or otherwise) by the elements of his theories. Thus, from a more
conceptual perspective, applying Nietzsche’s ideas to a period preceding that of their formulation
diminishes the possibility of the impression of any causal determinism in a theoretical sense,1 and
largely bypasses the accompanying epistemological entanglements that could arise if the theory had
emerged prior to this period of colonisation. Positioning Nietzsche in the historiography of New Zealand’s colonisation: an
outline In order to position the application Nietzsche’s views on the formation and underlying nature of human society, and their potential
ramifications for the interpretation of imperialism generally, and the language that accompanied the British colonisation of New Zealand
specifically, a summary overview of the historiography relating to New Zealand’s colonisation is useful to provide the necessary contextual
setting. The constraints of space of an article preclude the inclusion of a detailed survey, but a skeletal synopsis is sufficient to show how the
implications of Nietzsche’s
hypothesis on the emergence and characteristics of human society can, in some ways, serve as a
theoretical ‘next step’ (but by no means the only one) to current scholarship in the field of New Zealand’s
colonisation. Moreover, the expansion of theoretical options for analysis in this field is timely, given the
impression that some branches of the current research on the colonisation of New Zealand seem to
have stalled in terms of their theoretical development. By the same token, though, there is no suggestion here that this
particular theoretical departure in any way undermines or ought to displace any of the existing frameworks of analysis that have been
The intention is not to use Nietzsche’s theories in this area as a corrective

employed.
or substitute to these approaches, but more as a complementary theoretical

framework through which elements of New Zealand’s colonisation can be.
A2 – Eurocentric
Nietzsche’s notion of the good European is a European in motion – it is a nomadic
multiplicity without definite direction. Nietzsche aims to de-territorialize philosophy
away from the European unconscious
Beyond Good and Evil invites the reader to identify him- or herself as a good European who will give a
new sense to life in Europe, which has long since deterritorialized itself from what Nietzsche called the
"little peninsula of Asia" (WS 215; BGE 52; cf. BGE 208). Indeed, we will not understand "Peoples
and Fatherlands" at all if we begin with a human geography that fails to see Europe in motion. Like
all cultures and multitudes, it must be conceived in terms of mobility, difference, and multiplicity:
"I hear with pleasure that our sun is swiftly moving toward the constellation of Hercules?and I hope that
man on this earth will in this respect follow the sun's example? And we first of all, we good Europeans!"
(BGE 243). The diagnoses of European philosophy and art in BGE can be read as a critical account of
how thinking takes place in the relation between earth and territory. It would then be a geo-logic, a
cartography of human constructions of the Menschen-Erde, and an evocation of their futurity. The
problem that underlies Nietzsche's chapter "Peoples and Fatherlands" is that philosophy, despite its
universalistic ambitions and pretensions, is unconsciously territorialized. It aims, as Deleuze and
Guattari say, at absolute deterritorializa tion but necessarily reterritorializes itself, and in modernity
this means that it produces itself in forms associated with the national state. The preface recalls that
monstrous forms of thought like "astrology and its 'supra-terrestrial' claims" have had the most
stupendous effects on the lived earth, as in "the grand style in architecture in Asia and Egypt"; Nietzsche
ranks these earliest monumental architectural forms as among humanity's fruitful errors. Pre-Copernican,
they see the stars as divine, taking a local capital to be the center of the cosmos. Nietzsche nevertheless
admires these prime inscrip tions on the earth as grand experiments in giving a direction to the earth; they
are the architectural signature of thought still tied to transcendence and as such are necessarily figurative
and diagrammatic. These are ancient, diagrammatic equivalents of Zarathustra's opening challenge: What
will be the direction of the earth? Both dogmatic philosophy and "the grand style of architecture"
demonstrate that "all great things first have to bestride the earth in monstrous and frightening
masks in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with eternal demands" (BGE P).
Here it is helpful to recall Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of figurative or diagrammatic philosophy in
their chapter on geophilosophy. Deleuze and Guattari ask the question, "Can we speak of Chinese,
Hindu, Jewish, or Islamic 'philosophy'?"8 The answer is conditional: "Yes, to the extent that
thinking takes place on a plane of immanence that can be populated by figures as much as by
concepts." But ultimately, there is a distinction between figure and concept, however difficult it may be
to discern in specific cases: "Figures are projections however difficult it may be to discern in specific
cases: "Figures are projections on the plane, which implies something vertical or transcendent."9
Although on the plane, which implies something vertical or transcendent."9 Although Deleuze and
Guattari do not mention Derrida in this connection (and seldom elsewhere), I read this as an implicit
critique of the politico-aesthetic argument in Of Grammatology, which aims at undermining logocentrism
by demonstrat ing the omnipresence of writing and so undercutting the ethnocentrism that distinguishes
criticized Deleuze and Guattari for ethnocentrism on just this score.10 Whatever we might think about
this claim, however, note that Deleuze and Guattari distance themselves from Hegel and Heidegger, who
find the beginnings of philosophy in the original nature of the Greeks. Rather, philosophy arises as an
accident of geography: "The birth of philosophy required an encounter between the Greek milieu and the
plane of immanence of thought."11 Thought proceeds even under figurative forms, but without the
relative deterritorialization of the maritime culture of distinct cities as opposed to empire, there would
have been no friend, no philos. Without the friend, there is no notion of philosophy as common activity
but only of the radi cally marked individual philosopher as an idiosyncratic phenomenon. It is this that
Nietzsche has in mind in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, when he says that without a
common vibrant culture philosophers can appear only as isolated comets streaking through the sky. It is
the Greek maritime world that provided a milieu for the friendship that is necessary for philosophia as
contrasted to the isolated philosophos. Beyond Good and Evil undermines the residues of philosophical
and religious dogmatism (the figures of modern thought, which Deleuze and Guattari classify as subj ect,
obj ect, and other subj ect). It hopes to help invent the "good European." So "Peoples and Fatherlands,"
even more intensely than the rest of BGE, offers an inventory of forms of territorialization and its
variants. This chapter interrogates the title concepts, the state, empire, and addiction to the soil;
explores the national characteristics of German, French, and English thought; and provides an
analysis of Europe and the Jews, as well as the emergence of supranational and nomad peoples. It
asks whether and how "the pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationality has
induced" could be relieved by "Europe's desire to become one." I propose to read the chapter with an
eye to understand ing one of Nietzsche's answers to "What shall be the direction of the earth?" In
"Peoples and Fatherlands" the concluding aphorism announces in italics that "Europe wants to become
one" (BGE 256). What is it to become "one"? Is not Nietzsche in many ways the enemy of "the one"? I
think that we are right to be suspicious of essentialism here, and we might wonder if Nietzsche has
forgotten the lessons about the Weltprozess he had given to Hartmann. I suggest that we approach the
question of the one, the European one (and the multiplicity that is its apparent other), by way of the
geophilosophical concepts that Nietzsche deploys in this chapter.
Nietzsche’s figure of the ‘good European’ is an experimental cultural hybrid that goes
beyond all nationalism and essentialism.
Now we can read the concluding aphorism of the chapter, with its declaration: "Europe wants to become
one" (BGE 256). Nietzsche accuses the "insanity" of all the nationalisms of a mendacious
misinterpretation of Europe's desire. How are we to understand this desire to become one? If
Nietzsche is a confirmed antiessentialist (recall his critique of the national state and its
Schollenkleberei), would a new political Europeanism, a "European Union," generate a new essentialism?
"Europe"?this diverse collection of peoples whose differences Nietzsche has been cataloging and
analyzing throughout "Peoples and Fatherlands" wanting anything. Yet Nietzsche reads this desire "in all
the more profound and comprehensive men of this century" providing a representative list of writers,
interprets figures such as Stendhal, Beethoven, Heine, Schopenhauer, and Goethe as desiring that
Europe become one. Each, he suggests, "anticipates experimentally the European of the future," by
practicing cultural combination or synthesis. They are all hybrids (or monsters). Each proceeds
differently, and there is no grand synthesis, only different adventures. They exemplify a spirit of
patriots, in moments of "weakness or in old age." Wagner is the main example. Despite his egregious
German nationalism, Wagner's work, Nietzsche claims, is intimately related to the French romanticism of
multiplicity. It is experimentation outside the self-imposed limits of peoples and fatherlands that
makes these de facto cosmopolitans and hybrids exemplary. Nietzsche seems to say that we can
learn what it means for Europe to become one by studying these figures: "It is Europe, the one
Europe, whose soul surges and longs to get further and higher through their manifold and
impetuous art." But he breaks off his sentence with a question: "where? into a new light? toward a new
sun?" The question is left open whether these geniuses aim, even unconsciously, at a new Europe with a
determinate content. Nietzsche responds to his own questions: "What is certain is that the same storm and
stress tormented them and that they sought [suchten] in the same way these last great seekers [Sucher]!" It
is a new way of seeking, a Versuch or experiment, not an end sought, that is significant. "Becoming one"
means joyfully experimenting beyond the limits of nationality. These harbingers of the future are
united only insofar as they model (often unknowingly) new forms of hybridity and
cosmopolitanism. Nietzsche describes these "great discoverers in the realm of the sublime" in terms
of multiplicity and variation: they are "born enemies of logic and straight lines, lusting after the
foreign, the exotic, the tremendous, the crooked, the self contradictory." Yet these excessive
experimentalists "all broke and collapsed before the Christian cross," so their career trajectories
fail as models of the good European; it is the mad, antinomian, and rebellious aspects of what
Deleuze calls their lines of flight that offer a promise of the future. While these hybrids are all
"Tantaluses of the will," failures unable to realize their (often unconscious) projects of transcending
ethnicity and nationality, their experiments can serve as initial models of living in the century of the
Menge. Nietzsche has some fun at the end of the chapter's final aphorism, summing up Wagner's "way to
Rome" as in his last music drama, Parsifal. He ends with a rhyme that asks of Wagner, "Is this still
German?" and answers, "What you hear is Rome? Rome’s faith without the text" (BGE'256). So Wagner
used, again all unconsciously, the cloudy, nebulous spiritual geography of Germany, its mediating genius,
to produce a hybridity contrary to his explicit program. Wagner began, interculturally, with a music
growing out of French romanticism and ends with a displacement to Rome and Catholicism. He is a
middle, a cloudy milieu. If Nietzsche is appalled by Wagner's trajectory, he sees his transformations in the
context of Europe's democratic movement, a movement of populations that produces new configurations
of multiplicity, homogeneity, and hybridity, in the century of the Menge. But he has also shown that his
early hero, the apparent archnationalist, is one more odd hybrid produced by Europe's nomadic
fermentation.
A2 – Oversimplifies North South
Even if Nietzsche overemphasized the role of the north-south axis and Europe’s role in
history, his work can be used to re-think issues of modern politics and to push toward
cosmopolitanism.
Thoughts such as these provided inspiration to the numerous independence movements at work in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “east Europe,” often perceived as more “primitive,” less
“developed,” than the west. Indeed the contributors to the important volume East Europe Reads Nietzsche
present Nietzsche as the key figure for those ethnic minorities who were militating against their imperial
oppressors and searching for their identity and freedom. “The luminaries of East European modernism,” it
is claimed, had very “distinctive readings” of Nietzsche which in turn entail a reassessment of the place
national identity holds within his oeuvre (Freifeld et al. 1998: p. v). For the Romanian, Polish, Czech,
Slovakian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian avantgardes were indeed well acquainted with his works, which
were devoured by them in German, as well as rapidly translated into their native tongues.21 Reading
Nietzsche through the optic of the east shifts the overriding emphasis of most critics who, while
exploring the philosopher as a “good European,” tend solely to stress the north–south axis in his
work. They concentrate solely on the thinker’s flight from the beer-bloated and petty provincialism
of German places such as Schulporta and Naumburg to the mountainous freedom of Switzerland and on
to the inland and coastal health of sunny Italy (see Krell and Bates 1997). They thereby consider only
Nietzsche’s drive to “Mediterraneanize” thinking, to the exclusion of the Adriatic and the Black
Sea, and of the vast neighboring area of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This oversight is regrettable
because, as Peter Bergmann makes clear, it was “along the east–west axis [that] the unresolved
tensions of [Nietzsche’s] time [ran]” (Freifeld et al. 1998: 24). Evidently these same tensions went on to
determine the major political events of the twentieth century. It is therefore interesting and important to
read Nietzsche in the light of his reception in the other half of Europe. This new perspective on
Nietzsche’s influence goes against the dominant preoccupation amongst western Nietzsche readers (and
on the part of Nietzsche himself ) with the south, as defined and pitched against the north. Brushing
against the grain of such orthodoxy, the editors of East Europe Reads Nietzsche lay claim to the
importance and distinctiveness of the reception of Nietzsche in the Slav world, emphasizing how he
“provoked [his readers there] to voice their individuality in their native languages while connecting them
to an international avant-garde” (Freifeld et al. 1998: p. vi). For this other world, Nietzsche was not just a
cosmopolitan thinker22 but also an oft-cited and discussed “linchpin for a national cultural awakening in
the Slavic world” (Freifeld et al. 1998: p. vi). Adopting this different point of view on the reception of
Nietzsche’s ideas brings with it the added advantage of rectifying the illusion that modernism just
“flowed through the Vienna gate” out to its satellite cities and towns as if these other places – Budapest,
Prague, Bratislava, Cracow, etc. – were mere passive recipients of European culture and not already
avidly reading and discussing the works for themselves (Freifeld, in Freifeld et al. 1998: 4). As Alice
Freifeld writes: The Nietzsche reception in East Europe did not emanate from Vienna, rather Nietzschean
modernism was embraced, rejected and debated independently in the other metropolises of the empire.
The discourse of intellectuals was a cosmopolitanism addressed beyond the borders of the monarchy
rather than amongst the peoples within it. (Freifeld et al. 1998: 5) She goes on to stress that “the Viennese
Nietzsche reception reflected the political decline of Vienna,” and indeed it was Budapest that was “the
fastest growing city in Europe” (with Prussian Berlin also threatening to usurp the Viennese cultural
hegemony) (Freifeld et al. 1998: 2–3). Intellectuals in the east generally tended to be heavily implicated in
politics and public life, whereas the predominantly Jewish intelligentsia of Vienna was, as Zweig and
others point out, excluded from such realms and hence became “the guardians and protectors of culture”
as their sole means of exerting any influence (Zweig 1988: 35–6). In The Garden and the Workshop, a
comparative study of socio-cultural life in Budapest and Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century,
Péter Hanák suggests that Vienna was a city marked by Baroque “illusionism and an adoration of beauty
and ornamentation,” whereas Budapest grew up under classicism. This meant that “art for this
[Budapester] public was not an expression of piety and sensuality, nor the stage an evocation of the
illusion of reality. They were media for awakening national consciousness – effective tools for educating
the nation” (Hanák 1988: p. xxi). This seems to be true of the other regions of the empire which had been
affirming their specific and shared (pan-Slavic) identities at least since 1828 when the Slovak, Kollar,
published Wechselseitigkeit (Reciprocity), an analysis of the “common linguistic stock” informing and
underlying the various Slavonic dialects which it was incumbent on “every educated Slavonian” to be
familiar with (Krasinski 1848: 108).23 To give just some indication of the cultural swings and
negotiations of the period, whereas in 1848 Prague and Budapest were overwhelmingly German-
speaking, by 1914 Czech or Hungarian were the dominant languages (Freifeld, in Freifeld et al. 1998: 8).
The tide was even audibly turning. It might be thought quite strange that Nietzsche, who, as we have
seen, constantly inveighs against the stupidity and artificiality of nationalism and against
Kleinstaaterei (GS 377), against the formation of petty states bristling across the face of Europe, which
interfere with its wish to become one (BGE 256), should be read with enthusiasm, if at times qualified,
by those nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europeans involved in national independence
movements. Doesn’t Nietzsche make it clear that “the time for small scale politics is over” (BGE
208)? Doesn’t he embrace the übernational and push for the nomadic life of free spirits unattached
to any homeland, donators to European cultural hybridity (to the European Mischrasse) (HH 475)?
This is all true, but Nietzsche also constructs a mythic ancestral past for himself, that of a Polish
nobleman. This alternative national identity is seen as preventing him from lapsing into being a mere
Reichsdeutsche. He claims that his adoption of “the East” opens up a vision of what lies “beyond the
simply local, beyond the simply nationally conditioned perspective” (EH, “Why I Am So Wise,” 3;
see also KSA 14, p. 472).24 It is his embroidered Slavic connection which is seen as putting him in touch
with a future-oriented Europeanism, thereby opening a rich “imaginative field” in which to reorientate
himself (Freifeld, in Freifeld et al. 1998: 4). Nietzsche also speaks in favor of an adversarial, militant, all-
questioning culture; he calls on energetic youth to overturn the traditional – read imperial – values and
beliefs foisted on them in the name of self-affirmation. His analysis of the military successes of major
powers, such as Bismarckian Germany, are radically critical, dismissing any equation of political clout
with cultural vitality (see the analysis of HH 481 above). All these elements come together to form an
empowering discourse for would-be nations, looking for cultural expression and social justice. Those who
were not so much interested in empire-building as in affirming their will, and who felt in need of a strong
thinker to overcome the intimidating specters of Prussian and Austro-Hungarian domination,
enthusiastically adopted Nietzsche as their spokesperson.25
A2 – Feminism
Fem L/T
Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’ is perfectly situated within feminist theory- 4 warrants
Conway 93 (Daniel has a Ph.D., Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, “Das Weib an sich: The
slave revolt in epistemology”, Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, Routledge, 1993. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=169352, PP. 110-129,
p. 111-114) MRS
Nietzsche’s perspectivism, an epistemic thesis conveyed via a host of masculinist and residually misogynist images, might seem like an unlikely
precursor of feminist epistemologies. But in fact, Nietzsche
provides an epistemic framework that both
accommodates and prizes the radically situated experiences of women. In the following passage, which
contains Nietzsche’s most detailed and sustained discussion of the position now known as
‘perspectivism’, he both warns us to beware of traditional epistemology and points us in a more
promising direction: let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure,
will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject’; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory
concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself; these always demand that we should think 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.... There is
only a perspectival seeing [perspektivisches
Sehen], only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak [zu Worte kommen]
about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will
our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be. In this brief passage, Nietzsche makes several points with
which feminist theorists have expressed agreement. First of all, he warns us to beware of the traditional
interpretation of objectivity as disinterested contemplation. The goal of disinterested contemplation
presupposes ‘conceptual fictions’ and ‘contradictory concepts’, and furthermore requires us to posit a
disembodied, disinterested knowing subject, ‘an eye turned in no particular direction’. Nietzsche’s
perspectivism thus attempts to account for those affective components and determinants of knowledge that traditionally have been ignored or
discounted by epistemology. His
reconstituted notion of objectivity (consistently noted by his use of quotation
marks) suggests that knowledge is a function of the embodied expression of our affective investment in
the world. His perspectivism thus presupposes an account of subjects as radically situated, that is
affectively invested, in the world and in their bodies. Second, if we interpret these ‘eyes’ as
perspectives, whose ‘interpretative forces’ are sustained by a suffusion of affect, then we see that for
Nietzsche, perspectives are not disembodied points of view that hover disinterestedly over the world.
Indeed, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is strategically designed to recuperate the metaphorics of vision that
have dominated (and perverted) representational epistemology.2 In order to appropriate the
metaphorics of vision for his reconstituted notion of objectivity, Nietzsche glides effortlessly between
the twin sensory images of ‘eyes’ and ‘voices’: the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the
more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this
thing, our ‘objectivity’, be. Eyes and affects, knowing and feeling, seeing and speaking, conception and perception, situation and
expression: the pursuit of objectivity requires us to deconstruct these binary oppositions and integrate the
supposedly antagonistic terms within each. Nietzsche’s reconstituted notion of objectivity encourages a
maximal expression of affective investment in the world—a chorus of radically situated ‘voices’—and
thus stands 180 degrees removed from the traditional epistemological goal of disinterested, disaffected
contemplation. In fact, he concludes his warning against disinterested contemplation by graphically
likening the pursuit of objectivity to an act of self- directed castration: ‘to suspend each and every affect,
supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?’ (GM III: 12).
‘There is only a perspectival knowing’ thus means that knowledge is possible only if one’s affective
engagement with the world is both recognized and expressed. If it is not, then one can at best lay claim
to a desiccated, bloodless simulacrum of knowledge. Nietzsche’s recuperation of the metaphorics of vision enables us to
understand perspectives as bodies: suffused with affect, inextricably situated in the world, and inscribed with the pain and torment inflicted by
normalizing mores and institutions.3 Nietzsche consequently reconstitutes the notion of objectivity as an aggregation of radically situated
perspectives (or bodies)—none of which affords us an epistemically pure glimpse of the world. The
task of the Wissenschaftler
who aspires to objectivity is to compile as exhaustive an aggregation of radically situated perspectives
(or bodies) as possible, to assemble an unprecedented chorus of affective voices. Third, Nietzsche
recommends his perspectivism not for its epistemic purity, but for the strategic advantage that accrues
to his reconstituted notion of objectivity. His discussion of ‘perspectivism’ appears within the context of
his analysis of the ascetic ideal, with which he associates the traditional understanding of objectivity as
disinterested contemplation. Nietzsche frequently contends that the pursuit of objectivity requires a
concomitant assault on the affects, which in turn leads, paradoxically, to a diminution of our knowledge,
to the subordination of situated knowledges to lifeless simulacra of knowledge. The strategic advantage of objectivity lies, he
believes, in ‘the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to
employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge’ (GM III: 12).
Fourth, Nietzsche willingly accepts the self-referential implications of his endorsement of situated
knowledges. He readily acknowledges that his own perspectivism too is situated, that it reflects the
peculiar political interests of its author. ‘Perspectivism’ is itself perspectival in nature, for it is the
product of the partial perspective and embodied affect peculiar to Herr Nietzsche. Rather than stake an
illicit claim to epistemic purity, Nietzsche quite openly voices the hostility and resentment that inform
his own political campaign against the ascetic practices of traditional epistemology. It is no coincidence that
Nietzsche’s most illuminating articulation of his perspectivism appears in On the Genealogy of Morals, a book in which he announces and
foregrounds his own vested political interests in compiling a genealogy of morals. Nietzsche’
s perspectivism thus provides a
promising epistemological model for feminist theorists. But let us be clear about the opportunity cost of
embracing Nietzsche’s perspectivism: If we accept this reconstituted notion of objectivity, and seek a
maximal aggregation of radically situated perspectives, then we must abandon the quest for a
privileged, epistemically pure, God’s-eye perspective on the world. We need not disavow our cultural,
genealogical or political preferences for certain perspectives, but we must be careful to situate these
preferences within a discernible political agenda. The privilege of a particular perspective will derive
entirely from its situation within the political agenda it expresses, and not from its internal coherence or
privileged access to the real world.
Nietzsche and feminists agree on the failure of pursuing objectivism

p. 114) MRS
Virtually all feminist theorists, and at any rate those with whom I am primarily concerned here, follow Nietzsche in
rejecting the traditional philosophical ideal of objectivity. Feminist theorists have long maintained that
the achievement of objectivity would require agents to accede to a disembodied, trans-perspectival,
patriarchal standpoint—a chimerical gambit that Donna Haraway calls ‘the God trick’.4 This ‘view from
nowhere’ acquires the privilege and cachet of a ‘view from everywhere’, and effectively devaluates the experiences of those agents whose
knowledges of the world are most obviously and ineluctably situated. Feminist theorists
thus argue that this ideal of
disinterested, detached objectivity is pursued at the expense and exclusion of the situated knowledges
of women, especially women of colour. Traditional (patriarchal) epistemology thus delivers only a
simulacrum of objectivity, for its emphasis on disinterested detachment precisely discounts the
partiality that accrues to a radically situated perspective.
The notion of the cyborg tie Nietzsche and feminist theory together
p. 126--127) MRS
As an antidote to the dream of foundational innocence, by which Sandra Harding is perhaps enthralled, Donna
Haraway proposes
various imaginative exercises designed to liberate feminists from the perceived need for an originary,
epistemically pure standpoint. As an enabling narrative for postmodern feminists, Haraway offers the
myth of the cyborg, a composite, hybrid creature that embodies the irresolvable tensions and dualities
that characterize late mod-ernity.28 The cyborg represents the embodiment of purely prospective
agency, an unhistorical mutant to which the past—along with the allure of innocence, origin and
redemption—is irretrievably lost. If feminists can imagine themselves in their political activity as
cyborgs—which, in reality, women have always been—then they can perhaps exorcize the immobilizing
spectre of das Weib an sich, which continues to haunt their practices. Here too Haraway follows
Nietzsche. The original cyborg, I propose, is none otherx than Zarathustra, the consummate micro- political agent of late
modernity. I read the Bildungsgang of Zarathustra as something like a cyborg myth: operating in the shadow of the dead God,
consigned by his crepuscular destiny to a belief in idols that he can neither respect nor reject,
Zarathustra must somehow neutralize his romantic dreams of return and redemption. Zarathustra
eventually ‘becomes what he is’ by turning that which oppresses him—his destiny, his fatality—to his
own strategic advantage. He is ineluctably both free spirit and ascetic priest, and he implements both
strands of this dual heritage to found a micro- community of higher men (Z IV: 2–9). This community is unstable and
ephemeral, lacking altogether in theoretical justifications, institutional reinforcements, and foundational myths. This community of higher men
is exclusively prospective in its orientation; it has no laws, no history, and no goal above and beyond the survival of European nihilism.
Zarathustra founds this cyborg community, supplying it with a minimal micro-political infrastructure in the form of an inaugural ‘Ass Festival’ (Z
IV: 17–18), but eventually withdraws from it. He comes to realize that his dual heritage renders him both life-giving and life-destroying.
Although he has consecrated this micro- community in the Twilight of the Idols, he has also enslaved his companions and encouraged them to
invest their redemptive hopes in him. Sensing that he has enslaved his companions and usurped the station of the dead God—having become
someone for the sake of whom ‘living on earth is worthwhile’ (Z IV: 19)—he banishes the higher men and dissolves the micro-community he
founded. The
final scene of Zarathustra, framed in cyclical imagery that suggests a closed system, captures
the purely prospective agency that characterizes the cyborg. Restless in his sheltering solitude but
chastened by the prospect of reprising the logic that doomed his previous political endeavours,
Zarathustra rises none the less to greet the dawn. Bereft of hopes for ultimate success, armed solely
with the will to survive the decadence of late modernity, Zarathustra ‘goes under’ once again to found
yet another, equally ephemeral, cyborg community.
Indict – Harding
Harding’s objective attempts at epistemology turns feminism into slave morality
p. 123-124) MRS
From a Nietzschean perspective, Harding’ s terminological predilections appear uncannily honest, for
her dubious investment of the standpoint of the ‘slave’ with an epistemic privilege neatly recapitulates
the strategies of slave morality, as documented in On the Genealogy of Morals. According to Nietzsche, the ascetic
priest catalyses the ‘slave revolt in morality’ by supplying the slaves with metaphysical ammunition for
use against the nobles—and ultimately against themselves. Under the tutelage of the ascetic priest, the
slaves claim to prefer the punishment meted out to them, thus reinterpreting their suffering as a sign of
their goodness. The slaves may eventually succeed in disarming the nobles, but only by consigning
themselves to perpetual enslavement—herein lies their sole strategic advantage. Harding valorizes the
position of the ‘slave’ precisely as Nietzsche’s analysis of slave morality would lead us to expect: she
essentially transforms victimage into virtue. Fomenting what amounts to a ‘slave revolt in epistemology’, Harding
decrees that certain disadvantaged and subjugated agents command a privileged standpoint precisely
because they are victims. At first glance, Harding’s strategy might appear to reprise Haraway’s: both
endeavour to turn the conditions of victimage to the advantage of the victims, to ‘seize the tools to
mark the world that marked them as other’.23 But unlike Haraway, who openly situates her own
epistemological inquiries in the political agenda of postmodern feminism, Harding fails to situate her
own claims about (and upon) situated knowledges. Like its predecessor revolt in morality, then, the
‘slave revolt in epistemology’ empowers the ‘slaves’ only by displacing their agency and ensuring their
continued enslavement. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche offers us a sketch of the ascetic priest that instructively illuminates the
political consequences of Harding’s slave revolt in epistemology: He brings salves and balms with him,
no doubt; but before he can act as a physician, he first has to wound; when he then stills the pain of the
wound he at the same time infects the wound... in [his] presence everything necessarily grows sick, and
everything sick tame. (GM III: 15) Like the ascetic priest, Harding presents herself—qua epistemologist—
as the theoretical spokesperson for various subjugated standpoints, which she describes as instantiating
the position of the ‘slave’. Attempting to empower these disadvantaged agents as ‘slaves’, Harding
resorts to a quick fix. In order to alleviate the pain and alienation of their victimage, she promises these
‘slaves’ the (illusory) epistemic privilege that derives from a ‘less distorted’ perspective on the world.
These subjugated standpoints, she insists, afford their otherwise dispossessed residents a more accurate
glimpse of the world as it really is. Nietzsche’s psychological profile of the ascetic priest indicates that
Harding’s version of feminist standpoint theory treats only the ‘symptoms’ of gender-based oppression,
and not the underlying ‘illness’ itself (GM III: 17). If Nietzsche is right, then Harding’s groundless
assurance of a privileged standpoint on the world is more likely eventually to alienate women further
from their own experiences than to affirm and validate these experiences. The world appears alien and inhospitable
to the ‘slaves’ in part because they do not understand the logic and motives that inform the standpoint of the ‘master’. To lead the ‘slave’ to
believe otherwise, as Harding does, verges upon cruelty. The
quick fix that Harding provides will consequently prove
disastrous in the long run, for it ultimately prevents women from gaining the liberation that genuine
objectivity might supply.
Harding’s feminist project speaks for and over the most oppressed groups
p. 125) MRS
If Nietzsche’s analysis is applicable, then Harding’s version of feminist standpoint theory not only empowers
women qua victims, but also empowers Harding herself qua victims’ theoretical spokesperson—much as
the ascetic priest empowers the slaves qua sufferers and himself qua sufferers’ advocate. In order to
maintain the privilege of her own composite feminist standpoint, from which she presumes to speak
both about and for dispossessed women of colour, Harding must ensure their continued victimage. This
is not to say, of course, that Sandra Harding personally oppresses women of colour or consciously
sabotages their pursuit of enfranchisement. But because she fails to situate her own (second-order) claims
about their situated knowledges, and fails to appreciate the danger that her theorizing might further devaluate their
situated knowledges, she potentially stands in their way and further distorts their voices.24 By virtue of its very
constitution, trading on a problematic distinction between ‘women’s experiences’ and ‘women’s lives’, Harding’s version of feminist
standpoint theory cultivates in these victims a dependency on the mediatrix to express in a ‘scientifically
adequate’ fashion their experiences of victimage. Although Harding’s distinction between ‘women’s
experiences’ and ‘women’s lives’ is designed to subject the speech of all women to scientific rigour,25 its
implementation would be especially devastating for those oppressed women who already are not allowed or
empowered to speak for themselves. Those women of colour whose voices remain muffled, unheard,
unarticulated—and therefore ‘scientifically inadequate’— would become further enslaved to the
mediatrix who offers to derive theoretically the objective meaning of their experiences. Notwithstanding
her unimpeachably noble intentions, Harding potentially contributes to the victimage of those dispossessed
women of colour whom western culture—and now feminist science— discourages from speaking for
themselves.26
Indict – Generic
Feminist practice often recreates the power struggles that oppress women in the SQ
Tapper 93 (Dr. Marion Tapper lectured in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne for over two
decades and formally joined the MSCP in 2004, “Ressentiment and power: Some reflections on feminist
practices”, Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, Routledge, 1993. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=169352, PP.130-142, p. 130) MRS
The thesis is that some feminist practices, in so far as they are motivated by the spirit of ressentiment, have been preoccupied
with power as control and that this involves a double-edged danger. On the one side it risks playing into
the hands of, rather than resisting, the modern mechanisms of power that Foucault identified as operating by
techniques of surveillance, normalization and control. On the other, it involves a blindness to or forgetfulness of
other forms of the will to power which are positive, those active forms concerned with self-formation and autonomy. In particular, I hope to
identify what I shall call the
logic of a psycho-politics that seems to be emerging in a specific feminist
configuration of power/knowledge. It shifts from identifying and seeking to redress injustices to finding
‘evil’ everywhere, and not only in actions and practices but also in the ‘soul’—of individuals and types of
individuals, of language, discourse, culture and sexuality. It then requires and produces experts to detect
the ‘evil’ and special discourses to expose it.
Feminist political practice is based through ressentiment, this only serves to recreate
harms
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/purdue/detail.action?docID=169352, PP.130-142, p. 134-135)
MRS
The question I want to raise about this is whether it might be motivated and thereby explained by the
spirit of ressentiment? A number of features which are pertinent here characterize this spirit. First, an inability to ‘let go’, to
forget, it cannot have done with anything (Nietzsche 1969:58). It is both a backward-looking spirit—it needs to
keep on remembering past injustices—and an expansive spirit—it needs to find new injustices
everywhere. In the kinds of institutions, I am concerned with, those in which women have roughly
achieved equal power, it can be expressed in the following kind of phenomenon. Where those with
institutional power cannot justifiably claim that they are being discriminated against at the level of
actions and practices they can maintain their political integrity, their claim to ideological purity and
sense of powerlessness by resorting to finding ‘evil’ and injustice in wider and wider circumstances and
at deeper and more concealed levels. The issue is no longer just what men say about and do to women
but the very nature of language, discourse, culture and society. The enemy is no longer someone with whom you
disagree and hence with whom you can argue, but a type—man—who is uncomprehending and unable and unwilling to try, a type who’s very
being is recalcitrant to virtue, who is evil. The
person motivated by the spirit of ressentiment looks for ‘evil’, needs
to recriminate and distribute blame, to impute wrongs, distribute responsibilities and to find sinners. As
Nietzsche says, they want others to be evil in order to be able to consider themselves good (Nietzsche
1969:39). As Deleuze says, the man of ressentiment feels ‘the corresponding object as a personal offence and affront because he makes the
object responsible for his own powerlessness’ (Deleuze 1983:116). There seems to
be two elements here. One is the need
to see the other as powerful and responsible for my powerlessness, and then the transformation of this
thought into the thought that my powerlessness is a proof of my goodness and the other’s evil. And this
works by a revaluation of the enemy’s values— an act of the most spiritual revenge, as Nietzsche says (Nietzsche
1969:34). This makes sense of two aspects of feminist thought. First, the need to see women as helpless
victims, as abused, misrepresented, as powerless in the face of such an onslaught of sexist, patriarchal,
male power in every dimension of life and thought. Second, in the now frequently asserted claims of
women’s moral superiority: that women are caring, nurturant, their relations non-hierarchical, and so
on. And seeing ourselves as good gives us a right to demand that others conform to our values. One
further aspect of ressentiment worth mentioning here is the inability to admire and respect. In contrast
with envy, which allows for the possibility of admiring the work and qualities of those we envy,
ressentiment allows for no such thing. If a man gets a job or promotion or a publication it is explained
away by the fact that he is a man, using old boys’ networks and so on. And now that women are getting
jobs and so on we can see the same type of response on the part of men: she got it only because of
affirmative action policies or because of her sexual behaviour. However, in the discussion of ressentiment I
do not mean to be attributing particular psychological states to particular individuals, but rather to be
diagnosing the spirit of some current feminist discursive and non-discursive practices. The issue is why it is that
now that women have achieved considerable formal and substantial equality—at least in the institutions I am concerned with—this has not
proven enough. Myconcern is not with ressentiment as individual psychology but with the way this is played
out politically. Women have quite reasonably wanted power, but perhaps, entangled in the spirit of
ressentiment (quite unsurprisingly given our oppression throughout history) we have failed to be sufficiently critical
about what it was that we wanted in wanting power. We wanted what it was that we believed the
others had: power over.
Feminist politics engage in negative forms of the will to power

MRS
In this context it is interesting, if not also reasonable, to understand the extent to which the spirit of ressentiment
may be shaping the form and direction of feminist struggles and successes. May it not be that, under the
sway of reactive forces, we have been too inclined to seek power, to want to become masters of the
type appropriate to a regime of slaves, to want to dominate? That this might be so would be invisible to
us while we think of power as power over, while we think that whatever men do is exercising power or
control over us such that if we are to become powerful we will have to gain control. Ressentiment
makes it look as if power over is the only kind of power such that gaining power over seems the only
escape from powerlessness. This would blind us to the possibilities of other, positive, active forms of the will to power. It would
also, given that we are always enmeshed in relations of power, make it difficult to see how the ways in which we are
exercising power may be complicit in larger strategies of power that we might otherwise object to, such
that instead of resisting domination we are creating another form of it. To claim that some feminists
have been seeking power over men, and in some institutions are gaining it, is not to claim that women
have in fact gained the sort of power that those who manage institutions have. Clearly very few women
are senior managers, professors, deans or heads of department. What I mean can be better understood in the light of
Foucault’s account of the modern forms of power which operate by structuring the possible field of actions of others (Foucault 1982:221). It is
a form of power which makes individuals subjects; the crucial questions are: what sorts of subjects and
by what techniques is this achieved? My suggestion is that feminists do not have to be in ‘positions of
power’ to set up a situation in which certain things are not sayable and not doable, where certain
discursive and non-discursive practices are not acceptable. This can be done by establishing a norm for both discourse
and behaviour and using the rules and regulations of the institution to achieve this. If this is how power works we might well say why should
feminists not do this? After all, all
relations are embedded in relations of power in this sense and the whole point
of feminism is to rule out oppressive ways of structuring fields of action while, or in order to, opening up
other fields, other possibilities. I shall return to this question after having examined some ways in which
feminists are now exercising power. Let me consider some cases.
Feminist politics must reflect on what kind of power relations they wish to create
MRS
This last point brings me back to the issue that concerns me most here: the unreflective complicity in the modern forms of
power. It concerns me most because ethically I am not opposed to the idea that in the present context
special consideration should be paid in and to the appointment of women and that attention should be
given to the exclusion of women’s interests and needs from research and teaching. But the question is:
what are feminists doing in the way in which we are attempting to redress such injustices? The first
general point to be made is that these practices are playing into and extending the strategies of control
that the administrators of the academies are already implementing. Universities, at least in Australia, no longer seem
to be satisfied with the power to hold their staff accountable for what they do. They also require a new kind of person, one
prepared to engage in constant self-monitoring and to accept frequent external appraisal where the
criteria of acceptability, as distinct from accountability, are determined by the administrators in the
university and government. Some feminist bureaucrats and academics are providing them with further
criteria of acceptability and avenues for surveillance and in the process gaining further power for
themselves. For who will determine that acceptable procedures of appointment and promotion or
dismissal have been fulfilled? Who will decide what an androcentric perspective is such that they can determine that a curriculum is
gender-inclusive? Who will decide that a safe learning environment has been provided—that visual harassment has not occurred? Who will
assess which of the current research in women’s studies is to be the standard against which the content of a curriculum is to be reviewed? In
undermining the autonomy of individual academics and the processes of peer review and debate these new procedures will establish a profile
of the normal, acceptable academic and institute systems of surveillance and judgement. First, a
certain kind of individual will be
required, and not just one with the right statements, but also one with the right thoughts, movements
and gestures. Power, says Foucault, structures the possible field of action of others and the modern
form of pastoral power does so in ways which make individuals subjects: ‘subject to someone else by
control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (Foucault 1982:212).
And in its modern form it does so as both ‘a government of individuality and a form of government by individualisation’ (Patton 1989:265).
Second, the university administrators themselves may not care whether academics follow research in
women’s studies, develop gender-inclusive curricula or use non-sexist language, but it can only be
pleasing to them to have others supporting and proposing criteria and techniques of surveillance and
appraisal. Foucault says: in thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking of its capillary form of
existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and
inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, their learning processes and everyday
lives. (Foucault 1980:39) Feminists can and do use this kind of understanding of the mechanisms of power to
expose the effects of power on women’s bodies and lives (see Bartky 1988 for an example). But do we want to
use them ourselves? As with other areas of disciplinary power which employ experts to label us and
make us conform, these new procedures will require and produce a new set of experts and a new
regime of power/ knowledge. As Foucault says relations of power require the production of discourses
which involve an ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and which
have specific effects of power attached to them (Foucault 1980:131– 3). And this is what we are already
beginning to see. Arguments from authority—a feminist text says that Plato is sexist, so he is, that logic is masculine, so it is; women’s
studies research shows that multiple choice tests disadvantage females and that males and females employ different learning styles, so they do.
Will the content of a course be challenged because its text is sexist and so the teaching of it discriminatory? Will certain methods of teaching
and assessment be banned? Women claim that if they feel harassed then they have been harassed, and if need be will call in a range of feminist
experts to assert that this is so.
A2 – sexist
The most commonly pointed to passages to prove Nietzsche’s misogyny are actually
couched in irony and comments about societal structure, not his personal thoughts
Clark 15 (Maudemarie Clark is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside,
“Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics”, P. 143-147) MRS
Part VII of Beyond Good and Evil is titled “Our Virtues.” “Our virtues?” it begins. It is probable that we, too, still have our virtues, although in all
fairness they will not be the simpleminded and foursquare virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honor—and at arm’s length. We
Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we first-born of the twentieth century—with all our dangerous curiosity, our multiplicity and art of
disguises, our mellow, and, as it were, sweetened cruelty in spirit and senses—if we should have virtues, we shall presumably have only virtues
that 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—whereas is well known, all sorts of things lose themselves, all sorts of things are lost for good. Part
VII thus sets out to
search for our virtues—Nietzsche’s, of course, and the philosophers to whom the book is addressed—
the same ones who are asked in its first section: “What is it in us that wants truth?” This question—
probably the leading question of Beyond Good and Evil— does not receive its full answer until the
sections immediately preceding the statement of Nietzsche’s “truths” about “woman as such” at the
end of Part VII. If we wish to understand these so-called “truths” in their context, it should occur to us
that their placement is very strange unless they are intimately connected to what Nietzsche is trying to
tell us about both virtue and the will to truth, and that perhaps, as I want to suggest, his “truths” about
woman constitute a labyrinth in which we are meant to find the threads of Nietzsche’s own virtue. Beyond
Good and Evil 227 leaves little doubt as to what Nietzsche considers “our” main virtue. Honesty, he says, is the “virtue from which we cannot
get away, we free spirits,” and he calls upon us to “work on it with all our malice and love and not weary of ‘perfecting’ ourselves in our virtue,
the only one left us,” so that its splendor may “one day remain spread out like a gilded blue mocking evening light over this aging culture and its
musty and gloomy seriousness.” So,
I began to wonder if Nietzsche’s truths about “woman as such” could be
designed to illustrate for us the virtue of honesty. He certainly seems to be attempting honesty when he
prefaces them with the well-known warning that “these are after all only—my truths.” However, it is
unclear exactly what this is supposed to mean. If Nietzsche claims that his comments about woman are
true, he can’t sensibly claim that they are true only for him. So, the warning that these are “only my
truths” may be Nietzsche’s way of disclaiming the belief that his misogynistic comments are true. I think
we find a great deal of evidence for this interpretive hypothesis if we look at the warning’s immediate
context. On the issue of man and woman, Nietzsche writes, 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 as
only 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 ‘down deep.’ (BGE 231) This
is immediately followed by the warning in question: After this
abundant civility that I have just evidenced in relation to myself I shall perhaps be permitted more
readily to state a few truths about “woman as such”—assuming that it is known from the outset how
very much these are after all only—my truths. In other words, that these are “only [his] truths” should
already be clear to us from the comments that evidence Nietzsche’s “abundant civility” in relation to
himself. Those comments told us that what thinkers have to say about man and woman merely express
their convictions, and that convictions express the “great stupidity” they are, and are only “steps to self-
knowledge, sign-posts to the problem [they] are.” Nietzsche thus admits in effect that his so-called
“truths” about woman as such are really expressions of the great stupidity he is and are therefore more
likely to produce self-knowledge—if understood and analyzed appropriately—than knowledge of the
world (in this case, of women). At the very least, Nietzsche is letting us know that he is not claiming that
his comments on woman are true. Some interpreters may find nothing puzzling in this, for they think that Nietzsche denies that
any beliefs are true. But I have argued at length elsewhere that Nietzsche overcame this kind of nihilism in his later works (Clark 1990: 63–125)
and I can find no other basis he would have for denying that making an assertion involves putting it forward as true. So, I am left with the puzzle
of what his point could be when he makes assertions about woman after letting us know that he does not consider them true.
I start with
the observation that Nietzsche would be able to use these assertions to express his feelings towards
woman—for instance, his anger and resentment—even if he does not consider them true. The use of
assertions we do not believe in an attempt to hurt those we love or are dependent upon is hardly
uncommon among human beings, especially when in particularly childish moods. This suggests a way to
make sense of Nietzsche’s “Seven Little Sayings on Woman,” which seem so unlike anything else he
wrote and have always reminded me of children calling each other names and sticking out their tongues
at each other. That, I now see, suits them perfectly to play the role of easily recognized expressions of
resentment. Who could fail to recognize the resentment in, for instance: “How the longest boredom
flees, when a man comes crawling on his knees”? And since these “little sayings” do not even have the
grammatical form of assertions about woman, it is clear that we cannot simply read them as Nietzsche’s
beliefs about woman. Instead, we must arrive at these beliefs through a process of interpretation which
requires us to consider what his point is in reciting for us these sayings about woman. (It is not even clear
whose “little sayings” they are; they might be simply common sayings that BGE 237 in effect quotes.)2 Nietzsche’s “Little Sayings on
Woman” can therefore serve to warn us that his “truths” about “woman as such,” the ones that do have
the form of assertions about woman, also require interpretation, and that they might also be
expressions of resentment disguised as beliefs. Nietzsche’s “truths” about woman might serve to exhibit
for us (and to express) his misogynistic feelings, even though he is honest enough to admit that the
assertions these feelings inspire are not really true. I would find this strategy for interpreting Nietzsche’s
misogynistic comments problematic—because too open to abuse—if it required us to deny that
Nietzsche means or believes what he actually says about women. But I think the interpretation I have suggested can be
reformulated so that it avoids this problem. It requires only that we read Nietzsche very carefully and distinguish
what he actually asserts from what the reader is likely to conclude (erroneously) from his assertions.
When Nietzsche asserts that woman does not want truth, that “her great art is the lie, her highest
concern is mere appearance and beauty” (BGE 232), for instance, most readers will assume he means
that women do not want truth. In fact, however, he is writing not about women, but about “woman as
such,” which he also calls “the eternal feminine.” He is referring to the feminine essence, a social
construction that individual women need not exemplify. The German that Kaufmann translates as
“woman as such” is “das Weib an sich” or woman in herself (or itself). Given BGE’s central claim that das
Ding an sich (BGE 16) is a contradiction in terms, Nietzsche’s use of the phrase “das Weib an sich”
cannot be accidental. He is probably suggesting that our idea of the “eternal feminine” also involves a
contradiction in terms and therefore that no woman could really exemplify it. But I must leave this consideration
for another time. In any case, though we might want to disagree with Nietzsche about what the common understanding of femininity
involves,
once we see that his truths about woman as such are about this construction rather than about
individual women—especially if he thinks it involves a contradiction in terms—it is difficult to read them as either
misogynistic or anti-feminist. BGE 238’s claim that woman must be conceived as a possession is a slightly
more complicated matter. Nietzsche actually claims that this is how woman must always be thought of
by any man who has “depth, in his spirit as well as in his desires, and also that depth of benevolence
that is capable of severity and hardness and is often confused with them.” It seems to me clear that he is
talking about how such a man must think of individual women insofar as he thinks of them as
exemplifications of das Weib an sich, of the eternal feminine. This has no implications for how Nietzsche
must think of women given his skepticism about such essences. But why does Nietzsche think that a
man of depth and benevolence must think of woman as a possession? Contrary to some interpretations
of this passage (e.g., Schutte 1984: 162, 178–80), I find no evidence in it, nor in any section of BGE VII, that Nietzsche
thinks a patriarchal structure is necessary for the existence of higher culture.3 He does say it is worth
pondering how necessary and even humanly desirable it was that the Greeks became more severe
against woman as “their culture increased along with the extent of their power” (Kraft). I think the
emphasis here is on the increase in the ability of males to use force against women. This passage begins
by calling “shallow” those who deny “the most abysmal antagonism” between man and woman, and the
necessity of an “eternally hostile tension.” I take the claim to be that such eternal hostility exists
between men and women insofar as they see themselves as embodiments of the eternal masculine and
feminine. So it makes sense for Nietzsche to say that a man of depth and benevolence must think of
embodiments of the eternal feminine as property, if Nietzsche thinks, as I assume he does, that this
would be the best protection available to those cast in the role of the eternal feminine against the worst
abuses of male hostility and power. He may be wrong about this, of course, but he neither says nor
implies that women should accept for themselves the status of property. Therefore, I do not see his claim here as
anti-feminist.
Nietzsche encourages the act of searching for enlightenment and truth- he couches his
statements in misogyny to force his readers to think about his irony
In fact, if
we read Part VII carefully, we will see that nothing in it asserts or entails that women should not
seek their own enlightenment and emancipation from traditional sex roles and power structures.
Nietzsche’s most explicit claim against such attempts is that they involve a “corruption of the instincts”
(BGE 233) and a loss of “the sense for the ground on which one is most certain of victory” (BGE 239). Readers
can be expected to conclude from such claims that Nietzsche is against the emancipation of women, and
that he thinks he has reason to be. But careful readers of Part VII will find that its earlier sections give
grounds for making exactly parallel arguments against those who seek truth, and that Nietzsche
nevertheless encourages their search. I will consider his claims about the will to truth in some detail in order to exhibit the
parallel I have suggested that Nietzsche sets up between truth-seekers and feminists, and to answer another question I am sure many will
wish to pose. This question is: why,
if I am at all right about his actual assertions, did Nietzsche go out of his way
to make his comments on woman in these passages appear misogynist and anti- feminist? The two
sections immediately preceding BGE 23l’s warning that these are “only my truths” finally answer the
book’s initial question: what is it in us that wants truth? BGE 229 tells us that “almost everything we call
‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my
proposition.” When applied to those who seek knowledge, this proposition becomes the claim that “any
insistence on profundity and thoroughness” in matters of knowledge, i.e., any will to truth, “is a
violation, a desire to hurt the basic will of the spirit which unceasingly strives for the apparent and
superficial.” BGE 230 seeks to clarify this claim. It presents the desire for theoretical knowledge as an expression of the will to power.4 The
theoretician originally wants not truth, but to “appropriate the foreign,” to “assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold and to
overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory.” What is wanted, Nietzsche summarizes, is growth, “or, more precisely, the feeling of
growth, the feeling of increased power.” While intellectual appropriation may happen upon truth, it is too easily satisfied with a sense of
mastery to exhibit a will to truth, i.e., an “insistence on profundity and thoroughness” in matters of knowledge. So, it should be no surprise that
Nietzsche thinks the will that leads to theorizing is served by an apparently opposite drive, which produces “a suddenly erupting decision in
favor of ignorance, a satisfaction with the dark, with the limiting horizons, a Yea and Amen to ignorance— all of which is necessary in
proportion to a spirit’s power to appropriate, its ‘digestive capacity.’” But, then, to
repeat Nietzsche’s original question: if
philosophers can be so easily satisfied with the dark and the superficial, what in them wants truth? The
answer, given in BGE 231, is that it is their cruelty, their will to power turned against itself. To develop a
will to truth, Nietzsche is claiming, the spirit has to deprive itself of what it most wants: a sense of power
or mastery of the world. It has to discipline itself to give up what it wants to believe—because of the
sense of power belief would give—for the sake of what it has reason to believe. In so disciplining itself,
according to Nietzsche’s theory, the spirit still gets a sense of mastery, but it is mastery of the self rather
than of the world. But if the basic will of the spirit aims at mastery of the world (which I take to be
equivalent to the non-self), how can it give that up for the sake of mastery of itself? I think Nietzsche’s
answer is that it can do so only if it interprets its power over self as power over the world. He claims,
most explicitly in his GM, that the will to truth is the latest expression of the ascetic ideal, that thinkers
have been able to commit themselves to giving up what they want to believe for the sake of what they
have reason to believe only under the auspices of the ascetic ideal.5 The ascetic ideal is a life-devaluing ideal, which
gives priests and philosophers a sense of mastering the material and temporal world precisely because it devalues that world, by treating it as a
mere instrument or expression of the spiritual and eternal world with which contemplative types identify. According
to Nietzsche’s
story, however, this same ideal finally forbids itself the “lie involved” in belief in God, in metaphysics and
in any spiritual or eternal world, thus leaving us with what BGE 230 calls the “strange and insane task” of
translating human beings back into nature, of interpreting their activities, virtues, and value in
completely naturalistic terms. Part VII carries out this task in its account of honesty as an expression of
cruelty. Nietzsche calls “insane” the task of understanding philosophers and their honesty in naturalistic
terms, I think, because he believes that the will to power was able to become a will to truth only insofar
as honesty or truthfulness was interpreted in ascetic terms, as the overcoming of nature. The
naturalistic interpretation of honesty to which truthfulness itself leads therefore involves the “insane”
task of undercutting its own psychological support or attacking the ground on which it has been
standing.
Nietzsche’s critique of feminism is consistent with his general critique of power- he’s
not anti-feminist, he’s anti-traditional power relations
A great deal of the' reactive' nature of Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism can be seen to stem from the
ressentiment of the noble man who feels that his privileges are under threat, and the value he places on
difference and distance about to be rendered extinct. Diprose suggests that Nietzsche's anti-feminism 'is not
so much inconsistent but symptomatic of his own ressentiment \ As Diprose acknowledges, there is an
important aspect to Nietzsche's critique of nineteenth-century egalitarianism from which feminism can
learn; his point has become a matter of increasing concern to feminists themselves with the maturity of
the feminist movement. In the attempt to seek and establish equality - primarily, that of equality before the law -
oppressed groups often make the mistake of clothing themselves in the attire of their oppressors or
masters. They seek, quite understandably, a portion of the power which the masters have and which they wield.
But, in the satisfaction of this very human desire, these groups fail to realise that' the law' which will
make them equal is the law as defined and legislated by those in power: for women living under
patriarchy, for example, the law is the law of 'man'. In his essay on Nietzsche and woman called Spurs, the French philosopher
Jacques Derrida suggests that Nietzsche's radical- ness lies in the way in which his thinking is characterised
by a plurality of styles, and by a practice of writing which eschews adopting stable identities or positing
fixed essences. When, in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche claims that all (male) philosophers have
been dogmatic in their assumptions about truth, and compares this to their inexpertise with women, he
is saying that just as there is no single, unitary 'Truth' about life or reality to be discovered, so there is no
such 'truth' about woman to be found, for, like 'truth', she does not exist. The provocative suggestion contained in
Derrida's reading is that Nietzsche's objections to classical feminism can be seen to contain the 'post-feminist'
message that women's attempts to define 'woman as such' commit the same essentialist fallacies as the
masculinist tradition of Western philosophy. He writes: 'Feminism is nothing but the operation of a
woman who aspires 9 to be like a man... It wants a castrated woman. Gone the style.'
Permutation
His comments on women are couched in his concept of play in support of truthfulness-
he wants a feminism beyond good and evil and the perm can actualize that
One way of achieving a sense of power discussed in BGE 230 is the “by no means unproblematic readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits
and to dis- simulate in front of them.” In this, Nietzsche writes, “the spirit enjoys the multiplicity and craftiness of its
masks, it also enjoys the feeling of its security behind them: after all, it is surely its Protean arts that
defend and conceal it best.” If the interpretation I have offered is on the right track, Nietzsche must
think of himself as employing precisely this strategy when he conceals from us what he is actually
asserting about women and feminism—while leaving it fully accessible to the careful reader. Nietzsche
thus illustrates for us what it means to bring our “devils” to the support of our “gods,” and thus the kind
of support he thinks the will to truth will need once we completely abandon the ascetic ideal. In playing
this game of concealment, Nietzsche is not, or not only, having fun at the expense of women and
feminists. Misogyny is a particularly good issue with which to illustrate BGE’s claim about the future of
our honesty, our will to truth. By expressing misogynistic sentiments, Nietzsche shows us that he has an
interest in believing things about women that would justify those sentiments. What would justify such sentiments
is precisely his “truths” about “woman as such,” if they were truths about women. We can therefore interpret Nietzsche’s
comments about “woman as such” in Part VII of BGE as overcoming what he would like to believe about
women, out of his commitment to truth. If this interpretation is correct, Nietzsche’s comments on “woman as
such” exhibit his honesty at work more clearly than anything else in BGE, because nothing else shows us
so clearly the conflict between what he would like to believe and what he knows he has reason to
believe. So, Nietzsche can bring out here, more vividly than he could otherwise, the issue of what allows
him to be honest, to overcome his desire to believe, given his rejection of the ascetic ideal, all moral
posturing, and all ascetic conceptions of virtue. This is, I think, the major role of play in Nietzsche—not a
substitute for truth, as post-modernists sometimes seem to think, but an activity that supports
truthfulness in its non- ascetic reincarnation that Nietzsche here attempts to promote. Play can also
function as a sublimation of resentment, which Nietzsche also exhibits here. In conclusion, let me make clear that I
am not saying that Nietzsche is a feminist, or denying that he had problems with nineteenth-century feminism and would have them with
contemporary feminism. The
issue for him would still be, as BGE 232 suggests, whether women really want
enlightenment about themselves, whether we can will it. This means: whether we are willing to
understand ourselves and our virtues in completely naturalistic terms and to promote feminism without
the help of the ascetic ideal and what Nietzsche calls “moral word tinsels” (BGE 230). Whether or not
Nietzsche is anti-feminist ultimately comes down to whether a feminism beyond good and evil can and
will be developed.6 This is an issue for the future. But 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.
Perm do both- perspectivism is the best way to actualize the alt- the more perspectives
that can be put into something the better
Returning now to the passage under consideration, GS 76, we see that Nietzsche is explicit here about only one expression of the “enjoyment of
the mind’s lack of discipline”: “Precisely the most select spirits bristle at this universal binding force,” he writes,
“the explorers of truth above all. Continually this faith, as everybody’s faith, arouses disgust and a new
lust in subtler minds.” Those who so bristle are plausibly thought to be engaged in a higher or
sublimated expression of the will to power. But it is a “need of the first rank,” he concludes GS 76, that
“the faithful of the great shared faith stay together and continue their dance. . .. We others are the
exception and the danger—and we need eternally to be defended. —Well, there actually are things to
be said in favor of the exception, provided that it never wants to become the rule” (GS 76). There is much to be
said about this passage that I must leave for another occasion. But I want to point out that it does not take for granted
the value of the exception. Instead, it presents common ways of seeing and judging as a necessity of the
first rank for any human community. The exception is what needs to be justified. One thing Nietzsche
elsewhere puts forward in favor or justification of the exception is that its different emotions and values
give it access to truths that remain hidden from others. This is a major implication of Nietzsche’s
perspectivism, his claim that all knowing is perspectival, which is explicitly directed against the idea of
objectivity as disinterested knowing, knowing uninfluenced by willing and feeling (GM III:12). Stripped of its
visual metaphor, perspectivism amounts to the claim that all knowing is “interested,” rooted in affect or
will. I originally misinterpreted it, I should point out for those familiar with my work, because I took it to be an a priori claim rather than an
empirical one (Clark 1990: Ch. 5). I now see it as based on the application of evolutionary theory to human cognitive capacities.
Evolutionary advantage is conferred not by attention to any and all features of reality, but by selective
attention—at first, at least, to factors most relevant to human survival and reproduction. And it is
precisely affect, I take Nietzsche to be claiming—interest, emotion, feeling, passion—that turns the mind in a particular
direction, focusing its attention on certain features of reality and pushing it to register them as important. Perspectivism is thus a
metaphorical formulation of the claim that knowledge is acquired only by means of the focus and
interest supplied by affect (see Clark 1998b: 73–8, paper 12: 245–49 in this volume). So, interpreted, perspectivism has no
skeptical implications. Its point is not that there are different truths from different perspectives, or that
perspectives constitute their objects, but only that different affects call our attention to or reveal
different features of reality. But since we are talking about actual, “objective” features of reality, one
can continue to recognize their existence and take them into account even when one is no longer in the
grip of whatever affect allowed one to notice them in the first place. And one can also, at least sometimes,
move other people to recognize their existence even when they do not share one’s original affect, if for
instance they have an interest in taking you seriously or in being fair to people with other experiences or
perspectives. This, I take it, is much of why minority perspectives are important in science and other
disciplines. Occupants of these perspectives are likely to notice things others will not, and, given
conditions of equal power and respect, will often be able to bring others to see what they would not
have noticed on their own. This may not sound like Nietzsche to many. I can only say that I arrived at it by thinking through
Nietzsche’s perspectivism along with his commitment to science and his understanding of science as an essentially democratic enterprise. I
take Nietzsche’s well-known claim about the need for “more eyes, different eyes” (GM III:12) as a claim
about science as a whole and not about the individual researcher or research program, which he sees as
usually serving knowledge best by remaining stuck in some particular “nook,” a particular affective
stance or perspective.
A2 – Queerness
Perm
Nietzschean theory can be used to aid queer theory- destruction begets a new form of
creation, which the perm can actualize
In conclusion I want to say a few words about this. I take it that he was in the sense that Tamsin
Lorraine’s title specifies, that he was in flight from “oedipal masculinity.” Although I am not at all sure
how she understands this, it makes sense to me to interpret oedipal masculinity, the phenomenon
Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex was designed to understand, as first and foremost a matter of
defining the masculine or male over against and in opposition to the feminine or female: to be a “man”
is to have to a high degree just those qualities that are the opposite of those that are perceived as
characterizing women. It seems to me that the heterosexual fantasy of seduction that Nietzsche plays
out in Beyond Good and Evil is above all an attempt to “deconstruct” this version of masculinity, by
showing that the higher forms (and especially the highest) of the masculinity that begins by being set
over against the feminine eventually and essentially incorporates its apparent opposite. Nietzsche
identifies with women enough and loves women enough that I was tempted to claim that if he was in
the closet, he was actually a closeted lesbian. But here is what bothers me about Tamsin Lorraine’s
suggestions concerning Nietzsche’s flight from the form of masculinity we now see. I do not see how
Deleuze’s mechanistic talk of desiring machines and intensities can be helpful for such flight. It seems to
me more an expression of than a flight from oedipal masculinity. It is a picture of sex and life which
seems to withdraw from it all the passion, warmth, color, value, and significance that comes from the
projection of affect or feeling. And this seems to me prototypical of the masculinity that defines itself in
opposition to the feminine, as does Deleuze’s (1983) influential dichotomy between active and reactive
with which Lorraine is operating here. I agree that in some important sense Nietzsche thinks we are
“desiring machines.” We understand ourselves, he says, to the extent that we understand ourselves
mechanistically (A 14).4 Further, in line with the Humean position I have attributed to him, reason
cannot rule the will. What ultimately determines the will and sits in judgment over it can only be the will
itself, its actions and reactions, its desires and feelings. I believe that Nietzsche recognizes higher or
more developed forms of desire and feeling, but what counts as higher and more developed is again
determined by desire and feeling. So, all of this is in line with the talk of desiring machines that Tamsin
Lorraine takes over from Deleuze. But for Nietzsche, the view that I have just attributed to him comes
from a theoretical point of view. It does not give us the world as it appears from a practical point of
view, the viewpoint from which we care about things and live our lives, including, I would hope, our sex
lives. The world we care about is a world full of significance and value which are projections of our
feelings. Per- haps the problem that makes Deleuze seem attractive to Lorraine is that previous
interpretations and values have not been advantageous to queers. But for Nietzsche the solution cannot
be to abstain from value and significance, contrary to what Tamsin’s Deleuzean conception would seem
to require of us. We may have to destroy old values and significances, but, as Nietzsche says in The Gay
Science 58, we can destroy “only as creators.” To simply wipe value and significance from our picture of
the world, as is done by the Deleuzean picture of us as “desiring machines,” is simply to destroy, and for
Nietzsche that means: actually accepting the old values. But that is the beginning of a very different—
though certainly related—part of the story I have been sketching here.
A2 – Afropessimism
**Note**
utilize some of the cards from the Moten file – they are very consistent with our
argument and give you in-roads to Black Optimism arguments
Top – Becoming
Their reading of the historical technologies of antiblackness actively contributes to an
identarian model defined by stasis, pessimism, and ressentiment. Instead, you should
prefer our reading of sociology as a radical disarticulation of the very fabric of
humanity towards an ontology of freedom.
Scott 06 [Jacqueline, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University and Assistant Chair of the Philosophy Department, Scott,
Jacqueline & Franklin, Todd & Gooding-Williams, Robert. Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2006. Project MUSE]
I lost Nietzsche early on, though not in the willful way that Zarathustra prescribes. I had read him almost continuously during my junior year at
Morehouse College, starting with Beyond Good and Evil in a class and ending with a leisurely summertime perusal of Zarathustra. In a way this
experience brought me to philosophy, in part by demonstrating the possibility of doing whatever philosophers do in a recognizable voice, or in
what is recognizable as a voice, in part by giving me words for my inchoate but unmistakable inclinations toward antifoundationalism and
historicism. I would soon learn to articulate my early inclinations in language provided by philosophical pragmatists, mainly by John Dewey and
William James. But I was inclined in other directions as well, mainly toward work that spoke to the conditions of black life in the United
States. In
an effort to reconcile the impulse toward race work with my philosopher’s love for abstraction
and theory, I embraced a variety of Afrocentrism. But while that early accommodation fed my hunger
for historicism in ways that I will soon discuss further, it coexisted uneasily with my instinctive anti-
foundationalism. As I settled into my pragmatist convictions, my commitment to an Afrocentric model of
intellectual race work became a commitment to the branch of Africana philosophy that concerns itself
with race theory. Both the move to pragmatism and the move to, then away from, Afrocentrism took me
away from Nietzsche. He seemed at best indifferent and at worst positively hostile to my interest in race
work—there was, after all, all that talk of masters and slaves, of blonde beasts, both of which I freely
admit to misunderstanding, and of European culture(s). The resources I got from him I could get from pragmatism without
the added burdens of rampant misogyny, explicit elitism, and the demand that literary forms bear philosophical weight. And his genealogical
perspectivism seemed best suited to serve me simply as a preparation for the debunkings and reorientations of Afrocentric classicism, to which
I will also return. As it happens, though, some students became aware of my longstanding but long-dormant interest in Nietzsche and
approached me about a directed studies course in some of the later works. I warned them that other people at the university who then
employed me were better positioned to accompany them on this journey, but they persisted. I do not know how much they got out of our
meetings, but I got an opportunity to notice and to rethink what I had never really thought of before as my denial of Nietzsche. And that
opportunity led to this chapter.
I have never thought of pragmatism’s displacement of Nietzsche in my
intellectual life as a net gain, never forgotten that the costs of reading the likes of Ecce Homo come with
their own hidden benefits. But I have also never explained to myself just why I should not think that
way, and what the benefits are. So I would like to chart an alternate path from Afrocentrism to race
theory, this time using Nietzschean resources. 1 Think of it as a first step toward seeing how the
distinction between Deweyan pragmatism and Nietzschean perfectionism makes a difference. (A second
step would involve comparing the two paths, but first things first. ) In his writings, his editorship of the Journal of Black Studies, and his long
stewardship of Temple University’s Department of African American Studies, Molefi Asante has done more than anyone else to popularize and
refine the notion of Afrocentrism. (Mostly for this reason, I will use Asante’s name and “Afrocentrism”almost interchangeably. ) In
perhaps
his best book, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge, 2 he presents the view as a natural outgrowth of
the postmodern decentering of Europe and the deflation of Western pretensions to objectivity, to
neutrality, to the capacity to judge with context-independent universal validity. These Enlightenment
ideals, Asante says, served as masks for the promulgation of local European values and interests, and
recognizing this leaves us with two duties: to uncover the workings of interest in purportedly objective
inquiry and neutral behavior, and to find a new model for conducting inquiry and guiding behavior. On
Asante’s view, Afrocentricity is the key to discharging both duties. Asante’s alternative to universality involves the excavation and embrace of
centrism, which he describes as “the groundedness of observation and behavior in one’s own experiences. ”3 On his view, once we recognize
that behavior and inquiry necessarily depend on context, in particular on epistemic and experiential contexts, we ought to excavate the
relevant contexts and recognize the roles they play. Cultures provide the contexts that Asante takes most seriously,
and the cultures he is concerned with are the ones that correspond, to the extent that they do, to what
we think of as races. So his is a cultural, and a “racialist, ” centrism—where“racialist”appears in scare
quotes because he explicitly rejects the idea of biological races. On this view there is an African culture,
of course manifested in different ways in the local cultures of different African peoples, both on the
Continent and in the Diaspora. There is also a European culture, similarly manifested in various ways.
And while there are other broad cultures, these two play the crucial role in Asante’s project, which is
after all a blueprint for African centrism and for a greater understanding of the condition of “Africanity.
” Here is what focusing on the European epistemic context reveals: Europe wrote itself into history as an autonomous unit,
growing more or less steadily and alone from its Greek roots. It obscured both the relationships between its cornerstone,
Greece, and other Mediterranean cultures, like Egypt, and the role that other cultures, like that of medieval Islam, played in its subsequent
development. And along the way it denied that African cultures were civilized and, worse, that Africans had
any culture worth the name. When the creativity, productivity, and sophistication of some African
culture could not be denied, its African character had to be. So Egypt became part of the Orient or the
Near or Middle East, and the ancient ruins of great Zimbabwe became the work of a shadowy non-
African civilization with roots in Persia, India, or elsewhere. Just as the move to embrace centrism and reject universality
allows us to diagnose the obscurantist and self-serving nature of Europe’s self-image, it also helps us replace that image with something better.
Centrism requires that anyone seeking to understand a culture try as much as possible to do so from the standpoint of its
participants. African
centrism in particular encourages “the student . . . investigating African phenomena to
view the world from the standpoint of the African. ”4 Approached in this way, African cultural practices
will not appear as failed attempts to do something that Europe does better, or as proof of an
insensitivity even to the demands of culture, but rather as elements in a comprehensive way of life, with
their own meanings. And African history would be a narrative not of Africa as passive Object, acted upon
by others, but of Africa as active Subject, making its distinctive contributionsto the world. Here we reach
what Asante identifies as the centralidea of Afrocentrism:“the absolute projecting of African agency”—
as opposedto passivity and quiescence—“in every discourse and situation. ” 5 Any student of culture can benefit
from the Afrocentric perspective. But the injunction to understand “African phenomena from the standpoint of the African” also extends to
such African phenomena as the lives of African-descended individuals. Since
I am an African American, my attempt to
fashion a satisfactory life for myself is an African phenomenon, and as such is inexplicable without
reference to African culture. If I use European norms as guides, I will misunderstand my future and my
forthcoming self. I will, in Asante’s terms, have lost my center and risked my sanity. He has recently put it this
way: Despite the persistent travails of the centuries, the twists and turns in the road to agency, Africans in the Americas are clearly headedin
the right direction for sanity. And though we never had . . . a collective therapy session to straighten out our heads . . . we have been fortunate
to inherit a trust in our instincts . . . and the ability to keep an eagle’s eye on the African compass, not in the sense of some romantic vision of
Africa or some exotic biological determinism but in the deliberate historical appreciation of the role of our ancestors in maintaining in their
souls the knowledge of our continent of origin. 6 The historical inability of African Americans to navigate by the African compass—evidenced,
Asante explains elsewhere, by such traditionsas giving our children names like Paul Christopher Taylor rather than, say, Nnamdi Azikiwe or Adib
KMT – is the sort of problem that might benefit from “collective therapy. ”7 But we are getting better at orienting ourselves around the African
center, and are therefore “headed in the right direction for sanity. ”The
opposite of sanity in this context is dislocation, as
we see in this passage: Meaning in the contemporary context must be derived from the most centered
aspects of the African’s being. When this is not the case, psychological dislocation creates automatons
who are unable to fully capture the historical moment because they are living on someone else’s terms.
. . . Where will the African person find emotional and cultural satisfaction if not in her own terms?8 An
obvious question to put to Asante is the question of essentialism: one might wonder about the sincerity
with which Afrocentrism rejects “exotic biological determinism. ” This would produce a more nuanced conversation
than many have thought, since Asante can get much of what he wants without biological races. But I find myself thinking instead
that the first step along a Nietzschean path from Afrocentrism to race theory should involve the view
that is usually identified, even on Nietzsche’s behalf, as the pragmatic theory of truth. This label is fairly
misleading, not least because Nietzsche, like William James, remained mostly unmoved by the questions that call forth what we now consider
theories of truth. They were more interested in studying how we come to accept things as true, and in how that process enhances or inhibits
life, than in explaining what it is for sentences to successfully represent the world. In view of Afrocentrism’s historicist sensibility, I am
especially interested in exploring Nietzsche’s discussion of truth and power in his early reflections on historical inquiry. In the essay “On the
Uses and Abuses of History for Life, ”9 Nietzsche distinguishes three different ways of doing historical work, each
with its characteristic dangers, practitioners, and areas of applicability. The monumental historian spins
myths to embolden and inspire;he overlooks the unique confluence of circumstances that produced the
past and produces a narrative that conforms to the needs of the present, all in order to find models for
his own heroic activity. The antiquarian historian records and commemorates; he venerates the old and
denigrates the new, all for the sake of maintaining for others the conditions that have proven favorable
to the emergence of (his—and for Nietzsche it was always his) life. The critical historian, finally, questions and
condemns the past in order to be free of it, to make room for the creative activity of fashioning the
future. On Nietzsche’s view we need all three approaches, judiciously recruited at the appropriate
moments. The point of all this, or one point, is that human life involves narration, telling stories, discursive
emplotment:we need to establish a sense of ourselves, of who we are and what we are about, in order
to get on in the world. Stories, like life, unfold over time, and humans are unique among animals in their
awareness of their historicity. If storytelling is always selective, a matter of deciding what matters and
what does not, then for storytelling animals like ourselves, life is always selective. We tell the stories,
write the histories, that make sense to us, but sense making is shaped by extra-rational factors:by
unconscious drives, by a preconscious sense of the context in which the act of inquiry takes place. One aim
of “Uses and Abuses” is to make this aspect of the human condition explicit, to put us in a position to get better at the selective self-narrating
that we will inevitably engage in anyway. Nietzsche
aims here to make us aware of the different ways in which
selectivity can operate, of the different kinds of partial stories we can tell about the past, so that we can
recognize the importance of each approach. It is tempting to say that Afrocentric classicism involves a
kind of monumental history. Asante’s Afrocentric reorientation of history typically, and most vividly in hands other than his, 10 does
more than restore Egypt’s place on the African continent and its relationship to Greek culture and philosophy. It establishes Egypt as the
classical African civilization, as important to African peoples as Greece is to Europeans. Still, I am not confident of the link between Afrocentric
classicism and monumental history. Monumentalism, Nietzsche says, “pertains to the active and powerful human being, to the person who is
involved in a great struggle and who needs exemplars, teachers, and comforters, but is unable to find them among his contemporaries”(HL2).
The use of this kind of history “lies in the great stimuli that a powerful person derives from it”(HL2). This is one of the early appearances of the
doctrine that Stanley Cavell prizes under the heading of Perfectionism, the idea that one’s present self is something to be overcome, that an
Afrocentrism, it seems to me, is not
unattained but attainable self awaits recognition and approximation. 11
attentive in this way to the goal of providing resources for individual self-creation. The
aim of empowering the individual is always at the forefront of Afrocentric theory, but it
is constrained by the individual’s embedment in Asante’s overarching cultural
nationalist project. The project might be construed as a model for self-overcoming, but
it posits a specific self—the Eurocentric, alienated, dislocated self—to be overcome, and
a specific self—the centered Afrocentric self—that we are to become. Where Nietzsche undermines
most of his specific recommendations regarding what the unattained self looks like –“I want no believers, ”he says, and “I erect no new idols”
(EH“Destiny”1, EHP 2)—Asante tells us directly that moving in the direction of greater health, as he can agree with Nietzsche to call it, means
becoming a member of the African Cultural System. Afrocentric history does not seem driven by the monumentalist aim of self-overcoming, but
this may not yet provide grounds for criticism. Nietzsche
urges us to blend the three historical modes, and maybe the
dampening of the monumentalist’s fervor comes from Asante’s willingness to heed this injunction.
There is, for example, a fair degree of antiquarianism in the Afrocentric effort to recover the suppressed
history of African culture. Nietzsche seems almost to have been writing about the Afrocentrist when he
describes the antiquarian as someone who looks beyond his own transient, curious, individual existence
and senses himself to be the spirit of his house, his lineage, and his city. At times he even greets across
the distance of darkening and confusing centuries the soul of his people as his own soul; the ability to . .
. detect traces that are almost extinguished, to instinctively read correctly a past frequently overwritten .
. . these are his gifts and his virtues. (HL 3) The danger of antiquarianism is that “anything ancient and past . . . is simply regarded as venerable,
and everything that fails to welcome the ancient with reverence—in other words, whatever is new and in the process of becoming—is met with
hostility and rejected”(HL3). Again, this seems not to apply to the Afrocentrist, since Asante, at least, works quite hard to link new practices and
“African phenomena” to their ancient roots, or to the cultural predispositions that generated the ancient as surely as they do the
contemporary. And again, perhaps the avoidance of this pitfall shows the Afrocentrist’s successful blending of the different historical
modes. There is, however, a sense in which Afrocentrism does close itself to the future, a sense in which it
fails to fuse its approach with thethird Nietzschean mode of critical history. As I have noted, the
Afrocentric picture is locked into a kind of cultural racialism. Asante usually prefers not to call them
races, but his cultural groups are coextensive with the races of the dominant strains of nineteenth-
century Western race “science.” In addition, he picks out the dislocated members of his culture groups by
determining, in effect, what race they belong to—who counts as African descended and who does not, say—and evaluating
their relationship to the culture of their “continent of origin.” One wonders, what does this picture enjoin us to say
about the growing recognition that a metaphysics of racial purity is untenable? In one place Asante concedes the
“impurity”of all racial groups, especially African Americans. Nevertheless, he goes on simply to insist that “the core of our collective being is
African,”and that “we are by virtue of commitments, history, and convictions an African people. ”12 But even if we can defend this effort to
gloss over the “impurity”of the people we still categorize with intuitive ease, what are we to say about the growing numbers of people who
resist stable categorization and identify themselves as biracial or multiracial—that is, who link themselves to more than one “continent of
origin”? We are back in the neighborhood of worries about essentialism, but the point here has more to do with how Asante handles the
novelty that these essentialism-busting experiences and people represent. He might say that even
if people embrace their
heterogeneity and declare themselves mixed, the racialized distribution of social goods in places such as
the United States will still proceed as if these people belong wholly to one group or another. But to say
this is to make identity contingent upon the operations of white supremacy, and thereby to violate his
basic principle:“the absolute projecting of African agency, ” the depiction of Africans as self-defining
subjects rather than externally defined objects. As an alternative, he might say that it is politically
important for black people to abide by the one-drop rule, to recruit anyone with any discernible black
‘blood’ into the race. But the claim so far has not been that people who misidentify are politically naïve; the claim is that they are sick.
Finally, he might say that mixed-race peoplejust have more options, that they can permissibly identify with any part of their ancestry. But it is
hard to see how to reconcile this with the hypodescent-inspired ipse dixit offered in response to the general problem of purity, or with the
apparent assumption that one culture or another clearly counts as mine. 13 Whatever Asante might say, I have been unable to find any
published accounts of what he does say, which seems to me to suggest a kind of imperviousness to an emerging future. Instead of following the
path of the critical historian—and of the great historian, who artistically, poetically, blends the various modes in furtherance of life— instead
of freeing himself from problematic aspects of our racial past in order to creatively imagine a novel
future, the Afrocentrist venerates. In a way, in this way, Afrocentrism aligns itself with Nietzsche’s great
targets, Christianity, Socratism, liberal democracy, and so on: by privileging Being—in this case, racial and cultural
purity—over the Becoming of fluid and ever-changing forms of life, Afrocentrism becomes unable to say
yes when the world presents itself in ways that undermine the standing conditions of possibility for the
likes of Asante. A final example may make the point more completely. While arguing that African peoples should have African names, Asante
asks, “Can you imagine a white European with a name like Kofi Adegbola? Or a Japanese in the United States . . . with a name like Gerhard
Casmir?”14 As it happens, I do not have to imagine the latter case, or one like it: I once had a student of Japanese descent who had been
adopted as an infant, and, of course, named, by an Irish American couple. This student, whom I will call Siobhan O’Reilly—not her real name,
but close to it— was interested in her Japanese heritage, and was in fact exploring it in her studies; but she was comfortable with and loved her
adoptive family. I guess I am supposed to think of her as dislocated, as having gotten out of touch with her culture. This is an intuitively
plausible way to think; it may even have motivated her study of Japan. There is a sense in which the home of her biological parents belongs to
her, given the way the world is, the way we think about identity;and she should be free to explore it and create connections. There is even a
sense in which denying any connection whatsoever, denying that her body and heritage make her subject in certain places to certain modes of
treatment, to being approached as an Asian woman, with all that that means, might reveal her to be self-deceived. But should we have to say
that she is dislocated, that she needs therapy, if she recognizes her interpellation as an Asian-American in a racialized society but does no
more—if she refuses to claimher right not just to explore but to embrace Japanese culture? The case of Siobhan O’Reilly encapsulates much of
the complexity that attends contemporary social identities, the complexity that the Afrocentric approach denies in its constricted perspective
on life. The transmissibility of culture and mobility of peoples, which makes possible an Irish American woman with, as it were, a Japanese
body; the asymmetries of racialized desire, by which I mean, among other things, the disparity in the U. S. adoption “market”between the
robust demand for infants from Asia and the stagnant demand for African American infants;the accumulating effects of a few decades of
extremely relaxed— relative to its historical heights—state enforcement of racial identification in the U. S. , on account of which interracial
marriages are on the rise and even the census has abandoned the illusion of purity; the
increasing awareness of the extremely
parochial nature of United States racial practices and of the less than seamless fit between culture,
nationality, and race—all of these conditions of contemporary social life have to drop out of the
Afrocentric account, or appear as maladies, signs of the sickness of the age. What if we were to embrace the
conditions that make Siobhan’s case so complicated? What if those of us concerned with intellectual race work took
the complexity of race not as an incentive for disavowal and negation but as a challenge to our ability to
creatively and productively engage with, which is to say to re-create, the world? What if we moved from
antiquarian Afrocentrism to a critical, or critically historicist, race theory?
Top - Mythologization
Their view of politics actively contributes to the mythologization of whiteness – the
alternative is a reactionary flight from the self in opposition to white supremacy – this
culminates in ressentiment
Mbembe n/d (Achille, political theorist and professor of philosophy, “Achille Mbembe and the State
of South African Political Life”)
But behind whites trial looms a broader indictment of South African social and political order.
South Africa is fast approaching its Fanonian moment. A mass of structurally disenfranchised people have the feeling of
being treated as “foreigners” on their own land. Convinced that the doors of opportunity are closing, they are asking
for firmer demarcations between “citizens” (those who belong) and “foreigners” (those who must be excluded). They are
convinced that as the doors of opportunity keep closing, those who won’t be able to “get in” right now might be left out for generations to
come – thus the
social stampede, the rush to “get in” before it gets too late, the willingness to risk a fight
because waiting is no longer a viable option.
The old politics of waiting is therefore gradually replaced by a new politics of impatience and, if necessary, of
disruption. Brashness, disruption and a new anti-decorum ethos are meant to bring down the pretence of
normality and the logics of normalization in this most “abnormal” society. Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon and a plethora
of black feminist, queer, postcolonial, decolonial and critical race theorists are being reloaded in the service of a new form of militancy less
accommodationist and more trenchant both in form and content.
The age of impatience is an age when a lot is said – all sorts of things we had hardly heard about during the last twenty years; some ugly,
outrageous, toxic things, including calls for murder, atrocious things that speak to everything except to the project of freedom, in
this age
of fantasy and hysteria, when the gap between psychic realities and actual material realities has never
been so wide, and the digital world only serves as an amplifier of every single moment, event and
accident.
The age of urgency is also an age when new wounded bodies erupt and undertake to actually occupy
spaces they used to simply haunt. They are now piling up, swearing and cursing, speaking with excrements, asking to be heard.
They speak in allegories and analogies – the “colony”, the “plantation”, the “house Negro”, the “field
Negro”, blurring all boundaries, embracing confusion, mixing times and spaces, at the risk of
anachronism.
They are claiming all kinds of rights – the right to violence; the right to disrupt and jam that which is
parading as normal; the right to insult, intimidate and bully those who do not agree with them; the
right to be angry, enraged; the right to go to war in the hope of recovering what was lost through
conquest; the right to hate, to wreak vengeance, to smash something, it doesn’t matter what, as long
as it looks “white”.
All these new “rights” are supposed to achieve one thing we are told the 1994 “peaceful settlement”
did not achieve – decolonization and retributive justice, the only way to restore a modicum of dignity to victims of the injuries of
yesterday and today.
Demythologizing whiteness
And yet, some hard questions must be asked.

Why are we invested in turning whiteness, pain and suffering into such erotogenic objects?
Could it be that the

concentration of our libido on whiteness, pain and suffering is after all typical of the
narcissistic investments so privileged by this neoliberal age?
To frame the issues in these terms does not mean embracing a position of moral relativism. How could it be?
After all, in relation to our history, too many lives were destroyed in the name of whiteness. Furthermore, the structural
repetition of past sufferings in the present is beyond any reasonable doubt. Whiteness as a necrophiliac power structure and
a primary shaper of a global system of unequal redistribution of life chances will not die a natural death.
But to
properly engineer its death – and thus the end of the nightmare it has been for a large portion of the humanity – we
urgently need to demythologize it.
If we fail to properly demythologize whiteness, whiteness – as the machine in which a huge portion of
the humanity has become entangled in spite of itself – will end up claiming us.
As a result of whiteness having claimed us; as a result of having let ourselves be possessed by it in the manner of an evil spirit,
we will inflict upon ourselves injuries of which whiteness, at its most ferocious, would scarcely have
been capable.
Indeed for whitenessto properly operate as the destructive force it is in the material sphere, it needs to
capture its victim’s imagination and turn it into a poison well of hatred.
Forvictims of white racism to hold on to the things that truly matter, they must incessantly fight against
the kind of hatred which never fails to destroy, in the first instance, the man or woman who hates while leaving the structure
of whiteness itself intact.
As a poisonous fiction that passes for a fact, whiteness seeks to institutionalize itself as an event by any
means necessary. This it does by colonizing the entire realms of desire and of the imagination.
To demythologize whiteness, it will not be enough to force “bad whites” into silence or into confessing
guilt and/or complicity. This is too cheap. To puncture and deflate the fictions of whiteness will require
an entirely different regime of desire, new approaches in the constitution of material, aesthetic and
symbolic capital, another discourse on value, on what matters and why.
Fanon = Nietzsche
Fanon’s understanding of racism is that the white man comes to understand
himself relative to the black animal – this is premised on Nietzsche’s slave
morality
Haro 14 (Jose, University of South Florida “Fanon and Nietzsche” p 128-9)
Nietzsche’s conceptualization of ressentiment is both implicitly used and explicitly evoked in Fanon’s
work, particularly Black Skin, White Masks. In the final comments of his discussion of “The Black Man
and Recognition,” Fanon states, “Man’s behavior is not only reactional. And there is always resentment
in reaction. Nietzsche has already said it in The Will to Power. To induce man to be actional, by
maintaining in his circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human, is the
task of the utmost urgency for he who, after a careful reflection, prepares to act.”128 This passage ends
Fanon’s reflection upon the possibility of recognition in a racialized world. It captures both the problem
and the desired resolution. As to the problem, Fanon cites Nietzsche to claim that in all reaction
ressentiment is present. His desired solution is that people become actional through being provoked
into refocusing their attention on the basic values that ground the human world, the world of mutual
recognition. Reactionary ressentiment is thus a central theme of Fanon’s thoughts. any ontology is
made impossible in a colonized and acculturated society… In the weltanschauung [sic] of a colonized
people, there is an impurity or a flaw that prohibits any ontological explanation. Perhaps it could be
argued that this is true of any individual but such an argument would be concealing the basic problem.
Ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the black man, since it ignores lived experience.
For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some people
will argue that the situation has a double meaning. Not at all. The black man has no ontological
resistance in the eyes of a white man. From one day to the next, the Blacks have to deal with two
systems of reference. Their metaphysics, or less pretentiously their customs and the agencies to which
they refer, were abolished because they were in contradiction with a new civilization that imposed its
own.129 I have quoted Fanon at length because these claims provide context to this process of
understanding the consequences and dramas of colonialism and this then sets up ressentiment as a
central consideration of the chapter.
Fanon’s entire understanding of power, vision of a new humanity, and call to arms is
informed first and foremost by Nietzsche
Apter, Bhabha, and Terry 17 (Emily, Homi, and Brandon – all professors at Colombia University.
“Frantz Fanon and Nietzsche” http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/nietzsche1313/8-13/)
Frantz Fanon’s (1925-1961) thought and writings are marked by an orientation toward a possible future both in time and space, captured so
poignantly in the closing chapter of Black Skin, White Masks (1952)—his call to constantly introduce “invention into life,” to “endlessly create
myself,” to “build the world of you”—and in the closing line of The Wretched of the Earth: “comrades, we must make a new start, develop a
new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.” Fanon’s
call on the colonized to “start over a new history of
man” is striking, and naturally brings to mind many of the themes we have been discussing in
Nietzsche 13/13. Fanon’s first book—Black Skin, White Masks, published by Le Seuil in 1952 when Fanon was only 27 years old—
was book-ended by Nietzsche. A certain Freudo-marxian Nietzsche, a Nietzsche embedded in a
psychoanalytic perspective—but a Nietzsche nonetheless. Nietzsche is both the first philosopher
explicitly mentioned in text and the final philosopher who closes the last page of the conclusion.
“Man’s misfortune, Nietzsche said, was that he was once a child,” Fanon writes in the opening pages
of the introduction, before naming Freud or even mentioning disalienation. And Fanon closes his book, after
returning to the theme of disalienation, again with the penultimate thought that “At the start of his life, a man is always congested, drowned in
contingency. The misfortune of man is that he was once a child.” Nietzsche, Freud, Marx—the great nineteenth century
thinkers of suspicion—accompany Fanon. And as they did, Fanon too would unmask. Unmask those “white masks” brought on
by European colonialisms and their attendant complexes of inferiority. Much like Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and building on that even
earlier critical tradition, Fanon would seek to lift the veil from our eyes, to emancipate us from our self-
incurred immaturity—from our childhood. For Fanon, the task would not be easy—in part because of the peculiar history of
French slavery and colonialism. As Fanon would show in the penultimate section of Black Skin, White Masks, titled “The Black Man and Hegel,”
the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave would not play itself out in the same way in the French context, because the French lord as well as
the colonized (and here, Fanon drew a distinction with the American experience) is “basically different from the one described by Hegel.” The
colonizer does not seek recognition, and the colonized is far more dependent on him. In the French context, Fanon, writes, “the black man does
not know the price of freedom because he has never fought for it.” It has just been given to him—in diluted and make-believe ways. The
Hegelian dialectic cannot play itself out—but leads, in this case, only to a purely reactional phase full of ressentiment. And
it is therefore
to Nietzsche and his will to power that Fanon turns to articulate a positive, “actional” call to arms .
“Nietzsche had already said it in The Will to Power,” Fanon writes at the end of the last chapter on “The Black Man
and Recognition.” Fanon adds—once again, accompanied by Nietzsche: “To induce man to be actional, by maintaining in his
circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human, that is the task of utmost
urgency for he who, after careful reflection, prepares to act.” It is this positive, willful call to action that Fanon leaves us
with in 1952: a call to introduce “invention into life,” to “build the world of you, man,” to always question, to disalienate, to “touch the other,
feel the other, discover each other.” To “take a stand against this living death.” To be “a revolutionary.” Black Skin returns to the Dionysian
poetics of Césaire. It harkens back to Césaire’s conception of “Négritude,” which we discussed at the last Nietzsche 13/13—in fact, the
continuity from that last seminar is striking. It is in Césaire that Fanon finds the best expression of cultural imposition and of the task ahead: to
go all the way down, to reach rock bottom, but to come back up and overcome—bringing “the black man” with him, “lift[ing] him up to the
skies.” “Rise/ Rise/ Rise,” that is the sentiment, and one can almost hear Zarathustra as well in those passages. Frantz Fanon’sBlack Skin,
White Masks (1952) reflects a deep engagement with the thought of Nietzsche, especially in relation to
the themes of the active and reactive, spiritual metamorphoses, creativity, and willing a new vision of
humanity. In this seminar, we will explore Fanon’s work and its influence on critical and postcolonial theory with our distinguished
guests, Emily Apter, Homi Bhabha, and Brandon Terry.
Fanon’s understanding of action, specifically the actions of black revolutionaries and

their white counterparts, is informed by Nietzsche’s theory of agency. “The doer is
merely a fiction added to the deed.”
Posnock 97 (Ross, Department of English and Comparative Literature at Colombia, “The Black
Intellectual” p. 335-6)
Ten years after his death the official Algerian reaction sought to minimize Fanon's role, to "'de-Fanonize
Algeria, and to de-Algerianize Fanon,"' in the words of one official. In short, "although he helped with
'our cause,' 'he was not one of us"' (FF, p. 244). This attitude, notes Irene Gendzier, betrays a desire to
"lay aside the ghost of a too-powerful Fanon" and to "protect the authenticity of the Revolution as an
all-Algerian phenomenon" (FF, pp. 244, 243). Authenticity is precisely what Fanon endangers, for he
destabilizes the identity logic of us/them, identity/difference, inside/outside, native/stranger. Because it
eludes these binaries, Fanon's life seems incoherent, an "impossible life" of no return and harrowing
self-estrangement to those, like Memmi, who judge by the Cartesian terms of existential humanism.
These terms are blind to how Fanon's allegedly impossible life enabled him to introduce "invention into
existence" and challenge the disciplinary logic of identity thinking (BS, p. 229). We have seen that Fanon
reverses the trajectory of authenticity to instigate a crisis of origins. Analogously, he turns identity from
the ground of being into an effect of practice: what we do determines who we are. The West Indian is
buried an Algerian "brother." Fanon describes his leap of invention as Nietzschean in its effort "to
educate man to be actional" rather than reactional (BS, p. 222), and it approximates Nietzsche's
dissolution of the subject into action: "The deed is everything"-"'the doer' is merely a fiction added to
the deed."37 Making the deed everything, in Nietzsche and Fanon, demands that the past be
evacuated, for history's humiliations viscerally weigh upon one in the present. The Negro "is the slave
of the past," says Fanon, and "like it or not, the past can in no way guide me in the present moment"
(BS, p. 225). The extremity of Fanon's Nietzschean solution responds to the extremity of alienation
endured by a black colonial subject. Du Bois's alienation under Jim Crow is just as palpable-as "a colored
man in a white world" he felt "kept within bounds," neither an American nor a man (DD, p. 653). But for
Du Bois it would be unthinkable tojettison the past, since to work in the kingdom of culture is the very
"end" of "striving." Yet Du Bois's historical embeddedness does not paralyze his will to invent. After all,
he was trained by James in pragmatism, a kind of American version of the Nietzschean philosophy of
action that Charles Sanders Peirce initated in his 1868 deconstruction of the a priori Cartesian subject. In
this light we can place Du Bois's controversial claim that it was only at Fisk that "a new loyalty and
allegiance replaced my Americanism: henceforward I was a Negro" (A, p. 108).38 He replaces biology
with will, thus turning a statement of identity ("I was a Negro") into a declaration of practice. At Fisk,
recalls Du Bois, "I became a member of a closed racial group with rites and loyalties.... I received these
eagerly and expanded them" (DD, p. 627).
Fanon says that we should fail to destroy the idols of normative racism – this is an idea
developed from Nietzsche
Gordon 15 (Lewis, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought p. 24-25)
There is a white construction called “the black.” This construction is told that if he or she really is
human, then he or she could go beyond the boundaries of race. The black can supposedly “really
choose” to live otherwise as a form of social being that is not black and is not any racial form or
designation. Racial constructions are leeches on all manifestations of human ways of living: language,
sex, labor (material and aesthetic), socializing (reciprocal recognition), consciousness, and the “soul.”
Black Skin, White Masks thus describes a quasi-anonymous black hero’s eff orts to shake off these
leeches and live an adult human existence. Each chapter represents options off ered the black by
modern Western thought. In good faith, then, the black hero attempts to live through each of these
options simply as a human being. But the black soon discovers that to do so calls for living simply as a
white. Antiblack racism presents whiteness as the “normal” mode of “humanness.” So, the black
reasons, if blackness and whiteness are constructed, perhaps the black could then live the white
construction, which would reinforce the theme of constructivity. Each portrait is, however, a tale of how
exercising this option leads to failure. And in fact, “failure” takes on a peculiar role in the work; it is the
specialized sense in which Fanon is using the term “psychoanalysis”: “If there can be no discussion on a
philosophical level—that is, the plane of the basic needs of human reality—I am willing to work on the
psychoanalytical level—in other words, the level of ‘failures’ [ratés], in the sense in which one speaks of
engine failures” (Pn, 18). The French word that matches the ordinary English use of the word failure,
where defeat or setback is meant, is échec. Raté more properly refers to a misfi re, missing the mark, or
something backfiring, as in an old combustion engine, which explains Fanon’s reference to engine
failures. Th e word is also used, however, to refer to not measuring up, of failing to meet a standard, as
in the expression rate de père, a man failing to meet the expectations or standards of fatherhood, a
concept rich with psychoanalytical content. Fanon is thus referring to the frustration not only of
missing the mark but also of the repercussions, which, inevitably, lead to therapy. That is why he says he
is “willing to” work on the psychoanalytical level, for, as we will see, Fanon raises, as well, the question
of whether the approach of failure is also a form of failure, which Writing through the Zone of Nonbeing
25 further raises the question of whether such a psychoanalytical approach is exemplifi ed or
transcended because of ultimately not measuring up or failing to meet its own standard. Th ere is thus a
paradox of failure: To fail at it is to succeed; to miss the mark is to demonstrate the validity of rejecting
it, and therefore affi rming or achieving it. Th e motif of failure raises, still more, the question of the type
of text Fanon has composed and how he is situated in relation to it. What we fi nd is that each failure is
not necessarily Fanon’s, for he is both the voice of the text (the black) and the voice about the text (the
theorist and guide). Th us, although Fanon the quasi-anonymous hero of the text, the black, constantly
fails (misses his mark), Fanon the critic of Western discourses of Man, Fanon the revolutionary theorist
who demands systemic and systematic change, succeeds (by identifi cation of each failure).
Paradoxically, if the hero of the text wins (that is, achieves his aims), the hero of thought (the theorist)
fails, and vice versa. Th us, after announcing in the introduction that ontogenic and phylogenic
explanations fail and need to be mediated by sociogenic explanations premised on human agency,
Fanon charts the course of the black with these theoretical “idols” of humanization. Like Friedrich
Nietzsche, who sought to break the idols of (and, thus, idolatry in) Western civilization, Fanon hopes to
destroy the idols that militate against the human spirit in an antiblack racist and colonial world.
Fanon’s theories of colonialism and decolonization are built on his readings of

Nietzsche
Fanon is very much in line with some of Nietzsche’s thought about the inculcation of morality and its
violent nature. This is seen in his in thoughts about colonialism and decolonization, particularly with
his understanding of violence within these contexts. For Fanon, violence is a key feature of colonialism
that permeates the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. From the moment the
colonizers stake their claim to the territory of the colonized people, it is marked by violence. Regarding
this Fanon states, “Their first confrontation was colored by violence and their cohabitation—or rather
the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer—continued at the point of the bayonet and under
cannon fire.”223 Colonization begins as a violent encounter and the relationship between the colonized
people and the colonizers remains violent throughout its duration. Fanon demonstrates that
colonization is characterized as violent and the consequences of this process are apparent in the
geography, values, and modes of being of the colonized people and the colonizers. The physical
geography is repeated in the geography of the psyche. Articulating the colonized world and its
concomitant geography, Fanon states that it “is a compartmentalized world.”224 The world is divided
between the section of the colonized people and the area of the colonizer, and each place is quite
distinct. Fanon describes the colonizer’s 223. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox
(New York: Grove Press, 2004), 2. (hereinafter WE). 224. Ibid., 3. 114 areas as such: “The colonist’s
sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash
cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The colonist’s
feet can never be glimpsed … They are protected by solid shoes in a sector where the streets are clean
and smooth, without a pothole or stone. The colonist’s sector is a sated, sluggish sector, its belly
permanently full of good things. This colonist’s sector is a white folks’ sector, a sector of foreigners.”225
The area represents the modern industrialized European world and its amenities, like paved streets and
electricity, transplanted to the colonies. This is a world of such continuing overabundance and opulence
that it is revealed in its trash and waste. The people who inhabit this area are distinct in their opulence
and order, but also in that they are not native inhabitants of the land upon which their affluent life has
been erected. Rather, these are people from elsewhere and who have brought a replica of their way of
life to the colony. This area is distinct and separate from the native sector of the land.
**A2 – Framework**
Top – Space and Nationality
The very grammar of immigration policy is permeated by fantasies of national
unification and solidarity which can only ever mark the immigrant as a threat. Ethnic
and spatial boundary policing is cohered through the fundamental myth of the United
States as a singular object which is acted upon by immigrants and agents. You should
intervene in this fantasy and provide an alternative reading of politics and its
relationship to spatial boundaries.
Nation, Unwelcoming the Stranger: Anti-Immigration Policy in Contemporary ‘America’ p. 21-23)
NFleming
Despite
The Euro-Native American cooperation was more extensive than what was ultimately produced as various ways of living in the West.
the popular assumption that the West was "won" by overcoming Indian resistance, in various ways, Native
Americans assisted in the Euro-American westward advance. The myth of the self-reliant,
pioneer/Indian fighter that has been a significant part of the legendary US nation-building story is belied
by historical investigations into the effects of "The Covenant Chain," a treaty between Iroquois nations and the Euro-American colonists. As
Francis Jennings points out, the confederation between the Iroquois and the colonists not only helped the English colonists defeat the French
(as well as helping to keep the peace between colonists and Native Americans in the eastern zones) but also helped to open the western
regions for English settlement.124 Jennings's collaborative story of the
movement westward dispels a series of mythic
construction of US nation building: the one that arrogates all significant achievements to the "white race,"
the one that constructs US institutions as culturally homogenous, and, most essentially, the Rooseveltian myth
of the "Indians" as barriers to westward expansion. It remains unclear if the age of nationalism is near an end, but one of
its primary legacies remains well entrenched. The story of a unified national culture, designed to legitimate the
ethnic and spatial boundary policing of the modern state, retains its force. As a result, contemporary
“strangers in the land“ are constructed as threats to legendary and anachronistic national imaginaries.
The accounts I have offered-of the highly contingent and often arbitrary commingling of peoples and the resulting coinventions reponsible for
what have been historically rendered as autonomous cultural achievements-are meant as interventions. The
aim, at the level of writing, has
been to disrupt such national imaginaries and, at the same time, to offer an alternative language and thus an
alternative vision. A primary sustaining mechanism of the US national fantasy is the grammar of its
producers. To paraphrase Nietzsche, the only reason people believe in “America”-as a fixed, enduring cultural
entity-is because they believe in grammar. Diametrically opposed to the Nietzschean insight that “America” is an ongoing,
unfinished, and contested interpretive process rather than a fixed entity is Peter Brimelow’s “will to truth.“ Despite all his data displays in the
part of his Alien Nation entitled “Truth,” Brimelow constructs the cultural core of the United States with his grammar, not with his evidence.
He asserts, for example, that “slowly, over generations, America changed the Irish.“ “America” in this grammatical
construction is located as a unified actor/entity. Whereas what
constitutes “America“ at any moment are the forces
contending to shape it-Irishness, among other cultural practices, contributed to that shaping-Brime low fabulates an arbitrary cutoff to
the shaping process. Shortly after Anglo colonists arrive, “America” has become a culture. This fixed unity then
acts upon others or is, in turn, threatened by an alien presence impervious to its ability to assimilate it.
His “truth,” in short, is a lie, but the lie is lent a variety of rhetorical extensions. He likens his fabricated culture, for example, to a delicate
ecology liable to destruction by various imported new species; “Thus, the culture of a country, exactly like its ecology, turns out to be a living
thing, sensitive and even fragile.”127 The appropriate intervention in the grammatical production of such nativist “truths” is genealogical. The
ethnohistories of Israel and America, provided throughout this article, should be understood as such an intervention, creating accounts that
resist ”metahistorical deployments of ideal significations”l28 such as “America” or ”Israel.” As Foucault has noted,
genealogy opposes attempts to ”fabricate a coherent identity”129 and “reduce diversity.”lso Even more significant than the grammatical
construction of such entities as “America” and “Israel” has been the primary discursive mechanism of their historical realization, the legendary
stories through which they have been rendered as unitary national cultures. Again, the above ethnohistories should serve to
compromise the mythical accounts. However, if culturally dangerous strangers are to be turned into
consociates, it is necessary not only to compromise legendary stories but also to tell different ones .
Hence, Ammiel Alcalay's story, which recovers Levantine culture, is one that can allow "Israel" to be constructed as a place of coinvention and
the frontier story of Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin displaces a
the yew" and "Arab" as culturally imbricated historical characters.131 And
legend of heroic and autonomous conquest and nation building by white EuroAmericans with one that registers the
cultural sharing and cooperative institution building that paralleled the more conflictual, violent aspects
of Euro and Native American encounters.132 Employing the idea of a "frontier" not to deny the
existence of those who live beyond it but to open the problem of identity to ambiguity and
adjustment rather than territorialization and fortification must attenuate the threat of the stranger . In
current US anti-alien hysteria, it is primarily the fetishization of national
the case of the
space that renders the stranger as a threat.133 Exclusionary modes of nationalism, like racism,
are theories as well as practices (as Balibar has noted, racism requires theory).134 Such theoretical (and therefore
practical) interventions are thus important challenges to national fantasy structures .
The theoretical/ practical interventions provide alternative stories that

,denaturalize national space by recounting the "spatial events" (cultural encounters that
reshape the relationship of place to identity) through which structures of habitation have been invented and modes of selfhood have already
incorporated various forms of otherness.135 However, there
are also more specific modes of enactment in various
artistic genres that serve to attenuate strangeness and overcome the distance that legendary nation-
building stories have encouraged. For example, both Israeli and US cinema have provided important interventions in the dominant
national stories that construct the culturally dangerous alien "other."
Top - Grimm
All their arguments about predictability, fairness, and truth testing are life-negating
hatreds of contingency that relegate debate to a contestation of cowards – it turns
any benefit the activity has
Grimm 77 (Ruediger Hermann, art historian and Goethe scholar, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, ed.
M. Montinari, W. Miiller-Lauter & H. Wenzel, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pg. 30-33, Gender modified
Western logic and metaphysics have been traditionally founded upon a handful of principles which were regarded as being
self-evidently true, and therefore neither requiring nor admitting of any further proof40• One of these principles we have already dealt with at some length, the notion that truth must be unchanging. Rather
than further belabor the whole question of truth, we shall now turn to Nietzsche's analysis of why it is that truth should be regarded as necessarily unchanging in the first place. Nietzsche's view of reality (the will to power)
is such that all that exists is an ever-changing chaos of power-quanta, continually struggling with one another for
hegemony. Nothing remains the same from one instant to the next. Consequently there are no stable objects, no
"identical cases," no facts, and no order. Whatever order we see in the world, we ourselves have
projected into it. By itself, the world has no order : there is no intrinsically stable "world order," no "nature." Yet metaphysics,
logic, and language indeed, our whole conceptual scheme is grounded in the assumption that there is such a stable order. Why? . •
. die Annahme des seienden ist nothig, um denken und schliessen zu konnen : die Logik handhabt our Formeln fiir Gleichbleibendes deshalb ware diese Annahme noch ohne Beweiskraft fiir die Reali tat : ,,das Seiende" gehort zu
unserer Optik48• This can perhaps be best clarified by anticipating our discussion of Nietzsche's perspectivism. Even if reality is a chaos of power-quanta, about which any statement is already an interpretation and "falsification,"
we nevertheless must assume some sort of order and continuity in order to function at all. But the assumption of order and continuity even if it is a necessary assumption is certainly not any sort of proof. We
ourselves, as will to power, gain control over our environment by "interpreting" it, by simplifying and adapting it to our requirements.
Life itself is an ongoing process of interpretation, a process of imposing a superficial order upon a
chaotic reality. In Wahrheit ist Interpretation ein Mittel selbst, um Herr iiber etwas zu werden. (Der organische Prozess setzt fortwahrendes /nterpretieren voraus42• Thus we create for ourselves a world in which
we can live and function and further enhance and increase our will to power. Even our perceptual apparatus is not geared to gleaning "truth" from the objects
of our experience. Rather, it arranges, structures, and interprets these objects so that we can gain control over them and utilize them for our own ends. The "truth" about things is
something we ourselves have projected onto them purely for the purpose of furthering our own power.
Thus Nietzsche can say Wahrheit ist die Art von Irrthum, ohne welche eine bestimmte Art von lebendigen Wesen nicht leben konnte. Der Werth fiir das Leben entscheidet zuletzt43. Thus the "truth" about reality is simply a variety
of error, a convenient fiction which is nevertheless necessary for our maintenance . In the last analysis it is not a question of "truth" at all, but rather,
a matter of which "fiction," which interpretation of reality best enables me to survive and increase my
power. In an absolute sense, the traditional standard of unchanging truth is no more true or false than Nietzsche's own. But on the basis of Nietzsche's criterion for truth we can make a vital distinction. All
statements about the truth or falsity of our experiential world are functions of the will to power, and in this sense, all equally true (or false). The
difference lies in the degree to which any particular interpretation increases or decreases our power. The notion that truth is unchanging is the interpretation
of a comparatively weak will to power, which demands that the world be simple, reliable, predictable, i.
e. "true." Constant change, ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, etc. are much more difficult to cope with, and
require a comparatively high degree of will to power to be organized (i. e. interpreted) into a manageable environment. The ambiguous and
contradictory the unknown is frightening and threatening. Therefore we have constructed for ourselves a model of reality which is
eminently "knowable," and consequently subject to our control. Pain and suffering have traditionally been held to stem from "ignorance" about the way
the world "really" is : the more predictable and reliable the world is, the less our chances are of suffering through error, of being unpleasantly surprised. However, " darin driickt sich eine gedriickte Seele aus, voller MIBtrauen und
schlimmer Erfahrung . . . 44." The demand that reality and truth be stable, reliable, predictable, and conveniently at our disposal is a symptom of
weakness. The glossing over of the chaotic, contradictory, changing aspect of reality is the sign of a will
to power which must reduce the conflict and competition in the world to a minimum. Yet resistance and competition are the very factors which
enable any particular power-constellation to express itself and grow in power. As we saw earlier, the will to power can only express itself by meeting
resistance, and any interpretation of reality which attempts to minimize these factors is profoundly anti-life
(since life is will to power). Furthermore, a person embodying a strong and vigorous will to power will "interpret" the
"threatening" aspect of the world the chaos, ambiguity, contradiction, danger, etc. as stimuli, which continually
offer [them] a high degree of resistance which [they] must meet and overcome if [they are] to survive
and grow. Rather than negate change and make the world predictable, a "strong" person would, according to
Nietzsche, welcome the threat and challenge of a constantly changing world. Referring to those who require a world as changeless as possible in order
to survive, Nietzsche says . . . (eine umgekehrte Art Mensch wiirde diesen Wechsel zum Reiz rechnen) Eine mit Kraft iiberladene und spielende Art W esen wiirde gerade die Aff ekte, die Unvernunft und den Wechsel in
eudamonistischem Sinne gutheissen, sammt ihren Consequenzen, Gefahr, Contrast, Zu-Grunde-gehn usw-45. A large part of the intellectual energy of the West has been spent in
trying to discover "facts," "laws of nature," etc., all of which are conceived to be "truths" and which, therefore, do not
change. For Nietzsche, this conceptualization of our experience is tantamount to a "mummification" : when an
experience is conceptualized, it is wrenched from the everchanging stream of becoming which is the
world. By turning our experiences into facts, concepts, truths, statistics, etc. we "kill" them, rob them of their immediacy
and vitality and embalm them, thus transforming them into the convenient bits of knowledge which
furnish our comfortable, predictable, smug existences46• Der Mensch sucht ,,die Wahrheit" : eine Welt, die nicht sich widerspricht, nicht tiiuscht, nicht wechselt,
eine wahre Welt, eine Welt, in der man nicht leidet : Widerspruch, Tauschung, Wechsel Ursachen des Leidens l47 For Nietzsche, this whole tendency to negate change which is so intimately connected with
the presupposition that "truth" always means "unchanging, eternal truth," is a symptom of decadence, a symptom of the weakening and
disruption of the will to power. This outlook says, in effect, "This far shall you go, and this much shall you learn,
but no more than this . . . . " In the absence of any fixed and ultimate standard for truth, of course, this outlook is no more true or false than Nietzsche's own. Yet it is not a question
here of rightness or wrongness, but a question of power. More specifically, it is a matter of vital power. "Der Werth fur das Leben entscheidet zuletzt48."
Nietzsche's conclusion is that this static world interpretation has a negative, depressing effect on a person's vital
energies (will to power). It constricts growth, it sets limits and hampers the self-assertion of the will to power.
The strong individual, whom Nietzsche so much admires, flourishes only in an environment of change, ambiguity,
contradiction, and danger. The chaotic and threatening aspect of the world is a stimulus for such
individuals, demanding that they constantly grow and increase their power, or perish49• It demands that they constantly exceed their previous
limits, realize their creative potential and surpass it, become more than they were. In the absence of any
stability in the world, the strong individual who can flourish in such an environment is radically free from
any constraint, radically free to create. It need scarcely be said that this world-interpretation is immeasurably more conducive to the
growth and enhancement of the will to power than the static worldview. And the increase of will to power is Nietzsche's only criterion : Alles
Geschehen, alle Bewegung, alles Werden als ein Feststellen von Gradund Kraftverhaltnissen, als ein Kampf . . .0 0
Top – Prior Question
Philosophy can and must inform politics- it must override politics
It is notable that the views enunciated in this passage are continuous with Nietzsche's earliest political thinking; once again he
expresses
the view that culture must override politics, and warns against Dionysian excesses, especially if they lead
to the cultivation of revolutionary fervour in a directly political sense. Nietzsche favours the Apollonian
'Voltaire', championing 'progressive evolution' over 'revolution'. Notwithstanding the excesses of his last books,
Nietzsche never abandoned his fear and distrust of moral and political fanaticism. In order to further the
cause of moderation and progressive evolution Nietzsche calls for a new mode of philosophising which
begins from the assumption that there are no eternal facts and no absolute truths. Philosophers lack an
historical sense. The recognition that man has evolved should guide the philosophy of the future. Nietzsche writes, on the way toward ' a
genealogy of morals': Now, everything essential in the development of mankind took place in primeval times,
long before the four thousand years we more or less know about; during these years mankind may well
not have altered very much. But the philosopher here sees 'instincts' in man as he is now and assumes
that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind and to that extent provide a key to the
understanding of the world in general: the whole of teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of
the last four millenia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural
relationship from the time he began. {HAH 2) Nietzsche's attempt to carry out a critique of metaphysics
and philosophical authority reflects what he sees as significant political changes taking place in modern
European societies. For him the growing liberalisation and democratisation of society generates the need
for a new 'historical' mode of philosophising which is to be both enlightened and critical. He becomes an
advocate of both programmes of change and development, the philosophical and the political.
**Blocks – Misc**
A2 – Liberalism Good
Liberalism’s notion of political authority rests on a false notion of agents as
independent of their social context. The liberal pursuit to minimize social conflict
undermines the conditions necessary for freedom.
Siemans 2009 (Herman, professor of philosophy at the University of Leiden, “Nietzsche Contra
Liberalism On Freedom” A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. By Keith Ansell Pearson, Wiley-Blackwell,
437-439)
Nietzsche’s thought confronts us with the task of reassessing the place and value of conflict in ethical and
political life. Because of the devastation so often caused by conflicts, moral and political philosophy have
tended to neglect the dynamic, productive, and socializing qualities of conflict, concentrating instead on
ways to prevent or to resolve conflict in favor of consensus and security. In Nietzsche’s philosophy of
life, however, conflict, struggle, and tension are not just a matter of contingent, local disturbances to be
avoided or resolved; they are an essential and all-pervasive condition for life, from the smallest organism
or cell to the historical struggle between master and slave moralities. How far can this position reasonably
be taken? And what exactly are the ethical and political implications of Nietzsche’s ontology of conflict?
Is there a way to acknowledge conflict and struggle as part of the “deep structure” of human existence and
interaction, and to affirm them for their valuable qualities without simply condoning devastation or
oppression as a consequence? One way to tackle this question is through a confrontation between the
liberal and Nietzschean concepts of freedom. Typical of liberalism is the negative concept of freedom as
freedom from external obstacles that would inhibit or prevent me from doing what I want. For Nietzsche,
by contrast, obstacles, resistance, and antagonism are the sine qua non for the exercise of freedom. In this
essay these radically opposed concepts of freedom will be played out against one another with a view to
assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each. This will be done by situating the question of freedom
within the broader antagonism between Nietzsche’s thought and liberalism. The term “liberalism” covers
a whole gamut of diverse positions with roots in quite distinct traditions and political histories. For our
purposes, liberalism can be identified above all with two values: a commitment to individuals as free and
equal persons; and a commitment to individual diversity, closely linked to the values of pluralism and
tolerance. The first commitment to individual freedom and equality makes for a characteristic attitude to
political authority: on the one hand, the defining liberal move is to place limits on political authority so
that the state does not infringe upon individual freedom and equality; on the other hand, there is the
argument for the necessity of political association and, specifically, for a state with the coercive powers
needed to guarantee the widest possible range of individual freedom compatible with freedom for all.
Typically, this ambivalence has led liberals to formulate a contractarian justification of political authority:
the legitimacy of the state resides in the free consent of individuals who come together (hypothetically)
and transfer (some of ) their powers to the state in exchange for the freedom to pursue their own ends.
The boundaries of political authority are often inscribed in the contract as inviolable, individual rights
(e.g. to life, liberty, property). The second liberal commitment to individual diversity is motivated by the
belief that each person has his or her own unique conception of what makes life worth living and is
entitled to pursue that conception. It is often expressed as a commitment to pluralism, that is, the equal
freedom of all individuals to pursue their moral commitments, values, or ends. This value is of particular
importance in connection with Nietzsche for two reasons. The first is that Nietzsche is above all a
pluralist thinker who starts out from the infinite diversity of life-forms, the uniqueness of each, and the
value of each in its uniqueness.1 The second reason is that pluralism is a potential source of conflict
between individuals, and conflict is for Nietzsche an essential condition for freedom. In its starkest
formulation, pluralism means that there is no shared concept of the good, so that social life is opened up
to competing, potentially conflicting views of the best life. The problem of liberalism is how to establish
peaceful coexistence among individuals with differing conceptions of the good (Mouffe 1996: 248).
Liberalism affirms or at least accepts pluralism, while seeking to minimize conflict in favor of harmony.
The question, as Mouffe (1995: esp. 39–45; 1996) has forcefully argued, is whether one can genuinely
value pluralism if one denies (potential) conflict. In his book Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (1995)
David Owen has made a valuable contribution to the antagonism between Nietzsche’s thought and
liberalism in the broad sense described. Focusing on the liberal idea of personhood, he asks about the
participants in the contract that legitimates political authority in the liberal state. Taking his bearings from
Rawls’s influential formulation of liberal theory in A Theory of Justice, he argues that they are persons
whose identities are prior to or independent of any specific commitments and any association with others.
In Rawls’s version of the hypothetical contract, the participants are separated from their conceptions of
the good – their beliefs about how best to lead their lives – by the so-called “veil of ignorance.” This
ignorance expresses Rawls’s liberal commitment to freedom conceived as the right to choose freely our
conceptions of the good. Specific conceptions of the good are ruled out in favor of purely formal freedom
to choose (any) good or end. By separating the individual from its ends, Rawls conceives the person as
autonomous chooser of ends. But this implies that a person is what he or she is independently of the ends
or values he or she freely chooses; as persons, we are “antecedently individuated” in the sense that the
ends we choose are not constitutive of who we are, of our identities. A second, equally dubious,
implication concerns our relations as persons to others. Rawls’s hypothetical contract also implies that as
persons, our ends are formed prior to, or independently of, association with others. Society does not
inform a person’s identity, values, or ends, but is rather the outcome of a contract between individuals
whose ends are already given; as persons we are “asocially individuated.”2 According to Owen (1995:
138), Nietzsche offers a powerful critique of these presuppositions. In the first place, Nietzsche shows
that our conception of the self as an antecedently individuated subject is not a metaphysical truth, but a
cultural artifact produced in contingent circumstances to express the practical interests of a specific group;
what Nietzsche calls the “slave revolt of morality” in essay one of the Genealogy. In the second place, the
Genealogy also shows that our capacities – especially our capacity for sovereign agency – are socially
constituted and the product of a long prehistory. In a similar vein, Volker Gerhardt writes, of Nietzsche’s
“sociological insight,” that the “freedom and self-responsibility of the ‘sovereign individual’ are due to
the stringency and severity of centuries of moral coercion [sittlicher Zwänge]” (Gerhardt 1992: 28f.). But
according to Owen, Nietzsche also offers an alternative, positive conception of personhood. This turns on
the constructive counterclaim that the maintenance and cultivation of our capacities – especially “our
capacities for autonomous reflection and agency” – is dependent on communal practices of contestation.
Freedom cannot simply be assumed. It has to be earned via overcoming obstacles.
Without such resistance, freedom cannot be secured. And without such freedom,
nihilism triumphs.
449-451)
In TI, “Expeditions,” 38, we once again find Nietzsche advocating an exercise-concept of freedom that
is bound up with antagonism and conflict (both within and without) and conditional upon
resistance or obstacles (within and without), obstacles of the kind that must be absent according to
liberal concepts of freedom. His opposition to liberalism on this point is radical and cuts across Taylor’s
distinction between “crude” opportunity-concepts (e.g. Hobbes, Bentham) and those with exercise-
components (e.g. Mill), for neither allows for obstacles or antagonism as having a positive role for
freedom or self-realization. By way of recapitulation, this section will focus on the question of conflict:
why does Nietzsche advocate conflict, obstacle, resistance as the sine qua non of freedom? Why in
particular does he connect inner and outer antagonism? The first answer (see section 3 above) is that our
capacity to realize freedom cannot simply be assumed, as it is in opportunity-concepts of freedom.
Freedom cannot be conceived in abstraction from the specific goals or “governing thoughts,” and
under modern nihilistic conditions our creative capacity to posit credible goals has withered. This
claim, moreover, instantiates a more general, “ontological” thesis that creativity requires tension. It is
only under pressure of external obstacles, of antagonism and resistance, that we are compelled to come up
with the “governing thoughts” needed for the exercise of freedom. This thought recurs across Nietzsche’s
writings under various rubrics, such as “freedom under the law” or under “pressure,” and “dancing in
chains,” to name a few (see GS 290; BGE 188; WS 10). The second answer, given in TI, “Expeditions,”
38 (see section 4 above), is that freedom attaches to the individual in its particularity and difference
from others, and it is tension, antagonism with external obstacles – not the elimination of such
obstacles through liberal institutions – that makes for particularity and difference. In Nietzsche’s
words: “war is a training in freedom. For what is freedom! That one has the will to self-responsibility.
That one holds on to the distance that divides us.” A third answer goes back to Nietzsche’s mature
formulation of inner antagonism as self-control in Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols, that
is, self-control as the tension or antagonism between measure and excess (see section 4 above). If we ask:
why does Nietzsche insist on self-control in this sense as a condition of freedom? we find a straight
answer in a subsequent aphorism in TI, “Expeditions,” entitled “ ‘Freedom, As I Do Not Mean It . . .’.”
Here Nietzsche recurs to his diagnosis of modern nihilism as a physiological phenomenon: we moderns
are “a kind of chaos” (BGE 224), “a physiological self-contradiction” in whom “the instincts contradict,
disrupt, destroy one another” (TI, “Expeditions,” 41; cf. CW, Epilogue, KSA 12, 9[35], and LN 147 on
“passive nihilism”). (This condition bears a certain similarity to the second phase of Nietzsche’s socio-
physiology of the individual considered in section 2 above, that is, the quasi-nihilistic conditions of
“demoralization” (Entsittlichung), in which the conflict of drives asserting their demands in an absolute,
unmeasured way destroyed the first “experimental individuals”). Under these conditions, Nietzsche
argues, no discipline would be too severe, and yet our modern, negative concept of freedom asserts the
opposite: “the claim to independence, to free development, to laisser aller” (TI, “Expeditions,” 41). In this
context, we can see that Nietzsche’s concept of freedom as self-control or the inner antagonism
between measure and excess is his response or counter-proposal to the modern concept of freedom
as an expression of inner, uncontrolled antagonism. In my closing remarks, I shall sketch a fourth
answer to the question why antagonism is to be viewed as the condition of freedom. I shall focus on the
connection between inner and outer antagonism central to of Nietzsche’s concept of freedom. This answer
goes back to Nietzsche’s critique of the modern concept of the subject as a substantive unity. From a
range of extraordinary notes from the Nachlass of 1880–1 (KSA 9), we can reconstruct an argument along
the following lines: 1 The modern concept of the unitary subject as substance is derivative of our
phenomenal sense of ourselves as subjects, the “I” experienced or “felt” in self consciousness, what
Nietzsche calls Subjekt-Empfindung (subject-feeling) (KSA 9, 11 [270] ). 2 This “I” of self-
consciousness or Subjekt-Empfindung is not an end-in-itself, but a means of survival; a myth, an error,
whose value lies not in its truth, but in its selective value for the kind of organism or “life-system” that we
are (Nietzsche’s naturalism).6 3 In truth, we are not individuals, but “dividua” (HH 57; KSA 11, 25[159]
): a plurality of antagonistic drives and feelings formed through the internalization of social practices and
norms (Nietzsche’s socio-physiology).7 4 We cannot therefore eliminate the antagonism of the plurality
of drives and feelings that we are. And since we cannot eliminate the antagonism of drives and feelings,
the question arises: how best to manage this inner antagonism? 5 One strategy would be to seek to reduce
to a minimum the vehement antagonism of our feelings towards their opposites; in this way, we might
overhear the inner antagonism and get the impression that we are entirely at one with ourselves (KSA 9,
6[58] ). The advantage of this strategy, as Socrates saw (cf. KSA 9, 11[182] ), is to save the individual, or
rather the dividuum, from suffering. 6 However, eudaimonia or happiness in this sense carries a high cost:
it is a kind of “euthanasia, entirely unproductive” (KSA 9, 6[58] ) that promotes uniformity. As we have
seen, creativity is contingent upon tension. 7 The alternative strategy is to maintain inner tension, the
vehement antagonism between our feelings and their opposites. But this then raises another problem: how
to avoid the complete loss of unity, our nihilistic disintegration as individuals through the unmeasured
conflict of drives? 8 Nietzsche’s answer is to connect strong inner tension with outer, interpersonal
tension as its condition. In the above-cited note (KSA 9, 6[58] ), he goes on to contend that it is through
relations of tension and antagonism with others that the antagonism of inner drives is best
contained, so that the dividuum can attain unity, or maintain itself as an individual. In modern
liberal society, he writes: “the oppositions among individuals are reduced to a sublime minimum: so
that all inimical tendencies and tensions, through which the individual maintains itself as individual
can barely be perceived” (KSA 9, 6[58]; emphasis added). This strategy carries the supreme
advantage of making the exercise of freedom possible. Freedom, as we saw, attaches to each of us
only in our particularity, and requires the creative capacity to posit credible goals or “governing
thoughts.” By stimulating and containing the inner antagonism of drives and feelings, this strategy
promotes the uniqueness of each being in its difference or distance from others, as well its
creativity. From the early 1880s on, this is one of the main motivations for Nietzsche’s ideal of
individual sovereignty as the maintenance of a measured inner antagonism through a measured external
antagonism with others. It is also, I believe, his strongest argument against the liberal concept of freedom
and for the necessity of conflict, antagonism, resistance, and obstacles as the sine qua non of freedom.
Liberal institutions destroy freedom by minimizing all resistance that can be

overcome. It produces a herdish cultural and political life that collapses into
conformity and mediocrity. Genuine pluralism requires conflict!
447-449)
The antagonistic concept of measure returns in one of Nietzsche’s best-known texts on freedom in
Twilight of the Idols, entitled “My Conception of Freedom.” David Owen has remarked (1995: 164f.),
this text offers a clear formulation of Nietzsche’s exerciseconcept of freedom:
Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is
nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what they bring
about: they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral
principle, they make small, cowardly and smug – it is the herd animal that triumphs every time. [ . . . ] As
long as they are still being fought for [erkämpft], these same institutions produce quite different effects;
then they actually advance freedom in a powerful way. Seen more closely, it is war [der Krieg] that brings
forth these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as war, gives endurance to the illiberal instincts.
And war is a training in freedom. [ . . . ] The highest type of free man would have to be sought there
where the greatest resistance [Widerstand] is continually being overcome: five steps from tyranny, up
against the threshold of the danger of bondage [Verknechtung]. This is true psychologically, if under the
“tyrant” one understands relentless and fearsome instincts which call for a maximum of authority and
discipline towards [gegen] themselves – finest type Julius Caesar –; this is also politically true, one has
only to take a look at history. (TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” 38) In these lines freedom is
defined as the exercise of self-control, whereby the tyrannical “relentless and fearsome instincts” call
forth “a maximum of authority and discipline towards [gegen] oneself.” Here, as in BGE 224, freedom is
defined in terms of an antagonism or tension between excess (“relentless and fearsome instincts”) and
measure or total control. For it is important to note that the exercise of self-control does not involve the
extirpation of tyrannical instincts; rather, it involves a form of control that “remains five steps from
tyranny, up against the threshold of the danger of bondage.” This concept of self-control does not,
however, exhaust the exercise-concept of freedom developed in the text. The passage cited explicitly
connects the inner or “psychological” conditions for the exercise of freedom with its outer or “political”
conditions: in both cases the exercise of freedom is greatest “where the greatest resistance is being
overcome.” The measure of freedom, Nietzsche argues, is given by the resistance to being overcome,
whether this be the inner resistance of tyrannical drives, or the outer resistance of other individuals or
communities. In general terms, then, the exercise of self-control is situated within a broad concept of
freedom, as the exercise of warfare, struggle, antagonism (Krieg, Kampf ) both within and without; the
overcoming of resistance both within and without; and the exercise of mastery over such resistance. This
broad concept of freedom serves Nietzsche to launch an attack on modern liberal institutions as a threat or
obstacle to freedom. His argument is that the institutionalization of liberal values – we may think here of
the protection of equal rights to basic liberties against external constraints (à la Rawls) – leads in practice
to the breeding of uniformity among herd animals; that is, it leads to unfreedom. At the heart of this
argument is a critique of the liberal opportunity-concept of freedom, what Nietzsche elsewhere identifies
as the modern laisser aller concept of freedom, freedom without limits or measure. To institutionalize the
opportunity-concept of freedom by eliminating external obstacles through the institutional guarantee of
equal rights to liberty, is, in effect, to promote the exercise of unfreedom in the sense of uniformity
among herd animals who know only how to obey, not to command (cf. BGE 242; KSA 12, 10[17] ).
Against this, the real exercise of freedom is defined by Nietzsche as warfare or struggle; that is, as the
exercise of martial – Nietzsche says explicitly “illiberal” – instincts. It seems clear, then, that the concept
of freedom advanced in this text is explicitly and implacably opposed to modern liberal democracy.
Yet this judgment falls short, because something crucial has so far been omitted, something which is
integral to Nietzsche’s understanding of freedom from the very beginning: the ends of freedom, the
wherefore (Wozu?), Zarathustra’s “governing thought.” In its proper formulation, Nietzsche’s concept
of freedom is not the brute exercise of warfare or struggle, but rather the struggle for freedom, or
in his words: “the war for liberal institutions” (der Krieg um liberale Institutionen). Nietzsche’s
argument against liberal democracy must therefore be reformulated as follows: if freedom means the
struggle for freedom, for equal rights to basic liberties, then the institutional guarantee of these
rights (by eliminating the exercise of struggle and promoting uniformity) undermines freedom. In
these terms, Nietzsche’s exercise-concept of freedom is still implacably opposed to liberalism and,
specifically, to the institutional safeguards against the conflict between different values or ends in
liberal democracy. However, as the “war for liberal institutions,” it opposes liberalism for the sake
of liberal values, as a preparation or “training” for their realization. This reading suggests that
Nietzsche’s exercise-concept of freedom (as warfare) intends an immanent critique of liberalism:
what liberalism claims to advance, the interests of the individual, it ends up undermining through
the uniformity and conformity engendered by liberal institutions. Nietzsche’s counterclaim is (in
agreement with liberalism) that freedom attaches to the individual in its particularity, in its difference
from a plurality of other individuals, but (contra liberalism) that it is conflict, obstacles, resistance,
and not the protection against them that promotes particularity, difference, and genuine pluralism.
A2 – Nazi
Nietzsche was not a Nazi; his work has systematically been taken out of context in
order to justify fascism
Nietzsche's pretention to be an artist and much more than an artist is grounded in his radical, modern concept of success: for him, at stake is not
only to throw products on today's market, but instead to create the market wave itself, by which the work is belatedly carried to success. In this
way he anticipated the strategies of the avant-garde, which Boris Groys has described in his already classic work on The Total Art of Stalinism. If
one wants to be a market leader, one must first operate as a market maker. And to be successful as a market maker, one must anticipate and
endorse what many will choose once they learn they are allowed to want. Nietzsche had understood that the phenomenon that would emerge
irresistibly in tomorrow's culture was the need to distinguish oneself from the mass. It was immediately present to him that the stuff out of which
the future would be made, could be found in individuals' demands to be better and other than the rest, and thereby precisely better than all
others. The theme of the 20th century is self-referentiality, in the systemic as well as the psychological senses. Only: self-referential systems are
autological and self-eulogistic systems. The author Nietzsche still has this knowledge in advance over contemporary theory. On his under
standing, or rather intuition, he created, in his lifetime, the conditions for his twofold posthumous success: he inscribed his name in the list of
classics, which throughout culture are handed down as reference points of approval and critique. This is what he described as his fulfilled need
for immortality; in addition, however, through the detour of his first interpreters and intermediaries, he above all imposed his name as a brand
name for a successful immaterial product, for a literary lifestyle-drug or an elevated way-of-life. This is the Nietzschean design of individualism:
We free spirits! We who live dangerously! When the author identifies himself as author, the self-eulogistic melody appears; when the market-
maker launches the brand, the advertisement appears. Nietzsche liberated modern language in associating eulogies with publicity. Only a jester,
only a poet, only a copywriter. This connection alone enables us to understand how that most resolute proponent of high culture could have
yielded effects on mass culture. It is undeniable that Nietzsche's second success, his seduction as brand, or as ethos and attitude, in the field of
individualism, by far constitutes his greatest effect-and also contains his more distant future possibilities. Indeed, it is precisely because the
Nietzsche life-style-brand, far more than the name of the author, still radiates an almost irresistible attraction, that, over the course of the last
third of the 20th century, with the onset of the overtly individualist conjuncture of the post-May '68 period, it could recover from the incursions
of fascist redactors and their copies. Doubtless, the
author Nietzsche, even given the then dire state of editing, was
unacceptable to national-socialist collectivism and that the brand Nietzsche alone-and indeed only in rare
and particular aspects-suggested itself for reproduction in national pop culture. To understand this point,
we have to factor in the fact that, procedurally, fascism is nothing other than the incursion of pop and
kitsch-procedures into politics. As Clement Greenberg already showed in 1939-confronting the critical case-kitsch is the world
language of triumphant mass culture. It depends on the mechanized forgery of success. Pop and kitsch are, culturally as politically, short-cut
procedures to get to the apparent taste of the masses. With this they content themselves with copying success and, with copies of the successful
in hand, with triumphing once again. Hitler's success strategy as pop and kitsch politician consisted in tying a pop-
nationalism with an event-militarism, as the simplest way to have the narcissism of the masses
effervesce. In doing so, radiophone acquisition techniques and open-air paramilitary liturgies played the
key roles. Through them, the population learned that it shall be a people and that it had to listen to the
rabble- rousing voices of its projected self. In this sense, all fascism is an effect of redaction. It is
deuteron-fascistic from the start, since it has no original; if a derivative can be insurrectionary, it is
precisely by way of an insurrection of scissors, which always know what they must cut, how, and to what
ends. From the energetic aspect, fascism is the event- culture of resentment-a definition, incidentally, which renders intelligible the shocking
convertibility of leftwing affects into rightwing ones, and vice versa. So long as publicness functions as a director's theater of resentment, the
ability to rape texts and to seduce the public as a "mass" is presupposed.
Brand Nietzsche could play a role in the semantic
advertising drives of the NS-Movement insofar as their imitations omitted his basic assessments, as
implacably individualistic and avant-gardist as they are, and retained only the "fast climber" attitudes,
along with a martial decor of the dictum. Hitler's clique edited Nietzsche with scissors and pasted him into
a collectivist gospel-shortly before, moreover, Nietzsche's sister had employed her scissors to prepare a
ready-made of brand Nietzsche. To the shame of German academic philosophy after 1933, one is forced
to remark that it did exactly the same thing on its level, as did the anti-Nietzscheans, who are still today
unable to do more than merely compile their self-pasted incrimination files-but how far must one reach
back to find university philosophers who do not philosophize with scissors? The National Socialists,
resolute editors of everything that guaranteed social and national success, were able to retain far less of
Nietzsche than Jefferson could of Jesus-most of his writings were too inappropriate for their kitsch
system, too anti-nationalist, too anti-German, too anti-philistine, too anti-revanchist, too anti-collectivist,
too anti-militarist, too anti-antirationalist, too disdainful of every concept of "national self-interest" [Volker-
Selbstsucht],2 and, finally, to mention the decisive barrier, too incompatible with any politics of resentment,
regardless of whether this presents itself as nationalist or socialist or as a multi-purpose form of
vengeance politics; national/socialist. That there is no path leading from Nietzsche to the German's
posing as masters must be obvious to anyone who's come into contact with his writings- too incisive was
Nietzsche's insight that Germans, whether they have graduated or not, have as their temptation not to
feel good if they cannot belittle others-but what else is Nietzsche's moral philosophical oeuvre if not a
single exercise in overcoming the need to disparage others? That nationalist politics rests on the pathetic
propensity to humiliate foreigners-who has brought this into sharper focus than Nietzsche, and who was
able to trace hooliganism to Wilhelmina? Nietzsche, to be sure, is anti-egalitarian, but this is not in order
to make common cause with revenge-hungry populists, as German moral philosophers, whose
differences can no longer impress, avidly continue to assert in the wisdom of their years. Instead, it is in
order to defend the freedom of self-enhancement against the consumerdom of the last men. From one
perspective only is a concession to be made to those who disparage Nietzsche and attempt to guard against his influence. It is correct that
Nietzsche, as the designer of a brand of "destiny," was obliged to ask himself whether his products should not have been endowed with better
copy protection and whether the brand should even have been allowed to appear next to the authorial name. Could he not have known that
from the riff-raff he repelled, his most tenacious clientele could emerge? Proof that these questions did not escape Nietzsche's consideration can
be seen-that is, apart from Zarathustra's prophetic sayings, more or less critical of the Church, about the parasites of the noble soul3-in certain
letters and work notes in which he pondered, in dread of the monstrousness of his insights, whether to abdicate from his authorship. However,
even if he had done this, it would have been imperative to disclose why he gave up being an author-and the result would have been nearly the
same. Perhaps Nietzsche knew the answer to such objections in advance, as he did for nearly everything else: "I am not on my guard for
deceivers, I have to be without caution-my fate wants it so."4
Nietzsche’s work was taken out of context in order to justify fascism

Stellino 17 (Paolo works for la Universidade Nova de Lisboa, “Nietzsche and the Responsibility of
Intellectuals”, Yulia V. Sineokaya and Ekaterina A. Poljakova (eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Legacy and
Prospects. Moscow: LRC, 2017, pp. 467-477) MRS
With these two perspectives in mind, we can now focus the attention on Nietzsche’s case, which is exemplary because of the ideological use that
has been frequently made of his thought, particularly at the time of Italian Fascism and German Nazism. To begin with, notice
that
Nietzsche is explicitly mentioned as one of the inspiring sources of Brandon’s murder in both Hamilton’s
play and Hitchcock’s movie. In the play, Brandon explains to Cadell that his friend and him have murdered
for adventure and danger, and then adds: “You read Nietzsche, don’t you, Rupert? […] And you know that
he tells us to live dangerously. […] And you know that he’s no more respect for individual life than you,
and tells us – to – live dangerously. We thought we would do so – that’s all. We have done so. We have only done the thing. Others
have talked. We have done. Do you understand?” . In the movie, on the contrary, it is Mr. Kentley, David’s father, who makes the association with
Nietzsche. More specifically, Mr.
Kentley asks Brandon whether he agrees with Nietzsche and his theory of the
overman and then associates this theory with Hitler. Let us consider both mentions of Nietzsche in detail.
The expression “to live dangerously” (German: “gefährlich leben”) can be found in section 283, fourth
book of The Gay Science. In this section, Nietzsche confesses to “welcome all the signs of a more virile,
warlike age approaching […] for it shall pave the way for a still higher age”, an age that “will carry heroism
into the search for knowledge and wage wars for the sake of thoughts and their consequences”.
According to Nietzsche, to this end “many preparatory brave human beings” are needed; “human beings
who know to be silent, lonely, determined, and satisfied and steadfast in invisible activities”. We do not
require a close and attentive reading to see that Nietzsche’s call for brave and heroic human beings
“accustomed to command” and to live at war with their peers and with themselves has nothing to do
with the idea of breaking every moral rule and killing “for sake of danger and for the sake of killing”, as
Brandon believes. On the contrary, Nietzsche’s call is clearly directed to seekers of knowledge
(Erkennenden) who must be determined and steadfast in their search for knowledge. Only with reference
to this context, the purpose and meaning of Nietzsche’s metaphorical language becomes comprehensible.
Conversely, only taken out of its context and distorted, Nietzsche’s words can be used to justify a murder, as it happens in Hamilton’s play. It is
interesting to notice that, in his (intentional?) distortion of the meaning and context of Nietzsche’s expression “to live dangerously”, Hamilton has
an “illustrious” antecedent:
Benito Mussolini, who was a great admirer of Nietzsche’s writings. With the occasion
of the opening meeting of the National Council of the National Fascist Party, held on August 2, 1924
Mussolini concluded his speech by alluding to an expression of popular wisdom: in a calm sea, every man
is a pilot; what requires a heroic spirit is to navigate when the storm rages. He then added: “A German
philosopher said: ‘Live dangerously’. I would like this to be the motto of the passionate, young Italian
Fascism: ‘To live dangerously’. This must mean to be ready for everything, any sacrifice, any danger, any
action, when it comes to defending the fatherland and fascism”. Even if Mussolini does not mention
Nietzsche’s name explicitly, the allusion is patent; the distortion of the meaning of Nietzsche’s words, too.
As we have seen, in section 283 of The Gay Science the exhortation of living dangerously is clearly
directed to seekers of knowledge. Even the metaphor of the sailing is usually associated by Nietzsche with
the search for knowledge, not only in section 283, but also in the whole book of The Gay Science.
Mussolini’s distortion of Nietzsche’s words consists, however, not much in taking the expression “to live
dangerously” out of its original context, but rather in associating this expression with the defense of the
fatherland. The idea of fatherland was a core concept of both the Fascist and Nazi ideologies. Nietzsche,
however, was a strong opponent of it. To see this, it suffices to consider briefly Nietzsche’s concept of
“good European”, introduced for the first time in the oeuvre in section 475 of the first part of Human, All
Too Human. In this section, Nietzsche criticizes the nationalist movements of his time, accusing them of
being not only artificial and selfish (they did not serve the interests of the peoples, but rather that of the
princely dynasties and of certain classes of business and society), but also dangerous, for they fomented
national hostilities. Far from falling into its trap, Nietzsche exposes the logic of nationalism and against this “sickness of this century” (WS
87), he claims that “one should not be afraid to proclaim oneself simply a good European and actively to work for the amalgamation of nations”
(MA, I, 475). Nietzsche’s
call for the amalgamations of nations and peoples, and for the creation of a “mixed
race [Mischrasse], that of European man” (MA, I, 475), reveals an anti-nationalist and pro-European
attitude that clearly goes against both the Fascist and Nazi ideologies. Moreover, notice that, according to
Nietzsche, in the creation of this future mixed race, the “Jew” is “just as usable and desirable as an
ingredient of it as any other national residue” (ibid.). Far from being the Germanophile anti-Semite that
Nazi ideologues made him out to be, Nietzsche believes that the Jews must be praised for “their energy
and higher intelligence” and for “their capital in will and spirit accumulated from generation to generation
in a long school of suffering” (ibid.). We have to be thankful to the Jewish people – Nietzsche continues –
for having produced “the noblest human being (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the mightiest book and
the most efficacious moral code in the world” (ibid.). Moreover, it is the merit of Jews to have preserved
the culture of Graeco-Roman antiquity in the darkest period of the Middle Ages.
He does not bear the full responsibility for how his work has been used- we will
defend what he wrote, not how it was interpreted
In conclusion: theories and ideas have consequences, like actions do. As a rule, we hold people responsible for their actions. In a similar way, we
should reasonably hold intellectuals responsible for their theories and ideas. Nietzsche constitutes no exception to this rule. The
large use
and abuse of his philosophy during the first half of 20th century, however, demand extreme caution in
considering his case. Nietzsche cannot be “absolved” (if need be) simply by demonstrating that his
thought was manipulated and distorted. This manipulation and distortion certainly mitigate his
responsibility, but it is not sufficient to supply an answer to the two objections mentioned above. On the
other hand, however, we must be careful not to charge Nietzsche with too much responsibility and turn
him into a Fascist or Nazi ante litteram. We do not know what Nietzsche would have thought of Italian
Fascism and German Nazism, but we can easily make a conjecture: he would have certainly rejected any
association between his philosophy of the future and a radical ideology based on anti-Semitism,
nationalism, and the fanatical and blind glorification of the Arian race.
A2 – Nietzsche Racist
Nietzsche indicts other philosophers for their belief in inevitable globalization and
racial extermination.
the University of Richmond,, Beyond Peoples and Fatherlands: Nietzsche's Geophilosophy and
In "On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life" Nietzsche's now largely forgotten target was
Eduard von Hartmann, whose philosophy of history, with its combination of Hegelian development and
Schopenhauerian pessimism was as close as the nineteenth century got to producing a theory of the end of
his tory and of the last man. In the historical part of Hartmann's massive and very popular Philosophy of
the Unconscious, he depicts humanity's gradual ascent to self-knowledge as it realizes the impossibility of
human happiness. It moves through four great periods, and so was attractive to the post-Hegelian periodiz
ing obsessions of the nineteenth century. It begins with (1) Greco-Roman youth, which gradually realizes
the impossibility of happiness in this life; (2) medieval adolescence, placing its hopes for happiness in the
fiction of immortality; (3) the mature manhood of the post-Reformation West, imagining itself as
contributing to future happiness on the earth; and (4) the disillusioned old age into which the world is
entering now. (Of course, for Hartmann, as for Hegel, the East has no real history, so his geography
implicitly reinforces his philosophy of history.) This old age submits itself to the Weltprozess that has
brought it about. It wel comes the process of human extinction. Old age prides itself on understanding that
process and its insight into the fundamental painfulness of life. In a deli cious Kierkegaardian moment,
Nietzsche describes Hartmann's treatise as a jest, a parody of gigantic proportions, meant to reduce
Hegelian philosophy of history to an absurdity (KSA 1:311-34). Hartmann is Nietzsche's Alexander
Kojeve and Francis Fukuyama rolled into one. Today we would be struck by Hartmann's notion of
inevitable globalization and racial extermination: he favors missionary work and commerce as more
effective means of eliminating "inferior races" than outright warfare - and by his belief that North
America's "republican pyramid" or oligarchy of egoists represents the ultimate form of political
organization. Hartmann wants to speed humankind on to its self consciously Schopenhauerian old age;
and he underlines the coincidence of his notion of the direction of the "world-process" with Christian
apocalyptics and its notion that we are living in "the last days."
A2 – Eurocentric
Nietzsche’s notion of the good European is a European in motion – it is a nomadic
multiplicity without definite direction. Nietzsche aims to de-territorialize philosophy
away from the European unconscious
Beyond Good and Evil invites the reader to identify him- or herself as a good European who will give a
new sense to life in Europe, which has long since deterritorialized itself from what Nietzsche called the
"little peninsula of Asia" (WS 215; BGE 52; cf. BGE 208). Indeed, we will not understand "Peoples
and Fatherlands" at all if we begin with a human geography that fails to see Europe in motion. Like
all cultures and multitudes, it must be conceived in terms of mobility, difference, and multiplicity:
"I hear with pleasure that our sun is swiftly moving toward the constellation of Hercules?and I hope that
man on this earth will in this respect follow the sun's example? And we first of all, we good Europeans!"
(BGE 243). The diagnoses of European philosophy and art in BGE can be read as a critical account of
how thinking takes place in the relation between earth and territory. It would then be a geo-logic, a
cartography of human constructions of the Menschen-Erde, and an evocation of their futurity. The
problem that underlies Nietzsche's chapter "Peoples and Fatherlands" is that philosophy, despite its
universalistic ambitions and pretensions, is unconsciously territorialized. It aims, as Deleuze and
Guattari say, at absolute deterritorializa tion but necessarily reterritorializes itself, and in modernity
this means that it produces itself in forms associated with the national state. The preface recalls that
monstrous forms of thought like "astrology and its 'supra-terrestrial' claims" have had the most
stupendous effects on the lived earth, as in "the grand style in architecture in Asia and Egypt"; Nietzsche
ranks these earliest monumental architectural forms as among humanity's fruitful errors. Pre-Copernican,
they see the stars as divine, taking a local capital to be the center of the cosmos. Nietzsche nevertheless
admires these prime inscrip tions on the earth as grand experiments in giving a direction to the earth; they
are the architectural signature of thought still tied to transcendence and as such are necessarily figurative
and diagrammatic. These are ancient, diagrammatic equivalents of Zarathustra's opening challenge: What
will be the direction of the earth? Both dogmatic philosophy and "the grand style of architecture"
demonstrate that "all great things first have to bestride the earth in monstrous and frightening
masks in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with eternal demands" (BGE P).
Here it is helpful to recall Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of figurative or diagrammatic philosophy in
their chapter on geophilosophy. Deleuze and Guattari ask the question, "Can we speak of Chinese,
Hindu, Jewish, or Islamic 'philosophy'?"8 The answer is conditional: "Yes, to the extent that
thinking takes place on a plane of immanence that can be populated by figures as much as by
concepts." But ultimately, there is a distinction between figure and concept, however difficult it may be
to discern in specific cases: "Figures are projections however difficult it may be to discern in specific
cases: "Figures are projections on the plane, which implies something vertical or transcendent."9
Although on the plane, which implies something vertical or transcendent."9 Although Deleuze and
Guattari do not mention Derrida in this connection (and seldom elsewhere), I read this as an implicit
critique of the politico-aesthetic argument in Of Grammatology, which aims at undermining logocentrism
by demonstrat ing the omnipresence of writing and so undercutting the ethnocentrism that distinguishes
criticized Deleuze and Guattari for ethnocentrism on just this score.10 Whatever we might think about
this claim, however, note that Deleuze and Guattari distance themselves from Hegel and Heidegger, who
find the beginnings of philosophy in the original nature of the Greeks. Rather, philosophy arises as an
accident of geography: "The birth of philosophy required an encounter between the Greek milieu and the
plane of immanence of thought."11 Thought proceeds even under figurative forms, but without the
relative deterritorialization of the maritime culture of distinct cities as opposed to empire, there would
have been no friend, no philos. Without the friend, there is no notion of philosophy as common activity
but only of the radi cally marked individual philosopher as an idiosyncratic phenomenon. It is this that
Nietzsche has in mind in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, when he says that without a
common vibrant culture philosophers can appear only as isolated comets streaking through the sky. It is
the Greek maritime world that provided a milieu for the friendship that is necessary for philosophia as
contrasted to the isolated philosophos. Beyond Good and Evil undermines the residues of philosophical
and religious dogmatism (the figures of modern thought, which Deleuze and Guattari classify as subj ect,
obj ect, and other subj ect). It hopes to help invent the "good European." So "Peoples and Fatherlands,"
even more intensely than the rest of BGE, offers an inventory of forms of territorialization and its
variants. This chapter interrogates the title concepts, the state, empire, and addiction to the soil;
explores the national characteristics of German, French, and English thought; and provides an
analysis of Europe and the Jews, as well as the emergence of supranational and nomad peoples. It
asks whether and how "the pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationality has
induced" could be relieved by "Europe's desire to become one." I propose to read the chapter with an
eye to understand ing one of Nietzsche's answers to "What shall be the direction of the earth?" In
"Peoples and Fatherlands" the concluding aphorism announces in italics that "Europe wants to become
one" (BGE 256). What is it to become "one"? Is not Nietzsche in many ways the enemy of "the one"? I
think that we are right to be suspicious of essentialism here, and we might wonder if Nietzsche has
forgotten the lessons about the Weltprozess he had given to Hartmann. I suggest that we approach the
question of the one, the European one (and the multiplicity that is its apparent other), by way of the
geophilosophical concepts that Nietzsche deploys in this chapter.
Nietzsche’s figure of the ‘good European’ is an experimental cultural hybrid that goes
beyond all nationalism and essentialism.
Now we can read the concluding aphorism of the chapter, with its declaration: "Europe wants to become
one" (BGE 256). Nietzsche accuses the "insanity" of all the nationalisms of a mendacious
misinterpretation of Europe's desire. How are we to understand this desire to become one? If
Nietzsche is a confirmed antiessentialist (recall his critique of the national state and its
Schollenkleberei), would a new political Europeanism, a "European Union," generate a new essentialism?
"Europe"?this diverse collection of peoples whose differences Nietzsche has been cataloging and
analyzing throughout "Peoples and Fatherlands" wanting anything. Yet Nietzsche reads this desire "in all
the more profound and comprehensive men of this century" providing a representative list of writers,
interprets figures such as Stendhal, Beethoven, Heine, Schopenhauer, and Goethe as desiring that
Europe become one. Each, he suggests, "anticipates experimentally the European of the future," by
practicing cultural combination or synthesis. They are all hybrids (or monsters). Each proceeds
differently, and there is no grand synthesis, only different adventures. They exemplify a spirit of
patriots, in moments of "weakness or in old age." Wagner is the main example. Despite his egregious
German nationalism, Wagner's work, Nietzsche claims, is intimately related to the French romanticism of
multiplicity. It is experimentation outside the self-imposed limits of peoples and fatherlands that
makes these de facto cosmopolitans and hybrids exemplary. Nietzsche seems to say that we can
learn what it means for Europe to become one by studying these figures: "It is Europe, the one
Europe, whose soul surges and longs to get further and higher through their manifold and
impetuous art." But he breaks off his sentence with a question: "where? into a new light? toward a new
sun?" The question is left open whether these geniuses aim, even unconsciously, at a new Europe with a
determinate content. Nietzsche responds to his own questions: "What is certain is that the same storm and
stress tormented them and that they sought [suchten] in the same way these last great seekers [Sucher]!" It
is a new way of seeking, a Versuch or experiment, not an end sought, that is significant. "Becoming one"
means joyfully experimenting beyond the limits of nationality. These harbingers of the future are
united only insofar as they model (often unknowingly) new forms of hybridity and
cosmopolitanism. Nietzsche describes these "great discoverers in the realm of the sublime" in terms
of multiplicity and variation: they are "born enemies of logic and straight lines, lusting after the
foreign, the exotic, the tremendous, the crooked, the self contradictory." Yet these excessive
experimentalists "all broke and collapsed before the Christian cross," so their career trajectories
fail as models of the good European; it is the mad, antinomian, and rebellious aspects of what
Deleuze calls their lines of flight that offer a promise of the future. While these hybrids are all
"Tantaluses of the will," failures unable to realize their (often unconscious) projects of transcending
ethnicity and nationality, their experiments can serve as initial models of living in the century of the
Menge. Nietzsche has some fun at the end of the chapter's final aphorism, summing up Wagner's "way to
Rome" as in his last music drama, Parsifal. He ends with a rhyme that asks of Wagner, "Is this still
German?" and answers, "What you hear is Rome? Rome’s faith without the text" (BGE'256). So Wagner
used, again all unconsciously, the cloudy, nebulous spiritual geography of Germany, its mediating genius,
to produce a hybridity contrary to his explicit program. Wagner began, interculturally, with a music
growing out of French romanticism and ends with a displacement to Rome and Catholicism. He is a
middle, a cloudy milieu. If Nietzsche is appalled by Wagner's trajectory, he sees his transformations in the
context of Europe's democratic movement, a movement of populations that produces new configurations
of multiplicity, homogeneity, and hybridity, in the century of the Menge. But he has also shown that his
early hero, the apparent archnationalist, is one more odd hybrid produced by Europe's nomadic
fermentation.
A2 – Trump – Defense
Nietzsche is inherently oppositional to Trump’s policies
Harper & Schaaf 18 (West Liberty University & Lincoln College, “Power, Resentment, and Self-
Preservation: Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology as a Critique of Trump,” M. B. Sable, A. J. Torres (eds.),
Trump and Political Philosophy, PP. 257-279, p. 270-271) MRS
Trump’s nationalist rhetoric has provided his most reliable explosive material. Encapsulated
in his maxim to “build the wall,”
Trump has identified myriad threats to the people of United States, including those of terrorism, crime,
and drug cartels. These threats, often attributed to foreign sources, are directly connected to the well-
being and identities of his voters. Also, he highlights trade and immigration as threats to American jobs
and entitlements. Nietzsche argues that this sort of nationalist rhetoric alienates people from each other
(BGE 256). He connects this strategy with short-sighted politicians enamored with old, and weak, forms of
nationalism. Nietzsche identifies other failures of the nationalist statesman who incites passions that
lead to anger, competing “truths,” and what he terms “spiritual leveling” (BGE 241). We find this most
clearly in Trump turning media outlets themselves into the enemy. He presents a world filled with
danger and doom, where “the American Dream is dead.” Not only is he the only one who can fix the situation, but he is
the only one who can differentiate real threats from fake ones. Trump also uses revaluation as a tactic to aggravate the need for self-
preservation. Nietzsche
recognizes that those under siege seek new pride in their identity. They claim for
themselves the mantle of virtue, while others are labeled unjust (GM III: 14). The parallels to Hochschild’s
analysis of Louisiana voters are clear, since outsiders are seen to be given unequal and unfair treatment.
Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” allows his supporters to claim a heritage of traditional
virtue for themselves. At the same time, the failures identified in the status quo justify moving in some
new directions. Already we have seen that Trump revalued elements of the Republican platform. Of
particular note is his radical approach to international relations, dismissing European allies while
embracing authoritarian leaders of Russia, Turkey, and the Philippines, effectively creating a new world
of imaginary or exaggerated threats hitherto unrecognized by Americans. By changing the usual notions of what is
safe and unsafe, Trump disrupts the traditional responses to these threats. Moreover, by highlighting failures of U.S. intelligence—again,
traditionally supported by Republican candidates—Trump undermined traditional political solutions. The threat to the livelihood of voters
makes Trumpism a preferred solution for many. The
revaluation of moral norms has been even more striking. The
Republican Party has long adopted the moral platform of the Christian right. Trump embraced
evangelical voters, yet he made numerous comments, including many of a sexual nature, that would
seem antithetical to Christian virtues. By the same token, many Trump voters engaged in a similar
revaluation, accepting behaviors they previously considered immoral. Parts of this revaluation seem purposeful,
although much is unintentional in nature. The need for self-preservation overrides other considerations; individuals adapt to survive when their
very identity is at stake. Thus,
like the priests, Trump’s campaign was able to “discharge this explosive in such a
way that it does not blow up either the herd or the shepherd” (GM III: 15). The result has been a form of
faith that Nietzsche associates with fanaticism, which is “always most desired and most urgently needed
where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive mark of sovereignty and strength.
That is, the less someone knows how to command, the more urgently does he desire someone who
commands” (GS 347). In studying Trump through the optic of Nietzsche, we understand more precisely
how the need for self-preservation, enflamed by rhetoric and other strategies, reveals Trump as the
“cure” society seeks.
A2 - Ressentiment Good
Ressentiment’s undirected and utopian character denies any potential it may have for
political change
Glezos 14 Simon Glezos, Brown’s Paradox: Speed, ressentiment and global politics, Journal of
International Political Theory 2014, Vol. 10(2) 148–168
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1755088214533042?journalCode=iptb
Ressentiment should not be confused with resentment. Resentment, a sense of anger over pain or injury
we may have suffered (of whatever sort), is a natural response, as is the attempt to challenge or overturn the
sources of these pains or injuries.12 Nietzsche (1976) does not council a kind of ascetic rejection of
judgment, simply accepting everything as it comes—in which case, we would become, in his words, the
ass which can only bray “Yeah-yuh” (p. 424)—nor is he arguing for a Christian “turning of the other
cheek.” Being angry, resentful, unhappy, and so on are all perfectly acceptable to Nietzsche so long as—
and this is crucial—they serve as a spur to action. So long as your resentment or anger becomes a vector
for productive intervention in the world, then they have the potential to be good or noble. The trouble
with ressentiment is that, counter to resentment, it does not act as a spur to productive action (although it
does still frequently spur reactive behavior, a distinction I will shortly explain). Quite the contrary, ressentiment is resentment
crystallized and spiritualized, and thus focuses not on any particular agent or actor, but rather simply on
the world as a whole. Ressentiment expresses itself as a generalized resentment against a world that
allows pain and suffering to occur. It frequently manifests as a rejection of the world, and the imagining
of a world of perfection in opposition to this “imperfect” world. Nietzsche (1968a) makes clear how this
drive to idealization is linked to ressentiment and the spirit of revenge. “To talk about ‘another’ world
than this is quite pointless … we revenge ourselves on life by means of the phantasmagoria of ‘another,’
a ‘better’ life” (p. 49). This link between idealization and revenge is displayed quite strongly, Nietzsche (1968b)
says, in many of the major works of metaphysics in the Western canon: Psychology of Metaphysics—
This world is apparent: consequently there is a true world;—this world is conditional; consequently
there is an unconditioned world;—this world is full of contradiction: consequently there is a world free
of contradiction;—this world is a world of becoming: consequently there is a world of being:—all false
conclusions … It is suffering that inspires these conclusions: fundamentally they are desires that such a
world should exist; in the same way, to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression of hatred
for a world that makes one suffer: the ressentiment of metaphysicians against actuality is here creative.
(pp. 310–311) “It is suffering that inspires these conclusions” and ressentiment is “expression of hatred for a world that
makes one suffer.” This is the danger of ressentiment and how it differs from resentment. Resentment is
a part of living in the world for Nietzsche, a world which produces suffering and which therefore must be
responded to. But ressentiment takes one out of the world. It orients one’s actions to other worlds,
worlds which do not exist.
**A2 – Nietzsche**
Discriminatory
Sure, he’s not a Nazi, but his work is directly abelist, classist, and sexist
A second and more problematic objection concerns those aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that, without needing to be
manipulated or distorted, lent some support to the later Fascist and Nazi ideologies. It is no secret that
Nietzsche praised the masculine, healthy and strong instincts which he saw ideally embodied in the
conqueror, rapacious and master races. Accordingly, he despised Christian moral values (which in the Genealogy he questionably
understood as deriving from the slaves’ resentment) as life-negating and decadent. It is also known that Nietzsche was a harsh critic
of democracy, to which he opposed an aristocratic and hierarchical model of society, a society needed for
“the enhancement of the type ‘man’” (JGB 257). This society was composed by two main classes: the higher
one (the aristocracy) and the lower one (the common people). By virtue of its superiority, the former
class could accept “in good conscience the sacrifice of countless people who have to be pushed down and
shrunk into incomplete human beings, into slaves, into tools, all for the sake of the aristocracy” (JGB 258).
This was in perfect accordance with Nietzsche’s understanding of life in terms of will to power, as the following passage from JGB 259 shows:
“lifeitself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker,
oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting”.
Finally, one should not forget Nietzsche’s harsh conception of sick people as “parasites on society” and
his call “to create a new sense of responsibility for doctors in all cases where the highest interests of life,
of ascending life, demand that degenerate life must be ruthlessly pushed down and thrown aside – the
right to procreate, for instance, the right to be born, the right to live...” (GD, Skirmishes, 36).
DA – White Supremacy
Nietzsche’s understanding of strength and morality is a core staple of white-
supremacist curriculum
Gardell 18 (Martin, Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism, Uppsala University, “Urban Terror: The Case of Lone
Wolf Peter Mangs” p. 9-10) Nick Fleming
When he was finally caught on November 6, 2010, Mangs showed no remorse. During the trial, he demonstrated his contempt for the court
under the pretenses of not listening to TERRORISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE 9 the proceedings, putting fingers in his ears, attending to his
clothing, or reading books. By his acting, he intended to teach potential race warriors how to behave if arrested: do not cooperate with the
enemy, show no guilt, and do not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the System you have waged war upon. To many reporters, already inclined to
see the white serial killer in terms of individual pathology, Mangs’ actions reinforced their image of him. The first Mangs trial coincided with the
Breivik trial, where mental health issues long overshadowed Breivik’s political motives, with mental health experts debating whether Breivik
suffered from paranoid schizophrenia or personality disorder.45 In Mangs’ case, forensic psychiatrists determined his “deeds were planned, not
an expression of disorganized, psychotic thinking.”46 However, as Mangs’ political writings—The German Philosophy—surprisingly was
excluded from the investigation protocol, prosecutors could not even substantiate their charge that Mangs was guilty of hate crime. Hence, the
political motive, the very key to his terror war, was left aside. Why were Mangs’ political writings excluded? “Of course, we sensed there was
some driving force there,” a detective chief inspector said, “but it was the prosecutors’ call and they didn’t let the political overshadow the
technical.” Besides, they deemed Mangs’ text “opaque.”47 To some extent, the document I found in an unmarked folder in Mangs’ computer is
obscure. Modelled on Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, The German Philosophy is a series of
aphorisms and meditations with hidden references, each bestowed with a title and arranged alphabetically. Like Nietzsche,
Mangs abstains from discussing the intellectual work preceding his interventions. “I never go through the dull experience of
explaining the basic structure that my philosophy is based upon.”48 Purportedly “based on the collective
effort of the German gene-pool” to understand the meaning of existence, The German Philosophy is cast as the
continuation of the works of Martin Luther, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Adolf Hitler.49 However, the thoughts of
Luther figure only implicitly in its anti-Semitism, and Nietzsche’s influence mainly transpires in its mobilization of
particular concepts, which owes more to Nietzsche’s iconic standing in white power culture than an
intellectual engagement with his philosophy. Incorporating Nietzschean concepts that are
more or less digested (e.g., master-slave morality, herd morality, beyond good and evil, and Übermensch), seems part
of the white power activists’ general curricula. Mangs oscillates between first-person and third-person, where
he appears as The Author, emphasizing that his contribution does not spring from academic effort. “The author has never studied any theory,
he is basically studying his own nature and the strife of his genes.”50 True
wisdom springs from the collective unconscious
of the Aryan race, inherent to its racial soul. “I don’t study much, I listen inwards for the whispers of the ‘Deutsche Volk-
Seele.’”51 This figure of thought is in line with the Ariosophic tradition of occult National Socialism, and Wotansvolk, an Odinist think-tank out
of St. Maries, Idaho,52 which Mangs came across through the Swedish Heathen Front, and the writings of Magnus Söderman, a national
socialist intellectual who regularly translates American material into Swedish (including Turner Diaries and Hunter) and runs the influential
fascist podcast, Motgift.53 Much like Carl Gustav Jung’s musing on Hitler as “the mouthpiece of the Gods of old,”54 and national socialism as
the resurfacing of psychic forces deeply embedded in the Aryan collective unconscious,55 Mangs argues that “Nazism is the return to
Wotan.”56 Despite the imposition of estranging Christianity, Wotan will be alive 10 M. GARDELL as long as there are Norsemen in the North.
“The laws of the physical universe have not changed, it is still survival of the fittest and the weak will die,” Mangs wrote. “It is highly ineffective
to live according to unnatural Christian rules and this is the reason for the problems in our time.” The (emerging) “New Viking will fight, kill and
die for his survival and he doesn’t need an excuse that is an illusion. He strives to be an animal, physically, and at the same time an evolving
spirit.”57 In the project to unfetter the force of Wotan, Mangs
saw himself as a forerunner, a self-realized Nietzschean
superman whose nature is key to racial survival.58 “Kindness … will be the death of the Aryan race,” whereas “extreme
brutality” is imperative. “I don’t have the same limitations and inhibitions that the surrounding individuals have, therefore I could be the one
that defines the future of our identity.”59
Eurocentricism Turns
Nietzsche is a Euro-centrist.
Morgan 2009 (Diane, lecturer of cultural studies at the University of Leeds, “Nietzsche
and National Identity,” A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. By Keith Ansell Pearson, Wiley-
Blackwell, 458-60)
In the same section (WS 87), Nietzsche also seems to be overtaken by cultural and political developments
in his assumption that the “good European” – he who has broken free of the shackles of the national – has
facing him the task of managing the cultural health of the globe. After a twentieth century largely
characterized by war and by colonial, totalitarian, and genocidal crimes, one would probably hesitate to
confer “the direction and supervision of the total culture of the earth” solely on Europeans, however
apparently free-spirited they might strike us.7 Here again his “unidirectional” abandonment of the
national in favor of the wider mode of belongingness, in this case the European, fails to satisfy. In
relation to the topics of “fashion and modernity” Nietzsche further expresses his clear disdain for the
national: Wherever ignorance, uncleanliness and superstition are still the order of the day, wherever
communications are poor, the landscape is meagre and the priesthood powerful, there we still also
discover national costumes. (WS 215) Sartorially itching to distance themselves from their otherwise all
too conspicuous origins, modern folk are reaching for the anonymous internationalism of fashion. The
complicatedly belted and pleated traditional costumes induce mental and physical sluggishness. Just as
national identity itself becomes a carcass hindering new development, so does folkloric attire consist of
cumbersome garments hampering movement. By contrast, the bold, easy-wear, slick designs of the great
metropolises are able to accompany a liberatingly accelerated speed of life and thereby promote mental
and physical agility. This section is most notable for the definition it gives of Europe, one that is of
topical interest: Here, where the concepts “modern” and “European” are almost equivalent, what is
understood by Europe comprises much more territory than geographical Europe, the little peninsula of
Asia: America, especially, belongs to it, insofar as it is the daughter-land of our culture. On the other
hand, the cultural concept “Europe” does not include all of geographical Europe; it includes only those
nations and ethnic minorities who possess a common past in Greece, Rome, Judaism and Christianity.
(WS 215) Whereas national identity is usually designated by mapping out a particular region within
which a specific people is assumed to dwell, Europe presents us with a different logic. Nietzsche partly
dissociates Europe from any clearly demarcated land mass. Europe, understood in strictly geographical
terms, is a mere “little peninsula of Asia.” There is a non-alignment between this somewhat negligible
promontory and what “Europe” means here. The idea of “Europe” is cultural and for this reason it also
has to include its “natural” extension, its “daughter-land,” America.8 Likewise it also excludes, for
Nietzsche, Islam. The Muslim populations of Bulgaria, Bosnia, or Romania are not considered to be
“European” according to this definition. Additionally, if Nietzsche’s criteria were to be adopted, Turkey
could not be considered for entry into the entity now called the European Union, unless it were partitioned
in such a way that what used to belong to the Greco-Roman dominion of Thrace could be incorporated.
Here Nietzsche reveals a conventional and restricted notion of Europe’s composition, one predicated on
conventional ideas of the “Western” and, as such, over-simplistic in its understanding of the nature of the
“common past” informing Europe.9 “Europe” also has a problematic relationship with Russia, as
Nietzsche indicates in an aphorism entitled “Most Dangerous Form of Emigration” (WS 231). Russia
figures throughout Nietzsche’s writings as both “occidental,” part of Europe, and “oriental,” foreign to
Europe. The latter aspect, called “Asia,” provides both constitutive sources for European culture and an
alien force against which Europe defends itself and by so doing consolidates itself.10 Geographically
Europe joins the vast Asian continent, and it is only culturally separated from it to a vacillating extent.
Through an ongoing process of confrontation, taming, conversion, and incorporation, Asian elements can
nourish the dynamism of European culture. Indeed, to give a prime example, Asia is the source of the cult
of Dionysus. However, the potential of the Dionysian for revitalizing and deepening culture could only
make itself felt in Greece, where, once “moderated,” it entered into a most beautiful “Bruderbund” with
the Apollonian (KSA 1, p. 583).11 Otherwise, in its raw, unmediated state, Asia permanently threatens to
engulf Europe with “barbarism.” A similar diagnosis is echoed in this section from Human All Too
Human: furious about being drained of intelligence as “good books” increasingly entice its thinking
population towards Europe, “the spirit of the deserted fatherland [is turned] into the extended jaws of Asia
that would like to devour little Europe.” Russia is characterized as a volatile entity, whose biopolitical
balance can change and whose disposition towards Europe can fluctuate. The ascendancy of the Asiatic
for Nietzsche spells a menace for “civilization,” for things “Greek” (HH 114). However, this threat can
provide an opportunity for reinvigorating cultural resilience; the world-weary Europeans are obliged to
tap into dormant energy reserves so as to mobilize a defense of their heritage and their future. Russia is
considered by Nietzsche to be a key consideration when discussing European matters, including the fate
of nation-states – as indeed it still is today.12
Ressentiment Good – Trump
Ressentiment is inevitable and uniquely key to challenging the Trump administration
Dolger 16 (Stefan, Professor at Brock University, “For Ressentiment: An Alternative to Trumpism”
http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/08/for-ressentiment-an-alternative-to-trumpism/#.WXE3Z4jytPa)NCF
Donald Trump’s campaign of anger may have jumped the shark this past week, and I am afraid that may lead my friends on the Left (whether
you like Bernie, Jill, or Hillary) to mistake the lessons of this electoral cycle. It is tempting to believe that the collapsing Trump campaign signals
something larger, a triumph of optimism over fear, but that is precisely the lesson we should not draw. Trump’s successes draw on the well of
despair and rage in the American voter, but his failure would not mean that despair and rage have lost their political salience. It is high time
we on the Left learned to embrace instead of reject ressentiment — the feeling of impotence that leads to anger
directed against enemies we blame for our suffering — as a means of mobilizing voters. Ressentiment is a potent political
weapon, as Friedrich Nietzsche knew so well, but for the last forty years it has been almost the exclusive provenance of the Right. It’s time
for that to change. First some context: despite Trump’s unprecedented series of offensive, treasonous, and ignorant gaffes, this election is not
over yet. Second,we should face up to this ugly political reality: regardless of Trump’s failure, the House and Senate are likely
to remain in Republican hands. But third, and even more importantly: another liberal president will do little to alter the
Republican dominance[1] — I use that word not just for emphasis — of state legislatures and governorships, where Republicans hold
approximately a 2:1 advantage. Yes, you read that number right. [2] The Right’s tapping into ressentiment, of which Trump is
merely the symptom of rather than the cause, is one very powerful reason for this profound electoral success. We of
the Left need to start thinking more creatively about the upside of anger in politics if we want a more
enduring Left coalition, because the sad truth is that America in 2016 has already chosen the path of
ressentiment. And it did it a long time ago. You may want to think of this as the era of Obama/Clinton, but the numbers say otherwise.
What Trump and the right wing “resonance machine” (as political theorist William Connolly has sagely termed it) have done so well, is to craft a
mythic story that is broadly appealing to large numbers of American voters. This story goes thusly: you, the American citizen, are
entitled
to a life of freedom, comfort and safety, but your entitlement has been stolen from you. The thieves are many
— government bureaucrats, Mexican immigrants, terrorists, “race hustlers,” feminists, Muslims, China, big business — but all are united by
their efforts to undermine the American Dream. Is this narrative true? Not particularly. And the
patent falsehoods and disavowals
of this narrative have led us on the Left to try (and try, and try), to reveal the lies underlying this story of
America. We have become a tribe of fact-checkers and myth debunkers, always ready with our handy copy of
Thomas Piketty or Michelle Alexander, to try to reveal the facts to those gulled by these lies. But as political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason
Reifler have convincingly shown, trying to fact-check errors in others, even when those errors are indeed demonstrably false,
typically only reinforces the mistaken belief.[3] So what if we just stopped trying? I don’t mean we should stop
the political struggle. Instead, I suggest that we retool some of our efforts, to move away from a “politics of truth,” and
instead embrace the politics of ressentiment. As political thinkers like Connolly, Wendy Brown, and Lauren Berlant[4] have
argued, the American economy is a ressentiment generating machine par excellence — relentlessly
distributing hardships unequally while maintaining, at the same time, that the American Dream is
achievable by all — resulting in a strong cognitive desire to find an enemy who is “really” to blame for
your individual failures. When everyone is supposed to be able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, but you in Canton or
Indianapolis can’t, it’s not surprising that you direct your rage at whatever targets can be plausibly linked with your suffering. But instead of
finding suitable outlets for rage (though Bernie’s campaign and Black Lives Matter made a start of it, and Hillary is now clueing into
the Trump/Putin bromance as another opportune target [5]), we on the Left have relied on reason, empathy, and hope
to inspire and mobilize. And theorists on the Left have been diametrically opposed to cultivating
ressentiment, following Nietzsche in his belief that such a disposition poisons the soul. You know what? Nietzsche may have been right.
But in a world that runs off of ressentiment, it seems a tad utopian to abjure its use. Did America swear off tanks, because the Germans used
them in the Blitzkrieg? My worry, in a nutshell, is that we
on the Left have misunderstood the legacy of the Civil Rights
Movement. By focusing too much on ushering in Martin Luther King’s “beloved community,” where love
triumphs over hate, we have lost sight of the most basic of political wisdom. We have instead thought that
since “another world is possible,” that it is somehow immoral to use the tools of THIS world to get there
(and we forget how much rage was cultivated by the Left in the 1960s). And when we have been taken to the woodshed (electorally speaking),
we have comforted ourselves with our good intentions and the purity of our political tactics, as if that
somehow excuses our very real failures. You know how on those days when you think everyone is a jerk, it’s usually you that’s being the idiot?
Same rule applies in politics. It’s a bad idea to think that the entire world is wrong, and that you have the secret keys to the new kingdom. The
upshot of this shift, from fact-checking to myth-creating, might be more profound than meets the eye. Consider that one of the common
complaints by those in “middle America” is that they don’t like being lectured to by “pointy-headed intellectuals” about their beliefs, their
tastes, their choices. In effect, they think we think they’re stupid. And, well, judging by my Facebook feed, they’re largely right about that. But
embracing ressentiment, as I suggest, might loosen this divide between the supposedly knowing and the
assumed ignorant. If we stop seeing ourselves, for just a moment, as the fact-tellers to the world, but instead
as blinkered ressentiment-laden subjects who are just as eager to find enemies to blame as the
“ignorant,” then maybe, just maybe we can start again to make common cause. And if I’m suggesting that we
use ressentiment as a tool of manipulation (I am), it’s not out of any sense that we’re superior or somehow immune to it. In
fact quite the opposite — we are all the subjects of Queen Ressentiment, and we’d be smarter political actors if
we stopped thinking otherwise. What I am suggesting is not that we can overcome our ressentiment, but that
we can make better use of it. Instead of the white hot rage that erupts in us, when we see the latest video of Trump supporters
chanting racist slogans (and they do this, no doubt), perhaps instead of thinking of them as the enemy who needs to be lectured, we can shift
our focus a little. See the rage in them. And feel the rage in yourself. And give in to it… and give in (a little) to theirs. And
then see if you can find a target that both of you can aim that rage at, instead of fantasizing about lecturing them on their stupidity. In other
words: don’t give them more truth; give them a better villain. The world is full of enemies — a veritable cornicopia! — so
let’s go find some useful bad guys. Putin is one good candidate. But he won’t do entirely, since what is really needed is a villain responsible for
the current suffering across the Rust Belt, etc. While “the 1%” is also a good target, I would suggest yet more refinement of that label —
something that focuses attention on those who become wealthy not by “hard work” but by feeding like parasites off of the labor of “real”
Americans. And if the story has a whiff of conspiracy, and tales of licentious excesses by the conspirators… well then, even better. Is someone
getting their rocks off, while Appalachia suffers? That’s where to look. Marx liked vampire-imagery to describe capitalism, so there is good
precedent for this rhetorical pivot to parasitism by the Left — we just need a more sustained campaign against specifically identified robbers of
the American Dream, if we ever want Congress or the States out of Republican hands. This is less satisfying, in some ways, than our preferred
Left political-economic story, because we have to give up a little of our own moral superiority. We’re not inherently more rational, or more
righteous. We don’t own a “spiritual discipline against resentment” (to quote Reinhold Niebuhr) that our opponents lack. But if we don’t want a
bloodbath in the 2018 midterm elections to erase whatever crumbs of liberalism come to us in 2016, we had better find a way to overcome our
distaste, and just “embrace the bitter.”
Ressentiment Good – Cede the Political
Avoiding ressentiment cedes the political – you should embrace it and be upset with
the current state of American politics instead of affirming their placid nihilism
- A bad card!
Newman 2000 (Saul, earned a degree in philosophy from Macquarie University “Anarchism and the
politics of ressentiment”) NFleming
Can this paradoxical relationship of reflection and opposition be seen as a form of ressentiment in the Nietzschean sense? I would argue here
that, although there are differences, the Manichean relationship of opposition between the human subject and
political power that is found in anarchism obeys the general logic of ressentiment described above. This is
for two reasons. Firstly, as we have seen, ressentiment is based on the moral prejudice of the powerless against the
powerful — the revolt of the ‘slave’ against the ‘master’. We can see this moral opposition to power clearly in
anarchist discourse, which pits the essentially ‘moral’ and ‘rational’ human subject against the essentially ‘immoral’ and ‘irrational’
quality of political power. It is evident in the opposition of natural to artificial authority that is central to
anarchism. Secondly, ressentiment is characterized by the fundamental need to identify oneself by looking
outwards and in opposition towards an external enemy. Here, however, the comparison to anarchism is not so clear-cut.
For instance, one could conceivably argue that anarchist subjectivity and ethics — the notion of mutual aid
and assistance — is something that develops independently of political power, and that therefore it
does not need an oppositional relationship with the State in order to define itself. However, I would suggest that
although anarchist subjectivity does develop in a ‘natural’ system which is radically exterior to the
‘artificial’ system of political power, it is precisely through this assertion of radical exteriority that
ressentiment emerges. Anarchism subscribes to a dialectical logic, according to which the human species emerges from an ‘animal-
like’ state, and begins to develop innate moral and rational faculties in a natural system.[40] However the subject finds this development
impeded by the ‘irrational’, ‘immoral’ power of the State. Thus the subject cannot achieve his full human identity as long as he remains
oppressed by the State. This is why, for Bakunin: “The State is the most flagrant negation...of humanity.”[41] The realization of the
subject is always stultified, deferred, put off, by the State. This dialectic of Man and State suggests that the identity of the
subject is characterized as essentially ‘rational’ and ‘moral’ only in so far as the unfolding of these innate faculties and qualities is prevented by
the State. Paradoxically the State, which is seen by anarchists as an obstacle to the full identity of man, is, at the same time, essential to the
formation of this incomplete identity. Without this stultifying oppression, the anarchist subject would be unable to see itself as ‘moral’ and
‘rational’. His identity is thus complete in its incompleteness. The existence of political power is therefore a means of constructing this absent
fullness. I would argue, then, that anarchism can only posit the subject as ‘moral’ and ‘rational’ in opposition to the ‘immorality’ and
‘irrationality’ of political power. In
the same way the identity of the ‘slave’ is consolidated as ‘good’ by
opposing itself to the identity of the ‘master’ which is ‘evil’. Nietzsche would see in this an attitude of
ressentiment par excellence.
Link – Settler Colonialism
Nietzsche is not only complicit in but argued for conquest of indigenous peoples – they
are going to say this is a misreading of his work – even if that’s true, their logic
becomes the rhetorical fodder for neo-colonialism which is empirically proven
Moon 16 (Paul, Professor at Auckland University in Auckland, New Zealand. “’Blonde Beats of Prey: A
Nietzschean interpretation of the language of Britain’s colonization of New Zealand”) NCF
The intention in this section is not to provide a comprehensive analysis of all texts which exemplify these
associations – the constraints of space make that infeasible. Rather, indicative samples of language from
the categories of colonising agents mentioned above are provided and grouped in a general way
according to their correlation with the various elements of Nietzsche’s theories on social, cultural, and
moral evolution, on the proto-human evolution of race, and on the innate tendency by some groups
towards conquest. The influence of Social Darwinism on the intellectual environment from which On the
Genealogy of Morals emerged extended to how Maori were sometimes seen by the British colonisers in
the latter nineteenth century in particular. Keith Sorrenson has noted that Social Darwinism ‘provided a
new basis for racism’ in New Zealand at this time, fostering a view among the colonisers of Maori as
having remained culturally, socially, and intellectually static in the centuries prior to European
intervention.54 In this vein, the amateur scholar Edward Tregear argued in 1894 – at the tail end of
Britain’s colonisation of New Zealand – that the intellectual horizons of Maori society had been severely
limited prior to the arrival of Europeans in the country. He alleged that their knowledge of science, for
example, was ‘distorted by imperfect observation, and affected by the primitive superstitions and dim
perceptions of cause and effect which mark the simple mind of the barbarian … .and, unable to reason
inductively, he deduces some false conclusion’. 55 On the intellectual scale Social Darwinism offered,
the Maori were ranked well below Europeans. Even biologically, the Maori were sometimes deemed to
be inferior to their European counterparts. Addressing the issue of high infertility rates among Maori
women, in 1881, the doctor (and later politician) Alfred Newman suggested that improved fertility
‘would have attended a cross with the more vigorous fertile white race’, but that despite such
developments, the Maori were ‘dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior
race’. Twenty-five years earlier, another doctor, Isaac Featherstone, had anticipated this ‘extinction’,
suggesting that when it came to the fate of the Maori, ‘[o]ur plain duty, as good compassionate
colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow. Then history would have nothing to reproach us with’.
56 The language of racial superiority and inferiority could not be more explicit.57 The ascendency of
European civilisation more generally, and the accelerated rate of European intellectual progress, which
Nietzsche discussed as in Beyond Good and Evil, together with the notion that Europeans as a race are
– in the scheme of Social Darwinism – superior to the ‘savage’ races, are all plainly evident in these
statements. Presumptions of superiority, though, were just an entrée into Nietzsche’s reconstruction
of the formation of human society, and the emergence of relations between both peoples and
protostates. His frequent promotion of the concept of a master race was contingent on the existence
of an antithesis, which in this case was the ‘savage’. During the roughly first half century of Britain’s
colonisation of New Zealand, the term ‘savage’ was interchangeable with ‘native’, 58 both of which
were designations of what would later be identified as ‘Maori’. However, from around the 1840s,
‘savage’ began to be used with an increasingly pejorative meaning – one more in keeping with the
designation Nietzsche ascribed to it. It was not just that ‘savage’ was appearing in the language of
British colonisers increasingly as a derogatory term, but that in certain contexts, the existence of this
inferior category of humans was drawn on to warrant the further and accelerated British colonisation in
New Zealand. An example of this appears in an 1842 book by the Auckland settler Charles Terry, who
described New Zealand in the half century after Captain James Cook’s arrival in the country in 1769 as
‘the abode of savages and cannibals, and without the pale of civilization’, before attributing the
presence of more Europeans in the country as leading to improvements in the ‘social conditions’ of
Maori.59 This disposition of the implied master race to improve the savage race was only partly a
fulfilment of Nietzsche’s prescription. The German philosopher had emphasised the element of
conquering the savages in such encounters, although arguably, the process of ‘civilising’ could
conceivably be construed as a form of conquest, albeit primarily a cultural one. A more literal
reflection of Nietzsche’s implied meaning of conquest appeared in the works of Walter Gudgeon,60 the
settler, soldier, and writer, who described British–Maori engagements during the wars of the 1860s in
more martial terms. He argued that there was ‘neither honour nor glory to be gained fighting with
savages’, and that by the time the Imperial forces withdrew ‘the natives learned who were to be their
future masters’, after having been ‘thoroughly conquer[ed]’. 6
Not Nietzsche
Performative statehood
Aff is performative statehood
Immigration reform is the ‘left hand’ of the performative sovereign- it is the assistive
hand that places the state as the sole
Shammas 18 (Victor works in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography University of Oslo,
“Staging sovereignty: Punitivity, xenophobia, and the frail society,”
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a8d8d5c80bd5e24bc0797f6/t/5ab13f1870a6ad041285c698/15
21565465561/Staging_sovereignty_Punitivity_xenophobi.pdf)MRS
There has been an increasing recognition among thinkers of state power that sovereignty is contested and disjointed, an
“uneven and fragmented performance, rather than a stable capacity” (Bonilla 2017: 333). The imperative of a
continuous performance of sovereignty, which crucially revolves around a display and projection of
public authority as if it were not fragmentary, is central to late-modern statecraft. Simultaneously, one
of the central problems in postindustrialized societies is that of surplus populations, those individuals for
whom there exists no positive economic use under increasingly advanced conditions of capital
accumulation, and who consequently must increasingly be regulated, managed, and controlled by
agencies of the state. Such organizing actions seek to prevent the eruption of smoldering social pathologies into blazing fires that might
incinerate the dominant order – what a Citigroup economist calls “Vox Populi risk” (Fordham 2015), a euphemism partly
covering the exercise of popular sovereignty in liberal democracies, primarily centered on “protests and
volatility in public opinion” which are said to “pose ongoing, fast-moving risks to the business and
investment environment.” In response to rebellions, resistance, retreatism, and what postwar
sociologists would have called “dysfunctions,” the state mobilizes both its “left” and “right” hand, in
Bourdieu’s conceptual terms, i.e. either the assistive or the disciplinary wings of the state (see Bourdieu 2008), from
countercyclical economic initiatives and social assistance programs to more traditional coercive
measures, including the police, jails, and prisons. The response to such surplus populations, or “problem
populations” (Spitzer 1975)—disorderly youths, unemployable “ex-cons,” unassimilated immigrants or
asylum seekers, unskilled and under skilled members of the working class, and (to use a bureaucratic neologism) so-called NEETs (“not in
education, employment or training”), to name but a few categories—is the state’s reassertion of its sovereign powers over
the social body, often undertaken with quite public, even theatrical displays, which can be conceived of
as acts of what we might call staging sovereignty – including aggressive policing, carceral expansion,
assertive rebordering, and the politics of austerity being among the most prominent examples. Staging
sovereignty involves bolstering, displaying, and reaffirming the sovereign authority of the state, and this
becomes all the more important in the face of the trenchant problem of surplus populations, which
constantly threaten to turn into unruly problem populations. Against this broad societal background,
two of the most prominent sources of social anxiety that feed and fuel acts of staging sovereignty are,
on the one hand, the fear of immigrants, asylum seekers, ethnoracial minorities, and other
“foreigners”—those groups which Wacquant (1999) ironically labels “suitable enemies”—and, on the other hand, the fear of
criminal offenders, convicts, inmates, and other disorderly or “anti-social” bodies. It has, of course, become something of a
truism that the fear of crime and criminals and the fear of “foreigners” and other “others” have become
increasingly intertwined. But why are these disparate issues so often amalgamated in public discourse?
And what can we learn about the proponents of xenophobia and punitivity by viewing them as one? On
the one hand, the fear of foreign bodies betrays a fundamental lack of belief in themselves by host
populations, “native” inhabitants, and ethnonational or ethnoracial majorities. These fears are a
transmuted expression of a lack of faith in the strength and solidity of their group, involving an absence
of self-confidence in the idea that a self-identified group, national culture, or “way of life,” possesses
sufficient strength to withstand the weight of an opposing force, to resist the cuts and slices of a “tide”
or “wave” (those popular metaphors so often invoked in collective representations of mobile bodies), in short, a lack of belief in
its capacity to assimilate others rather than be assimilated. Similarly, the fear of crime and criminal offenders, the need to
punish inmates harshly, to establish austere conditions of confinement, betrays a lack of belief in the strength of law, morality, and the state.
The aff only brings in immigrants in so far as they can be broken down and assimilated
into Anglo-American culture. The label of ‘legal immigrant’ makes the assimilation
process easier because the legal immigrant is allowed to be there, the illegal
immigrant is inherently separate.
In the eponymous Platonic dialogue, Timaeus observes that whenever matter like air, water, and earth is “caught
inside fire and gets cut by the sharpness of fire’s angles and edges, then if it is reconstituted as fire, it
will stop getting cut.” Fire is energy, and it remolds the three remaining kinds of matter in the Platonic-
Timaeaen ontology. Fire ceases to remake air, wind, and earth if they too are made into fire, sensibly
enough, because “a thing of any kind that is alike and uniform is incapable of effecting any change in, or
being affected by, anything that is similar to it.” To be of a kind means to be incapable of affecting an entity of the same kind:
if water could dilute water, then either the thing doing the diluting or the thing being diluted is not truly (or rather, purely) water. But,
Timaeus continues, “as long as something involved in a transformation has something stronger than it to
contend with, the process of its dissolution will continue non-stop” (Plato 1997: 1259). While Timaeus’s aim is
to describe the transformation of physical particles in nature, his description resonates with modern
debates on the “rehabilitation” of criminal offenders or “integration” of immigrants: And likewise, when a few of the
smaller corpuscles are surrounded by a greater number of bigger ones, they will be shattered and
quenched. The quenching will stop when these smaller bodies are willing to be reconstituted into the
form of the kind that prevailed over them...But if these smaller corpuscles are in process of turning into
these and one of the other kinds encounters them and engages them in battle, their dissolution will go
on non-stop until they are either completely squeezed and broken apart and escape to their own likes,
or else are defeated, and, melding from many into one, they are assimilated to the kind that prevailed
over them, and come to share its abode from then on (Plato 1997: 1259-1260). The imagery of a war of
assimilations, a contest of strength that can only yield one victor, will be familiar to those following
contemporary discussions of immigration policies, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. Both nativist
struggles against immigration and law-and-order campaigns against criminal offenders and inmates
revolve around the symbolic representation of the strength hosts and “intruders” respectively. Who is
the “smaller corpuscle,” to use Timaeus’s term? Who will be “shattered and quenched,” and who will be
“squeezed and broken apart”? Magnitude is itself a stake in the battle, as Bourdieu’s theory of fields reminds us (Shammas and
Sandberg 2016). There are no ready- made “minorities.”
Selection is one part of performative statehood- in order to exclude one group, you
must include another. The ‘legal immigrant’ is included at the direct expense of the
‘illegal immigrant’
The aim of staging sovereignty is to shore up strength and deny weakness. The fixation on strength and weakness is
evident in places like Document.no, a Norwegian right- wing website, operated on a heady ideological brew of Islamophobia, nativism,
Bannonite Trumpism, Nordic supremacy, and the occasional statement of sympathy (at least in the comments section) for the Norwegian mass
murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Commenting on the formation a new center-right coalition government, including the right-wing populist
party, the Progress Party, one reader comments: “Zero respect for these politicians who are incapable of stating the one important challenge
facing us. Namely that our trusting, law- abiding, and productive population is being replaced by new kinds of people who lack trust, are
criminals, and produce absolutely nothing.”2 Or, as another reader writes, “The illusion that one can integrate people from Somaila [sic] and
the middle-east [sic] really only exists in the minds of the political correct. Where I live there are zero signs of integration, which we, moreover,
aren’t interested in either.”3 Document.nois suffused with fear, with ethnoracial and ethnonational anxieties,
equal parts beguiled with and terrified at the prospects of being overrun by Arab, Somali, and Muslim
immigrants while beholden to “liberal” elites incapable of stemming the tide and dealing effectively with
alleged problem populations, who, it is thought, will bring about the downfall of an exceptionally
wealthy and generous welfare state, social democracy, social trust, ethnoracial purity, and a particular
(national) way of life. Xenophobia is mobilized in defense of the welfare state. What is so fascinating, if
that is the right term, is that these stalwart defenders of social democracy are miles removed, politically
speaking, from the political organizations and parties responsible for bringing about a modestly
decommodifying welfare state, including trade unions, the Labour Party, and various other political factions of the center-left. To
them, the social order is both superior and fragile: it is far greater and better than any comparable
national society, and yet it is always threatened with being overrun by semi-barbaric hordes. What
characterizes these movements above all else is their ressentiment. They are, to think with Nietzsche
(2006: 48-49), reacting rather than responding. The truly healthy individual “acts his reactions” or “responds
instead of reacting,” in Bogue’s (1989: 26) take on Nietzschean ressentiment: “Once the reactive forces gain dominance
in an individual, a spirit of revenge takes over, a permanent feeling of ressentiment, or resentment.
Because the man of ressentiment is incapable of acting or ridding himself of his memory traces, every
object that affects him causes pain, and he blames every object for that pain and seeks revenge against
it. Eventually, that revenge is directed against active individuals” (Bogue 1989: 26). To the nativist
xenophobe, often imbued with punitive inclinations, every experience is coded within the matrix of a
generalized resentment against the Other, no matter how “objectively” far-fetched. Immigrants,
minorities, foreigners, asylum seekers, and criminals are lumped together in a conceptual jumble, a “folk
category” (see Khalidi 2013: 55-65), composed of distasteful and dangerous bodies who must be nullified or
subjected to a strategy seeking to “select, eject, and incapacitate” them from the social body, in Webber and
Bowling’s (2008) apt phrase.
Aff isn’t that bad
The aff fixes the worst parts of performative statehood- it combats the violence and
sickness by favoring inclusion
To punish harshly, then, as the United States and Russia do today (indexed by their respective rates of incarceration), is to betray a
belief in the feebleness of these very polities. To call for heightened punitivity—from “zero tolerance”
policies in New York City through anti-social behavior orders (ASBOs) in England to the policing of “hooliganism” (khuliganstvo) in Russia—is
to disclose a subjective sense of insecurity amongst social elites vis-à -vis national culture. It is, as Slavoj Žižek
points out in a different context, to act like the rage-filled Father who beats and berates those around him, a
figure “in whom impotence and excessive rage coincide” (Žižek 2009: 313), and who thereby only mounts on
display his own frailty. Staging sovereignty, which means bolstering the appearance of power of the
state over and against both external and interior enemies alike, is a demonstration of infirmity – as
every observer of military parades—with their seemingly endless and mindless rows of ballistic missiles
and parading troops—knows well. There is something suspicious about such acts: they seem more like
attempts at covering up or concealing an infirmity that resists being hidden. As Adorno (2005) understood well,
every display of health—and strength is the ultimate display of health—is only additional proof of the reality of mortality, of a death-fixation, or
the “sickness of the healthy,” as Adorno puts it: “The
very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could
easily be taken for prepared corpses.... Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of
health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating” (Adorno 2005: 59). The
essentially reactive obsession with displaying strength is, at a societal level, revelatory of a societal sickliness, a decrepitude that becomes all
the more apparent, the more such groups and societies insist on their vitality and potency. But
where does this subjective
insecurity stem from? They are primarily derived from the economic dislocation of large sections of the
working and lower-middle classes and the symbolic displacement of previously dominant or valorized
social groups: the disappearance of stable, high-paying jobs, the reordering of relations of symbolic
domination, as is gradually taking place, at least in the space of public discourse, with white males in
Western Europe and North America, an incontestability being challenged by previous social
subordinates, from women through sexual minorities to black and brown bodies. In short, we can derive
a dictum from the contemporary political situation in postindustrialized societies, a dictum with special
relevance for those who study the application of negative social energy (the most exacting definition of punishment
imaginable at present) and the reinforcement of ethnonational and ethnoracial categories (which captures a wide range of nativist inclinations
and actions):Those who punish and nativize the most, simultaneously present and publicize their own
frailty. All societal anxieties and moral panics reveal a lack of confidence, a lack of self-assuredness in
the group-level mode of being. More specifically, ethnoracial anxieties, xenophobias, and racisms are, in
a purely analytical- descriptive sense, revelatory of inward weakness. Those who would defend a nation
against immigration, or a society against crime (the two are increasingly imbricated and interwoven),
claim that they do so from a position of superiority. The thing they purport to represent is worth
preserving, these hosts and defenders claim, because it is greater than or worth more than the force
which is said to threaten to disturb it. But this position of superiority is also an admission of frailty.
Studying the comments section on the right-wing news website Breitbart.com—the premier website of the “alt-right” movement in the United
States—is revelatory of this tendency. In
a comment on a Breitbart piece on immigration reform and the
importation of “low-skill farmworkers,” one reader writes, tellingly, “Those ‘low skilled workers’ are the
reason we spend trillions on entitlements for illegals. They bring their entire families with them -
children, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins...A dozen plus live in one-bedroom apartments and
every single one qualify for food stamps, get free healthcare, welfare, tax credits, education, child care
and more.”1 Majorities are minorities; minorities become majorities. That which is superior is also
fragile, a vulnerable thing; that which is inferior is excessive and exceedingly potent. Staging sovereignty
involves one or more of the following: exclusion, expressivity, and fortification. It may involve targeting
specific groups for symbolic exclusion from the social body, as with US President Donald Trump’s travel
ban aimed at Arabs and Muslims. It may express and communicate, as with “three-strikes laws” that signal the state’s resolve to
“take crime seriously” by subjecting repeat criminal offenders to punitive actions. It may involve shoring up the perceived
power of the state, or fortifying the nation, often in quite literal ways, as with the slated construction of a border
fence between Norway and Russia, likely to be largely ineffectual due to Norway’s mostly unguarded land borders stretching some 2,500
kilometers alongside Russia, Finland, and Sweden.
When the state acts in one or more of these ways—excluding,
expressing, or fortifying—it stages its own sovereignty. When the Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven promised to
consider deploying Sweden’s armed forces against the perceived growing threat of urban gangs (Nilsson and Skoglund 2018), he was trying to
block the right-wing Swedish Democrats from appropriating the symbolic profits connected with appearing tough on crime. When early in
his presidency Donald Trump regularly—and by one account, frantically—quizzed his advisors, “Should I
fire Bannon? Should I fire Reince? Should I fire McMaster? Should I fire Spicer? Should I fire Tillerson?”
(Wolff 2018; emphasis in original), this routine “ritual” was “more a pretext to a discussion of the power he held
than it was, strictly, about personnel decisions,” in Wolff’s (2018) estimation. It was an attempt to assert the
president’s authority, and by extension, the sovereignty of the state, over and above its constitutive
members. With the assassination of the former Russian FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko—by most accounts ascribable to a covert
operation ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin (e.g. Harding 2016)—the Russian state was signaling its capacity to strike down its
former citizens and security personnel “gone rogue” or turned dissidents. The paradox of staging sovereignty is that such acts often take the
form of attempting to assuage nativist and punitivizing anxieties, which are expressions of inward weakness, with the express aim of projecting
the strength, glory, and potency of the state. To take one example: in January 2018, the UK disclosed that as part of an Anglo-French bilateral
agreement, it would invest some £44.5 million in strengthening border security in Calais in northern France (Travis and Stewart 2018). This
is
part of a wider transnational trend by which sovereignty spills beyond the proper limits of national
boundaries, e.g. the United States stations “preclearance” US Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
personnel at major airports around the world to “inspect travelers prior to boarding U.S.-bound flights”
(CBP 2017), Norway ships inmates to serve time in a Norwegian-Dutch prison in the Netherlands (Pakes and Holt 2015), and in 2015 the EU
signed a 3 billion euro deal with Turkey to block refugees from reaching European shores (European Council 2016). The point of the Calais deal
is to show that the government of Theresa May is doing something—and doing it resolutely—about the (right-wing populist) perception that
Britain’s borders are being swamped with refugees. “This is about investing in and enhancing the security of the UK border,” a government
spokesperson said. According to The Guardian, Britain has now invested more than £150 million in border security in Calais since 2016,
including the construction of the 1-kilometer concrete “Great Wall of Calais” – to prevent mainly asylum seekers, from making their way into
the border tunnel under the Channel. This is a textbook act of staging sovereignty: erecting thick slabs of drab grey concrete to keep out mainly
young men from the Middle East and North Africa, a move resonating and reverberating with the infamous Brexit campaign poster, unveiled by
the then-leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage, that proclaimed a “Breaking Point” in immigration levels, while complaining that
“the EU has failed us all” and that “we must break free of the EU and take back control” (Stewart and Mason 2016).

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**Nietzsche**

SHAPIRO 16 (Gary, Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the

SHAPIRO 16 (Gary, Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the

SHAPIRO 16 (Gary, Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the

SHAPIRO 16 (Gary, Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the

SHAPIRO 16 (Gary, Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the

SHAPIRO 16 (Gary, Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the

In many ways, the

In this way the slave

High culture speaks the language of taking advantage of life

, . The discursive event which bears the name Nietzsche is

Nietzsche then emerges as a theorist of nomadism, migration, immigration, diaspora,

other times sympathetic and full of a profound love of

fear of immigrants is presented as the cause of our economic woes

Nietzsche attempts to construct a cartography of philosophy - past, present, and future - in

SHAPIRO 16 (Gary, Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the

Thought is a process of territorialization – of positing a relationship to the earth. But

*gender language paraphrased

Connolly argues that we

, . The discursive event which bears the name Nietzsche is

The intention is not to use Nietzsche’s theories in this area as a corrective

or substitute to these approaches, but more as a complementary theoretical

Nietzsche and feminists agree on the failure of pursuing objectivism

Feminist politics engage in negative forms of the will to power

And yet, some hard questions must be asked.

Could it be that the

Fanon’s understanding of action, specifically the actions of black revolutionaries and

Fanon’s theories of colonialism and decolonization are built on his readings of

The theoretical/ practical interventions provide alternative stories that

Liberal institutions destroy freedom by minimizing all resistance that can be

Nietzsche’s work was taken out of context in order to justify fascism

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